My Resignation letter to Green Party

Dear Green Party,
It is with great sadness that I tender my resignation from the Green Party. This is not because I have changed my mind on the need for a strong ecologically based political party in UK politics, quite the opposite. It is because the current leadership of the Green Party has taken the Party away from its guiding principles of democracy and fighting for a sustainable society and embraced the undemocratic autocracy and neo-liberal economics of the EU.

For several decades the policy of the Green Party on Europe has been
"to replace the unsustainable economics of free trade and unrestricted growth with the ecological alternative of local self reliance and resource conservation, within a context of wider diversity. We want to foster co-operation on issues of common interest, not establish international institutions for their own sake." (Policy EU100) and

"EU101 We recognise the value of the original goal of the founders of the European Communities, who sought to remove the threat of another war between European states. This has been distorted by vested political and economic interests into a union dominated by economic interests, which lacks democratic control, and promotes the goals of multinational corporations which are interested in profit not people, and which runs counter to the professed core values of the Union."

However, now the leadership is actively campaigning to overturn the democratic will of the British people that it promised to uphold. Prior to the referendum, in our 2015 manifesto, the Green Party promised the British people to respect the outcome of an in-out EU referendum. The Green Party said:

"The biggest lesson of the Scottish referendum was that when people are given the responsibility for making big decisions, they grab it with both hands." (Section 11)

"We support the proposal to have an in-out referendum so that the British people can have their say. This is because much has changed since the UK joined the Common Market in 1974. Endless debate on membership is a diversion from more important matters, such as ending inequality and adapting our economy to one-planet living."

The Green Party is now encouraging that endless debate in a concerted attempt, (funded by the same big business interested only in profit not people that the Green Party previously condemned), to overturn democracy and frustrate the British people from their choice to leave the European Union. This endless debate is frustrating the fight against global extinction by diverting the attention of the media away from the climate change crisis towards a campaign to reverse the decision on leaving the EU that the Green Party had previously promised to honour. (This was clearly demonstrated this weekend when climate change demonstrations in Newcastle and elsewhere were over shadowed by the rally to overturn the referendum result in London.)

Indeed, the leadership of the Green Party of England and Wales knows that the long term EU neo-liberal economic policies, which recently forced Greece into 42 years of austerity, make effective action on climate change, like promoting de-growth, impossible in the time the UN says we have left to attempt to reverse climate change. And yet they continue to sacrifice our planet so that they can continue to get their thirty pieces of silver from the EU.

This is cynical, self-centred hypocrisy and I can no longer be a party to it. Therefore, I resign my membership of the Green Party.
Yours Faithfully,


Leslie A Rowe
Richmond Green Party Parliamentary candidate 2005, 2010 & 2015