Category: notes from JK

Superb Green Election Broadcast this year… Below is the local elections version with Caroline Lucas, click to view the London-specific version with Sian Berry.

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

If the economic downturn is hitting your wallet here are some easy ways to save you significant sums of money each year whilst also reducing your environmental impact on the world.

1. Stop buying bottled water

   Water that sits in plastic bottles for months whilst being shipped around the world is not only a huge source of carbon dioxide emissions, it’s also a waste of money. Bottled water has less checks on its purity and safety than British tap water. If you’re worried about chlorine or impurities in tap water just use a water filter. In bulk filters cost only £2-3 a month, as much as a bottle of fancy mineral water!

2. No more washing powder and fabric conditioner

   Household laundry is one of those great invisible sources of consumption and cost. Your machine may be costing you significant amounts of water and electricity if it isn’t efficient. But what about the stuff you put in it? Cut your cost per wash down to 3p by using EcoBalls and if you must tumble dry then use DryerBalls for faster drying and softer clothes.

3. Buy in bulk

   You can save loads of money and reduce packaging by buying in bulk. This goes for food or any consumable. For example, in Brighton & Hove, Green Party members run a bulk-buy scheme through Infinity Foods which saves us money whilst also generating donations for the party. Join Now

4. Go Car-free

   Do you really, really need your car? Because if you don’t you can save a huge amount of money by going Car-free. Think of how much you spent on the car, then add insurance, tax disc, MOT and servicing every year PLUS petrol of course! For occasional use how about a car club (if there’s one in your area) or you can rent for as little as £30/day. If you really do need a car, try getting a smaller one or a hybrid. These will reduce not only your fuel bill but also your car tax as well as the car’s emissions.

5. Treasure heat

   Whether it’s hot water or heating think about how to make best use of it. Don’t leave the hot water running in the kitchen sink whilst wiping surfaces. Wear a sweater or fleece inside so you don’t need to keep the heating up so high. Use draft excluders and other gadgets available at DIY stores to quickly and cheaply keep your home as warm as possible.

These five steps are straightforward but could save your thousands each year whilst also dramatically reducing your impact on the environment. How can you resist?

Woke up this morning confused as to why my alarm hadn’t rung. Then I realised the lights wouldn’t turn on, my phone and laptop weren’t fully charged either. Ah… no power. Stick my head out of the door… no power on the whole floor of the hotel (which is actually more accurately some rooms above a pub).

Hence the day starts with me late for a meeting, I descend to find all the doors at the front of the hotel locked and struggle for five mintutes before finding a way out.

After catching the rump of my first meeting I check my email and news feeds to discover that Amazon S3 – the distributed, reliable, storage service – has been down for over 2 hours. Bit worrying after having started using it in a production setting last week.

I move into the afternoon with trepidation… what next?

Before you ask my why I'm wandering around the Green Party Spring Conference drinking Pret-a-Manger coffee please note:

• McDonalds no longer own a stake in the company.
• The milk is organic.
• The coffee is organic, freetrade and Rainforest Alliance Certified.
• The beans are fresh.
• It tastes really, really good.

Thank you.

• Monday 4th February
  Regency Ward Surgery – meet your councillors!
  12:30-15:30 St Mary Magdalens Community Centre, Upper North Street, Brighton

• Wednesday 13th February
  Stop the War Meeting speakers include Caroline Lucas MEP
  19:30 Friends Meeting House, Ship Street, Brighton BN1 1AF

• Thursday 14th to Sunday 17th February
  Green Party Spring Conference
  Reading Town Hall

Despite being a local councillor now I don't want to make my blog entries too parochial so I will try to balance highly ward-specific posts with my usual topics.

However there is a local matter I do want to raise today… and it's Post Offices. At the end of last year the local Green Party hosted a meeting to discuss proposed Post Office closures for Brighton & Hove. Representatives from the Post Office were not particularly convincing arguing that long queues currently experienced were simply the Christmas rush. They also admitted that the usage figures their closure plans were worked from predated the closure of our Crown Post Office in Ship Street, a large facility that was relocated to WH Smith.

This relocation was a poor idea and seem obvious to me and so many others at the time. A wonderful building with a long history as a Post Office was vacated, and is still empty, and another service was pulled into the private space of the ghastly Churchill Square shopping centre.

Additionally the skilled and experienced staff were offered jobs at 'shelf-stacker' wages by WH Smith. Understandably they took their redundancy packages instead. We have ended up the city's main Post Office being in the drab basement of WH Smith, with low-paid inexperienced staff and huge queues – which are not a symptom on Christmas.

I've been trying to post two packages for a week. Last Friday at 2.30pm there were 28 people in the queue and I saw six or seven others turn away when they saw the queue before I too gave up having seen the queue not move an inch. On Monday at 5.20pm there were 15 people in the queue, again unmoving. Even at it's busiest times the old office had a queue that always moved.

We're in a position where our current Post Office facilities are insufficient and they want to close more – it's absurd.

Hello and happy holidays from Lublin, Poland where I’m spending Christmas with my wife’s family. We’ve a dusting of snow to keep things looking festive.

Today we popped into a new mall which didn’t exist last time I was here, about 18 months ago. The Lublin Plaza is a giant temple to consumerism with a good helping of chain shops, a seven screen cinemaplex and bowling alley. The prices seemed fairly high for what is a poorer area of Poland and so the place wasn’t busy even though it’s the last Saturday before Christmas.

The mall reinforced my continued sense that Poland, like many other countries, confuses imitation of Anglo-Saxons (Americans, Canadians, British etc.) with socio-economic development. I find the ensuing loss of identity and distinctiveness depressing. Such imitation also results in reduced locality of services, manufacturing and trade with all that implies – dependence on multi-nationals for goods and employment, increased vulnerability to world markets (particularly in the race to the bottom for wages) and longer distances travelled for goods.

I wonder how much these malls, their foreign chain stores and the giant supermarkets from Tesco, Leclerc, Real etc really offer the Polish economy or society. Seeing the Christmas decorations in the Lublin Plaza I had to take a picture. Is there a catalogue for mall decorations somewhere? I felt that I’d seen the same decorations in Canada, USA, UK, Dubai… wherever I’ve been.

Enjoy your holidays wherever you may be and see you all soon.

We won. Thank you.

It's an incredible testament to the hard work of party activists and the trust of Regency residents that not only did we win but that we increased our vote share when compared to the election in May. This bodes extremely well for Caroline Lucas' chances of being elected at the next General Election.

The big disappointment of election night was turnout which was about 23%. Given the amount of leafleting and canvassing that went on, I wonder how many people were turned off from voting by the appalling tone some took, particularly the Labour party. I'm also sure that given the low amount of media coverage many just didn't realise it was election day – this is the perennial challenge of a by-election, particularly in winter.

I recognise that despite a convincing win there are large numbers of residents who didn't vote for me and even more who didn't vote at all – still I will work hard to representing them all as best I can.

Thanks again, and Merry Christmas!

At hustings the other night I was struck how the other candidates didn’t even try to explain what their parties stood for. What do the grey parties believe in these days? Not even the Tories are sure of themselves anymore.

As a Green Party candidate I was able to explain that our party stands for peace, social justice, equality and respect for the environment. A clear set of values which we apply to everything we do as candidates or elected representatives and when developing policy.

In the final day before polls open, with the sun shining on a chilly Brighton, I feel proud of the campaign we’ve run. Voting Green is such a positive statement of wanting a better city and greater respect for the environment, but also showing support for a group of people who are genuinely trying to forge a new form of politics whilst remaining electorally successful.

We’re not giving up on politics or disconnecting from society – those are the easy options – Green Party members are trying to participate in our political society with fresh approaches whilst holding themselves to higher standards.

Whatever the result tomorrow, nobody can deny the need for new ways of doing politics. I hope the voters of Regency will re-confirm their May result by voting Green again.