Green Surge in the European Election Polls

Whilst canvassing for the Green Party in the run up to the European Elections, I and other members have reported a very positive feel from the voters. This seems to now have gone into overdrive with the revelations in The Daily Telegragh about MP’s expense claims, which MP’s tried to suppress. The voters I have spoken to over the past week or so, have been pretty animated about the issue and many are saying that they will vote Green to register their disgust with the Westminster parties.

Who can blame them? MP’s have demonstrated their complete contempt for the public with these outrageous claims for non existent mortgages, swimming pools, moat cleaning and the rest. The belated remorse and the promise to pay back the most extravagant of the claims seems not to have impressed the electors either. One man put it like this, ‘if I stole a car and then returned it to the owner, I would still be charged with theft.’

All of this is now feeding through to the opinion polls for the European Parliament elections on 4th June. Polls appearing in the Sunday newspapers show a surge in support for UKIP, The Green Party and to a lesser extent the BNP.

It could be that people are reluctant to tell pollsters that they will vote for the BNP, so these polls may be understating support for the far right party, we will see.

The idea that UKIP will benefit is somewhat perplexing. They are the traditional vehicle for protest votes at European elections, but in this case they are a very strange home for voters protesting about dodgy expense claims. Two of their MEP’s have been thrown out of the party over dodgy dealings during the last Parliament, and often they have no intention of being hard working MEP’s, signalling their contempt for the EU generally, whilst turning up in Brussels every now again just to qualify for their payments.

The two sitting Green MEP’s, Jean Lambert and Caroline Lucas, have worked tirelessly in the European Parliament for a diverse range of issues from scrapping the UK Working Time Directive opt out to making sure food is clearly labelled where it contains Genetically Modified foods.

A national opinion poll for ComRes/The Sunday Express at the weekend put Green Party support at 11%, almost double what is was in 2004 the last time Europe voted. Even better, the same poll put support within the south east of England at 16%, ahead of the Liberal Democrats. Other polls also show an increase in support for the Green Party.

If you want to vote for a party with an excellent reputation for integrity with policies to tackle unemployment, tax havens and disastrous climate change, think about voting Green.

Met Cover-Up

I attended the Metropolitan Police Authority’s monthly meeting at City Hall today, along with Anna Bragga, my fellow Haringey Green. We had both attended the G20 protest on April 1st, and have both since logged complaints with the IPCC. We were therefore very interested to hear what would be said about the tactics of the police during the event.

The public gallery was quite full with other protesters, including members of the group ‘Defend Peaceful Protest’ - my colleague Anna is an active member of this group. Although the public are meant to remain silent, it was often hard to do so, what with the bare-faced lies the Metropolitan Police Deputy Commissioner Tim Godwin and Chris Allison, the Assistant Commissioner were regularly spouting. I literally sat there gasping as they liberally re-wrote recent history.

For example, according to Goodwin and Allison, the cordons were initially ‘filter cordons’, where you could go in and out at will. That certainly wasn’t our experience. We repeatedly tried to leave immediately after the cordon was formed – and we were given short shrift. Indeed, I was pushed by a policeman in the direction of the other protesters.

We were also told that the cordons were loosened during several times during the day to let people out. There were shouts of derision from the public gallery at this claim.

We heard that police didn’t stop people and ask for I.D…funny, that’s exactly what DID happen to both Anna and I, the minute we stepped of the bus at Liverpool Street. We were questioned for 10 minutes about why we were there, and asked for photo I.D. A policeman told us that they had stopped lots of people with “bricks and stuff” and that they wanted to protect us. Curiously, there is no mention of finding these “bricks and stuff” in the official account of events – just the discovery of fake police uniforms. I suspect this copper was employing scare tactics, designed to discourage us from attending the protest.

Whilst the policeman attempted to fill us with fear, our details were radioed through and we were checked for criminal convictions. When they found us to be clean, they let us go. But less than an hour later we were trapped in the kettle.

As Jeanette Arnold, MPA member said, “If that’s not unlawful arrest, I don’t know what is.” There was resounding applause.

I couldn’t help but laugh when the problem of the ‘missing’ police I.D numbers was dismissed as a ‘wardrobe malfunction’. Better Velcro is to be used in future, apparently. Velcro is the answer to police corruption… ‘Fashion tape’ would be my recommendation – they sell it at Oasis, I believe…

As I suspected might happen, the Met are keen to see this is a problem with just a few officers (“we have a small number of serious issues we need to deal with” was how they put it) rather than a systemic failure. But a few days before the protests, Met officials were claiming “We’re up for it”. Sounds pretty confrontational, doesn’t it?
The overriding attitude that day from the police was aggressive, uncooperative and intimidating. This wasn’t just a question of a few officers being out of line – this was a problem which came from the top down.

The whiff of corruption in that chamber was overpowering. I hope that the MPA members, Jenny Jones included, will work tirelessly to expose this and not accept fob-offs or lies, which is clearly what they are already being offered by the Met. See:


http://www.defendpeacefulprotest.org/

Healthy Debate

Last night I attended a meeting of the Stop Haringey Health Cuts Coalition. The purpose of the meeting was to plan the key issues to focus upon and the ways in which the group is going to campaign.

The coalition has had some notable successes over the years. Less doctors surgeries are going to move into the Hornsey Polyclinic than was at first suggested, meaning that less people in the area will lose their local surgeries – hopefully. This makes sense not just from a practical point of view – who feels like travelling when they are ill? – but also from an environmental perspective.

The group also have done much to encourage the PCT to carry out consultations, though this still doesn’t always happen. Last year the Highgate baby clinic closed with one week’s notice, and with no consultation at all. Also, consultations can often be a paper exercise, with decisions made before the public have their say.

Stop Haringey Health Cuts Coalition have been tireless in attending the council’s overview and scrutiny committee and demanding that councillors act in the best interest of the health of residents. The group feel, though, that they usually do not get listened to – and they were famously chucked out of a meeting, of course!

It was agreed to make the broad issues for the campaign to be fighting cuts and opposing creeping/galloping privatisation. I stressed that we need to make sure that the campaign has a local focus: people generally won’t get interested unless they know how the cuts/privatisation will affect them and their families. Local GPs closing down will impact on people’s lives very quickly, and very negatively.

But the issue isn’t simple. A Unison representative at the meeting said that in the East of the borough, there are lots of ‘crap doctors’, and that fighting to keep them working would be pointless.

Another interesting piece of information that the Unison rep imparted was that yesterday some of the mental health patients from St. Ann’s Hospital had been moved to Edgware. The reason for this is that some of the wards at St Ann’s have been declared unfit for human habitation. Anyone who saw the recent photos of some of the rooms inside the hospital would certainly agree.

A productive meeting, then, with many new people attending, myself included. I suggested that we carry out our own consultation with residents, so that we can prove that we have the weight of public support behind us: it is easy to assume we know how other people feel, but as the issue of the ‘crap doctors’ illustrates, things are rarely black and white. We need to engage with the complex issues and problems within the NHS and offer tangible solutions, whether at a local or national level.

Getting Neighbourly

Haringey Green Party members Sarah Cope, Pete McAskie, Mary Hogan and Anna Bragga in deepest Stroud Green!



Yesterday I attended the Stroud Green Neighbourhood Day along with several other members of Haringey Green Party. It was organised by Stroud Green Residents' Association, and the sun shone all afternoon.

It was a great opportunity to meet local people, hear about their involvement in the community and find out more about the area. We had a guided tour of the Granville Road Spinney, a small wood which is an oasis of calm for local residents. There’s a wonderful mix of trees including plum, cherry, hornbeam, hazel and willow. There’s also a range of other woodland flowers, including ramsons and three-cornered leek. We sampled several edible plants including wild garlic.

The Police were there in the shape of the ward’s Safer Neighbourhoods team. We chatted with them for quite a while about issues in the local area and improving police presence on the streets. It seems that the team really want to continue to build up a good relationship with residents, which has to be positive.

It is great that these neighbourhood days are happening across the borough. I am currently organising the annual gardening day on my housing estate in Highgate – always a productive, enjoyable and sociable occasion.

By getting to know our neighbours, opening up our homes and getting involved with looking after the areas we live, we create communities, make friends and improve our quality of life. Indeed, recent research has shown that high earners with weak social links are less happy that those with little money and strong social links. And it costs nothing to put the effort into forging friendships and looking after each other, after all.

The Budget – A Wasted Opportunity to Green the Economy

The chancellor Alistair Darling, announced in his Budget on Wednesday, something like £1.4bn designed to ‘green’ the UK economy. As is always the case with this government, it is not clear whether all of this money is new money, or just a recycling of commitments already announced, in an attempt to grab a headline or two.

The chancellor’s announcement of a target to reduce the UK’s carbon emissions by 34% by 2020, though not nearly enough, is to be welcomed, but the nuts and bolts of planned spending on environmental matters does not fill one with confidence that this is anything other than an aspiration.

The £2000 offered to motorists to trade in their cars that are over ten years old is a case point. It is not clear whether this is in addition to the discount already on offer from car showrooms for the trade in of used vehicles, indeed it seems it is not. So, it is unlikely to tempt many to buy a new car at this time, whilst where it does succeed, we will see emissions rise by building new cars and scrapping old ones. A lose/lose situation it would appear.

The money promised for green initiatives, at £1.4bn even if it all appears is a drop in the ocean when set against a £175bn debt accrued by the UK government propping up the banks, and really is a huge missed opportunity to generate up to a million ‘green collar’ jobs at the same time as making us more energy efficient and really boosting the renewable energy sector in this country. Most other comparable economies are being much bolder than this, and so once again the UK is lagging well behind the leading nations.

The day after the budget, the government announced plans for the building of four new coal burning power stations, claiming that they will be equipped with carbon capture and storage facilities. These facilities are as yet untried at any large scale plant anywhere in the world, so it seems a bit risky to throw money at this kind of ‘green’ industry. What if it doesn’t work, will these power stations be closed? I doubt it. I’ve not seen estimates of the costs of these four new plants, but I would bet it will be a damn sight more than the pitiful £500m announced in the Budget to help the wind power industry.

As usual, this government is trying to spin the energy/environment debate, like so many other issues over the last twelve years. This time though, with an impending climate crisis on our hands, it amounts to criminal negligence.

AFTER THE G20, WHAT ?

AFTER THE G20, WHAT ?
Anne Gray, 18.4.09

In the justifiable furore about police brutality which followed the events of April 1st and 2nd in London, we seem to be losing track of what the summit was really about. Suddenly - the ‘Washington consensus’ is dead, Keynesianism has been rehabilitated, and the leading capitalist governments are trying to spend their way out of recession. But is the era of neo-liberal economic policy really over, or is it just taking a new form ?

Let’s turn aside for the moment from the question of how many trillions of dollars worth of economic stimulus the world needs, and whether the politicians have ‘done enough’ in terms of these numbers. What is the crisis, and the British government’s solutions, going to do to the distribution of income and wealth ?

The recent measures to address the banking crisis will lead to a major transfer from poor to rich in at least six different ways:-

First, the massive rise in government borrowing means we, the taxpayers, one day have to pay more in order to get the national debt back down to size. Second, despite the government’s willingness to expand corporate welfare for the banks and let their executives get away with fat rewards for failure, public services are likely to be starved because ‘there isn’t enough money’. That is, public spending is now hitting a ceiling defined by the market’s confidence in UK government bonds and the economy’s future ability to repay. So, for example, schools and universities are currently faced with major funding deficits, and thousands of students will be unable to enter uni this year.

Third, the government are likely to have a further round of ‘selling the family silver’ to fill the hole in public sector finances. We can expect more privatisation over the next few years for this, if no other reason.

Fourth, the general message from the government has been that money can now be very cheap to borrow, but bankers must not take risks and the government is not taking any either – except where needed to provide corporate welfare to failing banks by buying their shares. Result; small businesses affected by the recession are going under, and new ones, especially the ones we need in innovative and ‘green’ sectors can’t start up or expand. The result will be greater monopolisation of the economy, with small shops and restaurants, farmers and small manufacturers all disappearing. The demise of Woolworths and MFI in the ‘big store’ category should not blind us to the likelihood that the survivors of the recession will be mainly the giants who already hold too much market power. The losers already include smaller stores like Myers in Crouch End, and key ‘green’ enterprises like the UK company recently applauded for pioneering the generation of wave power off the coast of Portugal.

Fifth, the reliance on near-zero interest rates to get the economy moving, without doing anything about the institutional basis of pensions and savings, has left many pensioners high and dry, and workers approaching pension age with the prospect that they could work till they drop without saving enough to retire.

Sixth, neo-liberalism for the unemployed is still going strong. Despite the soaring numbers on JSA, the government has continued with its welfare reform plans, which were bad enough when they were conceived in 2006-2007, a period when dole queues hit a historic low. Over the next 3 years the unemployed will be made to compete ever more strongly for a pool of vacancies that has all but dried up. There will be tougher benefit rules which will stop JSA for more people who fail to meet job centre requirements, and a new scheme to bully people into low paid jobs by threatening them with workfare placements after two years on the dole. Changes in the benefits systems for people with disabilities, and for lone parents, are designed to force many of them to start searching for work. If there is none, the government will waste a fortune on back to work schemes (now to be largely done by private contractors, who have already demanded a huge increase in the payments they get per person placed in work, because they know they will have so few). And to set even more people to chasing so few jobs will intensify the wage-reducing effect of high unemployment. Which of course is what neo-liberal employment policy since John Major’s day through Labour’s ‘New Deal’ has always been about – tough benefits rules to bully people to apply for more jobs, especially low-paid jobs, and hand cheap labour to the employers.

How would we, as Greens, address these problems ? There is much that needs fleshing out in Green Party policy, and much in the Green New Deal, published last July, that needs fine-tuning and updating as a result of the cataclysmic economic events of the last few months. But the Green Party is the only electoral force – apart from the remnants of Respect – to oppose privatisation. And it is the only party calling for less rules and more universal rights in the field of state benefits, the long-established Green ideal being a universal citizens’ income which would bring in-work and out-of-work benefits all together in one allowance and ‘means-test’ only through progressive income tax. We also need to think about broadening capital ownership as a key to democratising the economy and bringing down interest rates permanently, as proposed in Rodney Shakespeare’s book, ‘The New Economic Paradigm’.

Molly Scott-Cato, in her book Green Economics, calls for a different kind of economic stimulus which would not add to the national debt, a demand which she stressed at the recent Green Party conference in Blackpool. That is, spending newly created money directly into the economy to produce real wealth. Not the Bank of England’s ‘quantitative easing’, which simply buys up old government bonds from those lucky enough to own them and hopes that they spend it on something that creates wealth and jobs – rather than foreign bonds, or derivatives, or second-hand buildings. All of the forms of investment envisaged in the Green New Deal could be done as direct government spending. Likewise, under this heading we could place a large increase in benefits and state pensions (to bring them into line with most other west European countries, and update them to the relationship they held to wages in the years before Thatcher).

David Byrne, a prominent member of the Green Left group within the Green Party, was a signatory to an excellent letter in the Guardian on April 14th, joining with several socialist academics to call for an end to tax havens and much larger taxes on wealth and inheritance.

But the basic architecture of the pensions and savings system is a major obstacle to real economic change. It gives us all a purely selfish interest in the capitalist castle (of bubbles) in terms of rising house prices, and because much of our pensions saving is now stock-market dependent, in rising share prices. Older people need something solid to invest in which gets them away from this – a start could be local authority bonds which are seen in the Green New Deal as an important vehicle for ‘green’ investment and building social housing. Some detailed policy on local authority borrowing and investment, and on investment vehicles for social enterprise and creative lending to small business, would make a real contribution to developing a post-credit crunch economy of a saner and fairer kind.

CLAMS AND CLIMATE CHANGE – A REPORT FROM WALES

by Paul Butler, College of Natural Sciences, Bangor University

Some of the more long-established members of Haringey Green Party may remember me as an active member and occasional agent and candidate back in the 1990s who left in 2001 to continue his education in North Wales (although I’m still a paper member of HGP). Having submitted my thesis and undergone a viva voce (defence of the thesis) I have now achieved a doctorate, and Mary Hogan has asked me to write about it for the Haringey GP blog.

The subject is strongly relevant to current issues in climate science, since it’s concerned with the investigation of the marine climate of the past, and in fact the academic who assessed my thesis, Keith Briffa, is one of the lead authors of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports. We can find evidence of past environments in natural archives, such as ice cores, stalagmites/stalactites and tree rings. What’s important is that they preserve some kind of timeline, so that we can work out the sequence in which the material was produced. It’s then possible to use our knowledge of how the material in the archive was produced to say something about its environment (temperature or rainfall, for example). For my work on the marine environment, I’ve been using the shells of clams. So my PhD has been dotted with cruises to various parts of the seas around the UK (and, in one case, to the north coast of Iceland) to collect shells of a particular clam – common right across the North Atlantic region - called the ocean quahog. Why are these shells useful? Well, they’re annually banded (you can see the banding in the picture), so that the material created each year is demarcated with an identifiable line which indicates a period of no growth, and they’re very long-lived (we found one off Iceland which had lived for just over 400 years). Importantly, all the shells in a population grow synchronously – in a strong growth year all the clams secrete large amounts of shell material and they all have wider bands, while in a weaker year they don’t secrete so much and have narrower bands. So the patterns in the shells can be matched, which means that by comparing patterns in shells of known date (from live caught clams) with patterns in dead shells, it is possible to work out when the animals which created the dead shells were alive. Using this process, I’ve been able to create an archive of material using shells from just off the Isle of Man which goes back to 1516. This is exactly what is done with tree rings, but they are only relevant for the terrestrial environment. Up until now, it has been very difficult to find an equivalent archive for the marine environment.

I expect anybody who’s got this far will be wanting to know if I’ve actually found anything in this groundbreaking archive. Well, yes I have, but to describe it would take up a lot more space than I have here, since I’d have to explain a whole lot of other rather complex stuff in the process. However, in the field of climate science just the creation of this archive is regarded as pretty important, so I am quite pleased with what I have achieved already, and I hope eventually that my work will feed into the models used to assess the impacts of climate change.