The Weatherill Lecture is named after Bernard Weatherill (25 November 1920 – 6 May 2007), the former speaker of the House of Commons. He was the Conservative MP for Croydon North East between 1964-92. The Weatherill Lecture will be an annual event organsied by a group of his Croydon friends who have formed The Weatherill Society. Tony Benn's lecture was on 'Citizenship and Integrity in Public Life'. Upon entering Croydon Parish Church, the venue for the event, those attending, which numbered around 300, were given a handout. The first paragraph notes....

THE WEATHERILL SOCIETY

The newly founded Society was initiated by a group of his Croydon friends who, having attended his memorial service in Westminster Abbey agreed that all of his fine "old fashioned" principals of honesty, integrity, decency and compassion are essential ingredients of a civilized society, The Weatherill Society will promote the qualities and virtues that he personified so that future generations might share his vision and values of public service not self service.

....powerful stuff and very appropriate for these times.

Revd Canon Colin J Luke Boswell introduced Tony Benn. The Vicar highlighted that Tony Benn got his inspiration from Marx and the Bible. Mr Benn then gave the lecture. He noted the major landmarks in the history of the Houses of Parliament alongside technological advances, and related these to his life, and the life of his father, grandfather and great grandfather.

After his speech the floor was open for questions.

I put my hand up and got a chance to ask him:

You were introduced as getting your inspiration from Marx; you mentioned in your lecture you were born in 1925. If Anthony Wedgewood Benn was not born in 1925 but in 1992 - and was 18 years of age - and decided to pursue a career in politics, which political party would he join?

I heard an audible teehee from the floor. To my dismay he answered the Labour Party, but he did go on to list what Marx teaches us.

For more info: weatherillsociety@yahoo.co.uk


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Tags croydon, greenparty

Originally posted at Matt Sellwood For Hackney

Yesterday, I was glad to see this article in The Guardian, which makes the case that the Green Party has been arguing for many months. Namely, that it is insanity to submit to a round of swingeing cuts given our economic situation - that public investment and revenue raising are the way to get out of this recession, and that slashing public spending will only hurt the poor and the vulnerable.

Caroline Lucas MEP has been speaking out against job cuts in Brighton, where she is aiming to become one of the first Green Party MPs, and as she puts it:

"The last thing we need to be doing in the current economic climate is making cuts. What is needed is investment in public services, to make sure we get out - and stay out - of recession."

Quite. It's a pity that the three establishment parties don't seem to be on the same page. For a few weeks, it seemed that Brown might be opening up a bit of clear red water between him and CameronClegg - but alas, he soon fell back into line and started competing with the two opposition parties about precisely how tough he could be. Never mind the fact that you hardly save any money in total by sacking public sector workers, because of the fact that you put them straight onto the dole. Or the fact that we could face a double dip recession if we drastically cut our spending now. No, the important thing is to look tough.

I agree entirely with David Blanchflower, who points out in the article above that "the dire state of our public finances is not due to excessive spending growth but the collapse of revenues. So the most effective way to tackle the deficit is to stimulate revenue. Private sector investment has collapsed, so what's needed are government subsidies on investment and job hires. Instead of cuts, we need to be talking about how to get the economy growing again, and how to create jobs."

Absolutely right. We've been doing our bit in Hackney Green Party, to push for one of the key foundations of the Green New Deal - namely, massive improvement and investment in our housing stock.

Over 4,600 families in Hackney currently live in fuel poverty - and in the Green Party's 2010 budget amendment, Cllr Mischa Borris proposed over £600,000 of investment to kickstart a scheme to provide free insulation for every home that needs it. That key funding from the council would help lever in large amounts of additional money from energy utilities, as part of their obligation to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The programme would be prioritised towards vulnerable and low-income households.

The scheme, similar to the successful progamme introduced by the Green Party on Kirklees council, could reduce fuel bills for the poorest by an average of £150 a year per home and would make a significant impact on fuel poverty in the borough. And, crucially, the scheme would also help to create 'green-collar' jobs in the borough, helping to tackle Hackney's high unemployment levels.

How to fund it? Well, Mischa proposed a £16 a year increase in parking charges, for the most polluting cars. As she put it:

"A slight increase in parking charges for the most gas-guzzling cars is a fair way of funding a scheme that will benefit those without cars and living in fuel poverty. Councils should be creating ways of helping the most vulnerable residents. Using money from energy companies and those with polluting cars will benefit thousands of people who are struggling to keep their homes warm."

Makes sense to me. Of course, Hackney Labour rejected the plan and have just spent a bunch of money changing every lamppost banner in the borough into a party political broadcast about their council tax freeze. Public money, well spent...

Ever since the 1930s, the policy of ‘green belt’ – rural, green land that has been designated as protected from outside development – has been preventing urban sprawl from encroaching into the countryside and protecting the environment.

Unfortunately land once considered safeby being designated ‘Green Belt’  has become much less so in recent times. Many environmentalists support the continued protection of the green belt. Over 1,100 hectares of green belt have been lost every year since 1997, and over 45,000 homes have been built on green belt land – the size of the City of Bath – since 1997.

There are cases all over the country of green belt land being reclassified and then built on. It does rather remind me of the famous John Prescott quote when he was deputy PM;  ”The green belt is a Labour achievement; and we intend to build upon it”.

Case 1. Near Bath a government inspector from the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister has ruled 35 acres are to be removed from the green belt with the potential to be built on. Residents opposed to the plans said they are  and are very disappointed the remainder of the land was likely to be built on.

Case 2.  ‘South Cambridgeshire District Council produced a report “The Way Forward” – An Assessment of the DEGW Report to Cambridge City Council on the Eastern Expansion of Cambridge. Edge of Cambridge by drawing back the Green Belt – 8,100 Houses. For longer term reserve by drawing back Green Belt – 4,600 Houses. This approach was agreed by the Council’s Planning Committee in April 2001. In coming to this overall strategy the committee considered the general locations where the Green Belt around Cambridge would need to be withdrawn to provide for the 8,100 houses.’

Case 3. Manchester ; a council which boasts of its rural credentials is planning to use 98 acres of green belt land – about 56 Old Trafford football pitches – for industrial use. Salford council has earmarked the land at Barton Moss, on the Eccles and Irlam border, to attract companies to the borough. It would mean either Grade 1 agricultural land or Boysnope Park golf course being ripped up to provide warehousing and other industry. The site is to the west of City Airport Manchester – formerly Barton Aerodrome.

Case 4. Coventry; a planned Eco-town on greenbelt land at Keresley, it is being opposed and may not happen.

Case 5. Southport Lancashire; developers could build houses on Greenbelt land in and around Southport in a bid to stave off a looming ‘housing crisis’.

Case 6, Surrey. The Office of Deputy Prime Minister announced that Surrey County Council, which is responsible for education and social care in the county, had been given permission to build the school to re-house Freemantles School, Chertsey. For the residents of Mayford, home to the sensitive green belt land that separates Woking from Guildford, it is the third time this year that “very special circumstances” have been found to justify building on supposedly protected land. Also in Reigate and Redhill; where the Green Belt has been stripped to pave way for 10,000 homes in the borough.

Case 7, Canvey Island Essex handsoffourgreenbelt says between 1000 – 1500 houses and fifteen acres of industrial development to be built on greenbelt land.

I blame the Barker review, which imposed local councils with finding thousands of locations for new homes. Instead of looking for radical ideas, Labour have chosen to focus on building ever more houses on increasingly less appropriate land.  A few alternatives would have been to use empty homes, second homes, or  all those empty office blocks could be turned into housing with no need to build on green sites.

Also a bit of government planning would see investment in areas where housing is cheap and jobs scarce, so less pressure on the South East. When I discussed this with my Labour MP Martin Salter he though I was being Stalinist. We moved the DVLA to Swansea years ago, why not send some other London based civil servants to the rest of the country? I see Labourhave been considering my plan. ‘Labour’s plan to dismantle Whitehall revealed; 132,000 civil servants and 90,000 employees of “arm’s-length bodies” currently based in London and the south-east’.

Nearly a 100 people turned out at Whiteshill Village Hall last week - many had heard that 60 sites listed in the consultation are in the Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONB) including up to 588 houses in the Ruscombe valley, 240 filling the hillside between Ruscombe and Randwick.Photo: People leaving the meeting - I forgot to take one earlier!See my blog here for more background to this

Reduce carbon emissions by ditching your tumble dryer and spring into cleaning the green way with eco-friendly scourers, sponges and cloths from EcoForce. Manufacturers of practical, everyday, household products from recycled materials, EcoForce's range comprises a Recycled Clothes Line, Recycled...

As a new foundation Governor for SS Peter's and Paul's School, Gordon Road, Ilford. I found myself attending a training course put on for new Governors at the Teachers Centre in Ilford this weekend.

Presenters on the day included members of the Council's Finance department, who informed us of how School budgets were raised, spent and evaluated. Whilst also learning a Governors responsibilities with regard to school finances.

The Head Teacher from Seven Kings High School - Ms Tracey Smith, advised us of the important role of Governors and the need to work with School staff as a "critical partner". With her came the Chair of Governors for the School, who informed us of all the responsibilities a governor hold - including the hiring of Head Teachers!

We were taught what type of Curriculum's are taught in Schools and definitions for the various "key stages" (age and learning level classifications).

Finally we we given a presentation from a leading Children Services officer on "Good Governance".

It was a rewarding day and highlighted the special responsibility for safeguarding the learning of younger people that a role as a School Governor entails. However, the training also illustrated how rewarding such a role could be as it provides an opportunity to mould and shape young lives into in a non-direct but essential manner.

As the father of two children and with another child on the way I realised, how exceptionally lucky the people of Redbridge are. Our schools are amongst the top performers in the UK 6th place in overall performance when compared against boroughs holistically.

Such impetus and excellence is something we need to fight to protect and nurture. With this in mind, I have created a petition asking our Council to continue funding the necessary development of Educational Services and provision, despite the current recession. It is essential that we secure a good future for Redbridge posterity by investing in people at a young age, that they, might be equipped, to avoid the ever present pitfalls of a recession or other adversity.

Moreover, there is a distinct need to increase local school provision, to counter the existing shortage of places.

My Petition can be signed by clicking (here)

I have sent this petition to several School Governors as they too expressed similar concern at the meeting.

While Chris Martenson was in the UK recently, Peter Lipman and myself did an interview with him, which was fascinating and wonderful, but the memory chip it was on just got corrupted before I could download it and it is lost.  Gah.  As a meagre way of overcoming the profound sense of trauma I am [...]

First Past the Post (FPTP) is the electoral system used in the UK, and a rump of its former colonies, namely Canada, India and the USA.

It is a deeply flawed system, because: 

1 It is not democratic.
Democracy is the political system where the Government represents the will of the people. There never has been a perfect democracy, there are only degrees of approximation, and democracy goes far beyond discussion of the voting system. Nevertheless, the voting system is an important element in shaping a democracy, and FPTP is woefully inadequate in expressing the will of the people, because the vote never gets beyond the constituency boundary. The only people whose will is represented in Parliament are those who back the local winner. All other votes are lost, or "wasted". They are no more. They are annihilated. They have no representation in Parliament.
In the UK 2005 general election, 70% of votes cast, 19 million, where invalidated in this way.

2 MPs are elected on a minority of votes
The Electoral Reform Society (ERS) page on FPTP states: Representatives can get elected on tiny amounts of public support. In 2005, for example, George Galloway polled the votes of only 18.4 per cent of his constituents, yet ended up in the House of Commons. Only three MPs elected in 2005 secured the votes of more than 40 per cent of their constituents.

3 FPTP encourages Tactical Voting
Voters are frequently forced to vote for a party that they do not back, in an effort to keep out a party that they most dislike. So Labour voters might vote LibDem if the LibDem has the best chance of beating the Tory.


4 FPTP penalises parties whose support is spread widely,
and rewards parties whose support is concentrated in one area.
ERS again: at the 2005 general election, the DUP won nine seats on 0.9 per cent of the vote, yet the Greens won no seats, despite polling almost 16,000 more votes than the DUP.

5 FPTP encourages gerrymandering
ERS: With relatively small constituency sizes, the way boundaries are drawn can have important effects on the election result, which encourages attempts at gerrymandering.

6 FPTP encourages Safe Seats

MPs in safe seats are more or less guaranteed to win every election. They are not motivated to compete for votes, and their party in not motivated to frame policy that will benefit the people in that constituency. Since 1970, only 50% of seats have changed hands. The other seats are a sinecure; like the old Rotten Boroughs.

Politicians pretend that they are concerned about turnout, but ignore the fact that turnout is lower in safe seats.


7 FPTP delivers power to marginal seats
Parties lust after the vote in key marginal seats, where two parties stand neck and neck. Within those marginal seats, there are a few uncommitted voters who must be won over. The politicians pile in with money to campaign in those seats (this was Lord "non-dom" Ashcroft's tactic), and trim their policies and pronouncements to please the swing voters in  key marginals, who constitute about 0.16% of the electorate.


8 FPTP is the first step to full radical reform in the UK
The scandals of the MP expenses, the unelected House of Lords and non-dom donors demonstrate the need for radical, root-and-branch overhaul of the British Parliamentary system. Voting reform is the first step.

So that is the case against FPTP. What is the case for it?


1 Proportional Representation (PR) breaks the constituency link
This is a lie. Some forms of PR maintain the link.


2 The British electorate is too thick to understand PR
The British electorate may take a different view


3 FPTP delivers Strong Government
So the One Party State produces even stronger Government. Is that the way to go?
PR produces mixed Governments, composed of more than one party. It seems to work in all democratic the countries with the exception of the UK colonies mentioned at the top.


4 FPTP is quick and easy to count
So? Do the count on the next day, not during the middle of the night. Idiots

In conclusion, there are 7 (this was 8, but a Google glitch has forced me to retype the second half of the post) forceful arguments against FPTP, and 4 weak and specious arguments in its favour.  It is time to change the system. We have to recognise that this will take civil action, demonstrations and civil disobedience, since most MPs elected by FPTP are bound to regard it as an excellent way to elect people. However, those parties who do want change should clearly look to finding ways of co-operation to beat the system and get more pro-democracy MPs into the chamber.

Have just signed the NSPCC 'I Stand for Children' pledge after receiving an email (edited and adapted extract in bold italics below) from a Bristol East voter. Children and childhood are very important and central to green thinking and action, given that we are about creating a new ethics - that of securing a decent life for future generations.

Tributes as French Resistance Agent Rose dies at 105 Bristol News

What a women. What a life. We have a lot to do to live up to the example set by this generation!!

We’ve got so many wonderfully diverse and inspiring activities to show you this month…ideas for getting people involved and having fun! And they’re here for the sharing… In the UK, TT Luton is organising a series of Grow Your Own events to relocalise food production and consumption, with discussions and a [...]

Graph by Richard Lawson - sample of 2001 General Election results, plotting majority (x axis) against turnout. It shows that the higher the majority, the lower the turnout. More on this topic.

A safe seat is where the majority of the sitting MP is so massive that there is no reasonable chance, short of an electoral landslide, of changing the MP. Voters know this, and the chart above, shows that some voters are aware of this, and do not bother to vote in safe seats.

Politicians express concern at low turnouts, but refuse to address one of the major causes of low turnout.

In a safe seat, it is far better to vote Green than to abstain from the vote, because a high Green vote, although publicly scorned by politicians like Norman Tebbitt, privately causes them to try to "green up" their policies in order to attract the green vote next time.

Our shameless local council have done it again. Like an overconfident ice-skater, they are talking the talk, whilst failing spectacularly to walk the walk.This time it's the 10:10 campaign. That marvellously simple idea that if we all reduce our emissions by 10% during 2010, we'll have made a good start. Thousands of individuals, hundreds of companies, and over 100 councils have signed up to

One of Totnes’s best kept secrets is cartoonist Simon French (who, trivia fans, is the son of the head of Sixth Form from when I was at school).  Every week his column ‘Two Knights in the Castle’, based around two knights sitting on the walls of Totnes Castle, grows more surreal and ploughs its own [...]

Greener Leith is a big fan of the My Society service FixMyStreet.com that makes the process of reporting issues like potholes, litter and graffiti easy and more transparent. 

There's already various phone applications to make it easy to report things when you're out and about. However, a new service, called Fix My Tweet, has been launched that allows you to report things into FixMyStreet via Twitter. All you need to do is register your email on the site, and then you send a tweet with the postcode, a description of the problem, a link to the photo (optional) and the hashtag #fixmytweet

As an example, here's a tweet we made earlier:

 

Best of all if you're using Twitter from your phone, (using an application such as Tweetie 2 for iPhone, Ubertwitter for Blackberry or Twidroid for Android) you don't even need to know the postcode of the place where the problem is. You can geotag your tweet instead. This is an important feature, and we think this'll make the FixMyTweet service even easier to use than the official iPhone application.

Local authorities in England are starting to embace FixMyStreet by investing in it in various ways. FixMyTweet was built by Lichfield District Council - even though it works throughout the UK. Meanwhile Barnet Council have integrated the service straight into their main website.

Whilst we've not detected the same enthusiasm for FixMyStreet in Edinburgh Council, you can continue to view the latest local reports that people have made on our Fix My Leith page here. It's heartening to see that more and more local folk seem to be using it, and FixMyTweet is so easy to use that we hope it will encourage even more folk to get involved.

You can register your email with FixMyTweet.com here.

Students at universities all around the world represent an enormous, and greatly untapped, potential.

As we learn, we can do work.

As we teach, we can do work.

As a community we can bring challenges, lessons, opportunities and context.

Together we can have impact.

Thank you to the students and teachers already engaged with Appropedia, and thank you to those communities that have made it possible and worth it.

Today was International Women's Day. It's 100 years since the second International Conference of Working Women agreed that every year in every country there should be a celebration on the 8th March to promote suffrage and equality for women.

As someone who's proud to call herself a feminist, I *heart* IWD. And as the deadline for submissions to March meeting of Full Council generally falls on or around the 8th, it's always a good opportunity to try and get [*ahem*] "something for the ladies"* onto the Council agenda.

Last year Greens successfully passed a Notice of Motion calling for Brighton & Hove City Council to sign up to the Fawcett Charter, which seeks to end the objectification of women in the workplace.

This was passed on a vote of 28 opposition councillors and our sole independent member (thanks Jayne!) versus 26 Tories.

Those of you with too much time on your hands can check out the proceedings here and here (the second clip is funny in a kind of dark way - you can see me getting radgier and radgier as I'm trying to speak over the barracking of certain male Tory members crying "OMG you're saying our officers go to lap dancing clubs!!!1!11!" - no, chaps, that wasn't what I was saying at all).

However... under the new and totally undemocratic arrangements at BHCC, the Motion was passed to the (all-Tory) Cabinet who unsurprisingly kicked it into the long grass. Very disappointing, especially when one considers that Millicent Garrett Fawcett (pioneering feminist and suffragette from whom the Fawcett Society takes its name) had strong connections to Brighton, and made an acclaimed speech calling for votes for women at the Town Hall in 1870.

(I also called for a blue plaque for Millicent to be placed on the Town Hall, but needless to say that hasn't happened either.)

Anway, this year (possibly slightly less controversially) we're calling for more funding for maternity and post-natal services in Brighton & Hove, based on recent findings by the local PCT, and in support of the NCT's Reclaiming Birth campaign. The Motion will be heard by Full Council on the 18th March, so watch this space.

On the whole, IWD tends to be somewhat ignored by the mainstream media, so it was excellent to see a bit of a flurry of activity from the sector this year; in particular, the following:

• The Politics Show South East: all-female slate for Pavilion

Annoyingly enough, most people in Brighton Pavilion actually receive regional TV and news services from BBC South, so a lot of us had to go online to watch this, but it was well worth it - it's here for the next 6 days for your viewing delight. Millicent got props too - nicely tied together I thought. Caroline Lucas was excellent as always, but it's a bit depressing to think that the Pavilion all-women slate is a first in UK politics, 90-odd years after we first became enfranchised...

• The Independent on Sunday's Top 100 British Women

I was also thrilled and very proud to see Caroline named in the Sindie's Top 100 Women of the last century. The overall list is an interesting mix - the Sindie obviously strived hard to achieve a balance between the arts, science, politics, industry and sport, but personally I would have liked to see fewer theatrical types, and more proper musicians.

I mean, obviously it was ace to see Dusty in there, but where was Kate Bush? Or the mighty Polly Jean Harvey? Or Christine McVie - a women responsible for writing global hits and a member of one of the world's biggest bands ever...?

And what - no Mo Mowlam? The woman brokered peace in Northern Ireland, fgs! (Incidentally, if you ever find yourself near Trafalgar Square with 20 minutes to kill, do go and have a look at John Keane's wonderful painting of Mo in the National Portrait Gallery - very moving and inspiring).



I guess these sorts of lists are never going to please everyone though, and on the whole it's been really encouraging to see the increased media attention on IWD this year. It all bodes well for next year, which will be the official centenary of International Women's Day. You can bet we'll try and do something big here in Brighton & Hove - ideas and suggestions on a postcard please!

Happy International Women's Day to you all.


*I am allowed to say this because I am a *post modern* feminist with a sense of humour.

Today was Equal Pay Day.

Women working full-time earn on average 17% less per hour than men working full-time. For ethnic minority women, the gap is even higher at 20%. For women working part-time compared to men working full-time the gap is 36% per hour – rising to 45% in London.

Today, working women effectively received their last pay cheque of the year. This is because the 17% full-time gender pay gap is equivalent to men being paid all year round while women work for free after the 31st October.

The excellent Fawcett Society works hard every year to highlight this important issue by co-ordinating a series of events across the country to raise awareness, and to put pressure on the Government to reform legislation so that this disgraceful inequality in pay is outlawed and brought to an end.

So this morning Brighton & Hove Greens converged on Brighton station, to collect signatures for Fawcett's petition on Equal Pay, and to give out free biscuits to commuters with low blood sugar - with a 17% chunk missing to give them food for thought as well.

















I baked my contribution last night (above).

I used this recipe, and these handy icing pens for (*ahem*) the Propaganda, and they were very tasty biscuits indeed.

But sadly not quite sweet enough to replace the bitter taste in my mouth whenever I think about the facts of pay inequality in the UK.

We got an average of three signatures per minute :) I love proper campaigning :D

It was interesting to hear Gordon Brown at the Chilcot Enquiry giving his unequivocal support to the invasion of Iraq, an invasion that I have always believed was illegal and wrong. His clear statements of support for the war pose a problem for those Labour candidates who were less enthusiastic about the invasion.

I have met my Labour rival, Nancy Platts, a couple of times now, and I like and respect her. But let's be clear: whilst there are only a limited number of votes that the Tories can hope to pick up in Brighton Pavilion (their only hope of winning is if the ‘progressive' vote splits and they bustle unsatisfactorily through the middle), Nancy and I are both hoping to win the ‘progressive' core vote that is most representative of Pavilion's electorate. In order to help people decide whom to vote for, it might be helpful for voters if a number of questions were addressed.

For example, what does Nancy think of her party leader Gordon Brown? Does she think he is the best person to be Prime Minister? Will she sign up to support the Labour manifesto? On her website, why is the emphasis placed on her ‘policy priorities', rather than those of the party that she represents?

We're now increasingly invited to hustings meetings, but at those meetings, it is surely be fairer to acknowledge what your party policy is, not just your own personal views.

And the number of areas where Nancy departs from Labour Party policy appears to be increasing: the Iraq war, the replacement of Trident nuclear weapons, the introduction of ID cards, the privatisation of the railways, Post Office closures and - as I discovered at an NUT hustings on Friday, where a statement from Nancy was read out - on the introduction of academies.

Indeed, on all those areas, Nancy's personal policies appear to chime with the Greens. If that's the case, wouldn't it just be simpler for her supporters to vote Green, secure in the knowledge that a Green MP for Brighton Pavilion will be free to fight for all of these in a way that a candidate whipped by a large national party which disagrees with her, will not?

If Nancy were elected, she would be under extreme pressure to toe the Labour party line - even more so, in the event of a hung parliament - voting for policies with which she may disagree, and which most Brighton residents won't want implemented.

By contrast, a Green MP would have no pressure on her to compromise her principles or beliefs, and could remain free to truly represent the progressive views of Brighton Pavilion voters.

Brook report published - Ismaila's report on the Ruscombe Brook has been made available on Amazon... but as one person commented according to the picture on the cover of report, Ruscombe Valley is now headed by a mountain similar to the Matterhorn ... perhaps its only a metaphor for what we have to climb with local authorities. See Amazon here.Ismaila (Photo left of Ismaila with other RBAG

I received an email (below) from Melanie Janner from the PCS Union a week ago. On my way to work I took a detour to say hello to strikers outside Lunar House (Border Agency). It was a cold morning, so well done to all those that braved the conditions to picket.

Dear Shasha

Up to 6000 Civil Servants in Croydon will be striking on Monday 8th and Tuesday 9th March over changes to our redundancy scheme, the Civil Service Compensation Scheme (CSCS).

The changes will see thousands of civil servants lose thousands of pounds if they are made redundant and will significantly increase the chances of civil servants being made redundant or privatised. The changes will also allow individual government departments to set their own voluntary redundancy terms, including using mobility clauses in contracts to force staff to accept jobs in other parts of the country or lose their redundancy payments.

In the Home Office UK Border Agency where I work we already know that there are 700+ jobs being cut in Croydon in the next 12 months, if changes are made to the CSCS it is likely that more jobs will be cut or relocated out of Croydon.

Yours sincerely

Melanie Janner
PCS Union

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Tags croydon, greenparty

Speakers, Workshops, Music, Food
Date: March 18, 5PM-late
Location: Goldsmiths, University of London

We stand united, as students and staff, in opposition to the new
points-based immigration rules. They frame students as suspects and
turn staff into border agents. Join us, meet others, and help spread
the campaign! With Les Back (Sociology Department, Goldsmiths) Phil
Booth (NO2ID), Valerie Hartwich (Manifesto Club), Sandy Nicoll (SOAS
Living Wage Campaign/Justice for Cleaners), Frances Webber (Human
Rights Lawyer), speakers from the Joint Council for the Welfare of
Immigrants, No Borders, and more. Hosted by Goldsmiths Students' Union
and Goldsmiths UCU.

Speakers and workshops in RHB 141 (Main Building) from 5PM to 8:15PM;
food/social in the Common Room (Students' Union) 8:15-10PM, live music
10pm-late.

Register at studentsnotsuspects@gmail.com

Directions:
Main Building (Richard Hoggart Building), Goldsmiths, Lewisham Way,
New Cross, SE14 6NW
Closest train stations: New Cross, New Cross Gate
Buses: 21, 36, 53, 136, 171, 172, 177, 225, 321, 343, 436, 453

More details about the campaign at:
http://studentsnotsuspects.blogspot.com/
Facebook (Students Not Suspects)

I have been hunting again for the source of these lines:

I can say only this
That I can nothing say.

Cannot find it. Google draws a blank, the quotations websites also. Last one I looked at came up with thousands of instances of the word "say". Duh.

I am sure it was one of the Metaphysical Poets. Not Donne...not George Herbert...not Traherne.

Who got in trouble with the authorities?

I'd better give up looking. Last Google took a few seconds, and vague Google searches take a lot of energy.

Anyway, I'm pretty sure someone wrote it, and it wasn't me. A poet in the throes of censorship. Like a super-injunction, except with one of those, you can't even say it exists.  Anyway, he said it, and it stayed said.

I had a patient once who confided important one fact to me. I am sure that for him or her to reveal that fact to his or her family would be therapeutic, but I am blocked.

It is a miserable thing to censor someone. It is an exercise of mental power. An attempt to control the mind of another.

The stupid thing is that censorship never works, and it always makes things worse. Like repression.
Whatever has happened, censorship compounds it. People can tell when censorship is about, they can read between the lines.  Families can tell when a member has something on their mind and are not talking about it.

Death is a big taboo in our culture. Many people die surrounded with a wall of deceit. "You'll be all right Grampa, be out of here is a cou[le of days!"  "Like hell I will, you liar. I'm dying, and everyone is pretending I'm not".

O bright wind, you cannot read, why do you turn my pages?

Another great poet wrote that. Not Li Po or Du Fu. Whoever it was, the word for Bright is Ming, and the Ming Emperor took his head off for writing those words.

But it was worth it, because his poetry lives on, and the only thing anyone can say about that Emperor is that he took off the head of one of the best poets in China.

Apparently, it will beo nhte council website in a couple of days

Read this stat in excellent coverage of International Women's Day in The Independent on Sunday. Some more: just 19.5% of MPs are women; 3 million women in the UK suffer rape, domestic violence, trafficking, forced marriage or other violence; 90% of local authorities do not have a rape crisis centre; of 109 High Court judges only 15 are women; womens average net income per week is £180 compared to £231 for men; 20% of people belive it is sometimes acceptable for a man to hit or slap his girlfriend; 36% believe a woman is partly responsible for being raped if she is drunk; 83% of experts cited in news stories are men; 19% is the proportion of women in news stories portrayed as victims, compared to 10% for men...

The front page of the paper had many powerful quotes from a range of women. Views expressed include: recent generations lack of achievement; momentum of women's movement has stalled; women suffering more from cuts in public services; equal pay not achieved; sexism still common; no female editors of broadsheet newspapers; female director general of the BBC needed; one woman a day dies in childbirth; girls suffer circumcision and prostitution; women left for hours on their own in labour...

Great to see Green Party leader Caroline Lucas on The Independents list of 100 women who changed the world (though I'm sure Caroline would say that she has a lot more to do yet!!). I was especially pleased to see scientists Rosalind Franklin, who played a key role in idenifying the structure of DNA, Jane Goodall, who has done vital work on chimpanzees and Helen Sharman, the first Briton to enter space(who I met when she visited the science dept at a school where I was working) listed, but did not see scientist Rachel Carson author of Silent Spring, who should be there. Caroline said this on her blog about the Greens policies:

Today is...a fitting day for the Green Party to launch its manifesto for women.

We support the introduction of quotas to ensure that boards of major companies are at least 40% female, based on the model already successfully implemented in Norway, and currently being considered in France.

We would insist that all large and medium-size companies carry out equal pay audits and redress inequalities uncovered; and that the law be changed to make joint suits for equal pay cases simpler.

We also propose better provisions for maternity and paternity leave, with a focus on paid paternity, to ensure that responsibilities are shared more equally in a way that benefits both parents.

I am proud to be a part of the only political party in Britain that is explicitly committed to equality for everyone, and as part of International Women's Week, I'm delighted to be appearing on Question Time this Thursday - in front of an all-woman audience.

More here:
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/news/a-century-of-distinction-100-women-who-changed-the-world-1917427.html

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/politics/the-rights-of-woman-how-far-have-they-advanced-1917579.html

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/politics/a-progress-report-six-tales-reveal-how-much-still-remains-to-be-done-1917580.html

A common argument made by global warming sceptics is that CO2 forms only a tiny fraction of the total atmosphere. Richard Lindzen says; "The total carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is only 4 hundredth of one percent (0.0004 of total atmosphere). The total increase by volume of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere in the last 150 years is only one hundredth of one percent (0.0001)".

OK.
One tablet of Buprenorphine amounts to 0.00000000035% of the total weight of the human body. But is still works as a powerful pain reliever. From which we learn that it is not the mass,  but the effect of the substance that matters.
It is a physical fact of physics that CO2 has heat trapping properties.
There are six factors which affect earth climate, of which, undeniably, one is the greenhouse effect.
It is established that we have significantly increased the greenhouse effect.
It is impossible to explain temperatures since 1980 without factoring in this increased greenhouse effect.

A belated birthday present from Matt, last Friday we boarded the  Calendonian Sleeper from Euston to Glasgow, departing at 23:15. Lying on my front in the top bunk of a moving train took me back, right back, to the movements my dad must have made to get me to sleep against his chest. I couldn’t sleep, [...]

Last week David Woods from Phoenix Rising, spoke to Alastair Tibbitt about the Forth Energy plans to build a Biomass Energy plant on the Leith Docks. After a bit of editing, to take out all of Alastair's umms and ahhs, David was kind enough to share the finished product with Greener Leith, so we uploaded it to our Audioboo.com account. You can listen to the interview below.

Listen!

This week we're putting together our formal response to the Scottish Government on the main environmental impacts that we think will stem from the proposed Biomass plant. Meanwhile, it's interesting to see that there's been a 25% rise in the share price of Forth Ports on the back of a take over bid. According to the Evening News Forth Ports has become a particularly attractive investment as a consequence of it's potential to earn lot's of cash in the future.

"Forth gave a heavy hint that the consortium was attempting to snap up the company on the cheap as it stressed its portfolio of ports, property and renewable energy projects "has the potential to appreciate greatly in value when property markets recover".

Forth is working with its joint venture partner Scottish & Southern Energy on proposals for four biomass plants at its Scottish ports which could add "significant value" as well as make a major contribution to the country's renewable energy needs."

You can perhaps draw your own conclusions from this latest twist in the story about how much cash these plants stand to generate for their owners - if they get the go ahead. 

Lastly, Dave is also trying to raise £500 for The Citadel youth centre, by shaving off all his hair. You can sponsor him on-line here. 

Tension is rising as round two of the Tokyo Two trial starts today in Aomori, Japan, where Greenpeace activists Junichi Sato and Toru Suzuki are on trial in Japan for their role in exposing major corruption in the government funded whaling industry. This week they get to give evidence for the first time, and the whistleblower who alerted them to the embezlement scandal will also take the stand. Watch the video above for an update on the story so far...

There are still concerns over the fairness of the trial, however, as the members of the whaling crew who received the stolen whalemeat look as though they may be able to avoid giving evidence. Apparently there is no mechanism in Japan's legal system to enforce defence witnesses to attend!

It's decisions like these that caused a division of the United Nations Human Rights Council to rule recently that the Tokyo Two's human rights have been breached by the Japanese justice system. This is the first ever such ruling of its kind for Japan.

Junichi and Toru have put their freedom and rights on the line to defend whales - please pledge your support for them. Tell the Japanese government that it is whaling that should be on trial, not those who oppose it.

We will ensure that your pledge is communicated to the government of Japan as we show the strong level of support behind Junichi and Toru during their trial.

You can follow updates from the trial on our Facebook page, or by following the Twitter list @Greenpeace/whaletrial or #whaletrial.

Support Toru and Junichi: sign our petition »

COMPETITION TIME

► Our LABOUR leadership in Manchester City Council have voted down a chance to reclaim £421,000 overpaid to a PR firm, this at a time when local services are being cut and community projects are really struggling to find funding - We feel this decision is UNFAIR!

Tell us, what could you do in your community wit 421k? A Quality Play area for children? A Community bakery? An Unemployment Centre? The mother of all Sustainability Festivals?◄

Get your answers to me(contact details below) by 17th of March 2010.

*Bottle of Lanson champagne(donated) for top 2 entries*

Closing date: 17 March 2010

--
Best Wishes
Gayle O'Donovan

The Story of Transition Tales by Simon Robinson (MSc student at Schumacher College). This is the story of Transition Tales, a small group within Transition Town Totnes. One of the aims of this project is to raise awareness within Primary and Secondary School children of the transition solution of community led response to [...]

This is an email just sent out about Gary H and the bin optional chipping scheme (something I think is well worth a trial).

It just reminded me slightly of Neil Kinnock meeting ronald Reagan at the Whitehouse in 1987 or so. Kinnck came out and made bland noises of a constructive meeting blah blah blah. Reagan stuck the boot in.

Interesting to see if everything now is in election mode. WIll labour take this scheme at face value or try to score whatever ponits they can?





Meeting with DEFRA concerning waste incentive scheme highly positive

A meeting between technical experts from Defra and Cllr Gary Hopkins, Executive Member for the Environment and Bristol City Council staff on a proposal for a pilot incentive scheme that would give Bristol residents the chance to receive cash incentives to reduce the waste they generate.

"We presented the bid for funding for this pilot and the panel of experts seemed very positive. At no time did they outline any area of concern." said Cllr Hopkins.

The panel confirmed that at present no politician has been briefed on the scheme but that they would now be making their recommendation to the Secretary of State, Mr Hilary Benn, who will make the final decision.
"We certainly were given no reason to be other than very positive that our bid will be accepted" said Cllr Hopkins.

Bristol City Council could become the first authority in the country to reward residents who produce less black bin waste.

Following a series of discussions and meetings with Defra and WRAP, the city council were encouraged to take formal proposal to Defra in London today to seek funding and support for a pilot incentive scheme that would give residents the chance to receive cash incentives depending on how much they manage to reduce their waste. The scheme would be entirely voluntary and is to reward people who are reducing their waste and therefore saving the waste disposal cost to the Council and the cost to the environment.

Friday's Times Online had an interesting article about the Tory target election campaign. Apparently deep within the bowels of Conservative HQ is a 'slim folder' with the Tories election strategy inside it. It's just the article I shouldn't be paying any attention to now I am a Green campaigning for Adrian Ramsay and Caroline Lucas, but with the endless stream of Tory and Lib Dem leaflets about to jam my letterbox, it's one I can't ignore.

Jeremy Browne, my Lib Dem MP, scraped to victory in 2005 with a huge amount of hard work and gusto. He defeated the incumbent Tory MP, Adrian Flook, who had been MP for 4 years and now has a majority of just 573 (a much fatter majority than Adrian had in 2001). From 1997 - 2001 Jackie Ballard held the seat for the Lib Dems. The reasons why she lost are widely thought to be a very clumsy campaign and the hunting lobby attacking her for her anti-hunting views.

Since hunting will be prominent in this General Election campaign once more I do worry that the hunting fraternity will try all the harder to help the Tory candidate, Mark Formosa, win and defeat Jeremy. I have picked up from articles that he is sympathetic to horse riders (although doesn't ride as an adult) and wonder if he has sympathies with hunting.

As the article in the Times reported on Friday:

'Lib Dem MPs acknowledge that they are unlikely to be able to hold back a rise in enthusiasm for the Tories in parts of the South West, but insist that the situation is not as bleak as a year ago. Lib Dems with a good local record are hard to unseat, with Eastleigh in Hampshire, held by the former leadership contender Chris Huhne by 534 votes, widely thought to stay yellow.'

Jeremy has been a very high profile MP for Taunton. There haven't been many bad articles about him or damaging publicity, apart from his expenses blip which has been solved now on his appeal win.

• Women make up half the world's population but only a fifth of the world's decision-makers.
• In the British Parliament, less than 20% are women, putting the UK in 59th place among other parliaments in the world. This is after countires like Afghanistan, Rwanda, and Mozambique! 
• 70% of the world's poor are women.

Gaby used to be the political editor of the Observer, but  resigned to spend more time with her two-year-old son. She writes a brilliant blog about her experiences over at usedtobesomebody.blogspot.com. (Found via babypicturethis). Today she writes about women who say that they are not feminists but believe that women should be equal. She looks at the problems around the image of feminism, and then she lays to rest some of the myths too. Just go on over and have a read. You can thank me later.

Happy international womens day.

xx

With the 2010 fashion weeks falling around Fairtrade Fortnight, we haven't failed to notice that ethical, eco-friendly and Fairtrade fashion has been one of the biggest talking points in Milan, Paris, New York and London. Some of the biggest fashion...

With March welcoming the first cloudless days of 2010, I can't be the only one to notice certain people thinking that this warrants cracking out the shortest shorts and the tightest tanktops, despite the still freezing temperatures. With enough power...

Last Friday I travelled to Dorset on a beautiful clear day which turned from a hard frost to glorious sunshine over the time I was journeying. I was going to Bryanston School which was hosting the Dorset Schools Green Summit, drawing together kids from 40 schools across the county. There were various [...]

Tomorrow the Brent Cross Coalition will be handing in petitions and letters to John Denham, Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, to ask him to call-in the Brent Cross Regeneration Application for a Public Inquiry.
Brent Green Party have requested a call-in based on the following grounds:
1. The residents of the London boroughs of Brent and Camden were not consulted on this matter despite the scheme having major impact on residents of the two boroughs. Our own council, Brent, remain opposed to this development despite suggestions to the contrary at the Barnet Planning Committee.

2. This development will have a major impact on North West London in terms of traffic, increased pollution and the destruction of local shopping areas in surrounding localities. These issues were not considered by the Barnet Planning Committee which had a Barnet-centric approach to the application. A wider assessment of the application is vital and would be provided by a Public Inquiry.

3. The application does not conform to the Government’s Climate Change Law to reduce Co2 by 80% by 2050. The scheme will generate thousands more car journeys per day and become a net contributor of greenhouse gases and global warming.

4. The lack of clarity in evidence presented at the Planning Committee on the proposed waste handling plant and incinerator. In the face of expert opinion by a visiting US professor on the potential health hazards of the proposed gasification process we believe that the Secretary of State should institute a Public Inquiry to ensure that the health and safety of the local population, and particularly that of young children who are particularly vulnerable to the impact of toxic substances, is safeguarded.

5. The major thrust of the application is to extend the Brent Cross Shopping Centre and other components of Phase One of the scheme, such as affordable housing, have been cut back. A proposal to increase the size of the Shopping Centre was rejected by a Public Inquiry in 1999 and a Judicial Review and High Court judgement in 2003. The proposal represents the developers’ second bite at the cherry in much changed and less favourable economic circumstances.

6. Although the Planning Committee is supposed to make an independent judgement, the application was compromised by the fact that the Barnet Borough Council are major supporters of the scheme and have helped facilitate the process for the applicants. Importantly they are also major landowners in the development area.

Being green can have everything to do with saving money, which is why I love shopping at second-hand shops.  There are charity shops, dress agencies and also the school second-hand shop for used school uniform.   The internet is also a great place to pick up second-hand goodies, good places to start including Freecycle and Ebay.

If your impression of second-hand things is dull and dowdy, take a look at these vintage finds from Etsy.

From left-right and top-bottom: vintage ANDREA PFISTER suede clutch; VTG 80’s ITALIAN Teal leather SNAKE SKIN Avant Garde OTK Over Knee Boots 6.5; Authentic military uniform, with all the bells, pins and whistles; The Anita Pallenberg Cape; Vintage 70s 80s Oversized SLOUCHY Sweater Cardigan S M; Dropwaist Velvet one shoulder Dress with Fortuny Mary McFadden Style Pleated Skirt; 80s LANVIN One Shoulder Art Print Maxi Dress; Chunky Cable Knit Cardigan with Wood Buttons, sz. L; Captain Jack vintage lightweight coat

A lot has been written about the levels of pay in the public sector - many commenting on the salaries of in particular senior staff in the public sector. Comparisons have been made with the PM's salary - and with those earning minimum wage in low-skill jobs.

The argument in favour of the seemingly high salaries for senior staff is generally along the lines of "we need to pay attractive salaries to get the best staff" - and to some extent I think that's a good one. An effective set of senior staff in a local authority is essential if we're to deliver the services that we need and want and get the very best value for money from the Council Tax and Central Government Grants that pay for these. It's about having staff that can see ahead, plan ahead, bring froward the best range of choices for the political leadership - the Mayor and Council to discuss, shape and agree. The focus on the actual salary paid is understandable - and as a politician I have to have a credible response to that.

As a Councillor I'm always keen to find ways of driving down the cost of running Lewisham without having an adverse impact on services available to residents. In terms of senior staff that offers us the following:

(a) having few of them
(b) paying them less
(c) sharing the cost with others

Of the above (a) and (b) are easy to understand - but it is (c) that interests me at the moment.

Some work has already taken place about sharing the cost of Chief Executives across different local authorities. As a London Borough with responsibility for a very large range of services that presents a challenge. Would we support a joint arrangement with say the London Borough of Greenwich? Would this be a step on the way to creating 'Super Boroughs' across London?

I think that if we are to consider joint arrangements as a means of reducing the cost of senior pay or justifying the higher pay of some senior staff we need to look first at other public sectors in Lewisham rather than our local government neighbours. In April last year in Hammersmith the Primary Care Trust and the Local Authority took a decision to do just this.

Doing this in Lewisham could save us a bit of cash...but it perhaps has more important points.

The advantages claimed by the Hammersmith and Fulham Team:

"move designed to better target resources on residents in need and boost future comprehensive area assessment scores"

The local Government article also states:

"Hammersmith & Fulham said it planned to create an integrated management team from the executives of both structures, with the appointment of a new managing director of health who will have day-to-day responsibility for the PCT."

Looking at the points raised in some more detail: Anne McDonald , the Local Government Association director of community wellbeing, said evidence from collaborations so far showed areas with roughly 300,000 residents appeared to be around the right size for shared directors and chief executives to work.

Lewisham would appear to fit the bill...but is it Green?

We've long thought that there is a clear role for increasing the democratic accountability of the NHS to its local users. The ability of Lewisham's Healthier Communities Select Committee to scrutinise the local NHS is a step in the right direction. Such joint arrangements would fit in nicely to the Green view of a locally and democratically accountable NHS.

As it is getting the organisations to work more closely together via joint Chief Executive arrangements could lead to a significant saving of public money, better democratic accountability and more joined up services for Lewisham's residents. It's co-operation both within the NHS and with others working with the NHS that will lead to lower costs and better services.

I have written about the Constitution Working Group (CWG) before – it is an ad-hoc group used by councillors and officers to explore changes to Lewisham's constitution prior to formal motions put before full Council for adoption, hopefully by consensus. There were three main items this week – my proposals about the appointment of the Directors to the new council-owned company which owns and runs the Catford Shopping Centre, a review of the scrutiny committees and the issue that I think is likely to be of most interest to bloggers – petitions.

When the final legislative hurdles have been overcome, Lewisham will be introducing a formal petitions scheme for residents to bring matters to the attention of Councillors, officers and the Mayor. This will mean that in general, if a significant number of people living in Lewisham call for a matter to be debated by the Council or one of its committees it will be. There are also provisions for certain senior officers to be called to give evidence on issues to again the Council or one its committees.

The CWG discussed the merits of how many signatures a petition needs to trigger a debate. The range discussed varied from 3,000 to 13,000 (5% of our population and the legal maximum we would have been allowed to set). A concern raised at the meeting was that if the threshold was set too low far too many issues could be brought forward creating a logjam at Council or our committees. I was not particularly convinced by this argument for raising the threshold above 3,000. For me, it was important to understand what Lewisham's residents might expect the threshold to be. I was far more concerned that residents understood what the purpose of the threshold is – it is not to limit the workload of the Council or its committees – for me it is convey to the residents that this is a mechanism whereby Councillors and the Mayor can confidently assert that this is an issue that warrants serious consideration and that ultimately it may mean that we have to do things differently. It is part of listening to and understanding what a significant proportion of our residents think are important.

This was why I was in favour of adopting a threshold of 10,000 – 10,000 as with any figure we could have chosen without further evidence is arbitrary. 'Ten thousand' is a number that people can understand as being 'a lot' – in voter terms it's about the size of an electoral ward in Lewisham. Some members thought the statutory maximum of 13,000 (5% of the population as a good figure) was appropriate, others believed a lower figure was better. In the end, as this is very friendly CWG we compromised on 8,000.

The threshold can and should be reviewed in a few months – then we'll have a better idea as to how it is used in Lewisham.

There will be no change to the way in which smaller petitions typically presented by a smaller number of residents in a tighter geographical area will be dealt with – these won't be downgraded – and of course it needs to be added that Lewisham will be developing a way whereby petitions can be held on line. With Lewisham's active bloggers and other online activities this will become the main way that petitions are fed into the Council.

UPDATE

An about turn from the Lib Dems caused this discussion to descend into chaos. We noted that the consensus on the issue had clearly fallen down when the Lib Dems changed their position quite dramatically to reducing the threshold to 1500 (I think that was their proposal but can't recall) we called for the issue to be referred back. In the end the proposals were passed as proposed in the paper on account of Labour's majority.

Today is the 100th anniversary of International Women's Day, and I thoroughly enjoyed speaking at the IWD event on Saturday at the Old Market - lots of people there, and had a very warm reception.

Also very honoured indeed to have been included in the Independent on Sunday's "100 Women who changed the World" - though still got a bit of work to do on that one!

But while International Women's Day is rightly about the celebration of what we've achieved so far, it's clear that so much still remains to be done. Women hold just 11% of FTSE 100 directorships and less than 20% of the positions in Parliament.

According to a recent report, at the current rate of progress, it will take 200 years for women to be equally represented at Westminster - only slightly shorter than the time it would apparently take a snail to crawl the entire length of the Great Wall of China(212 years).

Today is therefore a fitting day for the Green Party to launch its manifesto for women.

We support the introduction of quotas to ensure that boards of major companies are at least 40% female, based on the model already successfully implemented in Norway, and currently being considered in France.

We would insist that all large and medium-size companies carry out equal pay audits and redress inequalities uncovered; and that the law be changed to make joint suits for equal pay cases simpler.

We also propose better provisions for maternity and paternity leave, with a focus on paid paternity, to ensure that responsibilities are shared more equally in a way that benefits both parents.

I am proud to be a part of the only political party in Britain that is explicitly committed to equality for everyone, and as part of International Women's Week, I'm delighted to be appearing on Question Time this Thursday - in front of an all-woman audience.

2. I visited Another Place




On Crosby Sands














I can connect















Nothing with nothing.











With apologies to TS Eliot.

Spring is nearly here. It can't come soon enough for me. This has been the longest, coldest, grottiest winter for thirty years, and I will be *so* glad to see the back of it.

But the days are getting that little bit longer, and the sun was shining this week. In a fortnight's time it will be the Vernal Equinox, and then a week later we'll be Springing Forward, and something approaching normal service will resume...

Mea culpa dear reader(s) - I've been pretty bad at keeping this blog up to date of late. Mainly because I've had zero energy and a severe shortage of time. But following a rather poignant plea from the Brighton Politics Blogger (shucks BPB, I never knew you cared), I'm going to try and correspond more regularly over coming weeks.

Time is an issue, as I'm (still) looking for some other gainful employment to sit alongside my Council duties, so job applications have to take priority if I find myself staring aimlessly at the laptop screen with a relatively empty Council inbox (ha ha ha - you can imagine how often this is the case). But I'll do my best.

Anyway, suffice to say things are mad busy here and hotting up to molten levels as we enter the final furlong before the general election. There are less than nine weeks to go now.

Plenty of other people have been blogging about our prospects of returning Caroline Lucas in Brighton Pavilion as Westminster's first ever Green MP - there's still an epic amount of work to do, but the lighter evenings herald a major stepping up of a pace which has been fairly relentless even through the black nights of winter (massive props must go to Cllr Alex Phillips for her legendary efforts on the doorsteps in Withdean throughout the 'Snow Chaos' in January, and the general gloominess and chill of February).

So not wanting to repeat that which has been more than ably expressed elsewhere over the last few weeks, here are some other things which have been on my radar:

1. Very busy with Council work
Will post separately about this next week in order to do it full justice. Highlights: Phoenix will be putting in their planning application by the end of the month, and next Tuesday sees the launch of a new demonstration food growing garden in Preston Park. Lowlights: the recent Budget.

2. The Green Party slot on Channel Four was excellent


My inestimable mother phoned me to say how good she thought it was, so there you go. In fact she even offered to come down and help with the campaign (this is the woman who delivered around a thousand leaflets during my bid for election in 2007), but after some deliberation she has decided to assist instead in the Trafford marginals. Thanks anyway Mum!

3. Blogs I have been liking

• The Plural Progressive - I like your skillz and styles Luke - keep up the good work.
• Odd Cog - anyone who titles a post 'Political Apathy: Epic Fail' has got to be OK.
• Glum Councillors - this is just ace. Spot the B&H Green in the archives... ;) Speaking of which...
  

4. Jason Kitcat's Graphs
Every politics geek will enjoy this.

5. Blogging - I am still doing it wrong (probably)
Here's a handy Guide to Blogging & Facebook for Councillors - in fairness it's pretty sensible stuff. Good pointers for any elected bloggers out there.

6. Twitter
May the goddess forgive me, but I have finally bitten the bullet and joined Twitter. You can 'follow' me here [*messianic face* + lol]. I'm not promising I'll be any better at "tweeting" than I am at blogging as it is clearly extra cyber-mither, but at least I'll get to check out the #hash tags# now [eyes #mobmonday curiously...]

Happy Spring readers! Will check in again shortly - it's nice to be back :)

*After Emily Dickinson - A little madness in the Spring

And I like to challenge myself on other stuff too,  important stuff. I have read some good articles around the web recently.  Especially over this weekend. Stuff that has shocked me, inspired me, and challenged me, and i thought id tell you about them too? Just because.


Firstly, This article has already done the blog rounds but I love it. Its about blog fame, written by Pip of meet me at mikes, who is one of the hero's of the blogging world. According to me anyway. She floors me every. time. 
This is one of Pip's comments “I think the thing is, we really DO want to hear about YOU and what YOU do. Who cares if it’s not what everyone else does… or indeed IS what everyone else does! The important point is that honesty resonates and real life foibles are the stuff we LOVE to read about!”


I read this next article after Zoe tweeted about it. It is from Smaggle on women and jelousy:
“When was the last time you ran into a friend who was half the size she was then when you last saw her? Did you gush and say she looked great? But secretly wanted to liquify donuts and feed them to her intravenously as she slept? Why?”


I saw the next one in the Guardian. Its about the beef industry, and it renewed my resolve to only buy organic free range meat, or none at all.
"It isn't hard to figure out why the beef industry won't let even an enthusiastic carnivore near its slaughter facilities. Even in abattoirs where most cattle die quickly, it's hard to imagine that any day passes in which several animals (tens, hundreds?) don't meet an end of the most horrifying kind."


The saddest article Ive read in a while is from the Economist on the subject of Gendercide. It highlights  the millions of missing baby girls who are killed or aborted because of their gender. This reminds me to value the relative equality I enjoy today, and advocate equal rights wherever possible.
"All countries need to raise the value of girls. They should encourage female education; abolish laws and customs that prevent daughters inheriting property; make examples of hospitals and clinics with impossible sex ratios; get women engaged in public life—using everything from television newsreaders to women traffic police. Mao Zedong said “women hold up half the sky.” The world needs to do more to prevent a gendercide that will have the sky crashing down."


Anyway. Wow. That was a long blog post. Can you tell i've had a reflective weekend? (Read; totally unproductive.) Its true. I have not done very much. Apart from daydream. And clean. What an exciting life I lead eh. 


How has yours been? And have you come across anything recently which has challenged or inspired  or floored you? Id love to read it if so. 


Have a sweet week cherries. 


x

On Friday evening, 5th March, we gathered at The Redbridge Institute for an Interview with Tony Benn. Whether you agree with him or not he is part of the fixtures and fittings of British politics. There are not that many major figures in this field where you know what you are getting. Margaret Thatcher is another. With people like these it’s not a lucky dip. You just know they mean it.

The room was full with some 200 people. Lots of local Labour faithfuls [some disillusioned] paying homage plus at least one Conservative councillor, 6 known Green Party members and a fair diversity by age, sex and ethnicity. Such is Tony's pulling power.

The event was not terribly well managed. Tony was seated at the same level as the audience, so I could not see him, and he had a hand held microphone, which for somebody who likes to wave his hands about, [see photo] meant I couldn’t hear him most of the time either.

As always with these events the questioners rambled on with a speech of their own and Tony didn’t seem to know what the question was, and frankly neither did I. It rather spoilt the evening and the only comment from Tony that I can remember that stood out was this: “The Labour Party is not a socialist party. It is a party that has socialists in it”. Rather more in years past than at present perhaps?
-----------
At the beginning of the event Sonia Klein [our hostess for the evening and the Labour PPC for Ilford North] told us that she had been getting “hate mail”. Allegedly because the meeting was being held on a Friday [Friday evening is the Jewish Shabbat] and because she has called for sanctions against Israel. She is also a Muslim, but her mother-in-law apparently is Jewish.

I don’t like this sort of thing, it’s not nice. Our current MP, Lee Scott, is Jewish and he has held meetings on Friday evenings. This is because he is usually being detained at Her Majesties Pleasure in the House on Monday through to Thursday evenings. He has also led protest marches on local issues on a Saturday afternoon.

To sanctions against Israel. This is a perfectly legitimate position to take. You or I may not agree with it, but I would want to know precisely what is meant, and indeed I am not happy with my own parties position on this, which is BDS – Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions, including cultural and academic. However, I am free to argue that case, although it can get “heated” especially if one happens to be Jewish, which I’m not. But others are and sometimes they are not treated with due respect which upsets me even more.

I have to say here that the implication that the “hate mail” is coming from the local Jewish community is not necessarily true, presumably they are anonymous, and they could be and probably are troublemakers trying to stir up a bit of racial hatred. But whoever they are, they are not welcome.

Our commitment to road traffic reduction is high. Traffic congestion causes multiple problems, especially in cities like Bristol – and yet the big parties have neglected to give transport the attention and investment it has long needed.

Greens will plan to enable people to access local jobs and facilities close to where they live and promote walking and cycling. We want an integrated, sustainable transport authority serving Greater Bristol (as 6 of the 7 most economically powerful cities in England outside of London have*), convenient, speedy ticketing that can be used on both buses, trains and ferries, real-time information as the norm throughout the system and a transport hub where it makes good sense – right next to Temple Meads railway station on ‘Plot 6’ (pictured).

We will invest in convenient, affordable, accessible and expanded public transport, diverting money away from major road building and subsidies for expanded air travel: doubling the size of the bus fleet, investing £3 billion to buy 30,000 new buses, creating 70,000 jobs; subsidising bus fares and getting new services operational with £2 billion; bringing the railways back into public ownership, spending £2 billion on new track and rolling stock and urban tram schemes, creating 20,000 jobs; through a £3 billion subsidy reducing UK rail fares by one third, bringing them in line with the European average. At EU level Green MEPs are working for the introduction of a core UK rail freight network that includes the Channel Tunnel to connect with European networks.

More detail from: the Green New Deal and this excellent post from Tony Dyer on his Aurea Mediocritas blog.

This post is the sixth of a series giving positive reasons to vote Green in the run up to this years local elections and general election.

To : The Mayor of London
Boris Johnson

Dear Boris

I have a helpful suggestion for you, that will save you a lot of money and anxiety. You are going to like it.

It is about the Opening Ceremony for the London Olympics 2012. China is a hard act to follow, with their massive fireworks and computer graphics &c. We are not going to be in the same league, and also, as a Conservative, you will be looking to reduce the budget deficit wherever possible.

So here is my very helpful suggestion. Forget fireworks, because the Chinese invented fireworks, along with paper, the hang glider and an Encyclopedia Britannica of other things) because any display that we put up will be a damp squib (excuse the pun) in comparison with their effort. Forget huge displays of synchronised dancers with flags, because the Chinese outnumber us by 1000:1, and also the British are not so easily dragooned into uniform activities.

We need an opening ceremony that is (a) quintessentially British, and (b) cheap as chips. I am sure that your desk is piled high with expensive consultant reports telling exactly the same thing.

Well, I have the answer that you have been searching for.
It is...(drum roll)

A State Opening of the Olympics
Yes, you heard me right. A State Opening of the Olympics. As in "State Opening of Parliament". As in Golden Carriage, HM the Q, waving, Prince Phillip, perhaps with a shotgun (not loaded), the Royal Family, Horse Guards, Bearskins, Busbies, the lot. The full Monty. People will love it. Tourists will love it - they cross the globe to see the Horse Guards, they buy postcards of horseguards by the tonne. (Sorry, ton). Boris, you cannot go wrong with this one. We have all the gear, the carriage, the horses, the Grenadiers, the lot. All packed neatly away in the Quartermaster's stores. Get them out, quick dust down, quick rehearsal, you're ready to roll.


And the beauty of it is - that's not all.

You can follow up the Royal Procession with a Demotic Procession of other exemplars of Britishness. The only limit is the imagination.  Pearly Kings, non-bendy London buses, you name it.  I can see a squad of football supporters, selected for the uniform rotundity of their beer belly, wearing Union flag t-shirts, or maybe stripped to the waist. They will be happy to do it for a few free cans. They could even be doing that trick where they get a plastic washing-up bowl to stick to their bellies, you must have seen that? Anyway, I leave the details to you, or rather, to your team.  The football hooligans fans could be followed by a bevy of bare-midriff young ladies, all half-cut, teetering on or carrying their high heels.


I hope I have given you enough of my vision here to whet your appetite for  a truly British, yet low-budget, State Opening of the Olympics.


Naturally, this proposal, to be truly valuable, needs to the subject of appropriate remuneration. "Nothing", as King Lear so rightly said, "comes of nothing". I am not a banker, not a greedy man, but neither am I a pushover. Let us take the £400,000 cost of the Lisa Simpson 2010 logo as a starting point for our negotiations.


I look forward to hearing from you.


Yours sincerely


(Dr) Richard Lawson


PS when are you going to do HIGNFY again? You were good.
PPS I noticed on my last visit, that despite Transport for London giving a ludicrous reason to block my "Keep Left on the Walkways" proposal, that Londoners are now indeed tending to walk on the left in the passages of the Underground, which is improving the flow of pedestrians immeasurably.

Just over two weeks ago, I took the bold step of forcing the issue of Lord Ashcroft's tax status, by issuing a potentially libellous allegation.  Today, he coughs up the truth. He is a non-dom.   He does not pay full British tax. His company does not conduct his business in the UK.

What happens next?

Page 10 of the Electoral Commission's Guidance to political parties states,
3.6 Parties can only accept a donation or loan (as defined in Chapter 2, ‘Defining
parties, donations and regulated transactions’) with a value of more than £200 if the
donor or lender is in the following categories:
• an individual registered in a UK electoral register (including bequests)
• a UK registered company which is incorporated within the EU and carries on
business in the UK

So Lord Ashcroft is not a "permissible donor". The Tories are now obliged to report the donations:
5.2 Parties are required to report details of any of the following relevant donations: [...]
• any donation of more than £200 received from an impermissible or unidentified
donor

The Electoral Commission will require the Conservative Party to return Ashcroft's gifts.
Failure by a party to return a donation from an impermissible or unidentifiable source
Section 56(3) and (4) On summary conviction: statutory maximum fine or six months’
imprisonment.

O dear. That would make Dave the first PM to govern the country from a cell in Wormwood Scrubs. He will have to return the donations. I believe he needs to write a cheque for a sum in the region of £3,000,000, which should not be too much of a problem.

Unless the Electoral Commission somehow loses the paperwork or lets the trail go cold.



The Electoral Commission can be reached at:
Trevelyan House
Great Peter Street
London SW1P 2HW
Tel: 020 7271 0500 (switchboard)
Jenny Watson is the chair of the Commissioners.

Their stated aim is "integrity and public confidence in the democratic process."

Be polite but firm in your communications with Jenny.
[update: sadly, the Electoral Commission is doing an impersonation of an ashtray on a motorbike, functionality-wise]

'are you interested in becoming a member of a new green political Party then ?We are forming a new Green Party,the Name is yet to be decided, we are meting next Saturday in Dublin if you are interested ?'

More details here, do join and get involved.

The Green Party of England and Wales is great but things have seriously gone wrong in Ireland, coalition with Fianna Fail a party known for corruption was a very big mistake.....but a new green party is to be planted and nurtured in Ireland.

Hope something good can come out of this, there is already an independent Green Party in Donegal.

Today I joined over a thousand mothers, fathers and children marched from Lambeth to Downing Street, to protest about the closure of the Albany Unit in Peckham, south London. It supported women to give birth wherever they choose – almost half give birth at home – and medical intervention rates were low. All women have their babies delivered by the midwife they have seen throughout their pregnancy, and the group's caesarean and medical intervention rates were very low.

However, South London’s King's College Hospital terminated its contract last year, alleging that a disproportionate number of the babies it delivered suffered damage during the birth.

Children, many of whom brandished placards stating that they had been born at the Albany Hospital, marched to Downing Street to hand in a petition asking for the Albany midwives to be allowed to return to work.

Speakers at the rally included Professor Wendy Savage, a long-time campaigner for maternity rights and renowned obstetrician, and Beverley Beech, chair of the Association for Improvements in Maternity Services (AIMS).


The strength of feeling at this march was incredible. There’s a sense that, despite the government’s pledge that ‘maternity matters’, women are still not being listened to. Home births are still not an option for many women. By the Royal College of Midwives’ estimation, we are approximately 5,000 midwives short in the UK. Women are ending up with unnecessary interventions and are being traumatised. The day you give birth to a child is one you will remember for the rest of your life, and for many women it is a terrifying experience. This is partly because our medical approach to birth is completely wrong, and this is exacerbated by a chronic shortage of midwives.

I lodged complaints with both the Healthcare Commission and the Nursing and Midwifery Council after giving birth at the Royal Free in 2007. A catalogue of errors left me in labour for 48 hours, at which point an emergency caesarean was performed. I was then subjected to bullying by one midwife, who ordered me not to breastfeed. It was no surprise that The Ham and High reported later that year that high levels of complaints had been made about midwives at the hospital.

That the Albany midwives have been stopped from practising means that we have lost the ‘gold standard’ that all women should be entitled to. It was important to have this unit because it served as a reminder of what birth can, and should, be like. If I had had a one-to-one relationship with a midwife throughout my pregnancy, if I had been listened to in a non-pressurised environment, my experience would have been completely different. Bringing new lives into the world has to be one of the most important things to get right, and that’s why I was marching with my daughter today.

This headline is in this week's Health Service Journal:

Research by the think tank Civitas looked at more than 150 published studies of market reforms introduced to the NHS both under a Conservative government in the 1990s and under the present Labour government since 2002. 

Analysis concluded that although waiting times have shortened, and patient access and provider efficiency have improved, much of this can be attributed to greater funding and the use of targets, rather than the introduction of the purchaser/provider split.

Of course the Greens have been saying this for years, health care is a service not a commodity...

Time to the purchaser / provider split!

What’s the difference between the heading above and the headline on the main Redbridge-i website – “0% Council Tax Rise”. I’ll tell you. A 0% Tax rise is meant to indicate a successful outcome, i.e. we are not putting your taxes up, whereas a 0% Tax reduction would indicate a failure to reduce it.

Over in Hammersmith and Fulham council tax has been reduced by 3% for the fourth successive year and a Band D property pays £1,121, including the London Assembly precept. Meanwhile in Wandsworth council tax is on course to remain the lowest in the UK at £687 for an average Band D property after the authority announced proposals for freezing its share of the bills for the third year running. Here in Redbridge the tax on a Band D property is £1,405, more than twice that in Wandsworth and over 28% of the basic State pension. These are all Conservative controlled London Authorities so the notion that the Government grant [the majority of a Council’s income] is biased towards the party of government doesn’t really stand up here, but it does indicate a postcode lottery when it comes to council tax and maybe should be looked at again to even out the burden. [Note: yes I know Redbridge is currently "hung" but they are the administration]

Anyway, there are some things to be pleased about. As the Full Council meeting last Thursday unfolded some of the proposed cuts were deferred. The Local Studies Library is safe for another year, the reduction in street cleaning staff has been shelved and also the removal of concessionary rates for over-60 allotment holders, as well as major cuts in the adult social services and highways budgets.

However, the money for these will have to come from elsewhere within the existing pot. That's the challenge for whoever is in charge after May 6th. Unfortunately, the prime candidate to give way, the Redbridge Life Newspaper, seems to be off limits and the Labour group even want it to be more localised, i.e. more expensive.

Here's the official version of events.

Friends of the Earth, together with St Albans branches of the World Development Movement, Transition Towns and the Campaign Against Climate Change, are holding a hustings for all the general election candidates in St Albans, focussing on the candidates' green agendas.It's on 13th April, at the Marlborough Road Methodist Church. Doors open 7.30pm. Entry is free.

It is clear that there is an increased incidence of birth deformities in Fallujah.
What is causing it? The candidates are Depleted Uranium (DU), White Phosphorus, something else, or a combination of the above.

We know that White Phoshorus was used.
Abu Sabah, a refugee from Fallujah, reported seeing phosphorus bombs: "They used these weird bombs that put up smoke like a mushroom cloud. Then small pieces fell from the air with long tails of smoke trailing behind them. These exploded on the ground with large fires that burnt for half and hour," Abu Sabah said. "When anyone touched these fires their bodies burnt for hours." Source

However, White Phosphorus, although toxic , is not known to cause birth deformities. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, but it is not a major candidate.

Malnutrition, particularly folic acid deficiency, is a known cause of neural tube defects, but not of the more complex defects being seen in Fallujah.

It would seem that DU was used in Fallujah. This is hotly denied by Richard S Lowry, a "military historian" who has written a book on Fallujah.

Having seen what appeared to be a depleted uranium (DU) missile fired at a building in Fallujah on CNN during the first week of the fighting, AFP asked the Pentagon if DU weapons are being used in Fallujah. "Yes," Lt. Col. Joe Yoswa said, "DU is a standard round on the M-1 Abrams tank." Source.
That quote again:
Christian Bollyn of the American Free Press , Washington D.C asked Lt.Col. Joe Yoswa if the US was using Depleted Uranium in Fallujah and received the reply that " DU is the standard round on the M-1 Abraham Tanks" which have been used in Fallujah. source



It was estimated that during that assault over 10,000 tons of depleted uranium, DU, was used in the bombardment of the city of 300,000 people. Both the Pentagon and the British governments insist that the use of DU is not illegal. Source 
This 10,000 tonne figure is doubtful. It may relate to the amount used in Iraq as a whole - see below. 

ICBUW is investigating the possible use of uranium weapons during the attacks on Fallujah. Currently it seems that Abrams tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles were deployed during both battles. Both vehicles carry armour piercing rounds containing uranium and high explosive rounds which do not. However the fact that they were not facing armoured targets does not mean that only high explosive rounds were used. In fact, there are indications that armour piercing ammunition may be more effective against individuals fighting behind cover in urban areas. While is not known how widespread the use of uranium weapons was during the fighting, it seems likely that it was used to some extent.
Source

The Pentagon admits to having used 1,200 tonnes of DU in Iraq thus far.
Source

Yes, wide discrepancies in the reportage. So let us have a look at the ammunition lists from 2004. Or let's hear from crews who were there. Most importantly, let us do a survey on the ground in Fallujah, to find out what radiation counters and chemical analysis shows.

Here is one source that could prove Lowry wrong:
Mr. Rasheed presented a video report entitled "Witness from Fallujah." And regarding DU, he said: "We detected abnormally high radioactivity by using a Geiger counter." Source.

DU is both radioactive and chemically toxic. As a chemical weapon it would be banned by the Geneva Convention, so the military have no choice of stance except Stout Denial. There is no proof that DU causes these problems, they say, exploiting journalists ignorance of the fact that there is no proof in science, only evidence. And the evidence that DU causes problems is as widespread as the use of these weapons.

What is lacking is not "proof", but the willingness of politicians to listen to doctors rather than to generals in matters relating to medicine.

The evidence needs sorting out, and the Bradford Hill guidelines need to be applied.

My decision to withdraw from the General election in Weston has been contentious, although a modest majority of the feedback I have received has been supportive. For me, and I am sure for the local party, it has been incredibly painful, especially the loss of the power to take part in the local electoral debate. Such as it is - three or four hustings, which would cost about £250 apiece for the privilege of participation, hardly a bargain.


There are some who would prefer quietly to bury this story, but this I cannot do. There is a debate to be had, about the iniquity of the archaic First Past the Post (FPTP) electoral scheme. FPTP forces people into tactical voting, and now, in my case, tactical withdrawal.

There is a fear within the Green Party that the LibDems will say to other GP candidates, "Why don't you do like Richard and stand down, to let us defeat the Tory?" The obvious answer to this is is, "No, it's your turn to pull a candidate to our advantage. That way we get a better probability of two MPs who support Proportional Representation (PR)".

If the LDs do try to spin my withdrawal, using it against the GP, I am prepared to reverse the decision. They know this, and so far I have not seen any reports of this. LibDem blogs have mainly just reproduced the Weston Mercury editorial (see the post below).

This decision, painful though it is, might raise the profile of PR in the election.

The "Safe Seat Argument" runs thus: "This is a safe seat, so you are free to use your vote to show support for the Green political principles, which are for Radical Reform of politics, economy and international affairs. It is a very powerful argument, though in the past it has carried a drawback, the corollary of what happens in marginal seats. This has stopped us using it before. Now though we have the above "Your Turn" argument which disposes of that problem.

There is a whole discussion to be had of party politics, and co-operation. We want PR: that necessarily involves inter-party co-operation in Government. It is difficult and dangerous, as we see in Germany and Ireland; so we may as well start practising now. Voters are fed up with party bickering; they should be interested in cooperation.

I am well aware of the deficiencies of LibDems, and their manifold shortcomings in local Government. Not to mention Michael Brown. They also have a list of apparently perverse votes by Green Councillors. We could go for a mudslinging battle? Or would the cooperation story be more positive?

Yes, the LDs are often obnoxious, particularly vicious around elections (is it a kind of PMT?) but that's politics. We chose to get into this game, we have to learn how to play it. Yes, they are growthist &c. We have big policy differences, but we also have common interests, notably PR. And it must be accepted that they are more environment-friendly that the LabCon axis.

There is a history to what happened in Weston. I was elected to Woodspring DC with an arrangement with the libDems. I withdrew from the Parliamentaries in 1997 in favour of the LibDem Brian Cotter, and he won with a margin of votes equivalent to what I used to get. Not all Green votes, but they helped.

Mike Bell the LD will have a tough job on his hands to get a 2% swing, but thngs are volatile, and the FPTP debate, when it opens up here, can help to swing it.  Who knows what damage the Ashcroft affair will do to the Tories? (not a lot, probably, due to the power of the Tory media to suppress information).

This posting may create wrath in some parts of the Green Party, for which I am duly regretful.
I'm going to invoke free speech here. The Green Party does not subscribe to the whip system, even less to the on-message control freakery of NuLabour.

As someone said in a comment, there is more to politics than party politics. Democracy transcends party interests, and let there be no doubt about it: FPTP is a travesty of democracy, and FPTP must go. And to get that, we need inter-party cooperation.  Either that or a General Pause.

The Weston Mercury ran the story of my withdrawal from the election last Tuesday, and also carried this editorial :

No such thing as a 'wasted vote'

Aspiring politicos of all persuasions are dusting off their snappy suits and colourful rosettes, and preparing to hit the campaign trail to convince people why they most deserve the public vote.

Or at least, that's how it should be.

But here in Weston, one party's candidate has already conceded defeat, dropping out of the race and signalling his wish to see a rival party secure the victory.

Doctor Richard Lawson - who earned close to 1,300 votes when he stood previously - secured his Green candidacy as an embodiment of the party's ideals, and spoke boldly of the need for action on his environmental agenda.

Undoubtedly he would have won friends and support, even if - as he suspects - not in sufficient numbers to have triumphed.

Yet those ideals and would-be voters have been abandoned.

What do Green Party voters do now?

'Vote Liberal Democrat' is Dr Lawson's instruction in what he transparently admits is a tactical ploy to deny victory to the Conservatives.

But how much credibility do these instructions have?

Many prospective Green voters will feel marginalised and betrayed by Dr Lawson's concession, so it's difficult to imagine an ongoing loyalty which would see them follow the instructions of a party which has turned its back on them.

Whether one supports Britain's 'first past the post' electoral system or not, the fundamental principal which allows freedom of candidature and voting makes Dr Lawson's decision unfathomable.

He may feel otherwise, but minority party backers will argue there's no such thing as a 'wasted vote' - the chance to throw your weight behind a cause or ideal you believe in makes your vote a significant message, even if it's not in a winning cause.

And that's exactly what the Green Party option stands for - or at least, what it could have stood for, and what the people of Weston will now be denied.


Here's my response:

The Editor
Weston Mercury
5.2.2010


Thank you for reporting and commenting on my withdrawal from the General Election race. I would like to clear up some misunderstandings. You say my motivation was “unfathomable”, but I set out my reasons very clearly in my press release.  I said that the Conservative party  is infested with climate change deniers and free market fundamentalists. The Conservative Party supports the ridiculous and sub-democratic First Past The Post electoral system. The Conservative Shadow Chancellor Osborne's economic policies threaten to bring a double dip recession onto the country. Cameron's "greenness" is wafer thin, as evidenced by the lack of emphasis on the environment in his recent speeches. If you are unable to publish these reasons because of their political content, then I would be grateful if you would at least publish this link, http://bit.ly/cLjaYI , where people can find out my reasons for withdrawal first hand.

You state that I gave “instruction” to people to vote Liberal Democrat. I categorically deny that, as you must agree if you read my blog. The fact is that although we Greens do take votes from across the political spectrum, there is a significant overlap between Green and LibDem voters.

You suggest that I have conceded defeat. It is impossible to concede defeat if you never claimed victory, and throughout my political career, I have never made unrealistic laims about victory. I did predict victory on the times when I actually was elected. The most likely victor in Weston is the sitting Conservative MP, and Mike Bell perhaps has an outside chance, if he makes a supreme effort, and manages somehow to get a high turnout. All other parties, including Labour, are also-rans.

The fact is that this appalling decision was forced on me by the worthless and outdated First Past the Post (FPTP) system, which makes many people vote tactically, rather than for the party they believe in. By extension, my tactical withdrawal is to assist a party that might bring about electoral reform. With FPTP, all votes apart from the ones that back the winner, are “wasted” in the sense that they gain no representation in Parliament. FPTP is associated with safe seats, low turnout, higher expenses, political stagnation and an ominous tendency towards elective dictatorship.  We have to break the dead weight of a not fit-for-purpose electoral system, and to do that, sometimes it is necessary to think outside the box, and take action, no matter how personally painful and difficult that decision might be.

DR RICHARD LAWSON
www.greenerblog.blogspot.com
EX-GREEN PARTY CANDIDATE FOR WESTON

I'm struggling to understand what has happened with the Icesave debacle. It seems to me a fairly open-and-shut case. A bunch of naive but self-interested investors, egged on by internet and media commentators who made their living from touting risky financial ventures, put their money into banks outside our national jurisdiction. It is the first rule of money that the higher the return the higher the risk. Their gamble did not pay off and they lost their money.

This much makes sense. The bit I find hard to follow is why anybody who did not take the same risk, who did not enjoy the same returns, who invested their own money closer to home, perhaps in a secure, mutual savings institution now has to contribute to recompensing the high-risk investors for their loss. How is this different from innocent bystanders having to club together to repay a drunken gambler for a misguided punt on the National?

Now let's look at it from the Icelandic side. The ordinary people of Iceland have no doubt going about their ordinary business - catching fish, wallowing in hot pools, enjoying mud massages applied by lowly paid Baltic workers, whatever they get up to to keep themselves sane through the long dark winters. They had no democratic control over the activities of their Viking raiders, who sucked massive amounts of capital into their country from the unstable global economy. Anybody daft enough to invest anything significant in a company apparently domiciled in such a minute and wind-blown volcanic island was surely due for a catastrophic fall at some point.

But now these same self-respecting Icelanders are expected to put their hands in their pockets to compensate foreign governments whose foreign citizens made bad choices. And this is no small amount of compensation. If you add together the £2.3bn. offered to the UK government in the latest negotiations and the £1bn. offered to the Dutch and divide the total by Iceland's tiny 300,000 population you soon realise that every pensioner, worker, and child has to find £11,000 to support this compensation. I wonder how many of the individual investors in the UK and Netherlands lost so much.

The prime lesson from the past two years of credit crisis has been that the gains have been privatised while the losses remain with the public. The Icelandic public are rebelling against this law; we should do the same.

So as you may already have heard, on Tuesday evening I became a statistic, one of six cyclists who is seriously injured every day on Britain's streets. Rather than making it home after the east London Climate Camp meeting and my first introduction to their somewhat confusing process of consensual decision-making, I've instead spent this week in the Royal London Hospital, where I has an operation to repair the shattered bones of my shoulder and has a fair amount of morphine.

The trauma ward may have been as stifling as a sauna (not helped by my bad reaction to the painkillers, which sent my temperature sky-rocketing). There was a severe shortage of staff on Thursday evening and the food was astonishingly terrible, but the A&E staff were great and one staff nurse, who went out of her way to track down my missing valuables (including my flat keys), was yet another reminder why I'd always want to be treated by the NHS. Many thanks too to the many, many people who rang, sent me a text, tweeted, dropped by and visited and even blogged (thanks Louise). I promise you, it really helped - especially as I'd been desperately trying to avoid reliving the moment when I realised the car hurtling towards me wasn't going to stop, or the moment I hit the Whitechapel Road and thought, "shit, I'm not wearing a helmet".

At the moment, I feel like I've had my life placed on hold, unable to even make the simplest of plans, and I really wish I could just rewind to Tuesday evening, sit through the meeting at London Action Resource Centre all over again and this time accept the offer of a quick visit to the pub. I know it will take me around six weeks before I have significantly recovered and typing with one hand is slow-going. I also feel like I'm carrying around a five kilo deadweight of upper-arm elephantitas, which is inredibly tiring. Daily blogging seems unlikely - but it's about all I can manage for the time being, so bear with me.

Here’s  a head’s up on a new, exciting opportunity from the Sierra Club that could just be The Best Internship on Earth. One lucky young person will get to spend this summer travelling around the US to Sierra Club’s outdoor youth programs, including Inner City Outings, Volunteer Vacations, and Building Bridges to the Outdoors.  The intern will video-blog about all of the outdoor adventures that he or she will have (backpacking, rafting, hiking, etc).   As the cherry on top, the selected intern will receive a $2,500 stipend and be outfitted with $2,000 worth of gear from The North Face and Planet Explore!

No previous outdoor or video experience is required. Applicants just have to be between the ages of 18 and 25 and have a real passion for exploring, enjoying, and protecting the outdoors.  The internship is open to U.S. Citizens, permanent residents, legal residents with a valid work permit, or holders of a valid work visa.

More application info here.

Bee Lines is a new work by Alice Forward: the site09 Darbyshire award winner (*). I was fortunate to go to the preview yesterday afternoon at SVA, 4 John Street, Stroud. Well worth a look in to see...Photos: from the exhibition - starting with a giant varroa mite!Exhibition dates: 27th February-14th March: Tuesday-Saturday 10am-3pm, Sunday 11am-1pm - see more details at: www.sva.org.ukBefore

Well last Thursday was Full Council - and a more lively debate than usual - here is some of what we discussed:Photo: Members Room at Ebley MillStroud District Council approves 1.9% council tax riseStroud District Council approved a below inflation, 1.9%, increase for its portion of council tax for the year ahead. The Tories like to say that this increase will cover improvements to services in the

I've just started delivering my latest news letter - the contents of which are below - apols for delay - I usually try to get it out in January but due to a twisted ankle and the snow it has been delayed. Please also use the 'labels' or the search engine on this blog to find out more about my activities.Dear Resident,I feel very fortunate to live in and be part of these lively communities. We

Through my new friend the Frugal Queen, I have burst through into a seam of frugal living blogs. Lovable eccentrics all. Read the Frugal World of Doc, but not while drinking tea, as that would put you at risk of Doing the Nose Trick.

Greens are unusual for a political party - though we're small, we're one of the few political parties in Britain in which membership has actually grown over the recent years - membership is around 40% up over the past year.

Over the years, I've had many friends who have been active members of the Labour Party.

Some of them - long-term members and people with deep principles - left Labour in despair over issues from the illegal invasion of Iraq to the erosion of civil liberties and the renewal of the Trident Nuclear weapons system.

It is interesting that possibly as much as half the Green Party in Brighton and Hove is made up of former Labour Party members.

However it's not easy to leave your political ‘tribe', especially if you've been a long-standing activist.

It's a bit like a football team you instinctively remain loyal to - ask Peter Tatchell who crossed after many years in Labour to the Greens.

I really admire those who have had the courage to do so.

Some ‘Old' Labour activists will claim that they're still in Labour to change the party from within and to haul it back to its founding principles.

But when I look at some Labour MPs whom I've admired over recent years: for example, Clare Short - left the party - and Alan Simpson - leaving Parliament - I see people who've tried bravely to influence the direction of their party but have failed.

If they failed, what chance do less experienced members have in the face of a monolithic party machine?

So I sometimes ask myself, "What would it take for me to decide to leave my ‘tribe'?"

Well....

*If it took us into an illegal war, I'd leave my ‘tribe'.

*If it committed £78 billion on building and running a replacement for Trident, I'd leave my ‘tribe'.

*If one of its leading policy-makers articulated the view that, "We are intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich", I'd leave my ‘tribe'.

*If the actions of its leaders contravened my core principles, I'd leave my ‘tribe'.

Fortunately I don't think these are likely to be Green Party positions in the near future...

Last summer, my husband asked an old friend, a Labour activist for 33 years, "What would it take for you to leave the Labour Party?"

"I'm one of those people who tends to work on the ‘glass half-full' theory of life. I focus on the positive," was his friend's reply.

"But, there comes a time," my husband responded, "when you have to consider what it is that you are drinking."

His friend has now left Labour and is supporting the Greens.




http://www.carolinelucas.com/cl/blog/what-would-it-take-for-you-to-leave-your-party.html

This is a draft update on my profile:I moved to the area in 1993 brought by the countryside, the creative energy and work. Then, I was managing services for people with learning disabilities, but a chronic illness meant I was myself disabled for a number of very difficult years. I am now well again and work part-time for a charity that provides support across the county for people with mental

In my capacity as Parliamentary candidate for Reading East I have just signed the action for children pledge:

"Early intervention is the best form of child protection and the best way of making sure children thrive. In the UK we spent too much time and money picking up the pieces when it's too late. This has to change and we need your help to make it happen."

This is well and truly at the centre of the Green Party Parliamentary campaign under the slogan "Fair is worth fighting for!". Unfortunately this will be one of the areas which suffers under the "swingeing cuts" being proposed by the three main parties as positive programmes such as Sure Start face cuts to budgets.

http://oceanfrogblog.blogspot.com/

A modest contribution to recreating green politics in Ireland.

The Irish Green Party is wilting fast, sadly the culprits seem to be working themselves into a nice series of jobs, so that when the Party collapses they at least have salaries.

Given all the urgent problems we face, the actions of those in the Party have been criminal in at least a moral sense, what a time to trash green politics.

There are many good people in Ireland who want to create a green politics which is really green, I am sure the Frog blog will be a starting point for finding out more.

Thursday night saw the Sub Rooms packed - well over 200 people came to hear three speakers discuss 'What would a sustainable future look like?'Photos: from the eveningThere was much common ground between Rhiannon Colvin, young activist who had been to the Copenhagen summit, Martin Whiteside, Green Party parliamentary candidate, and Jonathon Porritt, environmental writer, campaigner and long term

I am concerned it would appear that since the December [2009] meeting in the Town Hall with the two relevant Cabinet Members and Council Officials our pool replacement campaign has gone ‘off the boil’. The reasons for this being that there has been little to report, and we awaited [in mid-February] the feasibility study regarding the suitability of either Seven Kings trailer park or Cricklefields as the site for a replacement pool [more later].

At a leisure scrutiny meeting [in January] I echoed the sentiments in the above paragraph and assured those present that there was no lack of resolve, and we eagerly awaited the study’s recommendations.

In this year’s Council Budget there is a proposed five-year saving projection for a new leisure and library facility in Seven Kings resulting in 2015 with a balance of £25m.

In February at an Area 4 meeting I said that although we welcomed something being done, we regretted that the earliest we could expect a replacement being opened was 2016!

We also asked how [since it was due any day now] the feasibility was progressing? You can guess my irritation when told that due to circumstances outside the council’s control the earliest date would be June [this year!]

After that I ‘phoned Keith Prince [Council Leader] who confirmed the delay, added his disappointment and assured us of his support .

A five-year haul is a long time to keep the pressure on especially when you’re getting on a bit.

John Sharrock
Chairman, Redbridge Swimmers Association

In case you missed this on YouTube I thought I would post this video by UKIP MEP Godfrey Bloom. He has a separate account to UKIP called 'Godders Vision - The World According to Godfrey Bloom' It's an attempt to dismiss his comments at Copenhagen which were about the Greenpeace boat sinking 'not being such a bad thing'. Apparently anyone who criticised his comments just doesn't have a sense of humour. The video is basically just an aimless rant against the Green movement (this time without a horse). He ends the video by stating 'if you're a spikey haired ring-through-the-nose weirdo beardo greenie you've killed an awful lot of people when you think about it...mull it over'. It's freak show/car crash YouTube telly - watch and smirk at his desperate desperate tactics...

Shhh.

Quiet.

Lean in closer, and don’t say a word.

*whispers*

I’m contemplating trying our cloth nappies again. It’s been months since we abandoned them, and the other day I happened upon them while up in the attic, rootling my way through boxes of kitchen paraphernalia which hadn’t seen the light of day since, well, probably 2005. There they were. The nappies, that is. Not the kitchen stuff. Though that was there too, of course. Ahem. Yes. Nappies. Now, some of you may recall the succession of traumas which were visited upon us during our time as cloth-nappiers. There was the nappy rash. And then – oh – there was some more. And then? Just for fun? A bit more of that ol’ rash malarky. And did I mention the rash? And of course, accompanying the rash, there were the creams. And the liners. And the lotions. And the camomile tea-soaked wipes. And the washing-powder changes. And the white vinegar, and then the not white vinegar. And the nappy-free time, and the hourly changes.

Oh, how we laughed.

And now, BECAUSE I AM INSANE, I find myself wondering (as a good friend of mine once did regarding his intense hatred of salmon) if this time, things could be different.

Of course, it’s probably idiocy of the first order to contemplate such a step, but you know, it really galls me that we have about two hundred pounds’ worth of nappies just sitting in the sodding attic, while each week I go and buy sodding disposable nappies (albeit the ones with a sop to the eco-conscious amongst us) from the supermarket, only to chuck them into landfill a few days later. They are very convenient, I’ll admit – quick to change, slim-fitting, and easily wrapped up using their own tabs when you want to chuck them – and, thus far, they are the only thing which has meant the small girl is rash-free. She does still get sore from time to time, but not in the skin-peeling, sunburn-resembling manner we started to think might be inevitable when we were using cloth all the time.

But…

But…

BUT – ! (If you’ll forgive the pun…)

I hanker after cloth backsides again. I didn’t mind the washing rota (although they do take FOREVER TO DRY, it has to be said, and I do think that tumble driers are probably anathema when it comes to the eco-contribution the cloth nappies make), and I loved the way they looked when she was trolling about in them.

(Is it sharing too much to say that what’s prompted this longing, in part, is the decision to buy some cloth sanitary pads? [Isn't that a grim phrase, by the way? 'Sanitary pads'. Shudder. Any better alternatives will be greeted with a friendly - yet not too firm - handshake and a smal piece of flapjack, the recipe for which will follow reasonably shortly, or, at least, as soon as I finish gorging myself on the aforementioned.*] Yes, it probably is sharing too much, but hey – them’s the breaks. I think that the cloth nappy experience just made me realise how many of such pads one buys, each month, only to chuck and find you’ve run out at just the wrong time the next month. So, washable ones, given that we still use washable wipes for the small girl, seemed like a natural progression.)

Has anyone out there found that an utterly irrational improvement was found after a long break from such nappies? If so, please do let me know; there is no reason to suppose that a second go would be anything other than a repeat performance, yet still I hanker…

* Don’t even ask about the exercise/eating regimen. I’m not gorging, honestly, but the last month has been an utter joke, exercise-wise. I shall do better, and retire to flagellate myself in the meantime. Hmm. Flagellation as a form of calorie-burning. Has promise, no? No. You’re quite right. No.

Green Party Conference is in London, which is a bit depressing as trees and vegetation are in short supply. It is as if winter is the only season. And loads of people. Masses. Everywhere - above ground and under ground. They have special closed down faces in the tube and buses, as there are far too many people to have a chat to, otherwise they'd never get anything done. I mean, if I am laying a hedge in Somerset, it takes 5-10 minutes' chat everytime someone comes by. In London, you'd spend all day chatting.

Pleased to notice that people are definitely tending to walk on the left in the underground walkways, since I had a chat about it with Darren Johnson at a previous Conference. It is due to a kind of disturbance in the Force, because the people at TfL came back with a ridiculous and totally illogical fob-off when Darren asked the Mayor to suggest that people walked on the left in order to smooth the flow.

Anyway, Conference.  Brilliant talks today about equality by Johann Hari and Kate Pickett on equality. Basically, research shows that unequal societies with a big RPG (Rich Poor Gap)  are miserable, unhealthy, violent, criminal, &c. More equal societies are happier, healthier, more peaceable, more law-abiding.

Could the fact that new money is created almost exclusively by making loans at interest have something with the RPG?

Funny that Greens, LibDems, and Labour are all campaigning in the General Election for Fairness.  Only the Conservatives are campaigning for unfairness. Johan had some amazing facts about Conservatives' perceptions - one survey showed that they thought the average UK income as £30k!!!

The Handbrake Tendency is going to try to stifle my  motion on Dealing with Dictators (here, and ctrl+f, or near the bottom). They much prefer the present set up, with oppression ("people must be free to decide what they want, some may prefer to be tortured") and to continue as at present with wars and stuff. (In fact Conference did not reach the motion)

And I have drafted an Emergency Motion to get Caroline to go on the offensive about the Party Funding Scandal.  It went through, but no action has been taken.

So - OK, not so bad today. Woke up in despair last night at 4 am, but that is normal for me at this stage of Conference.

The Editor

Clevedon and North Somerset Times

We are entitled to ask Liam Fox MP publicly to condemn the views of Donal Blaney, chief executive of the Young Briton's Foundation This organisation has trained up to 2,500 Conservative Party activists. Dr Fox spoke recently at the YBF rally. Blaney supports the use of torture, and has suggested that environmental protesters should be shot if they trespass. He also wants Britain to lose the NHS and have a US-style firearms policy. Fox has so far said that he does not support the YBF, despite addressing them, but he has not condemned their extremist views, nor has he said that the Conservative Party must dissociate itself from the YBF.

Dr Fox' constituents and electorate deserve a clarification, because incitement to violence is in breach of the law.

Sincerely


Dr Richard Lawson
Press Officer, North Somerset Green Party

Political breakthroughs are often surprising and unexpected by many with no interest in their success.

110 years ago today there were no Labour MPs in Parliament. It wasn’t until October 1900 that the first two, Keir Hardie and Richard Bell, were elected. In 1906, thanks to a pact with the Liberals, there were 29 Labour MPs elected. The 1910 election saw 42 Labour MPs returned to the House of Commons. 1924 saw Labour’s first Prime Minister in Ramsay MacDonald backed by 191 Labour MPs. Splits in the Liberal Party gave Labour plenty of room to grow leaving Labour to become established as one of the two major British parties.

History never quite repeats itself exactly, but its lessons are always instructive. Many in the political bubble talk of the parties as if they are inviolable timeless structures which shall always endure. But none of the three major parties currently in Parliament can claim such status. Conservatives, while the oldest, still can only trace their current incarnation back to the 1830s. Labour to about 1899 when various unions and labour organisations decided to contest parliamentary seats. And of course the LibDems only date to 1988 though their origins go back much further than that.

This is a time of incredible social, economic and technological change. Are the parties of the 19th and 20th centuries best placed to represent and serve the citizens of a 21st century Britain? Not necessarily. I’m sure some of their members recognise the new challenges we face such as the LibDem’s Cory Doctorow or Labour’s Tom Watson MP. But structurally I’m not sure those parties are best placed to respond to the new challenges.

When people raise questions about whether it’s worth voting Green given we won’t form the next government or that it’s between Gordon Brown and David Cameron, I respond that change has to start somewhere. Back in October 1900 voters had to vote for what they believed in, that a new party for the labour movement could come of age if given a chance.

Today I believe the Green Party is ready to come of age also. A party that puts social justice, public service and the environment ahead of free trade and trying to keep up with the military superpowers. Labour have lost their way, the Conservatives are divided between emulating ’97 era New Labour and their old hard-right ways whilst the LibDems struggle to resolve what they truly stand for.

We’re on the cusp of a fundamental change in the British political system – I believe a diversity of newer parties are going to have a major role to play in reform. I hope people will trust their vote in Greens to play our part.

Last night Brent Conservatives selected Cllr Harshadbhai Patel (Preston ward) to fight Brent North. His opponents will include former Conservative councillor colleague Atiq Malik (now a 'Democratic Conservative' councillor) who is standing as an Independent.

Cllr Patel was Mayor of Brent in 2007-8 and is associated with the Federation of Patidar Associations, Brent Indian Association and the Hindu Council. Atiq Malik is actively blogging about the election on UK Polling and Conservative Home to the annoyance of many fellow bloggers. On one blog he claims that at the selection meeting 2 rows of seats were filled with 'up to 30+' new party recruits but doesn't follow with any specific allegation. He claims that Patel has stated that he has 300 'foot soldiers' ready to go out and campaign in the election.

Another contributor asks if the Democratic Conservatives (Malik and Cllr Robert Dunwell) have 'gone into bed with the Greens or the Lib Dems?'As Green Party Candidate for Brent North I can answer that from our perspective with a resounding 'No'!

With a Labour candidate who, in calling for his resignation, demonstrated that he had no faith in Gordon Brown; and two Conservative candidates, Brent North is shaping up to be an interesting (and possibly bewildering) contest.

The next Leith Neighbourhood Partnership (LNP) meeting will take place on Wednesday the 10th of March at the Thomas Morton Hall. If you've been to a LNP meeting before a been put off by the traditional format of the 'top table' and powerpoint presentations style - this meeting will be altogether different.

It's going to be more like a market place, with loads of interesting stalls there on the theme of Housing and the Built Environment. Changeworks will be dishing out Energy and Waste saving advice, and with any luck we'll figure out a way to get the Eco-driving simulator there too. Out of the Blue will be doing the catering.

As part of our We Love Leith campaign, we've been running an on-line consultation gather ideas that should be in a 'Future Travel Plan for Leith.' At the LNP meeting, we'll be running a paper version of this consultation to give folk a chance to feed into this process who don't have internet access. We'll also have a general stall, so that you can quiz us about the other stuff we do, and see if you want to get more involved.

Also important - there's a chance to submit your ideas on how the Housing and Built Environment sub-group (that Greener Leith sits on) should spend their devolved budget for improving the streets and land around council housing. There will be a chance to find out what we spent the money on this financial year - things like getting rid of this, and upgrading it - to make it better for walking and cycling on.

Rumour has it that there may even be a display from Trams for Edinburgh too - as the formal consultation process on the changes that will need to be made to the streets along the tram route is now open too.

This meeting gives everyone the chance to have their say on how the neighbourhood could look in the future. Look forwards to seeing you there!

 

 

As part of our We Love Leith campaign to promote greener travel, we mailed everyone in the Leith Neighbourhood Partnership (that's about 30,000 households!) with a travel map, and a neighbourhood travel plan that gives residents more information about how they can get to the top 10 local travel destinations, to compliment the map.

The neighbourhood travel plans show you which bus to take if you want to take the bus. And If you want to walk or cycle, the travel plans show you how long it's likely to take you, and how many calories and climate changing CO2 you would save in the process!

We're delighted to be able to make these travel plans available on-line in case anyone missed them. In particular, we've had a few enquiries from local businesses looking for these resources for their staff. 

To do this we worked with our project partners SISTech, to divide the Leith Neighbourhood Partnership up into nine areas*, that you can see on the map above. Once you've worked our which neighbourhood area you live in, you can download the appropriate travel plan from the links below.

1. Pilrig/Broughton

2. Easter Road/Abbeyhill

3. Leith Central

4. Leith Links South

5. Leith Links

6. Bonnington

7. Newhaven/Fort

8. North Leith

9. Western Harbour

If your neighbourhood travel plan inspires you to to try a greener way to travel about the local neighbourhood, why not let us know by making a We Love Leith travel pledge?

*Now, we made the boundaries of these areas up, and their names, to make the travel plans 'work' - but we know they don't always match up with traditional neighbourhood boundaries and names so please don't bend our ears about it! 

Gloucestershire Friends of the Earth Anti-Incineration Petition can now be signed on-line at:www.glosfoe.org.uk/petition.phpPhoto: slide from Dr Paul Connet talk in King's Stanley - see here.

Marin Camille Hood has made a few really cool chandeliers out of old bicycles and bicycle bits. This is one of them.

The rest of them are here.

chandeliers [artwork by marin camille]
Recycled works by Marin Hood [Recyclart]

My friend, comrade and student (I teach him political economy) James Haywood has won his union election at Goldsmiths.

A US ecosocialist Ashok Kumar has stepped into the post vacated by Welsh ecosocialist Aled Fisher at the LSE students union.

lot of people nicked today for opposing the racist EDL at Westminster today including James.

Oh and I am off on a train early tomorrow to help Caroline Lucas get elected, my sixth trip in the last couple of months.

Greens are unusual for a political party - though we're small, we're one of the few political parties in Britain in which membership has actually grown over the recent years - membership is around 40% up over the past year.

Over the years, I've had many friends who have been active members of the Labour Party.

Some of them - long-term members and people with deep principles - left Labour in despair over issues from the illegal invasion of Iraq to the erosion of civil liberties and the renewal of the Trident Nuclear weapons system.

It is interesting that possibly as much as half the Green Party in Brighton and Hove is made up of former Labour Party members.

However it's not easy to leave your political ‘tribe', especially if you've been a long-standing activist.

It's a bit like a football team you instinctively remain loyal to - ask Peter Tatchell who crossed after many years in Labour to the Greens.

I really admire those who have had the courage to do so.

Some ‘Old' Labour activists will claim that they're still in Labour to change the party from within and to haul it back to its founding principles.

But when I look at some Labour MPs whom I've admired over recent years: for example, Clare Short - left the party - and Alan Simpson - leaving Parliament - I see people who've tried bravely to influence the direction of their party but have failed.

If they failed, what chance do less experienced members have in the face of a monolithic party machine?

So I sometimes ask myself, "What would it take for me to decide to leave my ‘tribe'?"

Well....

*If it took us into an illegal war, I'd leave my ‘tribe'.

*If it committed £78 billion on building and running a replacement for Trident, I'd leave my ‘tribe'.

*If one of its leading policy-makers articulated the view that, "We are intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich", I'd leave my ‘tribe'.

*If the actions of its leaders contravened my core principles, I'd leave my ‘tribe'.

Fortunately I don't think these are likely to be Green Party positions in the near future...

Last summer, my husband asked an old friend, a Labour activist for 33 years, "What would it take for you to leave the Labour Party?"

"I'm one of those people who tends to work on the ‘glass half-full' theory of life.  I focus on the positive," was his friend's reply.

"But, there comes a time," my husband responded, "when you have to consider what it is that you are drinking."

His friend has now left Labour and is supporting the Greens.

 

 

 

International Women's Day's on Monday so today (Saturday) am heading down to help ‘woman' a stall at the Old Market as part of IWD celebrations.

This prompted me to ponder the unusual election campaign in Brighton Pavilion where all the main party candidates are women.

According to the Fawcett Society, which monitors gender balance in political life, this is probably the first time this has ever happened, and is long overdue and welcome!

Yesterday, at a BBC TV panel interview of the main candidates, we were asked whether we thought the campaign is different in any way with an all women line-up.

It's a funny thing, although as women we obviously view issues from a different experience to men, since the departure of David Bull, the former Tory candidate last Autumn, the campaign's got much more negative and personalised.

I like to think that I campaign on the issues and policies. Unfortunately not all of the debate has been of this standard since David stood down, with periodic personal attacks and negative campaigning becoming more common.

I've pledged to run a clean campaign - which means no personalised attacks - sticking only to relevant issues and policies. However I'm not sure whether all the candidates share my view...

It's interesting, for example, that the ‘non-dom' donor issue (people who opt to be taxed elsewhere rather than in the UK but donate to UK political parties and seek to influence the political system) seems to be on the mind of some.

It looks likely to be just one of those issues that in Brighton some might seek to exploit to distract from their own party's records.

As far as aware, my party in recent years has not accepted any donations from non-doms - i.e. those who avoid paying UK tax.

A while back, Ben Goldsmith donated to the Greens, but he's only a non-dom by virtue of his French father's citizenship and he pays UK tax on all his worldwide income in any case.

I understand every bean he earns is taxed in the UK.

Anyway, back to the campaign: off to the ‘March for Jobs' at The Level, then National Student Pride at Oceana on the seafront after I've finished my stint at the IWD stall. Busy...

 

 

 

 

International Women's Day's on Monday so today (Saturday) am heading down to help ‘woman' a stall at the Old Market as part of IWD celebrations.

This prompted me to ponder the unusual election campaign in Brighton Pavilion where all the main party candidates are women.

According to the Fawcett Society this is probably the first time this has ever happened and is long overdue and welcome!

Yesterday, at a BBC TV panel interview of the main candidates, we were asked whether we thought the campaign is different in any way with an all woman line-up.

It's a funny thing, although as women we obviously view issues from a different experience to men , since the departure of David Bull, the former Tory candidate last Autumn, the campaign's got much more negative and personalised.

I like to think that I campaign on the issues and policies. Unfortunately not all of the debate has been of this standard since David stood down, with periodic personal attacks and negative campaigning becoming more common.

I've pledged to run a clean campaign - which means no personalised attacks - sticking only to relevant issues and policies. However I'm not sure whether all the candidates share my view...

It's interesting, for example, that the ‘non-dom' donor issue (people who opt to be taxed elsewhere rather than in the UK but donate to UK political parties yet seek influence the political system) seems to be on the mind of some.

It looks likely to be just one of those issues that in Brighton some might seek to exploit to distract from their own party's records.

As far as aware, my party in the recent years has not accepted any donations from ‘genuine' non-doms - i.e. those who avoid paying UK tax.

A while back, Ben Goldsmith donated to the Greens, but he's only a non-dom by virtue of his French father's citizenship and he pays UK tax on all his income in any case.

Every bean he earns is taxed in the UK.

Anyway, back to the campaign: off to the ‘March for Jobs' at The Level, then National Student Pride at Oceana on the seafront after I've finished my stint at the IWD stall. Busy...

 

 

 

 

I have got some great endorsements including support from Salma Yaqoob, Caroline Lucas, Peter Tatchell, Jagdeesh Singh, Nandor Tanczos and Jerry Hicks.....all people I have had the pleasure of working with.


http://www.derekwallforwindsor.org.uk/#/whos-backing-derek/4538560614

General Election Facebook if you are a facebook person 'Derek Wall for Windsor' here.

                                           Two kids inside a car

                                              fight
                                                     for the right

                                          to spin a useless wheel.


                                                     Politics.

[col. writ. 2/28/10] (c) '10 Mumia Abu-Jamal

It would be impossible to overstate the energies unleashed during the 2008 election.

This election broke a pattern of the last half-century by attracting 63% of voter participation. Not since Kennedy faced Nixon in 1960 have we seen numbers exceed 62%.

Key to this may have been the engaged participation of millions of youth, Blacks and Hispanics, energized not merely by the presence of an attractive candidate, but by the nature of the monochromatic opposition. The Republicans ran a weathered warrior for the top spot, and a V.P. choice that seemed more gimmick than substance.

Their appeal was pitched to yesteryear, and didn't even pretend to attract African American or Hispanic voters. The nation's Black community is perhaps the most anti-war of any other demographic. They also ran with the albatross of perhaps the least popular president since Nixon around their necks -- George W. Bush.

But a year into the Democratic administration, and much of the excitement of the election is markedly diminishing.

A pro-business, pro-war, and anti left orientation has been the theme of the opening year. Healthcare legislation has been stymied by both Republican and Conservative Democratic (so called Blue Dog) opposition. And although the Democrats hold majorities in both houses, they have been battered by a year of Republican and industry attacks.

They may hold a majority of seats, but they act as if they are still in the minority, for they are unwilling or unable to oppose their corporatist wing, which has whittled down healthcare to a mere shadow of it's original proposal.

In the first months of the administration, polls showed overwhelming support for a public option, and opposition to the Afghan war. A year later, and healthcare is on life support; and the Afghan war is in support of a corrupt, election stalling regime that is backed more by narcotics traders than its own people.

In essence, the new administration is doing largely what the last one did - just with a bit more class.

-- (c) '10 maj

COpy of an email I was sent....




Library workers have now been silenced - no longer allowed to discuss review with friends and family.

"Dear all
You will probably be aware that our review of frontline staffing, in particular the part of it that relates to Central Library, has been the subject of some discussion recently both politically and in the press.
During the course of these events it has become apparent that journalists, elected members and members of the public, including former staff, have requested and received confidential information, including membership information, from members of staff. Any member of staff sharing information that has been identified as confidential or information from our membership database inappropriately is in breach of the Council's code of conduct, and potentially the Data Protection Act, and could therefore face disciplinary action.
The links below will direct you to the code of conduct (Section 12 relates to disclosure of information and the Data Protection Act) and the ICT policy. You should already be familiar with these documents but please take some time to read them again and if you have any questions please raise them with your line manager.
http://intranet.bcc.lan/ccm/content/articles/css/hr/policy-pages-new-format/a2d/code-of-conduct-for-employees.en
http://intranet.bcc.lan/ccm/content/articles/css/ict/strategy/is-t-policies.en
If you find yourself in a situation where someone who is not a member of Library staff asks you for information about the frontline staffing review or for information from the membership database (other than their own membership information of course), please just tell them that you are not able to provide that information and give them my contact details. I will then take responsibility for dealing with the request, ensuring that information is provided to those authorised to receive it through the right channels.
If you are put under pressure by the person requesting the information or if you are not certain whether or not they are entitled to the information, you can seek immediate support from you line manager or from me or another member of LMT.
Please can you ensure that any colleagues who do not have access to email are shown a copy of this information.
on behalf of LMT

Copy of email just sent to the Woodland Trust Government Affairs team with regard to their Candidates' Commitment: As a candidate at the general election I believe that creating new woods and planting trees is a priority if we are to tackle challenges such as climate change mitigation and adaptation, wildlife loss, improving public health – both physical and mental – and shaping places where people want to live, work and spend their leisure time.

Dame Vivienne Westwood has paired up with SIGG, the makers of the original Swiss reusable aluminium bottle, to build awareness around the unnecessary waste and harm that is caused to the environment by purchasing and throwing away plastic. And...

Dear Cllrs Beynon and Bolton

PLEASE share this information with relevant organisations & networks in your ward - thank you.

The council is inviting applications from community buildings within selected parts of Bristol for Section 106 funding that has been paid as a result of two developments.

This is a new initiative, in conjunction with the local Neighbourhood Partnership, piloted with two development sites in the Southville and Bedminster wards.
Part of your ward is located within the area of benefit of one of these sites.

The funds currently available can only be:
- used to improve, replace or provide community facilities
- allocated to organisations meeting the eligibility criteria (these are attached to the application form)
- spent on community facilities located within a half mile or two mile radius from the two sites where the original developments took place.
Full details of these two funds can be viewed on the council website:
http://www.bristol.gov.uk/ccm/content/Community-Living/Community-Centres-Facilities/s106-funds-for-community-buildings.en

I am contacting you because all of the Southville ward falls within the two mile radius of the former St Dunstans Parish Hall, Bedminster Down Road, Bedminster.
Any community buildings within 2 miles from BS13 7AA may apply for some or all of the funding available. The total amount available is £15,000.

The areas that fall into this 2-mile radius include parts (or all) of:
Clifton, Hotwells, Kingsdown, City Centre, St Philips, Totterdown, Windmill Hill, Knowle, Filwood, Hengrove, Hartcliffe, Withywood, Bishopsworth, Headley Park, Bedminster, Southville, Ashton Vale.

There is also another fund of £15,000 but this can ONLY be distributed within a 0.5 mile radius from the former East St Baptist Church (BS3 4EQ).
The areas that fall into this area include all or parts of: Bedminster, Southville, Windmill Hill.

Any community buildings located within both circles may apply to both funds!
Full eligibility criteria are on the form that is attached to this email or that can be downloaded from:
http://www.bristol.gov.uk/ccm/content/Community-Living/Community-Centres-Facilities/s106-funds-for-community-buildings.en

The closing date for applications is Mon 3rd May 2010.

Please don't hesitate to contact me if you require any further information.
Regards

Hearing Gary Hopkins on Radio 4 is never the best way to start the day, especially when you are tucking into your breakfst.

Still, there he was pronouncing on the wheelie bin scheme - an opt in scheme to allow people to opt in and gain an incentive to reduce there rubbish. A trial in three wards has been mooted, all in Bristol West (all LibDem, I think), but probably corresponding to a collection round or two.

I have seen a bit of 'oh my God, what are they doing' commentary in the Evening Post, but basically think it is worth a try.

Similar ideas have been mooted before, and this one pays people for reducing the level of their waste - not a great deal, but something.

Problems raised seem to be around putting rubbish in other peoples bins, and the whole chip'n'bin thing. But I can't see the objection.

It's a trial after all, and designed to see if it works, so lets go for it. Go Gaza, go.

The following is the construction industry message to general election candidates. There is plenty about employment, but little on sustainability. So some of it is a short term agenda that will see ever more land used up and resources stretched. Some points are good, number 3 and 8 for example. Point 7 seems to think nuclear power is a renewable source of energy!

Their Agenda is:

1. The construction industry is a much larger part of the economy than many may realise: in fact, it can account for as much as 10 per cent of GDP. Promoting sensible decisions on construction will help boost both the UK’s national and regional economies.

2.  Construction can play a significant role in boosting employment within all MPs’ constituencies. And the industry employs about three million people, so it is important to remember that any cuts to building work equals a rising number of people facing the dole queue.

3.  Construction is not just about the Olympics or other show projects. Retrofitting is a huge part of what the sector does, and it will feature right at the top of the green agenda in the coming years. Based on the UK Low Carbon Transition Plan, investment in construction is a prerequisite for achieving ambitious carbon reduction targets – and improving the efficiency of British buildings will ultimately provide huge savings for the public purse.

4. It is crucial for politicians to understand the deep frustrations of the industry regarding planning. An intelligent appreciation of the balance between local needs and national infrastructure requirements should be a must for every MP.

5. Public spending cuts may be inevitable, but that does not necessarily mean huge numbers of capital projects need be slashed. The construction industry is not only working to become increasingly cost-effective on all sorts of projects, but is also keen to help the Government find ways of procuring contractors much more cheaply and ‘spending to save’.

6. There are currently about 1.8 million households on council waiting lists. And population projections show the situation is set to worsen. Investment in housing is hugely important, not just for builders but for local employment – for every home built, two direct full-time jobs and four supply chain jobs are created – and quality of life within the community.

7.  New nuclear plants and wind farms aren’t solely environmental and localism issues. The decision to take forward or block a scheme can have huge implications for the construction sector, which – particularly in the current economic climate – is relying heavily on energy companies to provide it with billions of pounds worth of work. The industry can help MPs achieve political objectives and meet renewables targets, but it requires visibility of work in the pipeline.

8. Pledging to improve local transport may not necessarily be a vote-winner, but a look at broader surveys will show it is resoundingly important for community satisfaction. It is an inexplicable aspect of British politics that calls for more investment here are not heeded.

They have a blog here but it says little about Construction Emissions in the UK

Peter Tatchell, speaking at the LGBT policy launch in Brighton, last
Friday
In my role as National Chair of LGBTGreens I was the Master of Ceremonies for last Friday's LGBT manifesto launch- it was a great evening with passionate speeches from Joseph Healy, our Parliamentary Candidate for Vauxhall, Cllr Bill Randall, the Green Group convenor on Brighton and Hove Council, Peter Tatchell, our human rights spokesperson and Caroline Lucas, Leader of the Green Party. It was a time to celebrate our recent brilliant new policy but also a time to warn that everything isn't going the way we want it. With an emboldened far right lobbying to make appearances on Question Time and today's march in support of Geert Welders by the English Defence League we have a long way to go.



Press release below-
The Green Party has launched its LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans) Manifesto for the upcoming general election. The launch took place in Brighton on Friday night, 26 February, in the Brighton Tavern, a popular gay venue, with keynote speakers Caroline Lucas Green MEP, and LGBT human rights campaigner Peter Tatchell.

The Greens claim they are offering "the strongest, most comprehensive and radical LGBT equality policies of any party."

These are 6 core areas of the LGBT General Election manifesto:

(1) Open up civil marriages and civil partnerships, without discrimination, to both same-sex and opposite sex couples.
(2) Require all police forces to have LGBT Liaison Officers with paid time allocated within their work schedules to tackle homophobic and transphobic hate crime.
(3) End the blanket, lifetime ban on gay and bisexual blood donors.
(4) Amend the Equality Bill/Act to provide explicit protection against harassment to LGBT people.
(5) Refuse visas and work permits to "murder music" singers and others who incite homophobic and transphobic violence.
(6) Ensure safe haven and refugee status for LGBT people fleeing persecution in violently homophobic and transphobic counties.

Caroline Lucas, speaking at the LGBT launch

Caroline Lucas, Leader of the Green Party, stated:
“We believe that all police forces should have LGBT Liaison Officers with paid time allocated within their work schedules to tackle homophobic and transphobic hate crime. Labour's Equality Bill is wrong to deny protection against harassment to LGBT people. The Green Party proposes re-writing the Mental Health Act to remove trans people from the Psychiatric Disorder Register and we would ensure LGBT awareness training for all teachers to create a safe, supportive environment for lgbt staff and students.”

Peter Tatchell commented on the launch:
“The Green Party will go into the General Election as the only party campaigning for marriage and partnership equality. We are calling for civil marriages and civil partnerships to be open to both same-sex and opposite sex couples, without discrimination. We reaffirm our opposition to the blanket, lifetime ban on gay and bisexual men donating blood. Our manifesto commitments show up the shortcomings of the other parties.”

Phelim Mac Cafferty stated:
“Our launch consciously coincided with the Conservatives’ Spring conference as we want to highlight the Tories’ continuous failure to commit to LGBT equality, whether that’s over the Shadow Cabinet’s votes against access to fertility treatment for lesbian and bi women or David Cameron’s own vote against gay adoption.[1] 85 per cent of those eligible in the Conservative Shadow Cabinet voted for the hated homophobic Section 28[2] while 90% voted against an equal age of consent and today Tories continue to oppose the Equalities Bill in the House of Lords.

“While the Conservatives voted against Clause 61 of the Coroners & Justice Bill, (outlawing homophobic hate speech),[3] Greens are using the general election period and our specific LGBT manifesto to send out a clear call that homophobic and transphobic crimes need, urgently, to be dealt with on a par with racist crimes.

"We believe that we offer the strongest, most comprehensive and radical LGBT equality policies of any party."

Press release notes:

[1] https://lgf.org.uk/euro-elections-use-your-vote/
[2] http://www.stonewall.org.uk/at_home/hate_crime_domestic_violence_and_criminal_law/643.asp
[3] http://www.publicwhip.org.uk/division.php?date=2009-11-09&number=243

Notes for Editors:
(a) PDF of the LGBT Manifesto and further press enquiries available from Phelim Mac Cafferty on phelimmacc@yahoo.co.uk & 07765 474 621
(b) Photos from the launch attached- photos courtesy of Jane Wrin, photos@janewrin.com
(c) Full equalities manifesto below


The Green Party aims to treat everyone equally and fairly. We will work to ensure respect for everyone whatever their ethnicity, gender and gender identity, age, religious belief or non-belief, sexual orientation, class, size, disability or other status.

* Amend the Equalities Bill/Act to provide explicit protection against harassment of LGBTI people.

* Require all police forces to have equality and diversity liaison officers whose remit is to tackle, and take preventive action on crimes against LGBTI people, people from ethnic minorities including refugees and asylum seekers, disabled people and on the grounds of faith or belief.

* Legally target incitement of hatred on the grounds of gender identity and amend the Equality Bill/Act to provide explicit protection against harassment of LGBTI people.

* Open up civil marriages and civil partnerships, without discrimination, to both same-sex and opposite sex couples.

* End the blanket, lifetime ban on gay and bisexual blood donors.

* Campaign for homophobic, transphobic and crimes against disabled people, including people with learning difficulties, to be dealt with effectively and on a par with racist crimes.

* Ensure legal parity for parents and those wishing to become parents regardless of sexual orientation, and equality of provision of maternity services; lobby for widely available, affordable state-funded crèches.

* Push for the rewriting of the Mental Health Act to remove trans people from the Psychiatric Disorder Register.

* Campaign against any reduction in the AIDS/HIV budget and target health promotion work to prevent sexually transmitted infections.

* Ensure safe haven and refugee status for LGBTI people fleeing persecution in line with other social groups according to the Geneva Convention.

* Ensure safe haven and refugee status from women fleeing domestic violence, forced marriage and female genital mutilation where there is no adequate protection by the authorities in their own country.

* Refuse visas and work permits to "murder music" singers and others who incite homophobic and transphobic violence.

* Oppose all opt-outs from equality and anti-discrimination laws by religious organisations and remove special treatment allowing faith schools to promote homophobia on the grounds of religion.

* Comprehensive training for teachers and educational staff on all diversity and inclusion issues; schools to promote equal opportunities in their anti-bullying procedures; equalities issues to be monitored in teaching recruitment.

* Implement a UK wide strategy to tackle violence against women including domestic violence, rape and sexual abuse and trafficking.

* Ensure that effective action is taken to prevent discrimination against disabled people.

* Work towards ending stigma against people with mental health problems including discrimination in employment.

* Enforce penalties against employers who continue to implement unequal pay

* Work vigorously towards ensuring that all levels of government are representative of the diversity of the populations for whom they work.

* Support human rights and democracy struggles including those of LGBTI and women's movements in oppressive states, such as Saudi Arabia, Jamaica, Iran

A while back I made some passing reference to chocolate malt cake, and I may even have gone so far as to add that I’d post a recipe at some point. Foolish me. Those words sealed the fate of that recipe for at least a month, as I then promptly went away for a week or so, and had a general melt-down. Well, meltdown over, I now present said recipe, along with an apology for its being so long in coming. I know what chocolate and malt means, gentle reader, and I don’t mess with such power lightly.

Chocolate Malt Cake
Ingredients
Chocolate and malt. Ha. Had you there, didn’t I? But seriously…
2 mugs self-raising flour
2 large-ish eggs (in my case, three smallish blue ones, I think)
½ mug dark brown sugar
½ mug malt extract
¼ mug cocoa
¼ mug sunflower oil

Yes. I used mugs. Not cups. BECAUSE I AM GREEDY.

Then…
Sling the lot in a large bowl and beat the buggery out of it. Pour the resulting shiny happy mixtureness into an oiled loaf tin (or a smug-inducing silicone one which requires no such fiddling) and cook in YOUR NEW OVEN WHICH HEATS UP IN ONE NANOSECOND AND ISN’T COVERED IN A MYSTERIOUS FILM OF OIL for about forty-five minutes on 180°c.

All clear?

Amicus Horizon was given planning permission for a revised building on the site of the Tiger's Head in Southend Village at my planning committee last night. In my view it was a depressing failure of Lewisham's ability to work with developers to bring about the aspirations of the Bromley Road Supplementary Planning Document agreed just weeks ago in January.

The plan outlines some of the aspirations for this area particular site within the Southend Village area:

* shops or similar at ground floor level
* no more than 5 storeys high
* consideration to saving the historic buildings
* a mix of tenures

Instead what we have is a 100% affordable housing with no shops or commercial development that completely demolishes the pub.

At the committee weight was given to the pledge from Amicus that they were intent on ploughing ahead with the original plans for this site if we turned down their new application. A bullying approach from a body supported with public funds is never a good start in my book. Worse still, even though Amicus intend to proceed with 100% affordable housing - in planning terms we are only able to request 35% - if this housing association sells the site on with the new planning permission we really are stuffed. But I should add that I don't believe there are any plans to sell the property on - but if Amicus are unable for whatever reason to get the grants they need then that of course will be an option. In planning terms unless it's in writing, guaranteed by a condition or a S106 agreement it has little weight - when push comes to shove in the building phase many fine promises made at committee can be conveniently forgotten if needed.

So there it is - a housing association has turned down the opportunity to make use of the Bromley Road SPD to build on the Tigers Head site in line with community aspirations for the area. On the plus side there will be a larger number of affordable homes available in Lewisham when this development is built - but many local people in the local area will also feel let down that a significant opportunity for improvement in the area has been missed - and I share that feeling.

When Emily from Once wed emailed me last week to ask if she could feature my wedding I was like 'sure, why not'. I confess that I didn't know how big a blog it was until my two engaged friends squealed at me about it. My reaction was mostly a lot of swear words.

Our little low budget anologue wedding is right there on Once wed, right next to those impossible, amazing and glossy weddings. Wow! Go analogue!




Go check it out!

I updated our original wedding post with some more photo's to celebrate which you can see here.

Hurrah!


So awesome. So weird too. Thank you Once wed!

And if you're joining me from there, welcome to seeds and stitches! It's very nice to have you here, very nice indeed.

.

This time last year, I wrote a comment piece for “the Herald”, arguing that today’s students are the most politicised for a generation. The main (though not only) piece of evidence I cited was a massive increase in turnout in student elections up and down the country. Politicians should take note – the conventional wisdom about apathetic youth may be about to be broken.

This week, a year later, three of the early student elections of the season have happened – Edinburgh University, Southampton University and Queens University Belfast. I was keeping a close eye on Edinburgh, where a number of friends were running for sabb positions, including the excellent Young Green Ellie Price, and NUS student journalist of the year, former People & Planeter, and generally very impressive Liz Rawlings. QUB also had Young Green Adam McGibbon running for Vice President, so I had half an eye on that race.

First, last night, Queens University Belfast broke their turnout record (and Young Green Adam was elected with around 1,700 votes).

Southampton then smashed not only their own, but also the British student election turnout record, with more than 7,000 votes cast.

But they didn’t hold the crown for long. Tonight, it’s estimated that more than 7,200 Edinburgh University students voted, adding up to the biggest student election in UK history (as a number of positions are elected, the number of people who participated won’t be confirmed until the morning). For those who care, Young Green Ellie didn’t win, but got what would have been a record number of votes 3 years ago. Liz Rawlings, however, was elected president with an astonishing 3864 votes. To put this in comparison, when I was elected to the job 2 years ago with 2271 first preference votes, this was one of the highest ever figures. I think this means she has more votes than any UK student union sabbatical ever.

OK, so, there are more people at universities these days. 7,000 is on fact not much more than a 25% turnout at Edinburgh. But if students are willing to vote in such large numbers for their union president, then surely more will be willing to vote for the national government. And if candidates are able to organise, on tiny budgets, campaigns which mobilise that many voters, then MPs wanting to hold their seats should start watching, listening, and learning.

These are good looking tote bags from Olive & Myrtle.   They’ve teamed up with San Francisco based Lab Partners on the Fruit & Veggie bag below (you can see their other two designs on the Olive & Myrtle website).  I also really like the Olive & Myrtle in-house Endangered Species bag.

The designs are silk screened with water-based inks onto 100% recycled cotton tote bags by Eco-Bags.

This week I called in to my GP surgery to get results of an X-ray last week on my ankle - fortunately it is on the mend and I am now able to walk more. Anyway it was good to see leaflets advertising the "Look after Your NHS" campaign - see here: www.lookafterournhs.org.uk/Photo: Stroud Hospital last weekI signed one of the leaflets but you can also find info on their website. As this blog has

Yesterday was exhausting - an incredibly busy day of back-to-back meetings.

First up was a meeting with the Director of Mind in Brighton & Hove, Sarah Danily. 

Was joined by Ben Duncan - my fellow Green parliamentary candidate for next-door Brighton Kemptown constituency.

I was particularly interested in Mind's pioneering work on tackling the stigma which is still associated with mental health problems.

The city's voluntary sector is likely to face a big squeeze in its public funding streams over the next few years (for example, NHS and City Council funding) on the back of the bank bail-out crisis and the knock-on cuts in government spending.

Locally, Mind provides some nationally acclaimed services such as MindOut for the city's LGBT community so am sure they'll find ways to continue to thrive even in this tougher climate.

That was followed by a meeting with Rachel Travers from Amaze.

Was very inspired hearing about the work they do with the families of children with special needs - truly amazing! - but worried to hear that the future funding of some excellent projects under the Aiming High programme could be in doubt post 2011.

After that, a quick dash down North St to meet with Tony Mernagh from the Brighton and Hove Economic Partnership, a business forum for the city.

Gathered some fascinating information - like, for example, the fact that over 30,000 people leave the city every day to work in London, while another 28,000 come into the city from the East and West - no wonder the roads and trains are so full...

Next up, a visit to the Brighton Unemployed Workers' Centre in Hollingdean, which seems to be fulfilling a vital need for many in the city, and then some fiilming for Meridian in North Laine.

Then a train journey to Eastbourne to catch up with Des Prichard from the Fire Authority, where I learnt about the issues they face both regionally and locally, including his take on moving the location of the fire station at Preston Circus.

A particularly moving part of the day was spent on the seafront in the early evening, meeting with a number of people who make use of the evening soup run, and hearing directly from them some of the difficulties they face in accessing housing and other local services.

I'll write more about this another time - but felt really privileged to meet some extraordinary people. 

You can read more about my visit and the St Mary Magdalen Soup-run at this blog site.

Finally, an hour or so at the monthly Amnesty meeting at Community Base, hearing a speaker outline a new campaign, Demand Dignity, which will include a focus on the environmental abuses committed by corporations in Nigeria.

Looking back over yesterday, the issue of dignity is actually one that was a theme throughout the day - from the importance of upholding the dignity of people learning to live with mental illness, to the dignity of those I met on the seafront, in spite of the huge challenges they face.

This afternoon I received an email from "PayPal" asking me to log in and confirm my account. It had managed to get through the BT spam filter. Well, I don’t have an account with PayPal and if I did I would not be using my Barkingside 21 email address, would I? So I did a bit of digging. This is the URL I was being directed to:
http://222.255.77.237/img/acc/management/financial/logon.html
Note how it is not like this one, which is genuine and has the paypal name in it. http://www.paypal.co.uk/uk
The email address from which this scam came from was this:
dprtnt@ppal.co.uk Note how it is ppal.co.uk and NOT paypal.co.uk

The IP address of the incoming email was 66.179.71.133 which is located in Saint Louise, United States [hardly .co.uk] and is registered to loki.vdhinc.com [Virtual Design House]. Googling that gives their website but Norton Security doesn’t like it, so I didn't have a look.
--------
Then I get a telephone call from “Enviro-Select”. They know my name and launch into their patter of “investing in Redbridge”. Apparently her database shows that some of my windows and doors need replacing. I ask how her database knows this and has she heard of the term GIGO [Garbage In - Garbage Out]. She hangs up. I love it when “they” hang up. I dial 1471 and it’s number withheld – surprise, surprise as Cilla would say!
---------
Then my RSS feed alerts me to Redbridge council warning residents about a scam offering “free burglar alarm systems”. The alarm may be free but the maintenance contract is not.

Isn’t it ironic that a “company” offering free burglar alarms is actually a pick pocket trying to get it’s hands into your wallet, purse or bank account.

And the really worrying thing is this. That they persist means they are making money out of it.

ON GUARD. And pass the word on to those who may not be quite as cute as you.

The Coalition opposing the 4.5 billion development for a Brent Cross Cricklewood new town is urging Secretary of State John Denham to call the development in to Public Inquiry, in view of Barnet sending the papers to the Government Office for London and the Mayor of London.
The Coalition for a Sustainable Brent Cross Cricklewood Plan believe the development clearly meets the criteria to merit a call-in as set out in section 77 of the Town and Country planning Act1990[1]. The Secretary of State’s powers to call this in are very general and discretionary. Barnet should have referred this to the Secretary of State prior to the planning meeting on the grounds that Barnet owns some of the land.

 Some other grounds for call-in are :
- significant effects beyond the immediate locality
- giving rise to substantial regional or national controversy or where issues are of more than local importance
- raise significant architectural and urban design issues
- and in 2008 the sustainability of the proposed development was specifically added as a criterion.

Lia Colacicco, Coalition Co-ordinator and Mapesbury resident says, “ This scheme could be called in on several criteria but in particular because its effects go far beyond the immediate area, Brent and Camden councils object to it, local people don’t want it in this form, and because it is completely unsustainable in terms of traffic, housing, and the environment. There was no meaningful public consultation so we are now calling on John Denham to call it in immediately so that these disastrous plans can undergo full public scrutiny….”

Darren Johnson (Green Party London Assembly Member) says “given Boris Johnson’s manifesto commitment to cut London carbon emissions 60% by 2025 and build more environmentally friendly homes the Mayor must refuse this development. From 2016 all new homes are required to be carbon zero whereas this development falls far short of that.”


The campaign was strongly backed at Tuesday's meeting on Fighting Climate Change after Copenhagen. People were clear that the regeneration proposals represented a reckless disregard for issues of over-consuption, sustainability and consultation.

The Mayor and Secretary of State John Denham have until just March 12th to call in the plans for Public Inquiry.

Criteria for a Call-in.
Petition Calling for a Public Inquiry
Coalition Website

This is an interesting development. Since the year 2000 Redbridge council has operated a Cabinet system of government. Each Cabinet portfolio has a Scrutiny committee made up of rank and file councillors which supposedly scrutinises the activities of their relevant Cabinet member. These meetings have, up to recently, been held at the Town Hall. But last December the Council’s Planning and Regeneration Scrutiny Committee held a meeting at Ilford County High School when a major agenda item affecting this area, the Regeneration of Barkingside Town Centre, was to be discussed.

We now learn that the Leisure Scrutiny committee is to hold its next meeting at Fullwell Cross library on Wednesday 24th March 2010. We are wondering why? The agenda has not been published yet so we don’t know what local issues may be discussed. It does say here that “Items on the agenda include an update on a new swimming pool and library in the borough” but those are Seven Kings issues. It also says that the “Public are permitted to ask questions to the Members if they register in advance”.

However, most committee Chairman do allow the public to comment if it adds to procedings as did the firm but fair Chairman of this committee, Bob Littlewood, in allowing me to speak at an earlier meeting when I had not registered.

Of course this could be an unpublicised initiative to get these scrutiny committees out into the communities they serve, and if this is the case it should be applauded. These committees do a lot of good and vital work and any move that encourages residents to attend, participate and scrutinise the scrutineers is very welcome.

Pioneering scheme in Bristol to make peace with your neighbours Bristol News

Great to see that this is up and running - and working - in Knowle West. I've blogged about this a few times*, as its a longstanding Green policy, a while back. I was concerned at the time that money might not be made available for this restorative justice work.

*See: http://vowlesthegreen.blogspot.com/2007/10/restorative-justice-in-south-bristol.html

http://vowlesthegreen.blogspot.com/2008/07/realities-of-violent-crime.html

The Electoral Commission (EC) has given the thumbs up to "Lord" non-dom Ashcroft's company, Bearwood Corporate Services*. It was a "permissible donor".

(This despite the fact that a search of Companies House for Bearwood, Bearwood Corporate Services, BCS &c. draws a complete blank. I checked to see if the search was working. "BP" did produce a bit of a result, but it looks as if Companies House does not throw up company information to any old oik. Anyway, according to the EC, BCS was incorporated in 1985.
Google was more helpful, producing a dinky little website, Bearwood Corporate Finance, which advises on acquisitions and mergers, minimum fee 10,000 safe and sounds).

I will just whizz us through the result of 18 months of Electoral Commission (EC) deliberations.

BCS, ...is not a regulated entity,
This may explain why it is not registered in Companies House (if indeed it is not).
Lord Ashcroft ...provided some information on a voluntary basis, although in response to requests for documents regarding BCS and its parent companies (including ownership, control, beneficial interests or provision of funding to those companies), his solicitors indicated that Lord Ashcroft did not have in his possession any such documents, and that his policy was to destroy documents unless retaining them was a requirement for an auditing, tax, or regulatory reason and any documents not within this category were not retained once their purpose had been served.Great policy. Free tip on How to Succeed in Business. Saves on space. Who wants to keep stuff about clients, outcomes &c?
The first reported donation by BCS to the party was on 28 February 2003. Between then and 31 December 2009 the party reported £5,137,785 of donations from BCS.
The EC gives no data on when BCS was founded, what its turnover was, what its profits were. Nada.
IN the absence of any data, let us assume that a company might choose to donate 5% of its total profits to the excellent Conservative Party. I make that an annual profit of £14,285,700. Nice work if you can get it. Inland Revenue please take note.

On the other hand, the EC says
There is no definition in PPERA** of “carrying on business”. However, in other areas of the law, the term has been interpreted broadly. It is not necessary for a company to generate profit. A company need not be actively trading, provided that the company continues to engage in business transactions, such as employing staff or paying for business facilities. Additionally, even if a company has not yet traded, provided that it is preparing to do so, it is likely to be within the scope of “carrying on business”.

• throughout the period under consideration BCS conducted a management consultancy business

• up to July 2006 it also conducted a merger broking business 

(Still is, according to its website).

• from December 2007 it carried on business as a holding company

BCS’ accounts indicate that the funds used for BCS’ donations were not generated wholly from BCS’ own trading activities.
(Money shifted to and fro from Besleaze)

Anyway,
The Commission concluded that BCS met the permissibility requirements for making political donations.
So that's all right then.

I'm bored already. This is like reading a New Age book entitled "Faeries are Real, Faeries are Good, Come Meet the Faeries in My Wood".

Read it yourself, if you think it is worth your time, it's only 7 pages long, with big type.
The point that I take home is that the Electoral Commission should be scrapped as part of the Governments' Debt Reduction Programme, and political party funding should be laid wide open to the free market. Anyone who wants to buy a politician, go right ahead. Be our guest.
Welcome to Britain, the land of unregulated political donations.

Remember this is the same EC that ruled that the Fraudster Michael Brown's company was OK to give a donation to the LibDems on the very day it was set up.

The aim of the Electoral Commission  is "integrity and public confidence in the democratic process".

My humble opinion is that they have utterly and completely failed. I could go on, but it would just be a rant, so I will close with just one final word: 


Bolleaux!!


*Funny name. Whatever would a bear be doing in a wood? I would have thought CathPope would be a more upmarket moniker. Never mind.
** The Law that covers this matter.

The image shows election results in the council elections immediately preceding the last general election and this one.

It won't be the general election result but might indicate some trends in voting from last time to this.

The stand out figure is the lack of progress made by the LibDems. YOu have to be slightly careful, because 2007 was the Home care election, and the Labour vote would have been high, and LibDem vote lower on that basis...well, maybe. But they had Filwood at one point and lost it. They've gained Windmill Hill.

The Tory vote has gone up slightly. Ours has doubled, but the 2003 election saw the Bristolian stand,. I hope to see us make further progress, but we will have to see.

We all presume in the general election, there will be a lower anti-Labour vote than in council elections. So the basic point is merely to confirm the unlikelihood of Bristol South being anything other than a safe Labour hold.....and I am going to struggle to believe any argument by any candidate to the contrary.

No-one should be living in severe poverty in a rich country like the UK. Wealth should be fairly shared and rising inequality tackled. The needs of current and future generations should be met - so that all have decent options. The UK needs to develop in ways that help to reduce and then eliminate poverty around the globe. As a powerful and wealthy country the UK has a very significant role to play in both giving more and in taking less from poor countries.

Received recently from Steve Haines, Director of Campaigns and Advocacy, Save the Children UK: Dear Glenn, Save the Children UK would like to thank you for supporting our Poverty Kills Childhood campaign in the run up to the General Election. We look forward to your continued support in the first 100 days of the next Parliament. For further information on the campaign please visit our website http://www.savethechildren.org.uk/election2010 or contact us at campaigns@savethechildren.org.uk.

I'd just like here to highlight what Save the Children are asking parliamentary candidates - and in fact everyone else - to sign up to. This is from their website:


Parents across the world worry their children won’t succeed, or even survive, because poverty is killing childhood.

Strong action — not just by politicians but by every member of society — is needed now to prevent the loss of a generation.

This manifesto sets out the key actions the British government must take for the coming parliament if it is to meet its obligations to children living in poverty at home and abroad.

We’re calling on all UK parties to make five key commitments:

Tackle severe child poverty in the UK

Break the link in the UK between poverty and educational achievement

Introduce a Robin Hood Tax on financial transactions to benefit the poorest children at home and abroad

Honour existing aid commitments

Act as a global leader on child hunger

04 March 2010 - Statement from Caroline Lucas, Green Euro-MP and Green Party leader, and Jean Lambert, London’s Green Euro-MP:

(more…)

There have been critiques of Transition in the past, such as the Trapese Collective’s one, or other more ranty online versions, usually from the very deep green Left, who argue that unless it can get rid of capitalism/economic growth [insert personal pet political issue here] first then it is unforgivably naive.  It was interesting therefore, [...]

The Green Party candidate for the Ilford South Parliamentary constituency is Wilson Chowdhry.

The Green Party candidate for the Ilford South Parliamentary constituency is Wilson Chowdhry.

Have you heard about the new collaboration between Paris based Merci and London based Liberty? Oh. My. I had to show you straight away. This means I am currently blogging from the toilet at work. Oh the glamour.




Apparently all Merci products above and more surprises will be available online and in store from 8th March.

Oui? Oui.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

A corner of rubbish-strewn wasteland at the intersection of Ossian Road and Mount Pleasant Villas in Stroud Green was targeted by a group of locals and us Greens last Sunday in a massive clear up and greening operation. Anna Bragga and I, along with Crouch End candidate Pamela Harling and local residents, armed ourselves with sturdy bin liners, pitch forks and shovels to transform the eyesore into what we hope will become a thriving oasis of plants, flowers, trees and wildlife.

We spent several hours clearing a large quantity of litter and an assortment of bizarre objects from the tangle of ivy roots covering the turf.

Local resident, Gloria Else, who spearheaded the Stroud Green Reservoir Project, commented:

"There are not many green areas in Stroud Green, but the few areas that do exist are basically ending up as dumping grounds. We were shocked to find a pogo stick, feather dusters, shoes, cricket bats, pots, plates, a carburetor, a hub cap, the entire contents of someone's kitchen, builders' rubble including bricks and glass, check book stubs, plastic bags filled with dog poo and rubbish amongst the beer cans, bottles and crisp packets. If six year olds can enjoy caring for their environment as two young residents of Ossian Road did yesterday, maybe others can take their example and put a little love and care into this area."


I've been walking past this particular 'grot spot' for over a year, and it's been progressively been getting worse and worse, with more dumped rubbish appearing endlessly. Although we've made the council aware of dumping hotspots in Stroud Green, we thought we'd tackle this head on, encouraging locals to take ownership of this neglected corner.

By shifting four car-loads of dumping, which included a billiard cue and a pogo stick, and planting shade-tolerant plants, we hope to reclaim this space as a community garden for locals rather than a dumping ground. We should be making the most out of every bit of land we've got. It was great to have local residents come out and join us, despite the weather! The children seemed to have a good time too.

The guerrilla gardening movement seems to be really taking off in Haringey. Last August, the Hornsey and Crouch End Journal reported that local woman, Bethany Wells, transformed a disused public garden on Tottenham Lane into a thriving community garden with the help of local residents.


Bethany's project really inspired us and showed us how easy it is, with a little imagination, to transform derelict land for the benefit of the whole community. Ever since then we have been looking at neglected plots of land that would benefit from a little DIY gardening. Because we spend so much time in Stroud Green, we soon identified a number of areas needing attention and chose this one to get started on.

Next Monday is 8th March and as we all know 8th March is International Women’s Day. But here in Redbridge it’s a day late on Tuesday 9th March. We’re rebels here and we don’t conform.

The Redbridge Faith Forum has arranged for a Women’s Conference to facilitate dialogue and promote understanding between women of different faiths and backgrounds. There will be workshops specifically for the women, but the general event is open to everyone and both men and women will be welcome.

The conference is an annual event and provides an ideal opportunity for us all to discuss topics that are highly relevant to our lives today.

The details are as follows :
Women's Conference
Tuesday 9th March 2010
The Gloucester Room
Ilford Central Library

Registration 6.45pm. Programme from 7pm - 9pm

The theme of the Conference is :
"Harmony in the Home? How do we cope with the stress?"

In an ideal world our home is a place of safety, a sanctuary where we can experience the peace, love and harmony that keeps us balanced and focussed. However, many external, and often internal factors, can lead to this harmony being disturbed. What are these factors? And how do we cope with the stress, which can so easily upset the delicate balance of family life?

There are three excellent speakers, who will each give us an insight into the topic, share their experiences and stimulate good discussion.

Rani Raju - Redbridge Carers Support Service
Pamela Wilson - Relate
Joan Findlay - Hear and Now

The audience will then be invited to participate in a question and answer session, which will be closely followed by group discussions and an open forum discussion on the topic. Light refreshments will be served during the course of the evening giving the participants a chance to network and socialise. It promises to be an informative and exciting event!

For further information please contact Saira Yakub: Email or Phone: 020 8708 2478

Young members of the RSPB children’s club, the Norwich Nuthatches, will welcome a special visitor to the Strumpshaw Fen nature reserve near Norwich on Saturday (10:00 March 6th).

Green Party General Election candidate for Norwich South, Adrian Ramsay, will be joining them to become the first local General Election candidate taking part in the RSPB’s biggest ever campaign by signing their “Letter to the Future”.

The letter calls for wiser investment in nature by politicians, urging them to consider our natural as well as our financial future when making decisions about how to tackle the country’s pressing economic problems. The RSPB aims to gain thousands of signatures to the letter before the General Election, to show the next Government that people care about nature as well as the economy and want to see it protected for the benefit of future generations.

Adrian Ramsay said:

“I believe it is critical that we protect the natural world while we are dealing with the current economic downturn. Politicians have a responsibility to protect green spaces, safeguard sealife, save tropical forests and stop species extinction. I am supporting the RSPB’s campaign because I want our children and grandchildren to grow up in a world rich in wildlife, where they can enjoy the countryside and learn about the wonders of the natural world – the sparrows, eagles, polar bears and tigers that we need to protect.”

The Norwich Nuthatches will be making the most of their morning at Strumpshaw Fen with a series of wildlife and art activities. Among them will be ten year old Kelci Land and her mother, Jacqueline, from Norwich, who said:

“I want my daughter to grow up in a world where politicians don’t shirk their responsibility for the environment as well as dealing with the other problems which face us. That’s why I think it’s absolutely right that Adrian Ramsay should be putting his name to this letter, just as I will. “

The RSPB's head of sustainable development, Martin Harper, said:

"The government faces tough economic decisions but these mustn't be taken at the expense of the environment. We are calling on the government to recognise this and ensure that future generations will be able to appreciate the natural world as we do.

"It's vital that politicians support us in this campaign and we are very grateful to Adrian Ramsay for lending his support."

A copy of the letter signed by Adrian Ramsay follows.

&

A while ago we published here a draft guide for Transition initiatives wanting to hold Transition hustings with their local election candidates, in particular to explore themes around resilience.  Thanks to everyone who sent in comments and changes, and I am delighted to announce that the final document is available now to download here.  It [...]

Councillor Jon Hartley in Park Ward seems to be in a spot of bother. Allegedly he has been failing to turn up to important meetings and may have misled the Council.

I would say maybe he had not been attending some of the council meetings because he was busy with casework. However as my recent Freedom Of Information Request has shown, at less than one item per month this is not the case.

If it is shown that Councillor Hartley has deliberately misled the Council then he should resign. Otherwise he will need one almighty grovelling apology!

Brockley News
The Mayor agreed to ask Lewisham's Officers on possible plans for improvements/part pedestrianisation of Coulgate Street. The short report had one simple recommendation:

"It is recommended that the Mayor asks the Executive Director fora Regeneration to consider and report back to him on the implications of the `Statement of Community Views’ from the Brockley Assembly."

Those views were simply put:

" i) supporting the people of Brockley to develop Coulgate Street as a pedestrian friendly, shared surface street where a regular street market can be held and the many commuters and shoppers that use it can do so in safety and pleasure.

(ii) consulting with residents, station users and local businesses about bringing forward plans to improve the area with the possibility of full or part pedestrianisation to be considered within the options"


I personally am very pleased that what has been a major priority for many in the local area is now being seriously addressed by Lewisham Council. Whilst local people have enjoyed participating in the spending of the Mayor's Fund and the Localities Funds - it is great that we have used this mechanism to put a formal report on the table for discussion by the Mayor. It is truly a step forward in seeing major improvements to this historic street

Brockley Views

After Mayor and Cabinet I rushed to Lewisham College for the last Assembly meeting before the local elections - but the subject of the elections did not come up. I am sure there will be many more opportunities to talk about elections over the next weeks.

We started with an 'end of term' review - which has given some great pointers as to how the next Assemblies can be improved. More and better communication of the time/place of the Assemblies was a key theme. Community updates were well-liked.

We ended with a section in which a number of local groups/people were invited to put forward their views of what they would like to see the Assembly working on in the future. Here are some of the points I noted:

Brockley Society - improvements to Lewisham Way - making it a place that joins the two sides of Brockley rather than divides it as it currently does; the Brockley Mews - improving and preserving these - preventing inappropriate development, misuse by inappropriate industry

Transition Brockley - helping Brockley move to a low carbon economy, more sustainable and protected against the economic shocks that the end of cheap oil could bring; working to get more food produced and sourced locally

Brockley Traders - the representative of the Brockley Traders (owner of Speedicars) expressed a desire for the introduction of short-term parking controls around the Brockley Station area so that people can continue to visit to use the shops and other businesses but without the parking problems caused by commuter parking; concern about the crime and community safety including the need for a real visible Police presence.

Brockley Cross Action Group - the Group reported that it was celebrating its tenth anniversary very soon - yet in many ways the problems it faces are similar to those it faced when being set up - the need for a safe and well-protected environment; and support for small shops in the area that provide a good range of local services. The Group expressed the view that the current shopping hierarchy which places Brockley and other parades of shops at the bottom and Lewisham Town Centre at the top in terms of support and importance given by Lewisham's planners was upside down. The Group sees that one of the main ways of improving the lot of our shops is to improve the physical environment around.

Overall a load of very interesting ideas and initiatives there - and I certainly hope to see some of these themes taken up by the next Assembly which will be on 17 July 2010 - and of course I hope to be there as one of the Brockley Ward Councillors.

German ecosocialists are organising


(acknowledgements to Gareth Price-Thomas)
Saturday 13th to Sunday 14th March 2010

Location: Region Kassel Volkshochschule hall, Wilhelmshöher Allee 21, 34117 Kassel

Organised by the SALZ Education Association in cooperation with the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, the latter being the think tank of the German socialist party ‘Die Linke’ (‘The Left’). The two main organisers are Dr. Michael Rieger and Peter Schüren.

Talks include ‘The International Situation from an Ecological Perspective’ (Dr. Bruno Kern, co-author of Ecosocialism or Barbarism, available at http://www.ecosocialistnetwork.org/Docs.htm), ‘The Environmental and Climate Crisis as Part of the Global Economic Crisis’ (Dr. Winfried Wolf), ‘Is there an Ecological Planned Economy?’ (Dr. Klaus Engert), ‘History, Significance and Perspectives of the Anti-Nuclear Movement’ (Thies Gleiss), ‘The Belem Ecosocialist Manifesto’ (Dr. Manuel Kellner) and ‘Quality of Work and New Conceptions of Work’ (Dr. Jürgen Klippert).

To book tickets (€25 when paid in advance), or for more details, please send correspondence to salzkreis@yahoo.de.

Prof. Karl Hermann Tjaden, teacher of political economy and economic sociology at the Gesamthochschule Kassel, writes:
“If the word ‘globalisation’ means anything at all, it signifies the now global nature of capitalist destructivity.

Even ruling-class politics acknowledges the issue of climate change. However, it disputes the connection between capitalist production and lifestyle and the ecological catastrophes which threaten us all.

But while intergovernmental conferences are taking place, NATO is making rather more concrete preparations: the expected floods of immigrants from new drought or flood zones are being classified as a danger to European stability, and will in the event be pushed back by military force. As in a pressure-cooker, social contradictions are heating up and intensifying on an international level – quite literally, in an ecological sense – and it becomes increasingly clear that the interests of the ruling class contradict the interests of the human race.

The direct ecological consequences of climate change are engendering massive global socio-political consequences which we can only tackle on a global level. What we need is a new internationalism.

The goal of our conference is to develop concrete demands and strategies out of the cooperation of different left, anticapitalist, socialist and communist tendencies, movements and parties, in order to act internationally against the continuing destruction of our natural resources as well as the capitalist build-up, the corollaries of which include a development of the surveillance state as well as cuts in social welfare. We want to search together for starting points for international democratic collaboration similar to what was laid down in the Belem Ecosocialist Declaration. The bourgeois ideological obsession with technical productivity ignores the need for a change in social relations. What is required is a world-wide programme of demands developed in concordance with the social and ecological movements, the trade unions and the anticapitalist organisations.

The social dimension of the ecological crisis demands international solidarity from below in order to push back capitalist globalisation from above. This solidarity must be based on a new rapport between economy and ecology, and can only be achieved with the end of the irresponsible, profit-driven capitalist dominance over nature and humanity. For this we shall need new understandings of work and productivity which respect the relationship between work and life and the effects of employment on the health and wellbeing of humankind.

We are headed for ecological crisis, but what can be done politically to steer us away from this and towards a dignified human existence in accordance with nature? How can this challenge, to develop new forms of international solidaristic cooperation, be put into political practice?”

A book entitled 'Why Vote Green' written by my friend and colleague Shahrar Ali has just been published. I received a copy through the post yesterday, and was 'umbled to see yours truly listed in the acknowledgements. Commissioned by Biteback publishing, the paperback is part of a series of 'Why Vote' books that explore the policies and commitments of the main political parties.
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Tags croydon, greenparty

New video from Caroline Lucas-enjoy.

This is a piece which will be published in a housing journal in the next few weeks - I thought you, dear reader, might also be interested....

Green Party housing policy: fairer and more sustainable

Matt Sellwood, Green Party national spokesperson on housing and parliamentary candidate for Hackney North and Stoke Newington

The Green Party believes that for too long housing has been treated as a speculative market, rather than as a vital human right. We would focus our efforts on reversing the marketising trends of the last thirty years, and in returning to an ethos which gives primacy to affordable, sustainable and well-designed social housing.

Truly affordable housing is clearly a vital component in any equitable and sustainable society. Not only does meaningful participation in a democracy necessitate a basic level of security and prosperity, but our current housing stock too often contributes to problems as widely varied as crime, climate change and ill-health. Any sensible government must invest massively in social housing, as one of the solutions to many other difficult issues.

Despite this, the current situation of social housing is dire, as the example of London amply illustrates. Social housing waiting lists have grown by around 80% over the last decade, while stocks of affordable housing have actually shrunk. 10% of households in our capital city are now waiting for a home that fully suits their needs. This is unacceptable.

Recent changes in government policy have made some small steps towards recognising the problem, but do not go anywhere near far enough in addressing its causes. The Green Party advocates bold action, including:

- The resumption of direct investment in Council and other social housing, at a scale far in excess of the current low levels on offer from the Government. Moves to allow local authorities to use receipts from sales to fund new accommodation must be solidified and accelerated. In particular, we would provide £4bn per annum to local authorities to expand social housing, mainly through conversion and renovation, creating 80,000 jobs.

- A programme of investment to ensure better use of the over 700,000 empty properties in the UK, and an immediate end to discounts and subsidies for empty and second homes.

- Steps to ensure that development is more evenly distributed across the whole of the country, so reducing pressure on housing in London and the South East in particular.

- Support to ensure that social housing tenants experience real democratic consultation, whoever their landlord, and that the cooperative model of management and ownership of housing is encouraged and supported.

- Support for a level playing field between all social housing stakeholders, including an end to the allocation of historic council housing debt to local authorities – whether under the current system, or under the proposed system of reallocation due to HRA reform.

This is what Green MPs would fight for in Parliament, and with party leader Caroline Lucas MEP tipped by bookmakers and pollsters to win the Brighton Pavilion seat in the coming general election, this is an approach we might hope to carry into the House of Commons in the near future. An increase in the Green vote nationwide will send this same message to the establishment parties in what may be a hung parliament.

We had a chat with Brian Haw on February 21st. He’s been camping opposite the Houses of Parliament for 8 years to protest against the aggression, death and destruction perpetrated by this country on Iraq. Brian deserves all our respect and admiration for standing up for human rights and civilised behaviour.

We agreed at the GBCP meeting the other night to pursue some sort of pedestrian facility on North St between Raleigh Road and Luckwell Road. They will also investigate a crossing on West St.

We were supplied with scant information, a list of a dozen or so sites, a three word description and asked to make a decision. Next year or time, it needs to be done far better. But the consesnsus was get something moving now.

There were a number of worthy causes. It is actually difficult to argue against any of them, or even to particularly prioritise them. But money only existed for one.

A crossing on North St has been a proposal for some years now, and, if it goes ahead, will tie in with helping the local shopping.

I hope the GBCP moves ahead with proposals to identify other priorities in other parts of the two wards for future years.

THis seems to have been removed, confirmed by officers.

Very disappointing, and Again, I am liaising with Sean to see if we can get them to reverse their decision.

I am liaising with Sean to write a letter to Asda to ask them to reverse their reduction in parking hours from 3 hours to 2. I have been contacted by people who are really upset at the changes. Anyway, I contacted the planners if there was anything on the originl planning consent about it...



It is understood that Asda have reduced their parking limit from 3 hours to 2 hours. Having reviewed the case there is nothing in the 1986 (reserved matters) and 1985 (outline) planning permission for this use. As part of the permission the applicants did enter into a Section 52 Legal Agreement with the Council which included "the superstore shall be operated so that long term parking shall be discouraged".

This matter was investigated before in 1996/7. Back then a ticket barrier was in use and Asda did offer the first 3 hrs free , after that they had an escalating charged per additional hour, upto and beyond 6hrs. This was their decision. Notwithstanding this planning enforcement considered that the escalating charges were so minor they didn't discourage long term parking at all. In the end charges were raised to reflect the essence of the s52 agreement.

There are no agreements, conditions or restrictions prescribing maximum stay lengths must be 3 hours , only that the S52 Agreement also ensures that parking is available for all and not just for supermarket users. In this instance it appears their decision to reduce the maximum stay to two hours would still be in the spirit of the S52 agreement and there would be little for us enforce should we wish to take this matter further.

I trust the above information is of assistance

Was very happy to sign up to the Gingerbread campaign against stereotyping single parents after receiving the email below today from, perhaps a little unusually, a certain Roger Berry MP. I will certainly fight such prejudices, along with any similar or related ones - this is essential work if we are to build the fair society and fair future that the Green Party wants.

Dear Mr Vowles,

I’m writing to ask you to support Gingerbread’s campaign to challenge the stereotyping and stigma that single parents face.

Eighty-three per cent of single parents surveyed by Gingerbread said the media portrays them in a negative light. Polling confirms that the wider public overestimates how many single parents are teenage, never married and not in work. Too often they are depicted as scroungers or bad parents responsible for ‘broken’ families.

There is likely to be intense debate around family policy in the run up to the election. Please help make sure this focuses on the facts, not on the stereotypes.

Gordon Brown, David Cameron and Nick Clegg have already signed the Gingerbread pledge below:

I promise to challenge prejudice against single parent families and support Gingerbread’s campaign to lose the labels.

Please email campaign@gingerbread.org.uk to pledge your support for the campaign. And I’d appreciate a reply to this email too, if possible, to let me know you’ve signed. Many thanks.

Gingerbread will be publishing a list of signatories on their website, along with regular campaign updates: see http://www.gingerbread.org.uk

BBC News - Former Labour leader Michael Foot has died

Great man of leftist ideas, excellent thinker and writer, inspirational and passionate speaker. A lovely man who stuck to his principles despite the dirty world of party politics and the media (some of whom treated him very unfairly indeed whilst he was Labour Leader).

Scottish Young Greens meeting

Temple Meads transport hub vital for rail-use increase Bristol24-7

Pete Goodwin, the Greens candidate for Stockwood, is doing great work on this vital Bristol transport issue. I've commented on this Bristol 24-7 story, giving the wider picture on Green investment plans, beginning...Given the transport problems of the city and the country (congestion, stress, delays, ill-health, both local and global pollution, additional costs…) we need to do what is best to establish an integrated, sustainable transport system – and a hub next to Temple Meads is a vital part of this. People can see it makes good sense and is a great investment with benefits – economic, social and environmental – stretching out to the long term....

See also: http://stockwoodpete.blogspot.com/

Above Caroline Lucas and below Peter Tatchell at the launch of the Green Party 2010 LGBT manifesto in Brighton.

You know you’ve crossed a few lines when you find your garden full of an unholy mixture of pallets, static caravans and knackered old cars with only one lock working. (Let us not speak of the repair bills we’ve forked out this year on Quercus’s sensible car, the car which replaced the avowedly not sensible Citröen CX, which cost a fraction of what this bastard replacement has needed; it is all the fault of said “reliable” replacement that we have had, in the last few months, variously, a multi-coloured Ford Mondeo, a Peugeot 405, a people-carrier thing, and several other semi-buggered courtesy cars from the garage up the road.)

But when you then find yourself contemplating – seriously, I might add – the purchase of a van, you know you’re in trouble.

Yes folks: it looks like we’re going to sell the bollocking car and replace it with a van, size, description and specification thereof yet to be decided. I suppose it’s merely a part of accepting that generally, cars were not designed to haul tonnes of rubble about the place, and, in an ideal world, their lives don’t include queries about just how much timber you can get in the front, or whether the axle can take a concrete lintel without complaining.

We are pikies. It’s simple.

Some day, I really must rediscover the concept of a garden.

Whiteshill and Ruscombe Parish Council along with the relaunched Ruscombe Valley Action Group organised a pubic meeting last night to explain the latest consultation. More on that coming in future blogs, however I was delighted to see so many people turn up.Photos: view to top right of picture of some of the fields threatened and below some of the local sites included in the consultation

Stroud Valleys Credit Union have their AGM on 27th March in The Library Meeting Room at 12 noon. I am sadly somewhere else at that time but wanted to give them a plug. Back in 2002 I helped establish the Forest Green branch which is still operating on Wednesdays at 2.30pm but now from the Forest Green Community Hall.Photo: 'Slave beads' or 'trade beads' - these glass beads were used as currency

Mind, the national mental health charity, have launched a campaign over the general election period to ensure that every MP knows about mental health issues and why they matter so much, so I'm excited to be meeting them as a candidate - and will be dedicated in fighting against mental health stigma if I'm elected.

I'm also really looking forward to meeting Amaze, a charity who give advice and support to families of disabled children.

It's a vital organisation which works to empower parents to help their children live fulfilling lives, despite the discrimination many of them will sadly face.

They're located at Community Base, an office for community groups on Queens Road, so I'm hoping they haven't been hit too hard by the difficult financial situation Community Base finds itself in after the Tory-led city council revoked its licence for advertising on its north wall space, which it had hired out for five years giving the offices much needed revenue.

Our Green Party fund-raiser quiz went well bringing £50 into the campaign. It was an enjoyable evening -- even though I am rubbish at quiz questions! The live fiddle music and singing was especially good.

However, we are still a good £700 short of funds for the Reading East campaign! If you've got any fundraising ideas for us -- and more importantly time to put them into practice -- let me know. Alternatively you can always make a donation and encourage friends and family to do the same via our PayPal donate link on the right.