New Green Party signing Jamie Driscoll discusses his political life

In the wake of his move to the Green Party, Jamie Driscoll talks about the experiences that shaped his political life:

I left school at 16, and got a job in a heating and plumbing factory. I used to get a lift home from one of the warehouse blokes who drove the delivery wagon, along with a warehouse hand named Sid. He was about the same age I am now, mid-50s.

One evening Sid told us he’d been given his notice. This was the depths of the Thatcher recession.

“Don’t worry about me,” he said, pride on the line:

I’ve got irons in the fire. I’ll be in work soon.

I bumped into him a couple of weeks later:

Those irons never came to anything, Jamie.

I saw a man deflated and drained of hope. Who didn’t think he’d work again. He’d lost not just his income but his self-belief and part of his identity. I was sixteen and not emotionally intelligent enough to know what to say. I haven’t seen Sid since, but I still remember him. We all have formative experiences that shape our worldview.

The long shadow of Thatcherism

Thatcherism continued without Thatcher. “setting loose our natural entrepreneurialism” – to quote Sir Keir Starmerw – was really just privatisation.

Tony Blair put the private finance initiative on steroids – hobbling hospitals with debt for decades. And, he did nothing for the North East – our earnings fell relative to London and the South East. Our private utilities extract billions to tax havens and fail to build new reservoirs or transmission networks. Council house stock halved, a significant cause of today’s housing crisis.

A generation later, my sixteen year old son Nelson spoke to me. He’d just come back from a banner drop to raise awareness of the climate emergency. He told me:

Logically, we know we won’t keep global heating to 1.5 degrees. That’s gone. We’re on target for over 3 degrees. I know that’s the world I’ll have to live in. We won’t be worried about pensions. We’ll be worried about whether the shops have any food. Whether there’ll still be law and order.

16 years old. And that’s the future he and his generation see. They still have to deal with all we did. Unlike us, they also have to fight against a climate catastrophe with imminent tipping points. However, he continued:

But it’s also logical to have hope. Because if we despair, we’ll give up. And we need hope so we keep acting. Because everything we do gives us that little bit better chance of actually having a future.

That’s why I’m in politics. To fight for the Nelsons and the Sids. To support and enable them to fight for themselves and for others.

The British public want what we want. The polling shows it. 65% to 80% want utilities run for public good. A wealth tax. Rent controls – including 44% of landlords who expressed a rent cap!

Tinkering around the edges is inadequate. We have to rejig our entire economy to work for workers and small businesses and future generations. And as any engineer will tell you, refitting a machine while it is running is a lot harder than starting from scratch.

Don’t wait for someone else to do it

We have to get beyond shoppinglistism. The erroneous belief that we hand over a list of demands to someone else who will deliver them. You can’t order an integrated public transport system from Amazon Prime on next day delivery. We need to train and develop a cohort of politicians capable of running arms of government. While under pressure and under scrutiny.

Otherwise the British public won’t trust us to run the country. They’ll ask, is their pension safe?  Will we spend public money wisely? We don’t have long to overcome the perception that we’re well meaning, but not ready.

It’s not surprising. The number of democratic socialists who’ve held state power in this country – as opposed to being backbenchers – is a tiny handful. I remember my own brutal learning curve, and I’d had decades of project management and organisational leadership experience.

The right are no better, by the way. Not just Kwasi Kwarteng’s self-imploding budget. As a Metro Mayor I worked with many a Tory minister who had no clarity on how to deliver their objectives. Or sometimes even what their objectives were. In reality they delivered little, but outsourced both their thinking and the contracts to the well heeled private sector organisations, whose sole loyalty was to their bank accounts.

That’s why centrists always end up doing the same as the right, despite the hand-wringing. If you intend to use the same mechanisms to implement public policy, you’ll get the same results.

To the Green Party

I left Labour in 2023. I’ve never looked back. Friends in the Green Party have been nudging me to join ever since. I’ve asked them are they serious about the challenge? Getting a handful of councillors in a city or MPs in Parliament doesn’t put you behind the steering wheel. Are you in this to win it? They’ve convinced me they’re up for the fight.

Over two-thirds of Green Party members joined in the past few months. It is transformed. It’s always had more radical policies than Labour. Even in 2017 and 2019. Check out the manifestos if you don’t believe me.

The media keep asking, “Will you run for office?” Yes, if they want me. But the more interesting question would be, how can you help the Green Party transform this country?

I’ll be working with the think tanks on how to deliver policies. Campaigning with the Newcastle Greens to replace Labour in May. And being part of a team that wants to make hope normal again.

Featured image via the Canary