Archives for posts with tag: Labour

Ken vs. Oona – anything new?

July 11, 2010 //
1

Being a Green, I’m not following Labour’s hustings for their Mayor of London candidate too closely. But being a realistic left-of-centre Green, I’m hoping that either Ken or Oona get elected into City Hall in 2012.

Oona King hasn’t impressed me much so far. Her candidacy seems very light on detail, her policy pronouncements full of nice language but no specifics. As Martin Hoscik writes, Ken Livingstone is simply rehearsing his 2008 manifesto, with a few innovations (such as borrowing affordable housing money on the bond market) that are basically unfolding behind the scenes in City Hall already.

But on the BBC Politics Show on Sunday, King did get one impressive point in. Livingstone is basically gearing up for a re-run of the 1980s, when he battled with Thatcher from the GLC. He wants to fight, fight, fight every cut (transcript here). But as King pointed out, once the Mayor gets a cut-down grant she/he can’t do very much about it.

In the face of cuts beyond our control we need to innovate (whilst of course speaking out against the cuts and making them very uncomfortable for Lib Dem and Conservative MPs in London). King cited the example of co-operative home ownership, something I have recently worked on with Jenny Jones. I have also written in the past about opportunities for local communities to regenerate their area without waiting, cap in hand, for big chunks of government funding.

Given that Livingstone has jumped on the bond market bandwagon to raise money for affordable homes I hope he will use the next two years to take up other innovations, as King suggested. I also hope Oona King puts some substance behind her slightly vague but insightful suggestions.

A campaign of positive ideas for London’s very varied communities would be much more interesting, and beneficial to London, than two years of simply attacking the coalition Government’s disastrous budget.

Tags , , , , , ,
Categories Uncategorized

Why I could never vote for the Pirates

March 24, 2010 //
5

I’ve a lot of respect for anyone who steps up to run for election with a manifesto that, they genuinely hope, will improve the lot of their constituents. But aside from my obvious partisan reasons, I don’t think I could ever vote for a Pirate Party candidate in these forthcoming national and local elections.

I suspect I’m like the majority of people in that I really get put off by politicians saying “don’t vote for Party X or you’ll let Party Y in”, as though they’ve nothing more compelling to offer voters than “we’re not that lot”. Ultimately I would always want people to vote for the party they most support, give or take some tactical voting if they prefer. So if the Pirates are your bag then get involved with them.

But the Pirates are an unashamed single issue party. Their manifesto lays out a radical agenda for copyright, patents and online privacy. That’s an interesting proposition for an MEP who can take that militant approach in a very large Parliament. But MPs and councillors are constituency politicians, they need to represent and support people on every issue on the books with an open statement of their approach. If I were to vote for a Pirate, I’d want to know that they are concerned about the need for affordable homes, better partnership working to improve my town centre and urgent action on climate change. Even if I weren’t a committed Green, I’d want a local Pirate candidate to set her/his personal stall on those issues before they got my vote.

We Greens also have some good policy on these subjects, tying them into our wider approach to the economy, culture and government. When their grassroots and youth wing mobilise, the Lib Dems sometimes take these issues up, the Conservatives sometimes talk the talk and the split personality Labour government have made some good recent moves. I’d much rather vote for a candidate from a rounded party who also took the Pirates’ concerns seriously in these elections.

Tags , , , , , , , ,
Categories Uncategorized

The cost of housing doubles in London

January 20, 2010 //
0

Halifax have published a great little fact sheet on some key housing trends over the last 50 years. The most dramatic is that the cost of buying a home has risen 273% above incomes over that period, with the sharpest rise during the 2000s when they rose by 63%.

This is the increasing cost of housing adjusted for increases in income; or adjusting for inflation to state rises in real terms, for economists. Imagine if food or heating bills rose that quickly compared to incomes!

Whilst the property-owning journalists hail this rise in house prices, more and more people are squeezed out of the market, or forced to sacrifice huge chunks of their salary to repay mortgages.

Jenny Jones published a report on the housing crisis in London recently. She shows that over the past decade the cost of buying a home doubled in London, well above the national rise of 63%. This makes the misleading boasts of our Tory Mayor – as he fails to even meet his own modest housing targets – all the more sickening.

Unless we double the number of homes we build, which is pretty unlikely, or we make a radical shift away from home ownership, this trend is set to continue for another decade. But our Labour government and this Tory Mayor are both  committed to mostly building homes we have to buy, with a very small minority available for affordable rent, almost no land being held by communities to keep it affordable, and pretty much no support for alternative models like co-operatives.

Tags , , , , ,
Categories Uncategorized

Can you balance right and wrong?

December 2, 2009 //
2

For your average closet climate change denier or otherwise-stuck-in-the-mud politician, the Balance is a great weapon to deploy against evidence-based policy. “Of course we want to tackle climate change”, the argument goes, “but we must strike a balance between this and [insert contradictory aim here]“.

If they understand the science of climate change, and have read the work of the Committee for Climate Change, they’d quickly realise they were asking for a balance between right and wrong, or more correctly and plainly for the wrong policy; you can’t really find a middle ground.

So lately we see lots of senior Tories running this trope in an attempt to rein in the green public face of the Conservative Party (despite the party demoting most of its green lights to the back benches). Riding the resurgence of denial in the Telegraph and Spectator, these MPs are boldly defending their right to ignorance. Three years after Stern put a conservative estimate on the cost of unchecked climate change at 20% of GDP, they decry mitigation efforts costing 2-5% of GDP which might “see the whole economy destroyed”, and call for a Balance to be struck.

It’s not just the neophyte Tories, either. In a London Assembly meeting today, Labour member Navin Shah joined the motorist lobby in pressing for weakened car parking controls in outer London. We need, he suggested, to strike a better balance between the needs of business and sustainable transport. Not the most exciting policy, I’ll warrant. But half an hour reading up on transport emissions would convince a moderately brainy 10 year old that we need to significantly reduce car usage in outer London; a further half hour would be enough to grasp that more car parking will do exactly the opposite. Promoting a balance between sustainable transport and business is nonsensical in the long term; the only option is to promote business within the constraint of sustainable transport policy.

It all brings to mind Ben Goldacre‘s rants against “humanities politicians and journalists” who have no proper training in the sciences or scientific method. Those politicians that want to put politics and economics before basic scientific evidence could take a lesson from Cnut, one of the wiser politicians to have graced this country.

Apply for the best website hosting package now and avail exciting offers. Discount coupons for dedicated hosting and web building tools are available. You can also signup for the cheap vps hosting packages

Tags , , ,
Categories Uncategorized

Dear Lily, culture is about more than cash

October 31, 2009 //
1

This video is just brilliant, it’s great to see ORG’s campaign against Labour’s absurd “three strikes” proposal picking up steam.

When I was more involved with the free culture movement I wrote my Masters thesis on a Lockean argument against Lily Allen’s view of copyright. The thing I love about the video is that it doesn’t just argue on the economics, as this brilliant essay on Liberal Conspiracy does quite effectively. No, he plays with – and demonstrates – the claim that culture should be something we all enjoy consuming, producing, sharing and learning from. He bought Lily Allen’s CD for his mum, which she loves, but that shouldn’t be the end of the story.

Tags , , , ,
Categories Uncategorized

Scrap those old boilers, politicians

October 15, 2009 //
7

This one is a no-brainer for blog action day. The UK’s Committee for Climate Change has called for it, Boris Johnson of all people includes it in his air quality strategy, and it will help people save money as energy bills rise.

The Government should set-up a boiler scrappage scheme (and you should sign the petition). Let people trade in old, inefficient boilers for new ones, or at least to get a massive discount. They did it for cars to help an ailing industry, why not do it with boilers to promote jobs across the country, cut carbon and help vulnerable households?

This fun little gimmick is of course one small piece of the unprecedented housing puzzle. How exactly do we cut emissions from heating, cooling and electricity by 90-100% across all the nation’s buildings in the next twenty to thirty years? The technical challenges are big enough, and with limp government exemplified by Labour up until a year or so ago – and matched by weak Conservative plans – getting the financing in place is a tricky subject.

But the hardest part will be selling it to the public. Loft insulation and new boilers are fine – more efficiency without visible changes. What about cladding that nice brick / pebbledash / stone house with external insulation? What about reducing some room sizes for internal wall cladding?

We need political parties that can implement this boiler scrappage scheme today, and begin to seriously address the wider challenge over the next two decades. We need MPs who are committed to a Green New Deal.

Tags , , ,
Categories Uncategorized

Don’t let the Tories get away with it

September 18, 2009 //
2

As long as the Democrats talked within Republican frames like “tax relief”, they always lost the argument. So why are Labour taking on Tory economic narratives during their party season? They’re handing the election to Cameron on a plate.

The first narrative is that we need to cut public expenditure to save the deficit and curb the national debt. Except that our national debt is much lower than most developed economies, and is projected to stay that way. Our deficit is large, but Cameron’s criticism of any fiscal stimulus would only have landed us in a bigger hole with more unemployment and smaller tax receipts; perhaps even a depression.

The second is that the public sector is an unproductive drag on the economy, and should be the focus of cuts. Except that the public sector injects stable spending power into the economy; provides the infrastructure and services that business can’t function without; subsidises businesses who want to pay scandalously low wages through the benefits system; is funded more by working people’s tax contributions than those direct from business; and so on.

For much of the left wing commentariat, who think “Left equals Labour”, this is more evidence of the intellectual vacuum at what’s left of the heart of the left Labour project. But New Labour was born from the marriage of social democracy and New Right economic thinking. Brown et al are never going to seriously rethink the economic terrain they shaped, which contributed to the near-collapse of the economy. Their only narrative these past few months has been “our cuts will be nicer”. Nice.

If only those commentators would look beyond Labour to parties who are articulating a genuine alternative, and who are challenging these Tory narratives. Like, urm, the Green Party. At the moment they seem resigned to an electoral wipeout without redeeming heros.

We have all things for passing microsoft certification exams. You can download the latest mcse 2008 exam passing tools for free. We will also provide you help in your cisco certification with our best brain dumps.

Tags , , , ,
Categories Uncategorized

A campsite of smaller tents

June 26, 2009 //
3

Maybe it’s just me, but it seems like mainstream journalists and celebs are starting to talk about the Greens in a totally unprecedented way. With a few exceptions we’re seen as credible, with good policies and a great leader. Notwithstanding the occasional backlash, we’re definitely on the way to establishing ourselves as the fourth “main party”. Just the increased number of nods to the Green Party shows that – in our largely first past the post scene – fewer people think Labour will always be the only viable progressive force in British politics.

Caroline evoked a lovely analogy at the recent Compass conference to sum up the change in mood: we no longer need New Labour’s big tent to bring all progressives together. From now on, we should have a campsite of many small tents, cooperating to progress environmental and social justice, and competing where we disagree.

Maybe 2010 will be the year that the Lib Dems stop shamelessly lieing to undermine Labour and Green votes, and that Labour supporters – especially in publications like The Guardian and the New Statesman – relax their tribal obsession with The Labour Party?

Tags , , , ,
Categories Uncategorized