Category Archives: Local

Local elections: reflections

Greens win in Battenhall

All the results are in at last from the UK local elections. No great breakthroughs in terms of building a more ecologically sustainable and socially just future, but several small victories.

Perhaps the best results were in Scotland, where the Scottish Green Party went from 2 to 6 MSP’s, including Ross Greer who at just 21 is the youngest MSP. Congratulations to Nicola Sturgeon and the Scottish Nationalist Party who won 63 seats, just two short of a majority. I can envisage SNP/Green collaboration to pursue some really great policy initiatives taking Scotland on an increasingly divergent course from Cameron’s England.

The other region where the Green Party did well was here in the West Midlands, particularly in Solihull and in Worcester. In Worcester Louis Stephen won the Battenhall ward from the Tories and Neil Laurenson held the St Stephen ward, which means that the Tories lost their control of the council. Labour and the Greens may be able to cooperate to get better policies enacted as a result. In Solihull the Greens have gone from 8 to 10 councillors. A highlight there was Chris Williams increasing his vote share to 75% in a 4 corner race in Chelmsley Wood.

In London the Green Party retained two members of the London Assembly, where Baroness Jenny Jones and Darren Jonhson were both standing down after 16 years as Assembly Members. In their place Sian Berry and Caroline Russell were elected. In the mayoral contest Sian Berry managed to come in third, out of a packed field of a dozen candidates. Labour’s Sadiq Khan becomes mayor. He’ll probably be reasonably good on social justice and human rights issues, but unlikely to take a leadership role when it comes to London’s ecological footprint.

As ever it seems progress through party politics is a slow, patchy and frustrating business. Technological innovation is zooming ahead in leaps and bounds, improving the possibilities for building an ecologically sustainable and socially just future, if only we had the politicians capable of seeing the opportunities!

Shifting Investments

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Glenn, David & Cathy from SHIFFT, with 6th form students.

A couple of days ago I went along to the Hereford River Carnival: lots of great floats, stalls and good community fun for all the family. There was a sort of festival within a festival as New Leaf had created the h.Energy village which featured a number of local organisations advocating greater sustainability. I stopped and chatted with lots of old friends and met some new faces. One of the groups with a stall was the new SHIFFT group, which stands for Stop Herefordshire’s Investments in Fossil Fuels Today. It’s part of the rapidly growing global movement lobbying for disinvestment from fossil fuels.

A few days earlier I went up to Llandrindod Wells to have a look around and talk to the people at Riversimple and see their amazing hydrogen fuel cell car. Robert Llewellyn, the actor and comedian from Red Dwarf fame, also happened to be visiting, making an edition of his Fully Charged video blog. I think we were both suitably impressed with what a breakthrough this car is. I’ve sung its praises a number of times on this blog. Riversimple currently are crowdfunding. This is to raise equity, so has a fairly high degree of risk involved, but also the potential to buy into an early stage start-up company which might well be a very lucrative investment. It is also of course just about as ethical an investment as I can imagine. They’ve kept the minimum investment at just £50 and would love to have many thousands of small investors.

Globally vast sums of money are flooding out of the fossil fuel sector, in part driven by the ethical arguments about the need to keep fossil fuels in the ground to prevent the worst ravages of climate change, and in part due to the realization that these reserves are very likely to become stranded assets, so undermining the perceived value of oil, gas and coal companies. The money is beginning to flow into the renewables sector in vast amounts. I mentioned in my last blog about the £229 billion that went into renewable electricity generation last year. On top of all this wind and solar comes the whole raft of cleantech innovation start-ups such as Riversimple. I do hope they achieve their crowdfunding objective, initially of one million pounds, with a further two similar sized tranches following on.

Political Change is in the Air

Diana Toynbee, Prospective Parliamentary Candidate for Hereford City and South

Political change is in the air. For the last 35 years a neo-liberal economic orthodoxy has held sway, and the right of centre parties that support it have dominated politics globally, and locally. A couple of political landslides over the last few weeks indicate the new openness and unpredictability of politics. Syriza’s victory in Greece has been much written about: more recent and perhaps more interesting has been the victory of the Arvind Kejriwal’s anti-corruption AAP in Delhi, and Annastacia Palaszczuk’s pro-renewables Labour group in the Queensland elections.

The Green Surge continues, with the membership of the England and Wales party up at 53,276, and our local Hereford City and South branch up at 136 as of this morning. People are joining for a wide range of reasons. Many ex Labour and LibDems have joined, fed-up with the ever rightward drift of those parties. Many Tories, especially the old One Nation type, are appalled by the extreme inequality that now exists, and in many areas fears over fracking are driving former Tories to join the Greens. Perhaps the biggest group of those joining are people who previously were not really involved in politics and didn’t bother voting: now they see that if they want change they do need to get stuck-in politically. The Green Party really does have a well thought out and popular range of policies across the whole spectrum: see the Vote for Policies link below.

Locally here in Hereford we have a really excellent candidate who’d make a great MP: Diana Toynbee. The local party is buzzing. Come along to our first new Members Forum type meeting at the Riverside Centre in Vicarage Road, St James, Hereford, 7.00pm Monday 16^th February. And if you’re not already a member, why not join today? (Just click link below, Join the Green Party.)

Queensland elections http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queensland_state_election,_2015

Delhi elections http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-31294500

Vote for Policies http://voteforpolicies.org.uk/

Join the Green Party https://my.greenparty.org.uk/civicrm/membership/joining

Local Green Party news, plus some great fun fundraisers http://hereford.greenparty.org.uk/

Arts for Greens auction http://www.jumblebee.co.uk/greenteaparty