(a) Green Diplomat?

Hello, I’m Gordon.

When I first made this ‘about me’ page, in August 2008, I said:

“I used to be an officer for my local Green Party in Hackney, but I’ve moved up to Edinburgh now, and am still integrating myself into the Scottish Green Party. Perhaps I’ll run for Scottish SOC.”

Since then (it is now August 2009), I have been elected the National Returning Officer (a member of SOC) for the Scottish Green Party.

That didn’t take too long…

I’ve also been appointed Electoral Returning Officer for the Green Party of England and Wales. While the jobs are different, they mostly resolve around running, and assisting with, internal elections in the respective parties. Fun times (and not completely ironically, either).

(I’ve since resigned as ERO of the GPEW. Too many initialisations.)

My primary concern is that the world becomes a more Just, Equitable and Sustainable place. The best way to do this, I feel, is through the political process, and in particular through the work of Green parties.

My concern in politics is that we achieve what we set out to do, whether that be short term goals like contesting elections, mid term goals like drawing up election strategy, or long-term goals like drawing up and implementing policy. We should try not to get bogged down in internal disputes and take level-headed, fair and non-partisan approaches to any problems we meet. Also, we should avoid pissing people off (unneccesarily).

Diplomacy to me, is acting to solve disputes, with restraint, and without flying off the handle. Often times, the political disputes I’ve seen have tended to be on arcane internal matters (because the policy matters are less contentious when we generally share a common philosophical basis). A lot of energy, therefore, often goes into disputes, instead of into more constructive pursuits like, say, winning elections. Hence, I aspire to be Green and Diplomatic (with the ‘(a)’ signifying that I don’t want to be the only one, and the ‘?’ signifying, that it’s really up to other people to make that judgement).

Anyway….

My other website is GreenFeed an aggregator (centralised collection) of blogs related to the UK’s Green parties (there’s also a related twitter feed here: twitter.com/GreenFeed.

Ok, thank you, goodbye.

Gordon