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Bristol Green Party has announced that it has reached 1000 members in the city today, on the same day that the South West Green Party reports that it has now got well over 5000 members in the South West region.
The growth in support for the Green Party continues apace, and nowhere is this more evident than in Bristol. Even before 2014, the Greens were enjoying steady growth, both across the country nationally and in Bristol, but the rate of growth in Green Party membership has been staggering in recent months. Since the European election and the city council elections last year, membership of the Green Party in Bristol has increased by over 160%.
It is wholly appropriate that the 1000th member to join Bristol Green Party today should live in Ashley, which was the first ward in the city to elect Green councillors to both of its seats. The Greens also now hold both seats in Bishopston, and are making steady progress in all the council wards in the city, especially in Bristol West and Bristol South parliamentary constituencies, where they expect to make further gains.
Last May, the Greens got their first Member of the European parliament in the South West with the election of Molly Scott Cato MEP, and the Greens doubled their number of councillors in Bristol to six. In the European election, Bristol Green Party took 20% of the vote in the city. Since these elections, it is clear that many more people are seriously supporting the Greens now that they realise that the Green party is winning more and more elections in the city, is likely to increase its number of councillors still further in May, and really can win in this year’s forthcoming general election, especially in Bristol West.
The people are joining Bristol Greens in ever increasing numbers because they can now see at last that there really is a political party which believes in social, environmental, and economic justice and which can win in order to deliver such a society. They know that the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats are destroying the NHS with their ‘reforms’ and privatisation of the NHS, and that the Labour Party indeed began the process of privatisation and cannot be trusted to protect the NHS. They know that only the Green Party will fight to protect all public services from privatisation, and will seek to bring both trains and buses back into public ownership, along with vital resources such as water; they know that only the Greens will protect our environment from exploitation by such terrible practices as fracking; and they know that only the Greens will fight seriously hard to stop the iniquitous TTIP agreement from destroying both the NHS and the hard-won environmental protections we currently have.
Finally people now also realise it is only the Greens who will seek real economic justice by putting a stop to the avoidance of tax through the cynical use of tax havens, and will compel the banks and bankers to pay for the financial crisis which they forced on all of us, and most devastatingly on the poor. For this is the way that we can pay for a fairer society and reduction of the deficit (which everybody knows was caused by the bankers in any case), and not through the Con LibDem coalition’s practice of austerity which they are pledged to take further (and which the Labour Party has already said it will continue if elected in May).
For people who believe in a really environmentally caring, economically responsible, and socially fair society in Britain today, there really is only one choice – and that is the Greens.