I always feel completely at home in Green Party meetings in France. They are people like me; we agree implicitly on almost everything; we are filled with the arrogant certainty of being right, of being the enlightened vangard of the... middle... class.

The main problem is that the typical cadre has had previous political experience in one of any number of left-wing parties, mostly Bolshevik (I englobe here the highly respectable, mainstream French Communist Party, as well as the various Trotskyite sects, the now-defunct Maoist cults etc); a minority come from outfits of a more libertarian outlook. Oddly enough, the stalinists seem to gravitate to the organs of power. While paying lip service to green ethics.

_{It is rightly acknowledged that people of faith have no monopoly of virtue - Queen Elizabeth II}