Challenge to the status quo

Today the Office for Budget Responsibility became the latest official source - following the IMF - to indicate to George Osborne that his austerity economic plan is not working even in its own terms.

Throwing workers into unemployment, cutting essential services and continuing to pander to the multinational corporations isn't cutting government borrowing, as the Chancellor said it would.

As the Green Party spring conference began in Nottingham, there was so much to attack about the way our country is being run in the interests of the 1 per cent - while pressing environmental problems from climate change to ecosystem destruction are ignored - it was hard to choose what to leave out.

One issue I was highlighting was how Green Party campaigners up and down the country are working with anti-cuts campaigners defending local libraries, defending local youth clubs, defending local Sure Start centres.

And that's critically important. We need to celebrate these efforts - and celebrate the victories.

I was delighted to hear that the Friern Barnet library, targeted by the dreadful Tory easy-council in that north London borough, was recently handed over to community ownership after a long occupation and legal struggle.

I spoke there at a Shift event last year - when it was under occupation - and was hugely impressed by the atmosphere and the book stocks. The council had in a midnight raid emptied the shelves, but voluntary donations had filled them again - and filled them with as varied and rich a selection as any local library might care to boast.

And today as I spoke I was delighted to wear a small yellow ribbon as a symbol of my support for the ongoing occupation at the University of Sussex.

Students there are resisting the privatisation of cleaning and catering services - defending 235 workers who learnt they were to be outsourced when the tender was advertised.

But it's important that we stress that simply being anti-cuts, anti-privatisation - while essential - isn't enough. It isn't radical enough - it won't deliver the massive change in our society that we must make now.

That said, a focus on anti-privatisation in the context of the NHS in particular is mightily important we must continue to defend the principle of a publicly owned and publicly run health service.

We don't just want to go back to 2006 when under a Labour government more than a quarter of children and a quarter of pensioners were living in poverty, when the minimum wage was - as it still is - greatly below a living wage.

We need to look forward to a transformed future, when the minimum wage is a living wage, when benefits allowing a decent standard of living are paid ungrudgingly, when all homes are comfortably insulated cutting fuel poverty and carbon emissions, when regional development is rebalanced away from swollen south-east England so that many of the 1 million unoccupied homes in Britain can be put back into productive use and rents stabilised back at affordable levels.

And we need to rebuild our economy to be jobs-rich and low-carbon - two qualities that must go together. To do that we must invest in the future, not continue with the Osborne "if you are in a hole keep digging" approach.

Investment must go into energy conservation, into renewable energy, into public transport and essential public services. That requires changes to the government's Energy Bill, particularly the return of the decarbonisation by 2030 target, and a proper focus on reducing demand - so much of the energy we use is wasted, and that is costing us all.

We are living in a Britain in which the mistakes, the great errors of the past, have not been dealt with, even though they are glaringly obvious.

We know the neoliberal model of a globalised economy in which we specialise in casino banking, arms sales to human-rights-abusing regimes, and pharmaceuticals, while leaving it to the rest of the world to make our goods and grow our food, has hit the buffers economically and environmentally.

Yet when opposition to the Tories "small state" ideology is so desperately needed, the Labour Party is content to mutter empty platitudes about being "one nation," keep its head down, not apologise for the mistakes of the past, not offer any change in direction and just hope that the incompetence and economic failings of the Tory-Lib Dem coalition will deliver them back into No10 in 2015.

That's perhaps not surprising. It was Labour which championed the "light-touch" regulation of the financial industries that the Tories have only continued, which abandoned all interest in supporting manufacturing and farming and was content to allow the jobs, the cash, the people of Britain to concentrate more and more in the south-east corner of the country.

It was Labour that started the marketisation of the NHS, championed the undemocratic academy schools that have morphed into Michael Gove's free schools, Labour that dotted the country with immensely expensive - but immensely profitable - PFI schemes that today's babies will still be paying for when they are parents.

And as we approach the tragic 10th anniversary of the start of the Iraq war. We can't forget that the Labour Party has not apologised, not stepped back from its decisions about that.

So without any true opposition from the Labour Party, it falls to us to deliver the alternative vision.

It's a big job but the Green Party has come a long way in the past few years. Of course in 2010 we won our first MP - the immensely effective Caroline Lucas - our membership has doubled in four years, we're looking forward to electing more county councillors in May and to trebling our number of MEPs in 2014.

That's going to mean many more people have Green elected reps and the Brighton Pavilion example can be presented to any electorate in the country - if Brighton can do it, why not you?