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
Michael Wills (Minister of State, Ministry of Justice):
There are no plans in the short term to extend the use of e-voting and e-counting to (i) local, (ii) European Parliament and (iii) general elections. (source)
How short term…?
Whenever there's a rise in energy prices media pieces are usually accompanied by grumbles from businessmen (and it's usually men moaning) about how the higher costs are making business harder than ever. Increased costs are always a challenge for businesses… any organisation in fact. But it really shouldn't be any surprise that energy prices are rising. It's been a matter of policy for years that fuel tax will increase ever year (Brown merely delayed the increase last year). It's also clear that with declining oil and gas supplies yet increased demand those prices are also set to rise, further augmented by carbon trading schemes.
These are not sudden occurrences. They have been in popular knowledge for years. Part of business is scenario planning to prepare for what the future is likely to bring. It seems to me that there's huge competitive advantage to be had from shifting your business away from the volatile, increasing costs of carbon-based energy sources to renewable sources. The business that can keep a lid on its costs by switching to renewables is also the one that is going to be able to offer the most competitive prices. Despite what some might argue, a greener economy is filled with opportunities, not gloom.
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.
I've heard too many people promise 'a new kind of politics' too many times… it's a big promise which needs to overcome huge dollops of immutable human nature. Still, despite not winning the New Hampshire primary as hyped, Barack Obama does have a special kind of charisma. Obama is reaching people who haven't voted before, and regardless of his politics that is sometime worth studying.
It's difficult to get an accurate grip of a campaign over the pond, but Obama's website is deeply impressive. It's engaging, cleanly designed and very comprehensive. It addresses a wide variety of issues, groups of people and Obama's background with a depth and clarity that significantly outstrips the other Democratic candidates.
The US Green Party are also holding a healthy primary process but, as in previous years, the voting system for presidential elections tends to polarise voters at the expense of newer parties.
I would love to see if Obama can deliver on even a fraction of the potential he appears to show at the moment… but he may never get the chance if the Clinton revival continues apace.
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.
Defending himself against recent accusations that Labour aren’t taking seriously their duty of care to our service-men and women, Gordon Brown boasted that the UK had the second highest defence budget in the world.
Nobody doubts that the brave men and women in our armed services deserve excellent care in terms of pensions, medical support and housing. Yet they have been risking their lives in foreign adventures which have made us arguably less secure rather than more so. They haven’t been defending us from any imminent threat, despite the dodgy dossier’s claims.
The Treasury expects to spend £32 billion on defence in the 2007-08 financial year. We’re not a superpower, our borders are not under threat of attack, yet why are we spending hugely more on armed forces than all other countries except the USA – the sun set on our empire a long time ago.
We do need to maintain defensive capabilities, but otherwise we should be spending this money much more wisely. Climate change is a huge challenge to world peace and stability. Oil, water and food supplies are already and will becoming increasing sources of conflict.
Our defence spending should be redirected to sustainable transport, greening our housing and kick-starting British eco industries to generate new jobs and ensure our leading position in this booming global market.
In a sense, as Rita Donaghy of the Committee for Standards in Public Life argues, the current series of revelations regarding donations to the Labour Party is a sign of the improving levels openness in British politics.
Yet these stories are hugely corrosive to public perception of politics and so politicians and the political parties. People end up wondering how they can trust any politician leaving them to disengage altogether. Which is just tragic because not showing up is what lets people in who may not have survived more thorough selection processes, election campaigns and so on.
The Tories are certainly not above criticism themselves, Lord Ashcroft's funds which they are depending upon mightily come from off-shore tax havens – famously Belize. Yet Labour have been astonishingly self-destructive with Ecclestone, two Blunkett and two Mandleson fiascos, cash for honours… the list goes on. Didn't they see what John Major's government went through? How hard is it to say no?
Pretty hard it would seem. Labour's Chief Fundraiser Jon Mendelsohn whose protestations of innocence ring increasingly hollow, was at the centre of a Labour lobbying scandal uncovered by Greg Palast for Newsnight and The Observer with Mendelsohn the lobbyist promising unprecedented access to the Government. There's an excerpt from Palast's book chapter on this story online.
It's disappointing when any party brings itself into disrepute. But Labour have seemed to have worked themselves to a state of dangerous arrogance whilst retaining an inappropriate sense of 'ownership' over progressive votes.
Votes are nobody's but voters. All politicians and parties have to work hard to earn trust. It's sadly much easier to lose than gain.
Jason Kitcat 