It's election season again but this year we've no elections in Brighton & Hove. So I've doing some travelling to help other Green parties as much as I can. I spent a Saturday in Oxford helping to maintain their strong position on Oxford City Council. There's a wonderful group of dedicated councillors and candidates there and I thoroughly enjoyed my time out campaigning with them.
A week later I was up in London helping the Greens there. Our two London Assembly Members, Darren Johnson and Jenny Jones, have achieved a huge amount by applying pressure on Ken Livingstone over the last four years whilst Ken has needed their votes to pass his budgets. Whilst we don't agree with many of Ken and Labour's policies and approaches, it's hard to imagine a Tory Mayor of London being as willing to work cross-party to build a successful budget.
Sian Berry's Mayoral campaign for the Greens has garnered lots of press coverage, the challenge is to make sure that translates into votes for Green Assembly Members where we can have much more influence than a high mayoral result — we all know it will be Ken or Boris after all.
Having spent time with some of our Assembly candidates I hope we can encourage voters to vote Green on all their ballot papers so these good, hard working Greens can put their energy and ideas to good use.
http://www.sianformayor.org.uk
http://www.votegreenparty.org.uk
Jason Kitcat 