I might be turning Green

I have a friend who lives far away. He's fond of putting political things on Facebook and, perhaps as a happy echo of arguments in student flats, I always try to pick holes in these posts. Recently, he claimed that if he still lived in the UK, he would "definitely vote Green". "Aye, right," I thought, "the Greens are..."

Tumbleweeds. I am struggling to argue.

Fast-rewind to the eighties. A TV sketch that shows some hippy-dippy environmental activists climbing into a clapped out bus that belches smoke as it pulls away fits my world view perfectly. Whatever messages on equality and local control that the Greens have are swamped to this immature physics student by an anti nuclear power stance he perceives as ill-informed. Actually, it probably was ill-informed. Whatever I think of their stance on nuclear energy now, I don't think it will be ill-informed and I'll come to that later. The thing is, you're never going to agree with everything a political party stands for and the nuclear issue isn't the big one for me anymore, nor should it ever have been.

The Greens seem to be the only genuine alternative out there. I don't think I'll be better off under them and nor should I be. The big smokescreen about "We're all in this together" is not that the 1% are the only people untouched by austerity but that people like me are too, in that we can still afford food, fuel, housing and plenty of treats, so we may be tempted to keep things going as they are. (That's me as an individual - go to my wider family where some are on zero hours contracts and it's a different story).

Many people, and I am probably one of them, need to pay more tax. I don't avoid it, I'm just not asked for enough for some things.

I like the internationalism of the Greens. They were pro independence but have been the most positive of the pro independence groups when it comes to working with what we've got. I suspect they were only in favour of independence because it was the best way to get social justice. That's a lot better than being in favour of social justice because it's the best way to get independence (and that is most definitely not a dig at our new FM).

In my current job, I sometimes get to hear politicians speak. Most are competent but unchallenging. Two have impressed. One was Gordon Brown, no longer PM and talking, with passion and sincerity, about international education rather than UK politics. The other was Patrick Harvie, co-convenor of the Scottish Greens. I was probably rather rude to him because I bounded towards him when the talk was over to shake his hand despite the fact that he was speaking to someone else at the time. He came across as compassionate and scientifically literate, hence the remark about the Greens not being ill-informed.

So, I'm not definitely Green, but I might become so. I didn't know where to go after the referendum, being hugely reluctant to call myself a 45. Feel free to argue. It does me good.