Categories
current affairs

The budget cuts in Brighton & Hove and the continued failure to empower local government

For no good reason other than showing how tough they are – a sort of budgetary chest thumping – we have cuts being imposed now. Even if you accept the need for cuts (which Greens do not), it doesn’t seem to me that we are getting the best value or service quality from rushing through in-year cuts. During the general election only the Tories were arguing the cuts should happen this year. How the LibDems have changed their tune.

At a recent Cabinet meeting I called for the local Tory administration to publish details of their budget plans as soon as possible, with councillors from all parties being involved in the process. This fell on stoney ground.

All we know at this point is what officers have been able to glean an announcement by Eric Pickles about 2 weeks ago. In summary for this year the council is obliged to cut £3.55 million from the budget already balanced and passed at the February budget council meeting.

That we’re being asked to change a budget in-year is less than ideal, it is threatening many long-planned projects and adds a great deal of uncertainty to council staff. Currently they are being told to carry on with planning but implement as little as possible.

However, and here’s the kicker, as long as the Tory cabinet manage the budget reductions within departments and don’t push money across departmental lines then none of the cuts will have to come to full council for decision. Instead they can sign them off at the Tory-only Cabinet-level meetings. In any circumstances, but especially for a council of no overall control, this is not the inclusive, democratic decision making that I believe residents deserve.

Additionally, pushing these cuts onto local government is confirmation that the Tory/LibDem government are intent on continuing the emasculation of local councils that the previous Labour and Conservative governments undertook with relish.

All the talk of ‘localism’, devolving power and such like from Tories and LibDems is immediately shown to be completely false. If they truly believed and understood these issues they would not have imposed swingeing cuts on local government without also granting new local powers. Let us not forget that local government had nothing to do with creating this budgetary deficit and have been delivering Gershon efficiency savings of 2-3% a year.

Local government haven’t been showered in cash the past years. The least the government could have done is offered local councils some new powers, perhaps alternative models for fundraising or a fairer local taxation system before cutting off our funds. Certainly the government’s only gesture to councils of removing the ring-fencing from a motley collection of grants is not much of a tonic in the face of these cuts.

Greens will oppose the cuts all the way, but it looks like the Tories will make sure we won’t even get a chance to vote on them. What sort of open politics is that?

Categories
voting

Why can’t I vote at my ATM? Hansard Society Debate

This evening the Hansard Society hosted a panel debate in Portcullis House, Westminster with the title “Why can’t I vote at my ATM? – the practicalities of the ballot box.”

I along with Electoral Commission Chair, Jenny Watson and Tom Watson Harris MP made up the panel. The audience was filled with a wide variety of interesting people including current and former Electoral Commission staff, civil servants, Lords and activists.

While we didn’t all agree on the reasoning, there was a fairly general consensus that electronic voting shouldn’t be pursued at the moment. There was lots of interesting debate on issues of access and turnout. I hope the society will put online a podcast or summary of the event in some form. I post below my opening speech for the event.

——–

Thank you for inviting me here to participate this evening.

I come to this issue as a programmer, as someone who has observed elections for the Open Rights Group and who, as a local councillor, has had a very personal interest in elections.

As an observer the ultimate compliment one can pay an election is to say that it was ‘free and fair’.

What does an election process need to do to be considered free and fair?

There are three key properties that ALL must be met. An election must be:

  • Secure
  • Verifiable
  • Anonymous

By secure we mean that the results cannot be changed, that only those entitled to vote actually do so and people can only vote one time.

Verifiable means that candidates, agents, observers and voters can check the result and have confidence that the result reflects the will of the people. Voters need to be sure that their intention was accurately recorded and counted.

Finally to prevent coercion, vote selling and bribery voters absolutely need to be secure in the knowledge that their vote is secret and that people cannot know how they voted. I am aware that the UK currently doesn’t have a completely secret ballot, we should, but that’s a debate for another day.

  • Secure
  • Verifiable
  • Anonymous

A properly run paper-based election can meet those three requirements.

However with current technology electronic voting cannot meet those three principles. It just isn’t technically possible to have an electronic system which is secure and anonymous whilst also being verifiable.

When the Open Rights Group observed electronic elections in the UK we were unable to declare confidence in the results, because we just couldn’t properly verify the counts at all, it was hidden behind the technology.

Online banking is a completely different problem, the transactions are not secret, we can see them in our statements and merchants collect lots of personal information about us to push through their anti-fraud systems. Technology is great for so many things, but not voting.

If you’ve heard the complaints from the music and movie industries over recent years, then you’ll know that computers are good at copying. With electronic voting we risk undetectable ballot stuffing on a massive scale.

Currently the very nature of paper – that you need a vehicle to move around lots of it, that it’s logistically challenging to deal with thousands of ballots – limits fraud and increases the chance of fraudsters being caught. With electronic votes the fraud can happen in a computer, where none of us can see inside, with millions of votes changed or copied whilst controlled by someone on the other side of the world.

I’ll save more details of the technical problems with electronic voting and counting for the questions, if people are interested. But there is a broad consensus in the computing world that these technologies should not be used. The Association for Computing Machinery and the British Computer Society as well as scores of academics have voiced their opposition. So far e-voting has been cancelled in Ireland, Netherlands, Germany, Italy and the province of Quebec. There have been serious problems found with e-voting systems in India, Japan, France, Belgium and of course the United States.

I might add that these systems are hugely expensive, costing many times more than traditional paper-based elections. In a 2003 e-voting trial in Sheffield, for example, the cost was £70 per e-vote cast versus £1 per paper vote. And on average turnout still declined during the UK’s electronic voting pilots between 2000 and 2007.

On turnout, we need to be very careful. Much of the over £50 million spent on UK pilots in the last 10 years was based on blind faith that online voting would boost turnout. It didn’t, simply because ease of voting is not the main factor for why people don’t vote. Indeed there are studies showing that people who live furthest from their polling station are most likely to vote!

People choose not to vote because they feel all politicians are the same, that their vote doesn’t count or they don’t know enough about the issues to vote. That’s a challenge for the political system to address, one which electoral reform could help with as there’s data clearly showing higher turnouts in countries with fairer electoral systems.

That being said, politics aside, what should we do about our electoral processes? We absolutely and urgently need individual voter registration and that could be tied in with an online electoral roll. That’s a place where technology could help voters, election administrators and party activists.

We need to clamp down on postal voting, it’s the source of most allegations of fraud. It will need to still be available, but in a much more controlled and secure manner.

We need to review polling day. I know the Electoral Commission have done quite a bit of interesting work on this. Moving elections to the weekends, perhaps all weekend, is one option but the consultation responses to this were, I understand, rather mixed. What we could do is declare a public holiday on election day, we could also consider offering, before polling day, early voting in town halls.

Finally, I think counts need to stay open, be manual, paper based and easily scrutinised. It’s only by watching piles of ballots add up, by observing them being sorted and checked, that we can have confidence in the result. What could help would be more standardised procedures for the counts. This would assist with training of all involved – at the moment every count across the country can be done in a different way. Let’s not stamp out local innovation, but let’s make sure there are minimum standards so we can have confidence in a modern, paper-based electoral system.

In closing, I believe electronic voting & counting are not the way forward, let’s update our existing electoral system whilst keeping it secure, verifiable and anonymous. The real challenge for engagement and turnout lies with our political culture and the fairness of our voting systems, not election administration.

Categories
notes from JK

Thoughts on incineration after visiting Rabbit Skips

Last week I had the opportunity to visit the facilities of Rabbit Skips in Lancing.

They are an independent local company who service many businesses, particularly construction and events, in the Brighton & Hove area.

I was very interested to know about how they are reducing their environmental impact. I was impressed with the clear passion with which staff did their work and pride in what they had achieved.

Rabbit’s process is a microcosm of what the city council, to an extent, do with residents’ waste.

Waste comes into the site and is sorted. Most of the sorting is done using a variety of electro-mechanical systems and magnets very similar to the Hollingdean Materials Recovery Facility used by the council. The difference being that while the council only put recycling through their system, Rabbit put everything through theirs (other than obviously re-usable large items like doors and girders!)

The sorting is impressive for what it can retrieve from the waste: Soil, wood, metal (even the tiniest screws, springs and nails), plastics, aggregrate and so on. Many of these materials, such as metals, plastics, are sold onto the market for recycling or re-use.

The remaining ‘residue waste’ is broken down into small pieces for use in an incinerator. I’m told it was the UK’s first incinerator using waste to be classified as using biofuel due to the amount of wood-chip and other organic materials that goes in there.

That a relatively small, independent local company managed to get through all the legislative hoops and pull together the financing to build these facilities – which are highly automated – is in itself impressive.

It seemed to my untrained eye that the incinerator has more machinery to clean the exhaust than anything else. Currently, when running both lines, they can generate up to 2MW which is sold as green energy onto the national grid. They would like to sell their heat too, but so far have not found any buyers.

While the majority of waste, when the mix is right, is burnt, they are still left with several tons a day of residue which has to be handled as hazardous waste. They also have a quantity of ash collected by filters which goes into road building – so it’s not a totally zero waste affair.

Let’s be clear, in my view incineration is very much second best to some other waste systems such as digestion technologies and pyrolosis. No process is perfect but in terms of efficiency and emissions they are clearly preferable to incineration. In my view incineration is not much different from landfill, you stick it in the air rather than in the ground, but at least you recover some energy in the process.

It is my goal to see Brighton & Hove using the most efficient, environmentally friendly waste processes possible. Nevertheless firms like Rabbit have a role to play because councils do not handle or process commercial waste. If incineration is to be pursued (and I hope not) it’s certainly better to have smaller, local installations than large mega-sites as for Veolia’s in Newhaven where emissions will be heavily concentrated in one area.

What I can support wholeheartedly is the waste sorting Rabbit are using. We could be using it on the bulk of our waste to push far more of it into the recycling market. The technology is there… but is there the will from the the Tories locally or nationally?

Categories
food

Friccassee de Poulet with Balsamic Vinegar

A few years ago it was another hot summer Sunday and I was planning something like a quick chicken teriyaki for lunch. But my mother-in-law dropped in and that would have to change. No, not the start to a joke, but the beginning of my falling in love with Provençal cooking all over again.

Usually my wife and I eat Japanese vegetarian food for our everyday meals, and a bit of decent quality organic meat for one weekend meal. But my Polish mother-in-law really finds Japanese a bit too strange for her tastes. No problem, I had plenty of good organic chicken in the freezer after overbuying for a BBQ.

I’m not sure why but I pulled down my yellow Provençal cookbook of shame. I say of shame because it is in English. Many years ago I bought it in a  shop in Avignon where both English and French versions were available. Despite French being my mother tongue the culinary terminology scared me into getting the English copy and I still regret it to this day. Silly really, especially as I’ve only used one recipe for ratatouille from there in all this time. (You can get the book from Amazon France in French or English)

Anyway, for reasons unexplained I reached for the Provençal book and flicked through thinking of something that I would enjoy cooking and everyone would enjoy eating. Well with only one chicken recipe in the book the choice was made!

Based on my own memories of Friccassees past I made some changes to the recipe which made it a bit more rustic. I served it with mashed potatoes (using a splash of milk and white pepper) and a green salad.

Many Friccassee recipes are extraordinarily involved. This recipe is straightforward and easy giving you a delicious country dish in under 40 minutes.

Don’t be scared by the vinegar in this recipe, it works. Just make sure you have a good balsamic vinegar which isn’t too tart, there should be some sweetness to its flavour.

Ingredients

1 chicken (1.8-2Kgs)

5 leeks

500ml double cream

200ml balsamic vinegar

4 shallots

8-10 crimini mushrooms (small portobello)

50g butter

1. Cut the chicken into eight pieces and lightly brown in a large pan using the butter. When the chicken has become golden brown, put in a dish to one side, discarding any remaining butter from the pan.

2. Finely chop the shallots and sweat them in the pan for a few minutes until they are becoming translucent.

3. Return the chicken to the pan along with sliced mushrooms and pour over the vinegar. While reducing the vinegar by half over a medium heat turn the chicken a few times to ensure even absorption.

4. Stir in all the cream and simmer gently for 10 minutes. Remove the white meat and continue cooking the legs until done, around 10 minutes.

5. Cut the leeks into 10cm (4 inch) lengths, discarding the loose, dark green leaves at the top. Cook in salted water, cooling in ice water when done.

6. In a serving dish lay out the leeks topped with your chicken which should have taken on a gorgeous brown from the vinegar.

7. Keep simmering the sauce until it has reduced a bit further then pour it hot over the chicken and serve.

Although I’ve played with his recipe, I can’t argue with Christian Etienne’s advice: “Serve this dish with a good wine.”

We had it with a wine which never fails to please during the summer months, Rosé d’Anjou.

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Categories
notes from JK

Why are Labour incapable of straightforward campaigning?

I’ve just seen the first leaflet from Labour’s by-election candidate for St Peter’s & North Laine, Tom French.

Does Tom offer any new ideas for the area or the city? No.

Does he use misleading statistics to support his candidacy? Yes!

Rather than quote figures from the last council elections, recent council by-elections in neighbouring wards or even the recent Parliamentary results in the constituency the ward is in, he comes up with a new metric… Tom aggregates the general election vote across the three constituencies (and thus includes the parts of Lewes district in Brighton Kemptown) to suggest Labour are in a close second place. If that’s how any of these elections worked – maybe, but that figure is of no relevance to anyone as it’s not restricted to the Brighton & Hove municipal boundary, it was for a different electoral arrangement and resulted in Labour winning no MPs whilst the Greens did win one.

Tom also writes that he’s “stood shoulder to shoulder with students, teachers and parents against the cuts in Higher Education” – which is intriguing given that the cuts higher education institutions in this city have experienced so far were all brought in by the Labour government.

Tom – You just can’t walk away from Labour’s record of 13 years in government nationally and over a decade on the local council.

And sadly calling Labour the opposition to the Tories is demonstrably untrue. I’ve sat in the council chamber and seen Labour vote with the Conservatives to end our committee system, award themselves additional allowances, to support health privatisation, curtail councillor speaking rights and much more.

Greens will keep putting forward positive proposals, such as for 20mph residential streets, and we’ll fight elections on the back of our ideas for the future. Let’s have a battle of ideas – that’s what would benefit this city at election times.

Categories
current affairs

Labour’s astounding hypocrisy on cuts

So word reaches me that Labour are campaigning locally to ‘stop the cuts’ that are affecting our great city.

Well I agree, we should fight unnecessary cuts (as most of them are) and campaign for the best deal possible for our city as the guillotine falls. This is exactly what Greens have been doing for a long time, whether it’s fighting privatisation, university closures or cuts to respite services. In fact almost the first thing I did on being elected in December 2007 was to have a run-in with Cllr Ken Norman over his plans to close the Vernon Gardens residential care home and day centre (which Tories steamrollered through).

Labour were never against the cuts the Tory/LibDem government are pushing through. They just wanted them next year instead of this year. A valid point if cuts must be made, as we don’t want a double-dip recession. But Greens campaigned on the fact that most of these cuts simply aren’t needed. With a rebalancing of government spending away from the military, ID cards and road building plus a reformed tax system, we could protect vital services whilst making our society fairer.

Indeed it was the Labour government, before they were turfed out, which began the cuts to our local educational institutions. As a result Sussex university want to close some degrees and fire staff, Brighton university are having to retrench losing the valued ARTHOUSE and associated staff contracts and City College Brighton, who a few years ago thought they were about to develop a gleaming new campus, are now cutting back after the funding they counted on just didn’t appear despite repeated government promises. Furthermore childcare facilities at both universities have been put at threat.

It was the Labour government that had been giving Brighton & Hove City Council some of the lowest block grants (a key source of funding) in the country, year after year. That the Tories have not spent this wisely is also true e.g. £100,000 on trimming verges more often.

Labour also presided over the skyrocketing of top civil service pay along with spiralling IT outsourcing contracts.

Labour created the regulatory system which allowed banks to get ‘too big to fail’ and it was Labour that chose to run up a huge deficit to bail them out. It was Labour who used PFI deals to push debt off the government books. International accountancy standards now require most of these to be, quite rightly, brought back into the government accounts and so we’ll see the government finances look even worse than the previous sanitised picture Brown and Darling painted.

So, yes, let’s stop the cuts. But until Labour renounce their policies which brought us here and began the cuts, they are opportunistic hypocrites of the first order to try to make political capital of their ‘opposition’ to said cuts.

Categories
food

Bob Blumer’s Beetrot Salad Recipe

Bob Blumer (a.k.a The Surreal Gourmet) came into my cooking life thanks to my cousin Sophie who gave me his wonderful book “Off The Eaten Path“.

I’ve always enjoyed beetroots but I know that many don’t so when I saw a recipe called “Gee, your beet smells terrific” I had to give it a try. It all comes down to roasting the beets which is a brilliant idea. It makes complete sense given how beets are packed with natural sugars, yet I’ve never seen this suggested anywhere before. Everyone who has this salad is stunned when I say the beets were roasted – they taste good.

There are so many clever flavour combinations packed in here so I haven’t modified his recipe much, just tweaked a few quantities.

Ingredients

3 medium size beets (tops removed)

3 teaspoons walnut oil

2 teaspoons good balsamic vinegar

3 teaspoons freshly squeezed orange juice

2 teaspoons fresh tarragon (finely chopped, stems discarded)

50g strong, crumbly French goats cheese (diced into 1/8-inch cubes)

3 tablespoons toasted walnuts (to toast just pop nuts in the oven until starting to brown and get them out quick as they’ll burn in a blink)

1-2 Belgian endives

salt & black pepper to taste

  • Place the beetroots whole, unskinned on a rack to bake at 200 C for 1.5-2 hours. Use foil to catch the drippings below. (Increase time if beets are big)
  • Remove beetroots from the oven to cool. Don’t worry about the exterior blackening, the inside is wonderfully tender and sweet.
  • Once cool peel with your hands and then finely dice the beetroots.
  • Combine all the remaining ingredients in a bowl adding nuts and cheese last before gently mixing.
  • For fancy presentation or as an entree spoon the mixture into whole washed endive leaves. Alternatively use just 1 endive and chop the leaves into 2 inch lengths and mix into the salad.

Note: All Amazon links for books will pay a commission to me if you purchase the book.

Categories
notes from JK

Seth Godin’s “Linchpin” – go read it!

I’ve read it twice to make sure. There’s no doubt in my mind that Seth Godin’s “Linchpin” is a powerful and important book for anyone in the world of work. In fact anyone who wants to contribute in any way – whether entrepreneur, employee or volunteer.

A key theme in the book is fear (aka ‘the resistance’) and how it holds people back from doing what they know they are capable of achieving. This is a topic many motivational speakers and writers touch on. I had forgotten this until yesterday when attending a little send-off do for Keith Taylor who has just stepped down from being a councillor (after 11 years!) to become an MEP.

Without any thought I had worn a t-shirt I’d received a few years back when attending Anthony Robbins’ “Unleash the power within” event. I’d been given the ticket as a gift, and had gone deeply skeptical, but ended up totally into it. The t-shirt simply reads:

Anthony Robbins

the firewalk experience

fear into power

And so a few people had asked me if I’d seen or done the firewalk. Yes, I’d done the firewalk, I replied without any thought (because I had done it) and they all became very curious and interested about the details of how it’s achieved. I talked about the focus and preparation needed.

As I cycled home I realised that this was a reflection of the power of fear. I had overcome fear (and deep skepticism) to do the firewalk a few years ago and reflecting on it, I did still feel empowered by that memory. If I can do that, surely my goals are all worth a try!

Godin cleverly reminds us all of such moments in his book. He says we have all been geniuses at some point in our lives – we’ve solved a problem, got ourselves out of a fix, improvised, entertained and surprised ourselves. This, he argues, is what we need to enable ourselves to do more often. Rather than assuming one is either ‘a genius’ or just an ‘ordinary person’, we need to aspire to more moments of genius. This is a useful change in perspective when most of us just don’t feel like a genius, that’s a label for ‘special people’, which is a self-defeating narrative for the 99.99% of people not publicly declared a genius.

Godin’s book has also had me reflecting on my on aborted doctorate. I spent five years diving in and out of it, under intense psychological pressure (of my own making) to finish the darn thing. I’ve realised that the reason I was unable to stop sooner was my concern about other people’s views. In particularl my supervisor, and doctoral classmates. We had been in this together and they had given time to this endeavour too. I knew I could do the PhD, I just didn’t want to.

That might sound odd, but I realised that neither the process nor the result of doing the doctorate held any interest for me any longer, though I could quite clearly see what I had to do to complete them. Very clearly in fact, as my wife was nearing the end of her ten year doctoral voyage.

So a fear, of other people’s opinions, was holding me back from doing the right thing. I overcame it and felt marvellously liberated by withdrawing from the doctoral programme. Instead I was able to focus my energies on politics, where time and passion are now being poured!

I can’t recommend “Linchpin” strongly enough. The book, especially the sections on education and management, tie in strongly with Sir Ken Robinson and Tom Chapell’s themes which I recently blogged.

UPDATE: Seth Godin has, for the sheer hell of it, announced a ‘Linchpin Day’ so I’ve set up a meetup in Brighton & Hove for 7.30pm on June 14th, join us!

Note: All Amazon links for books will pay a commission to me if you purchase the book.

Categories
food

Grandmother’s Classic French Dressing

My father’s mother was a wonderful cook. She revelled in cooking delicious French and English foods. Sunday lunches tended to centre around divinely roasted joints with superb gravies. She also loved to set all sorts of pleasures in aspic, asparagus being a favourite since the days when she used to have them fresh from her own garden.

There’s no doubt she took a huge amount of pride in her cooking and so there was more than a hint of rivalry with my mother. Though I can’t be sure I think more than once she would note down recipes ever so slightly incomplete so that her version would always taste better. She wouldn’t have been the first cook to jealously guard her secrets!

One famous family story is of the first Christmas my mother took on cooking duties. Buried in the kitchen for two days my mother wanted to be absolutely certain that she impressed. Being French-Canadian she naturally decided to cook a giant turkey.  This was before turkey had become as popular in the UK as it is now. So after some research a beast was procured which had been selected with some considerable deliberation from a specialist farm.

On Christmas day my mother was exhausted but proud as she emerged from the kitchen with the huge, golden turkey and placed it on a table laden with stuffing and home-made cranberry sauce. It was at this point that my grandmother made it known that she only ate goose for Christmas.UN peacekeepers nearly had to be called in at this juncture.

Goose is still popular in France for Christmas but I’ve not yet had the opportunity to taste it and I certainly never had the courage to ask my mother to cook it.

Whatever my mother was cooking I wanted to be involved in the preparation. I don’t know if this began because my hunger drove me to be as close as possible to the food or out of genuine curiosity. One of the first things I was permitted to make was salad dressing as it involved no dangerous implements.

My father taught me the dressing his mother had taught him. I fairly sure my grandmother showed me herself a few times also. In fact it’s less of a recipe and more a rule of thumb which leaves great flexibility depending on what will be in the salad and your mood.

The only way to mix this sort of dressing is by vigourous shaking so keep an old jam jar for this purpose.

Ingredients

Extra virgin olive oil

Vinegar (balsamic, sherry, cider)

Dijon mustard

Brown sugar or honey

  • The basic dressing consists of a 3:1 ratio of olive oil to vinegar. This needs to be played with a bit if the vinegar is sharp. I tend to use balsamic or cider vinegar but sherry or red wine vinegars are good too.
  • For every unit of vinegar you want one teaspoon of Dijon mustard. I’ve noticed that some mustards are getting more vinegary so you may need to make adjustments.
  • For every unit of vinegar you also want 1.5-2 teaspoons of sugar or honey depending on your taste.
  • Season with salt and pepper, then shake well.
  • My grandmother often liked to add a dash of Worcester sauce. Freshly crushed garlic is also very welcome in this dressing.
Categories
notes from JK

The election that was

This is a post I’ve kept putting off because I thought my thoughts would get more clear with time. They haven’t, they’re still a jumble. So apologies, but this is how they’ve come out.

This election campaign was filled with exhausting hard work, lots of late nights, hours spent writing and designing leaflets and hundreds of conversations.

It included reading lots and lots of blog posts, probably thousands of tweets and lots of time on iPlayer trying to watch the good bits I’d missed.

Working on Caroline’s campaign management team wasn’t just exhilirating because of the prize in sight, it was because I got to spend time with some extraordinary people.

The TV debates were overall a hugely negative change – they narrowed the terms of the political discourse and they gave excessive focus to just three parties out of all those standing across the country.

Election night was nailbiting and… long, very long. But the result was worth it – the sense of elation was incredible. Nearly 40 years after our party was founded, we have finally broken into the long-closed Westminster club. I’m not sure who took it, but this video at the count declaration, captures some sense of the moment.

Gathering on the seafront outside the Brighton Centre with a couple hundred of green supporters at 7am to toast our victory was an unexpected addition to the morning.

Going out onto New Road to help with Caroline’s first ‘street meet’ a few hours later was remarkable. We saw incredible support from everyone we met, even as we were surrounded by a swarm of cameras and journalists.

Reading the hundreds of congratulatory emails to Caroline and the Green Party from right across the world has shown what this breakthrough has meant to people spread far beyond what I could have imagined.

And finally, seeing a fraction of the invitations and casework coming in to Caroline, has shown to me how much hope the people of Brighton have put in getting more from their MP than ever before. Caroline and the Green Party will do everything they can to deliver on those hopes.