Green Is The Change - Vote On 1st May

Polling stations open tomorrow at 7am, and close at 10pm. If you're unsure about your polling station, the Coventry Labour Party has a lightening-quick type-in-your-street database, which will tell you where it is.

1st May And Afterwards ...

Tikkun, a US spiritual/progressive magazine, has a fascinating article about the "Obama phenomenon" and the motivations behind it.

What's key for the elections here in Coventry comes towards the end of the editorial:

Imagine how different that could be if Obama were to ask people to meet weekly in their neighborhoods in small groups to begin to build ongoing projects of social change that would embody their highest ideals. Groups could be organized, for example, around universal health care, environmental sanity, the Global Marshall Plan as the path to homeland security, corporate social responsibility, and electoral reform.

If the millions of people who have been touched by the campaigns (and yes, not only by Obama, but by Hillary Clinton, John McCain, etc.) were to begin working now for the changes they want their candidate to bring to the country, then these campaigns would stop resembling horse races and start resembling the building of mass movements and the reclaiming of social space from all those columnists, politicians, and public opinion leaders who deaden our hopes and convince us that we should just attend to our own personal lives.

I'd like you to vote for me, and the other 14 Green candidates in Coventry.

But, to quote Ralph Nader, democracy is a daily practice. We can't have daily democracy without daily citizenship.

If we want a different sort of society, a sustainable and equal society, we need to be involved in political activity throughout the year, not just a tick in the ballot box.

- If we want to address the growth of the BNP in Coventry (8 wards in 2007 with 10% of the vote or better), then we don't leaflet just before an election. We leaflet for the next two years, and have community-based meetings in white working-class areas, to change the debate, to educate, to inform.

- If we want a society where women and men exist as equals, we have to work for community projects that emphasise action on childcare, a domestic violence registry, involving women in local entrepreneurship, and have more women running in elections. We need to listen to the Fawcett Society when they say that 30 000 women lose their jobs each year because they are pregnant, and that many women, if they return to work, take on lower paid jobs below their skill level.

- If we want solar power, we organise ourselves to provide it (since it's clear that we can't wait for governments at nearly any level). My hometown of Toronto is very interesting, in this regard. Groups have held well-attended (200 people each) town hall meetings that have resulted in the installation of community solar electric systems.

We need to be the change, not just politicians, or the political class.

Campaign Update -- 30th April 2008

- I was part of an on-air election Q&A on BBC Coventry last night. The Tories, Lib Dems and Labour were included for the entire programme (from 6pm to 7pm), whilst ourselves and the Socialists received 5 minutes each, and the BNP did a 2 minute pre-taped statement. I was on air from 645pm to 650pm, and the "three main parties" hadn't mentioned the environment in the first 45 minutes! So, I used my time to talk about reducing and reusing waste, rather than just recycling, and to also talk about peak oil, and what we need to urgently do locally in Coventry to prepare for far higher energy prices.

- We were canvassing Styvechale Avenue and Earlsdon Ave South last night, with Albany, Winifred, Clarendon, Warwick St, and Poplar covered the previous evening.

- We have about 30 people who are able to come to the election count tomorrow night. Voting will end at 10pm, and polling boxes will be sealed, and the postal sorting facility sweeped, and then the count will begin at "The Elephant" gymnasium at the Pool Meadow baths after 1030pm. The shtick is to have 3-4 people per table, leaning over, observing the count, and counting how many Green votes are put into bundles of 25. So, that bundle has 3, that bundle has 12, that bundle has 7, etc. For each polling station, in each ward, we can then estimate where we are strong, where we're weak, and therefore where we can concentrate on for the next two years until the 2010 election.

The New Cuddly Conservatives

Dave Osler on the old class instincts of the Tories:

Workers, Osborne insultingly claimed, go on strike "at the drop of a hat." This is nonsense, of course. For a start, thanks to the anti-union laws that formed a key plank of Thatcherism’s offensive against the working class, it takes weeks to go through all the legal hurdles necessary to take lawful industrial action.

You can see the impact in the statistics. The total number of strike days taken last year, at just over 1m, is minimal compared to the average of 12.9m in the 1970s and 7.4m in the 1980s.

The truth is, Britons have substantially fewer rights at work than workers in any other industrialised country.

Even after Labour’s introduction of a national minimum wage, the European social charter, union rights at GCHQ and the Employment Relations Act, they remain arguably the worst in the EU.

However much the Tories try to present themselves as the human incarnation of the Care Bear Bunch, their project remains that of providing a political voice for the minority of wealthy people that control society.

That’s why they have opposed everything in history that has helped the poor at the slight expense of the rich, from the abolition of slavery and the Factory Acts right through to the minimum wage. However slick the marketing, they remain at bottom the nasty party.

Tesco And Carbon Labelling

Tesco will have a pilot scheme to have labels on their own brand products, so that we can see how much carbon is emitted over the life of a product - from manufacture to disposal.

It sounds good, but ... Tesco makes £200 million per month in profit, and it's a 2-year trial of only 20 products.

It's a baby step when we need far-reaching changes to enable consumers to make intelligence choices (carbon labelling on all products at all stores for a given chain; furniture stores and choosing sustainable wood; child toys and labels about child labour; kg of pesticides used on a shirt of non-organic cotton).

Transport Budgets For Cycling and Walking

In 2006-07, spending on cycling in England amounted to a tiny 0.3% of the overall transport budget.

Sustrans, and 69 other leading transport, health and planning organisations, are calling on all electoral candidates to commit 10% of transport budgets to cycling and walking initiatives if elected.

The signatory organisations of the "Take action on active travel" document are calling for:

- significant investment now to help create a population-wide shift away from sedentary travel and have a significant impact on public health.
- A 20mph or lower speed limit to be made the norm in residential areas
- Coherent, high quality networks of walking and cycling routes that link everyday destinations
- Improved driver training
- Better enforced traffic laws
- Planning decisions to give priority to walking and cycling provision

I'm strongly in favour of this. Heck, 10% is too low. Ask other local candidates on your doorstep if they come calling in the final hours of the election.

Renewable Energy At Home

"We want to move away from a society where people are simply consumers of energy, to one where people produce their own energy. We want to create an energy-generating democracy in the whole country."

Panorama Investigation - Clostridium Difficile

After 10 years of Labour saying that they are the party of healthcare, we should have a situation where hospitals are clean and safe. Instead, we have persistent problems with people going into hospital, and whilst there, catching MRSA and c.diff.

Panorama, in their programme tonight, looks at the rise of clostridium difficile in UK hospitals.

Professor Richard James, who runs a leading centre in Nottingham University to investigate hospital infections, is quoted as saying: "The figures for c.difficile show that more than 50 per cent of hospital trusts in the UK have a rate of infection that's more than 10 times that of any other country."

You can look at the hospital by hospital results here (PDF file). Page 30 is where you'll find University Hospital here in Coventry. The survey reveals that all of their wards will not be deep cleaned by March 2008. Only 40% will have been completely deep cleaned.

The final question in the survey, how a hospital defines an "outbreak" of c.diff, wildly varies. Literally, each hospital's definition is different. If every hospital decides what an outbreak is, you can't have a meaningful comparison of which 10% of hospitals have the most outbreaks nationwide!

"The Observer" Endorses Sian Berry

In the race for London mayor, The Observer is endorsing Sian Berry (Green Party) for first preference votes, and Ken Livingstone (Labour) for second preference votes:

The traditional beneficiaries of protest voting - the Liberal Democrats - have failed to make an impact in the campaign. Their candidate, Brian Paddick, is undoubtedly a decent man, but he has been out of his depth as a politician. There is a stronger case to be made for casting 'first preference' votes for Siân Berry, the Green candidate. The party has already used its toehold on the London Assembly to wring green concessions worth millions of pounds out of the mayoral budget. A respectable score for Ms Berry, an intelligent and articulate advocate of her cause, would send a clear signal to whoever wins the mayoralty that London cares about environmental policy. It would also deprive the British National Party of fourth place, a small but notable step towards the mainstream.

Funding For Non-Profits In Coventry

A report this week, from a charity called New Philanthropy Capital (NPC) showed that a donkey sanctuary received more in one year (£20m) than several well-known charities combined who work to combat violence against women.

Now, I'm pro-donkey. That's not my point.

We need to look at which organisations are doing essential work within Coventry (on issues like domestic violence, youth projects, one-parent families, women entrepreneurship, or refugee/asylum seeker support). We need to look at how they are funded. And, if they're struggling, then the city council should think about running (hopefully in slow-motion Baywatch-style with a good soundtrack), and providing core funding.

That means enough for one/two staff members, and some admin support, and leckie/water bills. And for it not be two months funding, or a year's funding, but an envelope of multi-year funding so that there is stability, so they can concentrate on their work, not constantly chase funding.

This wouldn't be money for free. It would require quarterly monitoring of said organisations, so they aren't just taking the money and doing nothing, but they take the money, hit their targets and change the city for the good.

Our National Free Insulation Policy

The Green Party has put out a statement about the oil supply disruption in Scotland:

Green Party Principal Speaker Caroline Lucas today slammed the UK Government for not taking measures to provide more secure energy provision for the UK in the face of the weekend strike by workers at the Grangemouth oil refinery - labeling them "incompetent" and "ill prepared" for fuel crises. Dr. Lucas, whose 2006 report 'Fuelling a Food Crisis' examined the dependence of the EU's food supplies on oil, said:

"In 2006, I asked several Government ministries what steps they were taking to prepare for a decrease in national fuel supplies. None of the organisations contacted gave a serious response: the DTI and Cabinet Office both refusing to answer the question, ridiculously citing restrictions under the Freedom of Information Act"

"Only the Green Party has the initiatives and policies that would protect the British public from suffering the consequences of a sudden decrease in fuel supplies."

"Our proposed national free insulation policy would ensure that homeowners can warm their homes for a fraction of the domestic fuel needed in uninsulated homes, and the Green Party policy to shift the UK towards a sustainable energy economy would mean that our homes' energy would be increasingly off-grid, readily available and not dependent on fossil fuel supply. Crucially, only the Green Party supports locally sourced food production, ensuring food security for communities is not dependent on long haul transport and the whims of the fuel market."

Happy St Georges Day!

Peter Tatchell has an interesting take on St George:

"St George's Day should be a national holiday in England. We should celebrate St George as a symbol of freedom, dissent and multiculturalism. He doesn't belong to the far right. He represents multiculturalism and rebellion against tyranny. He rebelled against the Roman Emperor Diocletian and was executed for opposing the persecution of Christians by the Romans."

"St George wasn't white or English. He was a rebel from the Middle East. His father was Turkish and his mother probably Palestinian. St George's parentage embodies multiculturalism and his life expresses the values of English liberalism and dissent."

You might be a Green .... Crime

You might be a Green if you agree with the following statements:

- The Green Party wants to encourage responsible use, not binge use, of alcohol by both adults and young people. We need more police in drinking areas on Fri and Sat night. We want to encourage the serving of alcohol in smaller measures -- all these specials on triple sambucas. We'd increase penalties on drink driving. Better late-night public transport means less alcohol-related crime. We'd review late licenses that are going awry (a lot of the complaints coming out of the "nighttime economy" in Earlsdon)

- We need projects that engage high-risk youth

- We need to crack down on gun crime by introducing a tough licensing system, and work to cut off the supply of guns to the UK

- We should ban the sale of replica guns

- Where appropriate, offenders should be brought together with their victims, so that they can be made aware of their impact on people’s lives, and, where possible, can make reparation for their crimes

- We can tackle drug-related crime by increasing the provision of treatment for addiction and breaking the link between drugs and criminal activity

- Homophobic and transphobic crimes should be dealt with on a par with racist crimes. Police forces should adopt and implement action plans on homophobic and transphobic hate crimes.

- We need more community police, holding community surgeries, and who are mobile (on teams of bicycles)

- 70% of crime is solved by "community-led intelligence" -- local people telling police information. Instead, the recent emphasis has been on investment in "listening" and "talking" CCTV. Cameras can't apprehend people if you're getting beat up. Cameras can only record what's going on

- Cameras already record us 300 times a day. With CCTV, ID cards and databases, we’re sleepwalking into a surveillance society.

Youth And Self-Harming

This is astounding.

A third of UK girls aged 11 to 19 have tried to harm themselves. More than half of the 800 young people surveyed said they knew someone who had self-harmed - either through cutting, burning or punching themselves.

Of those who admitted to self-harm, 43% said they did it because they were depressed, 17% because they were angry, 10% because of relationship problems and 10% because they were stressed.

Dr David Kingsley, consultant psychiatrist at Cheadle Royal Hospital: "We need to ask ourselves what it is about modern living that is causing such stress for our youngsters."

Green Hotels In England

The Guardian has an article on the greenest hotels in the land.

It's pretty straightforward stuff, with initiatives that any other hotel/B&B, or any business in general, can emulate:

- if you grow your own salad, you save £1,000 a year
- if you cut down on waste, you won't have to spend so much on contractors and industrial bins
- leftover magazines can be sent off to doctor's waiting rooms
- organic food waste can fertilise the vegetable garden
- full English breakfasts can be sourced from within 10 miles of the hotel or B&B