Claiming The Ground

My very Catholic, Peter Hitchens-loving friend, Ed West, holds up the following manifesto extracts as proof of the Green Party's "far-Leftism":

Introduce a Citizen’s Income for all, sufficient to cover basic needs, and redistribute wealth from those who have plenty to those who don’t. Only a society which shares the benefits of the economy fairly and provides for the needs of all its members can ever be sustainable.

Encourage local production for local use, by promoting small-scale local businesses with appropriate subsidies and with import tariffs and controls.

Reduce the powers of transnational companies, create a network of publicly-owned community banks, and stay out of the European Single Currency.

Curb speculation in land – the most fundamental of precious resources, which should be ‘a common treasury for all’.

Measure economic success in terms of the quality of all peoples’ lives, rather than the quantities of money spent or resources consumed.

Most of this could have been written by an American paleocon, or by Peter Hitchens. All of it could have been written by the Pope.

We must not cede this ground to the Greens. Instead, we must claim and occupy it for the alliance of the traditional Right and the traditional Left against the neoconservative war agenda and its assaults on liberty at home, including against any new Cold War with either or both of Russia and China. For the socially and culturally conservative, strongly patriotic tendencies within the British Left's traditional electoral base.

For those who recognise that we cannot deliver the welfare provisions and the other public services that our people have rightly come to expect unless we know how many people there are in this country, unless we control immigration properly, and unless we insist that everyone use spoken and written English to the necessary level.

And for those who refuse to allow climate change to be used as an excuse to destroy or prevent secure employment, to drive down wages or working conditions, to arrest economic development around the world, to forbid the working classes and non-white people from having children, to inflate the fuel prices that always hit the poor hardest, or to restrict either travel opportunities or a full diet to the rich.