Green Coalition?

      Both the Tories and Labour are having to face the possibility of sharing a coalition government with the Greens after the May election.   Green membership has quadrupled - there appears to be an idealistic yearning growing in the UK, apparently, for policies to save the planet.    The Greens now have more members than the LibDems or UKIP.
But the day-to-day mechanics of running the country would present new problems with a Green voice in the government;  negative growth is one of their policies.   
    This is reminiscent of the days of the growth of the Green movement in Germany a long time ago, when there were the same problems for the ruling parties.   In 1982, the Greens were stating conditions for coalition talks under their extraordinary young leader, Petra Kelly.    She had a missionary fervour totally committed to Green ideas, never giving up on her crusade to recruit to her cause everyone she met.   Under her leadership, power was taken away from the Social Democrats.  
     "If the SPD switches off all atomic power stations, stops the stationing of missiles, and starts building ambulances in place of tanks, we can begin to talk to them" she declared.    The Greens were warned - as has been the case in this country - that entry into the German Parliament, the Bundestag, could mean a victory for the Conservative DDU over the Social Democrats.  They said they were not concerned about this, that they were the anti-party party.   But the Greens secured significant representation in the Bundestag and Germany did not get nuclear weapons.
     Her father was an American serving in the forces in Germany after the war.  Petra had started her career with a post working for the EU in Brussels where she found many compromises in policy which shocked her.
     She came to Britain and spoke for the Greens in Trafalgar Square and at the War Memorial in Whitehall.   Now, at last, the Green party is here in force in this country, with its environmentalist ideas.   Whatever the outcome of the May election, some of those ideas will now be taken into account, as they were in Germany.