The most important thing for Greens to consider is that we will most likely only get one, two or three London Assembly members out of 25. There’s no room for colourful characters with narrow interests, bad tempers or a tendency for self indulgence. They need to be good communicators, both practical and radical, collegiate and disciplined.

We need to pick people who can get complicated and often innovative messages across to the mainstream media, to other politicians, to the public. It’s no use being Mr or Mrs Brains if you baffle people when you talk to them, or bore journalists with predictable soundbites. Politicians have staff to help with policy research and messaging, but nobody between them and their audience.

We rely on our Members to put across a good, rounded image of our party. Whatever your particular politics, will your choices show that the Green Party is both practical and radical, that we are able to achieve significant changes to Mayoral policy at the same time as advocating a radically different vision of London? Radical idealists might spend four wasted years making good speeches; practical realists might forget the reason they’re Green while working for minor concessions.

Our two/three members have, in the past, won a great many gains for London by working with other political parties and at times with the Mayor. The comparatively collegiate culture of the Assembly is one of the joys of working there. People who enjoy tribal politics, who thrive on factions and who find it difficult to work with others – especially if they’re those hated Lib Dems or “sell out” New Labourites, won’t get very far in the Assembly.

To focus on these basic political skills takes the final quality: discipline. Watching Caroline Lucas over the past few years, it’s been remarkable to see how hard she works to find realistic radical ideas, get them across to the public and the media in a compelling way, and work with NGOs, politicians across the political spectrum and anyone else willing to help her achieve our goals. To compare her to someone like George Galloway, who is an excellent speaker and fires a lot of people up, is to compare an effective small party politician to a character that can only be tolerated in a large party.

Of course this portrait of an effective small party politician reflects my politics; you may think we’re in this game for an entirely different reason. If you think there’s no progress without revolution or the Mayoralty, these reasons may not sway you.

It’s well worth actually watching the webcasts of a few Assembly meetings, perusing some committee reports and reading some press releases to get an idea of the work they do.

If you like the look of that work and can see its value, you might ask yourself: would this candidate be able to work cross-party on affordable housing funding and river deculverting, gain media coverage on these issues, and win some real gains for London?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?