Tag Archives: Green Party

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It has been brought to my attention….

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My weekly round-up of links and miscellany.

Whatever they said their intentions were when they decided to “reform” the NHS the Tories didn’t improve it and they didn’t save money, quite the opposite in fact

Watch how the measles outbreak spreads when kids get vaccinated – and when they don’t

““When you immunize your child, you’re not only immunizing your child. That child’s immunization is contributing to the control of the disease in the population,”.

 
A bunch of protesters trapped Nigel Farage in the UKIP office in Rotherham. Apparently he was forced to stay inside by a breastfeeding mother who refused to sit in the corner.

In the internet age it isn’t quite so easy to keep your stumbles under wraps as Robert Mugabe has discovered. He obviously hasn’t’ heard of The Streisand Effect.

What exactly are Mike Ashley’s plans for Rangers?


Sign Mugabe?

Does the Green Party unerringly prefer grandstanding and protest to the serious business of Government? Neil Schofield seems to think so.

Over 200,000 young people have gone missing from the Electoral register. It’s National Voter Registration Day today and time for the young people hit by the system changes to sign up. If you aren’t already registered you need to be. This upcoming General Election is crucial and if you don’t vote you are saying you don’t care.
Click on the link to register – you will need your National Insurance Number – and it will take about five minutes.

Domestic (UK), Politics

The Greens, chaotic as they are, give a lesson to the main parties

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A more nuanced, and better written, take on the electability of The Greens from Will Hutton in today’s Observer.

“The Greens, chaotic as they are, give a lesson to the main parties

 
Link to the full article here

Domestic (UK), Politics

Is the Green Party the Answer for the Left?

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The Green Party has recently seen a surge in the opinion polls and its members. Depending on how you count them they now have more members than the Liberal Democrats and possibly by the time the votes are counted on the 7th of May more MPs. However I have always had my doubts about the Green Party. Neither because I am a climate change denier nor because I don’t believe that we need to be careful about what we do to our planet, but because I feel that at a basic level what the propose probably won’t work.

The reason that I say this is because I do not think they have a theory of the generation and distribution of  wealth. All the other parties have a theory for both these functions. Sometimes the theory is fairly explicit as in the case of the Labour party, with others, especially the Conservatives it is implicit. I am not the only person who feels this, Suzanne Moore thinks the same.
As she says:

“We would like our politics to be bigger not smaller and for a moment to be able to think the anonymous “market” doesn’t always win. Some of us would like to vote for something unashamedly leftwing. Syriza’s Alexis Tsipras goes to lay flowers on the graves of communist fighters. He is unashamed of being who he is. The man is a radical who knows how to wear a suit, just as his finance minister, Yanis Varoufakis, knows his poetry as well as his economics.

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Syriza is a seriously radical party of the left. The Green party isn’t. They portray themselves as the only anti-austerity party in Britain, but don’t tell us how they will meet this aims economically. Do they favour tax rises and if so what tax rises?  What do they plan to cut, apart from the Trident programme – something incidentally I also think should be cut. The estimated cost of replacement at £34 billion, although some estimates go as high as £130 billion. This (£34b) is less than a third of the cost of running the NHS for one year.

Their one policy in this arena “The Citizen’s Income” which is an unconditional, non means tested, non-withdrawable income for every person, including children. It is, I think ,intended to be linked to citizenship and it replaces personal tax allowances, and most means-tested benefits. It will do away with jobseeker’s allowance, child benefit, the basic state pension and tax credits. There is one major problem; without means testing the poor will be worse off.

A second point is that if there is a link between Citizen’s Income and citizenship where does that leave foreign nationals working legally in the UK?  For example an EC citizen would lose all his or her tax allowances and be entitled to nothing in return. They would not be entitled to job-seeker’s allowance if they found themselves out of work nor tax credits if they are in a low paid job. It sounds more like a policy that UKIP would come up with than the policy of a party of the left. I also think that it would be in breach of EU employment law.

My other major gripe about the Greens is their anti-science bias. Significant  numbers of Green Party members seem to believe that the NHS should provide alternative treatments including homoeopathy as a matter of course.

As what is now unofficially known as “Minchin’s Law” states :

“Alternative medicine has either not been proven to work or has been proven not to work. Do you know what they call alternative medicine that has been proven to work? Medicine!

 
Still treating people using sugar pills and water must be cheaper than using the current methods. Chuck in a bit of Reiki and Crystal Healing and we should be able to get the cost of running the NHS down from £115 billion a year to £5.35 plus the water bill.

Ask your average Green party member if they accept the scientific consensus on Climate Change and you will get close to 100% affirmation. Ask if they what they think about safety of Genetically Modified Crops and they will that they are not sure and that we need to be cautious. Point out that the science behind the safety of GM crops is at least as sound as the science behind Climate Change and you will still be told that we should apply the precautionary principle. This is the same argument that Climate Change deniers make.

Similarly with Fracking. The process is safe, but you won’t hear that from the Green Party. There are very good environmental arguments for leaving as much oil and natural gas as possible in the ground. Instead of making the hard argument that making hydrocarbon fuels more expensive is in the long run a good thing, the Green Party prefers the easy but untrue argument that it is dangerous. But I suppose on the basis that all publicity is good publicity, getting your one and only MP arrested at a Fracking protest gets you in the news.

If you want to know what a Green Party government might look like take a look at the one place where they are in charge; Brighton. A Green Party has managed to reduce recycling rates and delivered a greater series of cuts and privatisations than the Tories had planned.

As Steve Bassam (former Labour Leader of Brighton and Hove Council) says;

“You just have to look at my home city, Brighton and Hove, where the Green Party run the council, to see what an unrealistic agenda looks like. Indeed, they have given radicalism a bad name, with unwanted gesture politics and unattainable promises.

 
I don’t know how Syriza is going to work out for Greece, but Greece does need something radical, and I wish them well. Radicalism must be rooted in reality and I’m afraid that the Green Party isn’t.
To the Green Party I would say come back and see me when you have worked out something like an economic policy and when you are prepared to accept the scientific evidence, even when it doesn’t fit your prejudices, in the meantime I’ll stick with the Labour Party and hope that it can grow a bit of a backbone.

I know voting Labour isn’t a particularly exciting vote, but we don’t have a Syriza or a Podemos to vote for in the UK and Labour is as close to a radical party as we have. Perhaps as Suzanne Moore says;

“If we actually want a leftwing party in Britain then we may have to do something quite green. Grow our own.

 

The original stating of “Minchins Law” can be found at about the 3:00 minute mark in the video (NSFW it’s a bit sweary). It also gives a very funny takedown of a certain type of person who probably votes green (if they can be bothered to vote at all)

Domestic (UK), Politics

Boris, Ken, or someone else?

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Non-Londoners can skip this post, I won’t be offended.

The time has come for those of us who live in The Great Wen to decide who we want to be Mayor of this great metropolis for the next four years. Although there are seven candidates, unfortunately I think our choice probably boils down to, do we dislike Ken more than Boris or vice versa?

Here, in alphabetical order are the seven candidates and the parties they represent:

Candidates
Name Party
Siobhan BENITA Independant
Carlos CORTIGLIA British National Party
Boris JOHNSON The Conservative Party Candidate
Jenny JONES Green Party
Ken LIVINGSTONE The Labour Party Candidate
Brian PADDICK London Liberal Democrats
Lawrence James WEBB Fresh Choice for London (UKIP)

Clicking on the candidate’s name will take you to their website, except for the B.N.P. candidate, who does not seem to have a dedicated website, so clicking on his name takes you to his Wikipedia entry.

Lets take a quick look at the minor candidates first.

Both the BNP and UKIP seem to think that the Mayor of London has more powers than he actually has. The BNP wants their Mayor to build a better NHS and pledges that they will not allow an amnesty for illegal immigrants. I might be wrong, but building (or currently destroying) the NHS is probably down to the Secretary of State for Health and granting an amnesty for illegal immigrants (not that there has ever been one suggested by either of the main parties) would probably come under the Home Secretaries remit. The UKIP Mayoral candidate, judging by his policies appears to think that the Mayor can unilaterally withdraw London from the EU. Both of them also seem to think that the Mayor can ban non-UK citizens from working in London.
If they don’t know what they Mayor can and can’t do then I think we can move on.

Siobhan Benita, the Independent candidate, is more interesting. I can agree with a lot of her ideas, especially on education, housing and infrastructure. Interestingly she is the only candidate to advocate building a third runway at Heathrow. If she was standing as the Labour or Liberal Democrat candidate (her ideas would fit reasonably well with both parties) I might consider giving her my vote, but as an Independent, she will find it difficult to garner the support she needs.

Jenny Jones, the Green Party candidate, is the only candidate with a well thought out and practical plan to turn London into a cycling city, along the lines of Amsterdam or Copenhagen, and for that alone you should consider voting for her. While cycling in London isn’t a dangerous as it is often perceived to be, it is not safe either, as she says:

It may well be fine if you are confident, experienced and physically fit, but we want roads where everyone feels safe whether you are 7 years old or 70.

Some of the other policies I am a bit more ambivalent about, though she is good on transport and recycling, slightly less so on what to do with non-recyclable waste.

Brian Paddick, probably doesn’t see himself as a minor candidate, but he is. He is not going to win, but the second preference votes of people who vote for him might, in fact probably will, decide who does.
He builds is candidacy on the following facts. For the first time the Mayor will be directly responsible for the Metropolitan Police, and he was a police officer for over 30 years. I will admit that during his time as Borough Commander he came up with some interesting and moderately radical (too radical for the Daily Mail) ideas on policing. The “big idea” on policing seems to be this:

If elected Mayor and London’s “Police and Crime Commissioner” I would make it my top priority to bring the police and public together, so that criminals don’t stand a chance.

Reading his manifesto it seems to me that he isn’t actually running for Mayor the position he wants is Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis. I want to elect a Mayor not a police chief. He is also a Liberal Democrat and I haven’t forgiven them yet.

Boris or Ken?

Here we have our choice then Boris or Ken, Punch or Judy, Scylla or Charybdis?
The best thing I can say about Boris Johnson is that he wasn’t (quite) as big a disaster for London as I feared he might be. He comes across as a cuddly buffoon, but is actually a very calculating politician.
There are two Londons, the divide is not between Inner London and the Outer London suburbs as some suppose, and Boris Johnson tries to pretend, the divide is between the City of London and Greater London.
The London that he has been Mayor for is not Greater London, he has been Mayor for the City of London.
Billy Bragg links to a story in the Sunday Telegraph and points out:

Two headlines from the Sunday Telegraph today – ‘Boris Johnson: We need more tax cuts’ and ‘Rich get richer’. Could the two be in some way connected?

The one thing that people will probably remember him for, the TFL Cycle Hire scheme a.k.a “Boris Bikes” wasn’t even his idea. Jenny Jones (the Green candidate) came up with it and Ken Livingstone adopted it during his last period as Mayor. It just happened to be introduced during his term in office, but he gives himself the credit for it. Similarly with introducing Oyster Cards on the rail system in London. The donkey work was done before his election in 2008, all he had to do was dot the i’s and cross the t’s.
What have his achievements been, well, he got rid of ‘bendy buses’ to keep the cab drivers happy and replaced them with white elephants, sorry Modern Routemasters, that is if they ever get enough built.
His reaction to last summer’s riots was late, ineffective and patronising, to put it mildly.
I won’t be voting for Mr Johnson.

That leaves Ken Livingstone, Mayor of London from 2000 to 2008, Leader of the GLC before its abolition by Margaret Thatcher back in the 1980’s and known to most Londoners as ‘Ken’.

In years gone by I would have said “Vote for Ken, he is the only candidate who actually understands London.” This time I am not so sure. I could be that I think he has been around too long – he is 67 this year – I think that Labour would have been better with Oona King as their candidate, but they plumped for the devil they knew instead. A few other things are also bothering me. There is a vague whiff of Anti-Semitism around some of his statements. There is also a feeling that he has been opaque about his financial affairs. Having said all that, his policies, cutting public transport fares and the reintroduction (in London) of the Educational Maintenance Allowance, and support for childcare, seem to me to be the best package on offer and look affordable.
Along with every other candidate he pledges to reduce crime and make housing more affordable. I can’t recall ever having heard a politician pledge to allow crime to increase, so I think we will ignore that one. Making housing more affordable is more easily said than done and while I am sure they are all sincere in their wish to get housing cost down, again I think that should be taken with a pinch of salt.

My vote, without any great enthusiasm will be cast for Ken Livingston. As the Mayoral election is a sort of Alternative Vote, I was toying with the idea of giving my first preference to either Siobhan Benita or Jenny Jones, with my second preference to Ken Livingstone, but I think I might as well just vote for him and leave the second preference blank. There is no point in putting a minor candidate as your second choice, because they will all be out by the time the second choice votes are counted. If you want to support a minor candidate put them as your first choice and the vote for Livingstone as your second preference.

As for the London Assembly my advice is this vote Labour for the Constituency Member (elected on First Past the Post) and vote Green for the London wide additional member – we need some greens on the assembly to make sure that the other parties keep to their pledges on the environment.

So to summarise this is how I recommend that you vote

  • Mayor – Ken Livingston – reluctantly
  • Constituency Member – Labour
  • London Wide – Green