Published: 11 September, 2014

CONFERENCE SKETCH
By RICHARD OSLEY in BIRMINGHAM

TO mark them out, recently-recruited Green Party members were asked to walk around the conference grounds with “first timer” stickers on their shirts. This was presumably to ensure they got smiled at as they crossed Aston University’s campus, welcomed, and convinced they had not simply walked into a real-life cliché when they were met with a giant poster for an upcoming vegan-a-rama festival in the exhibtion hall. 

Perhaps, they were offered a discount at the merchandise stall, which included the slightly-smug umbrellas with the stamp: “Don’t blame me for the weather, I voted Green.” 

One of these green Greens was posted on the door to what had become a makeshift press lounge, an earnest newbie, a nice guy who nevertheless had not heard of the recent Green stand in Camden, nor who Sian Berry was. He seemed to have only a vague knowledge of Baroness Jenny Jones as she slipped past. His job was instead to protect the complimentary sandwiches – all vegetarian, tasty enough – and the coffees. 

One beardy troublemaker, clearly an experienced conference-goer,  bearing the expression of a man who has filed too many Freedom of Information requests about the measurements of speed bumps or at least made a few attempts to perform a citizen’s arrest on Tony Blair, was turned away, displeased. His complaint was that this guarded barrier, which was just meant to create a quiet space for interviews, was not in the spirit of the Green Party’s conference, where bags are not searched and bouncers are not needed.

In a way, all of this showed where the Greens are: a hotchpotch, a mix of older voters irritated with all authority, and, to be fair, older voters who have an admirable desire to save the Earth for those succeeding them too, combined  with a crew of young disciples who stretch out to get cameraphone pictures of Natalie Bennett but who are, conversely, too young to remember Sian’s mayoral campaign. If they could get the ones in between, their numbers might continue to swell in a place like Camden, where the advantage for them is to position themselves left of a Labour council, rather than competing with Labour, and possibly being drowned out in the process, to be the opposition to a Tory one.