Derek Wall

Derek Norman Wall (born 26 May 1965) is a British politician. He was the joint International Coordinator for the Green Party of England and Wales and stood against Prime Minister Theresa May as the Green candidate for Maidenhead at the 2017 general election. Formerly the party's Principal Speaker, he is known as a prominent eco-socialist, campaigning both for environmentalism and socialism. Alongside his political role, Wall is an academic and a writer, having published on the subject of ecosocialism and the wider Green politics movement. He is a contributor to the Morning Star newspaper and a blogger.

Biography

Early political activism Wall first became involved in the Green movement in 1979. He joined the Ecology Party (later the Green Party of England and Wales) in 1980. By 1987, Wall was standing for the Ecology Party against Chris Patten in Bath. At the time of the European Parliament election in 1989, Wall was one of three National Speakers in the Green Party. In the elections themselves, which saw the Green Party gain over 2 million votes (14.5% of the national poll), Wall received 15% of the vote in the Bristol constituency. During his time in the Green Party, Wall has been a Parish Councillor. He was then in turn attacked as a 'parasite' by pragmatists such as Sara Parkin and Jonathon Porritt. These divisions contributed to highly negative press coverage at the time. Having taken a BSc in Archaeology at the University of London, he subsequently completed a PhD at the University of the West of England, later published in a revised form in 1999 as a book entitled Earth First! and the Anti-Roads Movement: Radical Environmentalism and Comparative Social Movements.

Babylon and Beyond: The Economics of Anti-Capitalist, Anti-Globalist and Radical Green Movements (2005), looks at the history of anti-capitalism, including reformist capitalists (such as Joseph Stiglitz), anti-corporate critics (namely Naomi Klein and David Korten), monetary reformers, eco-socialists (especially Joel Kovel), Marxists, green localists (including Caroline Lucas, Mike Woodin and Vandana Shiva) and anarchists (particularly Michael Hardt and Toni Negri). It includes a foreword by Nándor Tánczos, the Green Party of Aotearoa New Zealand MP.

Wall has written for the left-wing magazine Red Pepper and is an advisory editor of Socialist Resistance. He has also published articles in academic journals such as Environmental Politics, Social Movement Studies and Capitalism Nature Socialism. Organising a faction within the Green Party known as the Association of Socialist Greens, this left grouping was accused by pragmatists such as Mallen Baker as being responsible for ensuring the party was "going knowhere fast".

Wall is an eco-socialist and anti-capitalist who believes that "an infinitely growing capitalist economy destroys nature, fuels injustice and leads to an alienated way of life". He adds that "a world dominated by the need for constant growth puts people and the rest nature behind a blind economic system of accumulation."

His critique of Green Party politics is that ambition tends to dilute policy, reduce democracy and lead to failure. He says of the Green 2000 project to modernise the executive structures and reduce the number of Principal Speakers to two: "The right around the Green 2000 faction wanted to make us into a mainstream party with mass appeal, ditch the radicalism, re-engineer the Party constitution and centralise power. We fought them. I remember Sara Parkin talking to the Independent about 'socialist parasites' i.e. myself and Penny Kemp who had been members nearly as long as her. They won and then imploded, when the Party received just a couple of percentage at the 1992 General Election. When the 'realists' believe in achieving a Westminster Parliamentary government by 2000 (thus Green 2000), give me fundamentalism."

At the 2005 general election, Wall stood as a candidate for Windsor and received 2.5% of the votes. In November 2005, he was beaten by Keith Taylor in the election to be the Male Principal Speaker of the Green Party, by 851 votes to 803. Wall's critique centred on the link between the structure of leadership and ambition of the party; and the likelihood that a Leader coupled with ambition would be part of a project to move the party to the "right":

Political parties universally tend to attract those addicted to fame and careerism. ... Clearly, the biggest barrier to green electoral victory is the lack of proportional representation. Greens have been elected around the world in countries with PR. ... The fear is that a leader will shift the party to the right, cutting the Greens' radical edge. ...

The call for a single leader would compromise the party's commitment to radical democracy. It also suggests a failure to think about strategy in any real sense. The fear is that it could be part of a more extensive shift towards a new green politics of shallow environmentalism, rather than a thorough critique of an unequal, profit-motivated society.

He also linked the idea of a leadership structure directly to abuse of power. His September 2007 keynote speech took up this theme: what is power? You can't touch it or taste it. Sometimes I think you can smell it, like wealth or sewage, and if it is piled up in one place it stinks like rotten cod. For it to smell sweet, we need to spread it around. For power to be creative, we need to spread it around.

Collecting power in one place is like collecting money in a mega billion bank account, the work of a miser, a misery, a self obsessed fanatic. Green politics is about giving everyone power.

At times, personal attacks surfaced in Wall's comments in the debate. Replying to a Guardian letter from Jonathon Porritt and others supporting leadership, Wall drew parallels with Porritt's own behaviour as a green 'leader': Jonathon Porritt's call for the Green Party to select a single leader is flawed. Rather than suggesting the Green Party becomes a little more like the conventional top down political parties, Jonathon could show a little more personal leadership. Last year he took 42 flight clocking up air miles to go to meetings to tell people to cut CO2. I am calling on Jonathon to use video conferencing a little more and to fly a little less.

In the subsequent party-wide referendum, 73% of members polled voted to create a single leader. Wall said of the result, "The result of this referendum challenges the Party to create a leadership structure that is true to green ideals. It has put our future leaders on notice that the membership expects a more focused, more effective party, with a leadership team that is truly accountable to the membership in a real and effective manner".

Nevertheless, in 2010 he declared himself a candidate for the post of deputy leader under the new system, losing to the incumbent Adrian Ramsay. During his Deputy Leader campaign, Wall continued to promote the view that a "right" wing of the Green party is attempting to subvert its democracy, agreeing that "talk of 'modernising' the Green Party [is] actually code for changing inner Party democracy and changing the politics of the Party". Nevertheless, Wall's opponents, the joint ticket of Adrian Ramsay and Caroline Lucas, continue to promote both reform of the party and a left-leaning politics. Derek's defeat was met with disappointment from Green Lib Dems, who cited his defeat as a loss of a "good source of ammunition against the [Green] party".

Moving beyond capitalism

Strategies In a chapter of Babylon and Beyond entitled "Life After Capitalism: Alternatives, Structures, Strategies", Wall suggests that "conventional economics is surprisingly dangerous for a subject normally portrayed as a neutral science", and advocates the proposition of "solid liveable alternatives" by the anti-capitalist movement. Though he does not discount the "plots and plans" of the corporate lobby, American neo-conservatives, and free market liberals, which are "hardly secret", he criticises the tendency of many anti-capitalists to be attracted to "warm conspiracies" which "generate a personal enemy with a human face who can be challenged". Instead, he wishes to address the "structural element" of capitalism, drawing on the critical realist philosophy of Roy Bhaskar, who suggests that "invisible structures", like capitalism and language, shape society but can themselves be changed by human activity. This means that "the conspirators construct, where they are successful, new structures, but as capitalists they are themselves bearers of deeper structural imperatives to exploit labour, subjectivity and the earth". At present cats have more purchasing power and influence than the poor of this planet. Accidents of geography and colonial history should no longer determine who gets the fish. This will be a long fight and anti-capitalism may fail. Nevertheless, at the very worst, even in failure we might succeed in bearing witness to the pathological absurdities of a world where money makes human beings and the rest of nature a means rather than an end.