20 metres away

Under the turbine blade

The trouble is there does not seem to be much of a left to coalesce around these days. Take a look at the political compass from the 2010 general election: http://www.politicalcompass.org/ukparties2010 . Since the last general election I don’t see any evidence of Ed Milliband re-establishing Labour with its old now forgotten socialist roots. Ed failed to back the unions defending their pensions on 30th November. After criticising the Lib Dems / Tories nearly tripling tuition fees to £9000 he then saddles Labour with a policy of only doubling tuition fees to £6000!

What about Nick Clegg and the Lib Dems? It looks like they are well and truly hitched up to the coalition cuts right through to the end of this parliament. In a question and answers session after a speech given to Demos on 19th December Nick Clegg made it clear that there were no circumstances that he would pull out of the coalition – effectively he has neutered himself and admitted to the country that he is not able or willing to make a stand against the cuts. All of the Lib Dems I have spoken to, still in the party, seem to be pleased as punch to be part of the government and have generally accepted the premise that the economic problems we now face are due to over spending on the state rather than the greed of the speculators, insufficient regulation of the banks and the unsustainable bubble of toxic debt created by sub-prime mortgages.

As can be seen in the political compass (see earlier link) the Green Party remains almost as a lone left of centre libertarian anchor to the rest of the political establishment. At the bottom of the page on said link you can see how Labour and Lib Dems have tracked to the right seemingly accepting the free market conservative policies as their own. Whilst we may not be forming a Westminster government any time soon our essential job is to go on putting the case for people before profit by creating a sustainable planet. Our task is to keep the issues alive – that means standing in every election to keep the debate anchored in our direction. We will win a few seats along the way but just as importantly we play our part in stopping the Lib Dems and Labour from drifting further to the right in British politics.

We are needed more now than ever.

www.worcestergreenparty.org.uk

SIR – One of the causes of the 2007/2008 credit crunch, the bail-out of the banks, the drop in our living standards and the cuts to our jobs and services is that the banks and other city institutions were not properly regulated and were operating like casinos with high street money.

Faced with these massive problems the Government seems content to leave the reform of the banks until 2019.

It is now three to four years since the start of credit crunch – for the Government to wait another eight years it is simply being complacent. The Government seems more interested in reforming (privatising) the NHS and other public services than reforming the banks.

LOUIS STEPHEN
Worcester Green Party

http://www.worcestergreenparty.org.uk/localsites/worcester/letters.html

When money speaks, the truth is silent (Russian proverb)

Many people are surprised that the Green Party is leading progressive opposition to the Single Currency. In fact it is precisely because we are radical and internationalist that we oppose British entry to the Euro. A currency that is designed to undermine domestic economic control and help economic globalisation in favour of undemocratic centralised institutions is neither progressive nor internationalist.

The Single Currency will make recessions worse. It is a certainty that millions of European people, including whole regions or nations, will be trapped at any one time in the wrong exchange rate and with the wrong interest rate. An interest rate that is too low will trigger inflation; too high, deflation and recession. The lessons of the Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM) should not be forgotten. Governments surrender economic control at their (and our) peril.

The European Stability and Growth Pact lays down rigid rules for countries using the Euro. Even though Britain has not joined the Euro, Gordon Brown has still been warned that his borrowing plans may breach the pact’s guidelines. It may really come down to a choice between investment in schools and hospitals or the Single Currency. We cannot afford both.

Original article http://www.greenparty.org.uk/region/easternregion/news/2002-10-14.html

www.worcestergreenparty.org.uk

I must take issue with John Phillpott’s comments in the Worcester News (August 27) when he writes that “there is no longer any deprivation in Britain”.

While it is true that Britain has almost no absolute poverty, as seen in places such as the Horn of Africa, relative poverty in Britain is still an issue if we want to create a fair society.

According to data published by the Department of Work and Pensions, severe low income and material deprivation occurs where income is less than 50 per cent of average income.

The Government’s own figures show that five per cent or 700,000 children are growing up on less than £13 a person a day.

This £13 a day needs to cover food, transport, shoes, clothes, school trips, broken household items and household bills such as electricity, gas and water bills.

With government cuts affecting the most vulnerable disproportionately and now rising unemployment we can expect relative poverty to increase under the Conservative/ Lib Dem coalition.

The Green Party believes that to reduce poverty we need to reduce unemployment.

Instead of cuts we need to invest in hundreds of thousands of real jobs providing vital services and building up the nation’s infrastructure.

www.worcestergreenparty.org.uk

In the line at the store, the cashier told an older woman that she should bring her own grocery bags because plastic bags weren’t good for the environment.

The woman apologized to him and explained, “We didn’t have the green thing back in my day.”
The clerk responded, “That’s our problem today. Your generation did not care enough to save our environment.”

He was right — our generation didn’t have the green thing in its day.

Back then, we returned milk bottles, soda bottles and beer bottles to the store. The store sent them back to the plant to be washed and sterilized and refilled, so it could use the same bottles over and over. So they really were recycled.

But we didn’t have the green thing back in our day.

We walked up stairs, because we didn’t have an escalator in every store and office building. We walked to the grocery store and didn’t climb into a 300-horsepower machine every time we had to go two blocks.

But she was right. We didn’t have the green thing in our day.

Back then, we washed the baby’s diapers because we didn’t have the throw-away kind.. We dried clothes on a line, not in an energy gobbling machine burning up 220 volts — wind and solar power really did dry the clothes. Kids got hand-me-down clothes from their brothers or sisters, not always brand-new clothing. But that old lady is right; we didn’t have the green thing back in our day.

Back then, we had one TV, or radio, in the house — not a TV in every room. And the TV had a small screen the size of a handkerchief (remember them?), not a screen the size of the state of Montana.
In the kitchen, we blended and stirred by hand because we didn’t have electric machines to do everything for us.
When we packaged a fragile item to send in the mail, we used a wadded up old newspaper to cushion it, not Styrofoam or plastic bubble wrap.
Back then, we didn’t fire up an engine and burn gasoline just to cut the lawn. We used a push mower that ran on human power. We exercised by working so we didn’t need to go to a health club to run on treadmills that operate on electricity.

But she’s right; we didn’t have the green thing back then.
We drank from a fountain when we were thirsty instead of using a cup or a plastic bottle every time we had a drink of water.
We refilled writing pens with ink instead of buying a new pen, and we replaced the razor blades in a razor instead of throwing away the whole razor just because the blade got dull.

But we didn’t have the green thing back then.

Back then, people took the streetcar or a bus and kids rode their bikes to school or walked instead of turning their moms into a 24-hour taxi service.
We had one electrical outlet in a room, not an entire bank of sockets to power a dozen appliances. And we didn’t need a computerized gadget to receive a signal beamed from satellites 2,000 miles out in space in order to find the nearest pizza joint.

But isn’t it sad the current generation laments how wasteful we old folks were just because we didn’t have the green thing back then?

The problem is that in practice most doctors will not be contracting the health services themselves, they will be coming together in large consortia which in plain language means that our health service will now be via private profit driven businesses with little or no democratic control. The main issues seem to be:
“Any willing provider”. The British Medical Association has said that “Forcing commissioners of care to tender contracts to any willing provider, including … commercial companies, could destabilise local health economies and fragment care for patients. Adding price competition into the mix could also allow large commercial companies to enter the NHS market and chase the most profitable contracts, using their size to undercut on price, which could ultimately damage local services.”

Accountability. One of the generally accepted lessons learnt from the 2008 financial crisis was that it is not a good idea to split responsibility in too many directions as was the case with the tripartite split between the Bank of England, FSA and the Treasury. In these new reforms there will be five key national bodies: the Department of Health, the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence, the Care Quality Commission, the NHS Commissioning Board, and the economic regulator Monitor. Although the remit of each is set out in legislation, it is not clear how these national bodies will interact or how they will provide coordinated and consistent governance of the NHS.

Pace and timing of change. The proposed changes coincide with NHS Chief Executive Sir David Nicholson’s so-called “Nicholson challenge” under which the NHS is expected to make 4% “efficiency savings” per year, culminating in a total £20 billion by 2015, supposedly in order to find additional funds for increasing costs associated with an ageing population and new drugs and other technologies. The House of Commons health select committee described the savings target as “without precedent in NHS history”, adding that “there is no known example of such a feat being achieved by any other healthcare system in the world.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_and_Social_Care_Bill

The first, a pensioner, doesn’t go out much these days because she is confined to a wheelchair. She told me that when she has been out to a social event at the community centre she has always felt in the way and that people literally talk down from their standing position to her sitting in her chair. It seems that her world is getting ever smaller and narrower as the effort and strength to get out of her bungalow seems out of proportion to her feeling of being ignored and in the way. I’ve learnt that it is a good idea to get physically down to a wheelchair users level and in so doing you can take away a barrier even for that short time having a conversation.

The second was a mother with a physically handicapped child. We take our mobility for granted and it is certainly sobering hearing about the little things that can make their lives easier or harder. Tricia gave me a tiny insight into what it is like when you are using the buses and they don’t have a ramp for wheel chairs or when the bus goes past because they can only take one wheel chair passenger and there is already a wheel chair user on the bus. I have learnt just a little bit more about what it must be like to care for a handicapped child.

Generally these people go un-noticed and ignored. Today I have learnt a little bit more about the people in our city.

2. Simply rank the candidates in order 1,2,3 etc. You can put as few or as many preferences as you want. If you only want to choose one candidate, like you HAVE to under our present system first-past-the-post (FPTP), you can. The difference is that FPTP ONLY lets you choose one candidate which leads to more wasted votes and immense pressure to vote tactically which gives a distorted view of what people really want.

• Imagine being a Tory living in Margaret Hodge’s constituency of Barking and hating the Labour party but wanting to stop the BNP, to make your vote count you are forced to vote Labour otherwise your vote would be wasted and risk the BNP winning with a small share of the vote. This adds another vote to the Labour pile and gives the impression that this is total support for their policies, whereas almost the opposite is in fact the case from this voter and probably many others effectively forced to vote the same if they want their vote to count and stop the BNP.
• But FPTP is even worse than this, because it may be that loads of people have changed their mind in the constituency since the last election (which is the only source of information tactical voters really have) and although extremely unlikely maybe your Labour vote might be wasted and another candidate might have been better placed to beat the BNP if you had voted for them instead, so it is possible the BNP candidate wins with a dismal 20 something percent of the vote on a low turnout just because the majority who dislike them had voted for a range of parties.
• Think this can’t happen? The BNP have won county councillor seats with just 29% of the vote under our present system. With AV you can vote with your heart and show your true first preference and so on. The Tory can stop the BNP with any one of his preferences, including showing that Labour were only his final preference but this still beats the BNP who he did not rank. AV does away with the electoral roulette that voters currently have to play under the present system of first-past-the-post (FPTP).

3. If you order a chicken curry at a restaurant, but are told that has sold out then decide to have a lasagne instead, you have only had one meal. The same is true for AV, only ONE of your preferences will count towards the end result. Don’t be fooled by propaganda saying otherwise.

4. In every UK general election bar 1997 and 1983, it is predicted that AV would have distributed seats more in line with vote share, i.e. a more proportional or fairer result.

5. Australia has used AV for over 90 years with just one hung parliament from 38 elections. Our present system first-past-the-post has delivered five hung parliaments and three non-working majorities over a similar time-span. So to claim that AV will deliver more coalition government is not necessarily true. Both India and Canada use the Westminster system of first-past-the-post. Canada has now had five hung parliaments out of the last 8 elections and India has a 18 party ruling coalition.

6. NO2AV are claiming millions will have to be spent on counting machines. Australia has used AV for over 90 years and still doesn’t use counting machines. NO2AV are just making things up.

7. “Many Britons already use AV when electing representatives for charities, churches, companies, trade unions, societies and voluntary organisations.”

8. “Whether or not they know it, many millions of Britons already have extensive experience of using preferential selection because they have been regular voters in Big Brother, Strictly Come Dancing and The X Factor. They not only understand this form of voting; they enjoy it. The no campaign assumes nevertheless that they are incapable of writing 1, 2, 3 on a ballot”.

9. Politicians use AV to elect their own because they know it is more representative, yet want to deny us the chance to use the same system to elect them.

10. AV will reduce the number of safe seats. Safe seats lead to the sort of complacency and corruption we saw during the expenses scandal because most of our MPs currently have ‘seats for life’.

• Politicians don’t want the Alternative Vote because it will make them work harder to win their seats. They will have to win more support right across their constituencies and no longer can they pretend that only their party has all the answers. Parties will have to be more positive about each other and be honest about where they agree so as not to alienate potential preferences of their rival party’s voters. In short, AV will change politics and the effect will strengthen over many elections. AV will pull away the shroud of FPTP that obscures what people’s real preferences are.
• We have this once in a lifetime chance to tell the politicians they are wrong. We need to take it. We are going to be up against the might of the establishment and all the media but people power can prevail. Vote YES on May 5th. See YES to Fairer Votes for more.

http://neilharding.blogspot.com/2011/02/10-facts-about-alternative-vote-av.html

In the 1990s, Monsanto found an ingenious way to sell large quantities of its broad-spectrum toxic herbicide RoundUp to farmers. The company’s scientists gene-spliced corn, soy, cotton, and canola with foreign DNA, enabling these “Frankencrops” to survive massive doses of RoundUp. Farmers could now repeatedly spray their fields with RoundUp, killing weeds but not the crop. Unfortunately, the collateral damage of heavy RoundUp spraying includes groundwater pollution, toxic residues in crops, and destruction of essential soil microorganisms. The Genetically Modified (GM) crops themselves create herbicide-resistant Superweeds and spread genetic pollution to organic and non-GMO crops as well as plant relatives. Last but certainly not least, Monsanto’s GM foods have been linked to serious health damage – not only for animals, but humans as well.

Today, a major portion of cropland in the US is sown with Monsanto’s “RoundUp Ready” corn, soy, cotton, canola, and sugar beets. Eighty percent of these GM crops are then sold as animal feed to the nation’s 125,000 factory farms or Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) that produce most of the non-organic meat, dairy, or eggs sold in grocery stores or served in restaurants, schools, and hospitals. The other 20% of Monsanto’s Genetically Modified Organisms are laced into non-organic processed foods (soy lecithin, corn or sugar beet sweeteners, cooking oils, etc.) that are found in every grocery store aisle.

There is a direct correlation between our genetically engineered food supply and the $2 trillion the US spends annually on medical care, namely an epidemic of diet-related chronic diseases. Instead of healthy fruits, vegetables, grains, and grass-fed animal products, US factory farms and food processors produce a glut of genetically engineered junk foods that generate heart disease, stroke, diabetes and cancer. Low fruit and vegetable consumption is directly costing the United States $56 billion a year in diet-related chronic diseases.

Monsanto’s GM crops are highly profitable for the food industry, turning cheap, federally subsidized, genetically engineered crops and GE-fed animals into cheap, ubiquitous, junky foods. But from the standpoint of public health and environmental sustainability, Monsanto and their factory farm collaborators are nothing less than merchants of disease and death.

A critical mass of consumers would turn away from GMOs and Factory Farmed meat, dairy, and eggs – if they knew what they were eating. Please join and support OCA in our new Truth-in-Labeling campaign.