Quality of Life

Listen to some mainstream politicians for a while, and regardless of party, you’ll hear the same noises: Tough choices. Hard working families. Economic growth. Austerity. Unemployment figures. Benefits cut. GDP. Efficiency. Workforce. Crime. Fraud. Poverty...

You know how it goes.

What you will not hear mainstream parties talking about is quality of life. I suspect they want us to mistake spending power for quality. Spending power is relatively easy to measure and you can make graphs and claim you’ve proved something. Actual quality of life does not crunch into tidy numbers as easily, which tends to dissuade those who like making graphs from wanting to talk about it.

The more time we spend working and consuming, the more money moves around in the economy (that’s essentially all GDP really measures). If GDP is the love of your life, then more GDP equals more good, and what else needs discussing? The trouble is that working and spending does not equate to quality of life.

Feeling respected contributes to quality of life. Currently that’s pinned to your job and your earning potential, as though no other human qualities have any worth. There should be more to happiness and human dignity than work alone, and unpaid work should be just as dignified as other forms.

Being well contributes to quality of life, but our whole system focuses on patching up sick people. We aren’t talking about the lifestyle issues contributing to obesity and addiction, nor are we talking about the work stress creating an epidemic of mental health problems.

Working all the hours there are so you can just afford to keep a roof over your head is all too common. That’s survival, not quality of life. Barely seeing your partner or children, and having no time, energy or resources for a social life is not good news. We need a better work-life balance for all. We need to value family life, community life, friendship and leisure. All we hear about is ‘hard work’.

The Green Party has a radical idea: Wouldn’t it be great if politics was about trying to improve everyone’s quality of life? Wouldn’t it be great to have a political system that took wellness seriously, and treated people as though they had a right to a rewarding and happy life, rather than having to scrabble just to exist? Of course if you’re running flat out and exhausted all the time, sleep deprived, badly fed, lacking for rest and struggling to meet the next bill, it’s hard to find time to think about these things. The more pressured you are, the easier to is to keep you going along with the demand that you work harder and longer for less.

And yes, we are talking about cultural revolution. 

A better life

Most political parties define quality of life in terms of money washing around the economy. The more money there is, the better things are. This assumes that there’s a simple connection between financial wealth and happiness. But is there?

We are all better off than people were a hundred years ago and more. We all own more. However, the gap between the richest and the poorest has grown, so those of us who are poorer feel further from the top than our ancestors would have done. We have far less job security than ever, and the prospects of working and living for our children, are grim. Are we happier than ever with all this money? No.

The Green Party thinks there is more to wealth than money. We don’t think there’s much to be said for having a lot of money if you have to work such long hours that you never see your family or friends. We don’t believe that having money is the same as having a good life. We all need our basic physical needs met, but this money-focused system we have fails to deliver that for a great many people. That anyone in this day and age has to choose between heating and eating is a sad reflection of how badly this obsession with money serves us.

Wealth is quality of life. Health, sufficient resources, a home, happiness, leisure, friendship and family are much more important in terms of our sense of wealth than just a bank balance is. We know that just being able to access quiet green places makes a lot of people happier. We don’t think it makes a lot of sense to destroy our green spaces for the sake of a short term profit.

Mainstream politics has its priorities all wrong. GDP is not some magical force to make the world better, and it is not improving quality of life for most of us. Growth for the sake of growth is the logic of the cancer cell. We need politics that deliver something better, something more inspired. A politics based on quality of life, where the economy exists to serve its people, not the other way round. This is the Green vision.

Where do we build?

Photo: Ruscombe by Mike Gallagher

Most Greens have an instinctive aversion to building on greenfield sites. There are many good reasons for this – protecting our farmland, our green spaces, protecting habitats and wildlife and preserving the green belt. All of these in turn contribute to quality of life for all. However, there are times when it might make more sense to develop a greenfield site. Here are some examples.

When the infrastructure is better able to support it. Greenfield development where there are good local transport hubs, and good local resources already in place may make more sense than adding pressure to places where the road networks cannot take any more cars, where there are no schools, and no medical services, for example.

When the greenfield site is not much of a habitat. Arable farmland may look green, but may also be quite barren in terms of resident wildlife. Conversely, not all brownfield sites are devoid of wildlife. Locations reclaimed by nature can be rich with wildlife. We have a lot of sites in Stroud that are technically brownfield, because they have the ruins of mills on them. Some of those have become valuable habitats for otters and kingfishers. Old buildings are also potential roosting sites for bats, owls and other endangered creatures. Our old railway lines have re-wooded and, are valuable habitats and leisure spaces.

We might also want to think about the visual impact of development, about who is going to be affected by it, which views will change, and how it will impact on communities. In rural settings, we need to think about whether additional build could help to keep local schools open and other local resources viable and in place.

The government is championing new build as the solution to our country’s financial difficulties. The Green Party does not believe that covering the countryside in tarmac and brick represents a good solution. We have to balance quality of life against financial gains. We have to think about what is needed. While we aren’t keen on development for the sake of development, we are dedicated to doing our best to make sure that we get the right things in the right places for the right reasons. That means looking at the evidence on the ground rather than letting wild speculation and unfounded imagination guide the way.