French Greens statement on Calais jungle

Yesterday there was a small but lively protest outside the French embassy in protest against the events in Calais. Below is a picture of some Greens with the embassy behind them taken by Louise who has some more here.


The French Greens have issued a statement on the events which I thought you might be interested in seeing.

Calais: hide the misery that we could not see

The dramatic evacuation of the "jungle" is an inhumane and unnecessary PR exercise that does not solve the underlying problem.

The closure of Sangatte, as we predicted, merely moved the problem. It will be the same for the sweep of Calais.

The vast majority of refugees had left before the police arrived. As for those arrested, what will become of them? Will they be returned to countries at war where they risk death, in spite of international conventions. What will happen to the children? The problem has been masked temporarily and will reappear.

The French and European governments must accept their responsibilities towards the human drama of the Kurdish and Afghan refugees and give them asylum, rather than sweeping them away with bulldozers.

We must fully restore the Geneva Convention in Europe instead of choosing the strategy of terror and despair.

This media event was highly political. As with every election, the government is quick to stir up migration issues.

Djamila Sonzogni, Jean-Louis Roumégas

Brown's rules - ok?

For those who weren't in the conference hall, like Mr Duncan, you can read every sizzling word of our Prime Minister's speech here. For reference I think the high point was was when he declared "I stand with the people who are sick and tired of others playing by different rules". Yeah, this free society thing is a real pain in the posterior isn't it?

What with their hockey-cokey music and their head scarves and their weird food that isn't mashed potato. Bugger 'em I say. Well, no, not b... let's move on...

Our beloved leader continues;

"Starting now and right across the next Parliament every one of the 50,000 most chaotic families will be part of a family intervention project – with clear rules, and clear punishments if they don’t stick to them.

"And we have said that every time a young person breaches an ASBO, there will be an order, not just on them but on their parents, and if that is broken they will pay the price. Because whenever and wherever there is antisocial behaviour, we will be there to fight it."

Family ASBOs. Joy. If your son is out of control you might lose your home - I bet that threat creates 50,000 loving family units. Tough on crime, tough on the parents of criminals. Oh hold on, not criminals, because they would be tried in a court of law and sentenced there, we're talking about ASBOs where councils make up arbitrary rules in order to by-pass judge, jury, the ability to mount a defence, all that nonsense.

Brown Owl goes on;

"This is a new and more mobile world and so we have to step up the protection of our borders against terrorism and illegal immigration. And it means we must take a tough approach to who gets to come to our country and who gets to stay.

"Tightening our points-based immigration system ensures that those who have the skills that can help Britain will be welcomed, and those who do not, will be refused. And the ID cards for foreign nationals are working."

The Daily Mail haven't disserted the Labour Party yet have they. They must lap this shit up.

And then we have this, truly awe inspriring;

"And I do think it’s time to address a problem that for too long has gone unspoken, the number of children having children. For it cannot be right, for a girl of sixteen, to get pregnant, be given the keys to a council flat and be left on her own.

"From now on all 16 and 17 year old parents who get support from the taxpayer will be placed in a network of supervised homes. These shared homes will offer not just a roof over their heads, but a new start in life where they learn responsibility and how to raise their children properly. That’s better for them, better for their babies and better for us all in the long run."

We've had these before when working class women had kids in ways that their 'moral superiors' disapproved of. I don't think going back to the beginning of the last century for moral guidance is a sign of a progressive party. Putting young mums in homes (there's no way you'll see Dad's in them) and then pretending that institutionalised care will teach them how to "raise their children properly". Pfft.

Susan is unimpressed, as you might expect from a Labour Party member who actually believes in things like tackling inequality and poverty. Meanwhile Jennie feels it is feeding into a more general chauvinist mileau (can you believe that people actually defend Polanski! Jeez). I think I agree.

All in all Brown's speech was a mix of rubbish that will never happen, Daily Mail pleasing moralising and oddities like this little charmer which I'll end on;

"Because what let the world down last autumn was not just bankrupt institutions but a bankrupt ideology. What failed was the Conservative idea that markets always self-correct but never self-destruct. What failed was the right wing fundamentalism that says you just leave everything to the market and says that free markets should not just be free but values free."

You were elected in 1997 Gordon, that was in the last century! I don't think the Tories can actually be held responsible for the entirity of the global financial crisis - and sadly that's the strongest part of his speech.

Isn't there a song about this?

I was out leafleting in Lewisham today and came across these chaps.


Not a partridge but three pigeons, and a sunflower rather than a pear tree but, well, you get the drift.

Child Care: Verboten!

I see Mr Brown has announced he's going to roll out some "free child care for poorer families". That might look good if it didn't come hot off the heels of the case of two women who've been forbidden from looking after each other's kids. So New Labour has criminalised normal activity on the one hand and then makes a promise for a crumb on the other, not a great bargain.

Why's the government got to be in charge of everything? These informal arrangements are the life blood of communities. When you have two working women (police officers in this case) who are helping each other out so they can do their shifts this should be seen as a sign of a healthy society where we look out for each other - but no - it's not just a problem it's illegal and has to stop.

It seems that to perform even these normal everyday tasks we're going to have to be government registered and approved. Ludicrous! We should be trying to improve the level of child care in this country not creating a crisis where no one is able to look after their friend's kids unless they've been rubber stamped by the state.

I don't just think this is stupid, it is the kind of thing that actively undermines community cohesion and is part of the philosophy that everything has a commercial value which must be subject to regulation and control. We should not need a legal document to be good to each other and a few more nursery places are not a substitute for living in decent, caring neighbourhoods.

The underdogs of war

The Labour conference has heard it openly acknowledged that they are the political underdogs, on track to lose the next election if they aren't able to turn things around. That's all fine and dandy but the thing that's praying on my mind is who's going to be leader after the electoral defeat.

As always we're hearing about leadership challenges before the election but that's all wind. If I was a Labour member in Charles Clarke's area I'd be less than happy with the fact he keeps getting his knife out when he should be trying to hold onto his seat. Maybe he doesn't care and has given up - if so good riddence to him although why he feels it necessary to damage Labour's prospects in general is anyone's guess. Taking lessons from Blears I guess.

So who is going to be the next leader of the Labour Party? People keep telling me it's going to be Lord Peter Mandelson... could this really be true? Labour conference delegates seem very relaxed with the dark lord so perhaps it is, after all he seems to have bridged the Brown-Blair divide whilst other contenders seem too deeply ensconced on one side or the other.

I don't really have much time for the personal vilification of Peter Mandelson that the Daily Mail and the left seem to enjoy so much in and, I'll be honest, I even warmed to him a little after he was slimed - I'm not into personal attacks let alone physical ones. It's his politics that are the problem not his existence. I realise this is a minority opinion though!

However, if he was elected Labour leader it would make life a lot easier. They'd be no particular political shift in the party but he would give absolute clarity to what a vote for Labour actually means. Those who are happy with a free market, right wing party can keep voting for them - everyone else will have to find a new home. Sweet.

Europe votes: good news and bad

Yesterday saw the German and Portuguese General Elections, elections which have both good and bad news for us lefty greens. First the bad news. Labour's sister parties have been elbowed out of position in both countries leaving the right with a much stronger hand.

In Portugal the ruling Socialist Party lost their Parliamentary majority going from 45% to 36.6% of the vote. Although still the largest of the parties their support was eroded by both the left and the right - leaving the right stronger over all.

The FT believes that the SP will not try to form a coalition but rather, under the watchful eye of their Conservative President, will try to run a minority government with a program agreed by the two right-wing parties (the PSD and CDS/PP).

As you can see from the figures the PS lost its vote share in almost equal proportion to the right and left, with the hard left coalition Left Bloc (BE) making the largest gains. The Democratic Unity Coalition (CDU), a coalition of the Greens and the Communist Party, also increased their Parliamentary representation, although not in as spectacular fashion.

Party	Votes	%	Change	Seats
Socialist Party (PS)	2,068,665	36.56	-8.4	96
Social Democratic Party (PSD)	1,646,097	29.09	+0.3	78
People's Party (CDS/PP)	592,064	10.46	+3.2	21
Left Bloc (BE)	557,109	9.85	+3.4	16
Democratic Unity Coalition (CDU)	446,174	7.88	+0.3	15

In Germany it seems the Grand Coalition of center left and right parties is at an end. While Merkel's Christian Democrats did not increase their vote share they did increase their seats and certainly are the beneficiaries of the collapse of the Social Democrat vote, a vote that has been distributed among the far right, far left and Greens.

The Social Democrats lost a wapping great third of their seats and aside from the right-liberal Bavarian Party was the only party to lose seats last night. you can see from the numbers that the right neo-liberal Free Democratic Party was by far the biggest winner but the The Left and The Greens also made substantial increases.

	Total seats	+/-
Christian Democratic Union	194	+14
Christian Social Union of Bavaria	45	-1
Social Democratic Party	146	-76
Free Democratic Party	93	+32
The Left	76	+22
The Greens	68	+17

Which makes the German Parliament look like this;

Being an electoral geek it's also worth looking at how those seats were won. In Germany they have a dual system of constituency votes and party lists that use PR to top up. It's actually a very useful way of seeing at a glance how a PR system alters the way that people vote and, I think, the results show how the big parties of government in this country rely on first Past the Post to bolster their own declining vote.

I'll explain using numbers. Here are the results for the top parties (and the Pirate Party) in both list and constituency votes.

	Constituency
	Votes	%	+/-	Seats	+/-
Christian Democratic Union	13,852,743	32	-0.6	173	+67
Christian Social Union of Bavaria	3,190,950	7.4	-0.9	45	+1
Social Democratic Party	12,077,437	27.9	-10.5	64	-81
Free Democratic Party	4,075,115	9.4	+4.7	0	-
The Left	4,790,007	11.1	+3.1	16	+13
The Greens	3,974,803	9.2	+3.8	1	-
German Pirate Party	46,750	0.1	+0.1	0	-
	Party List
	Votes	%	+/-	Seats	+/-
Christian Democratic Union	11,824,794	27.3	-0.5	21	-53
Christian Social Union of Bavaria	2,830,210	6.5	-0.9	0	-2
Social Democratic Party	9,988,843	23	-11.2	82	+5
Free Democratic Party	6,313,023	14.6	+4.8	93	+32
The Left	5,153,884	11.9	+3.2	60	+9
The Greens	4,641,197	10.7	+2.6	67	+17
German Pirate Party	845,904	2	+2	0	-

The three parties of government uniformly got better results in the constituency poll than the list system. Two million people (which is a lot) voted for the CDU in their local first past the post constituency who voted for someone else in the PR lists, possibly the FDU although that's an informed guess.

The reason why I included the Pirate Party is that here you can see a small party with a bit of support who people did vote for when it was PR but who were not remotely tempted when it came to candidates for unwinnable First Past the Post seats. A full on 18 times as many people voted for the Pirates under the Proportional Representation system than for them in the constituency votes. In Germany you might shrug your shoulders and say, well they can get seats through the top up list, here in the UK there's no such mechanism which means that minority parties have their small vote diminished even further simply through the voting system we use.


So you can see from this chart that, basically, a load of people voting for the centre right vote for the more minor right-wing libertarians of the FDP when their vote has more chance of making an impact and a large portion of voters who vote for the SPD in the constituencies where only the big players might win then vote for the Left, the Greens and, ahem, the Pirates when their vote has more chance of influencing the outcome.

Geekery aside the Greens have done very well to get more than four and a half million votes and likewise for the Left to get more than five million votes shows, just like in Portugal, that there are alternatives to the failed Labour-style parties so they better buck up their ideas, but as yet that mileau is not winning votes from the right and without doing that they can't move society to the left, just move the left to the left.

NB I'd like to recommend Tina Becker on Die Linke which I thought was particularly interesting.

Weekending: 27th September

Blogs I'm highlighting this week, all highly recommended;

• World Coloured Glasses
• Why that's delightful
• Chris Coltraine
• Carmen gets around
• Obama is literally Hitler
• Calais Migrant Solidarity
  
• Don't sleep Dave has coined the term for "a preposterous amount of testosterone". What is it? Why "Preposterone" of course!
  

Once you've given those a try you might like to check these posts;

• Local government advise to blogging councillors.

Some dates for your diary;

• Tuesday, 5.30 pm at the French embassy protest in solidarity with migrants in Calais‏.
• 3rd October action Saturday in Brighton - come along help turn the place Green. For details contact 01273 766670 or e-mail: info@brightonandhovegreenparty.org.uk
• Friday 23rd Oct in Cambridge Robin Ince and Ben Goldacre.
• November 21st People's Charter National Conference, in Camden.
  
• National Climate March 5th December.
  

And our YouTube offering this week, pure genius;

Please don't blow everyone up

The Iranian regime’s current actions over their nuclear capacity are certainly not very helpful. On this most of the world agrees, however, let’s not let that fact blind us to some other aspects of the current situation.

First, we have the West’s hypocrisy. The hypocrisy that says we can have nuclear weapons but no one else can. Obama expressly cited non-proliferation when he condemned the Iranian regime. Well, I think he might have to take a little more action on that himself before he starts pulling on his hiking boots for that journey up the moral high ground.

Token gestures towards a nuclear free world, like Brown’s idea to reduce our nuclear fleet from four to three submarines are thrown into sharp perspective when we discover that this does not reduce the number of missiles we own, just the number of craft they are to be launched from. We get the same level of genocide but with savings to the public purse - that's one of those good news bad news things isn't it?

The sky would not fall in if the UK, for example, was to scrap its nuclear weapons. Plenty of nations are able to play their part on the world stage without the ability to obliterate millions. However, if the UK did pursue unilateral disarmament it would be the biggest step towards world wide nuclear disarmament the world has ever seen. Brown's got until May to get that started, what are the chances do you think?

The Iranians (and others) would find it far harder to justify building their potential nuke building capacity in the context of other nations disarming. Instead we surround them with war and openly call for the overthrow of the regime by foul means or fetid. That’s not helpful either.

Second, the West has been teaching rogue nations for the last couple of decades that the one way to ensure you don’t get invaded is to have nukes. It might not be an incredible surprise then if some of these 'rogue nations' start thinking that some of their nation’s resources need to be diverted away from corruption, torture equipment and hospitals into developing actually existing weapons of mass destruction.

Third, it is of course great to hear our foreign secretary, David Miliband, say that he is 100% committed to a diplomatic solution. I welcome that, but the evasions and fudging we get when he is asked about military intervention is completely counter-productive. Britain is currently responsible for civil wars in two of Iran’s neighbours (Iraq and Afghanistan) and has somewhat of a record of being willing to use force it’s when necessary, and when it’s not.

No one needs convincing that the UK and the US are up for it when it comes to an international bundle, what some of us do need convincing of is whether the tried and tested methods of belligerence, violence and sanctions actually achieve their stated aims.

While we hear news of tougher sanctions, Israel demanding a military strike and the possibilities of wider military action in the future (and for the record I should say I don’t think it’s going to come to that right now) what we don’t hear is how on Earth this is going to help the situation. Surely our experience is that it will make both the circumstances we’re trying to address more intractable and have far wider implications across the globe. That’s without considering the fact that sanctions will indisputably have a terrible impact on the lives of ordinary people while actually consolidating the hold on power of the current regime.

I don’t want that. You don’t want that. Let’s not go there.

RIP Dennis Marsden

I was saddened to see that one of my old Sociology lecturers, Dennis Marsden, had died.

Dennis was one of those old lefties whose charming manner and humble demeanour belied an unwaveringly hard, if nuanced, anti-capitalism. His work on class in the education system is particularly useful but far more importantly I always found him to be a really lovely chap. He will be missed.

From Scotland to Calais, immigration is not the problem

We're having a bout of immigrant bashing at the moment in the British Press. Baroness Scotland hired an illegal immigrant who'd forged her documents (and apparently that means Scotland has to resign) and the French authorities have been rounding up illegals in Calais which has made our Home Secretary, Alan Johnson, praise the "swift and decisive operation" which has filled him with "delight".

We push people to the margins of society, forbid them from working then harangue them for claiming benefits. We force people to live like animals then despise them for the conditions we have put them in. It's inhuman.

The camp in Calais is particularly disgusting where human beings, including kids, live in the most appalling conditions because we refuse to welcome them, despite the fact that immigrants are an overwhelming benefit to society.

We should not prevent people from becoming citizens and then use their second class status and poverty as evidence that they are less than us. We are less than them if we approve the morally squalid attitude that a person can be a non-person if they were born in a different place than us.

We're told that 278 people have been rounded up, of whom 132 are children, all of whom have been offered a once in a lifetime offer of "voluntary repatriation" back to Afghanistan, Iraq and Eritrea. Bet they can't wait.

The French immigration minister, Eric Besson, justified the misery the raids had caused saying that "The real world is not happy." Not with him in it it isn't anyway.

In the Scotland affair Labour MP Stephen Hesford, parliamentary aide to the government law officers, has resigned his minor bag carrier post because, although he has "great personal regard" for Lady Scotland, he felt she should have left her post."In my view, the facts of the case do not matter."

What a wonderful example he's setting he's setting to officers of the law - the facts do not matter. Watertight argument on display, let's make him a judge.

I'd say the facts of this case, as with any legal case, do matter. A lot. Her employee had forged documents and was settled in a long term partnership with someone she knew, and she committed no criminal offence. to hear some people talk you'd have thought she was a people trafficker. What the case does do is highlight how easily it is to turn someone who was a value for money worker (far be it from me to suggest Baroness Scotland would pay poverty wages) into a non-person.

One day she's a productive and useful member of society the next even having contact with her is a sacking offence for the great and the good. how little it took to turn her into an untouchable. As the Tories and Lib Dems use this woman as a stick to beat the government they do nothing to improve conditions for some of the most vulnerable people in this country.

I was very pleased to see Caroline Lucas launch a stinging attack on the way the authorities have treated those in the Calais camp and I think we should take this further. When Caroline states that "It is disgusting that vulnerable people from some of the world's most troubled countries are treated so inhumanely on European soil" for me that's not just about those in Calais it includes Scotland's housekeeper.

Bardot a feminist icon?

Agnès Poirier has been lavishing Brigitte Bardot with praise in the pages of the Guardian, which is billed on the front page as "And God created Bardot; The unlikely feminist". Unlikely? Bloody impossible more like!

There was a lot of it to wade through but evidence for this bizarre assertion did not rely on anything she'd ever said or spoken out on but the fact that there was a movement against racy films and she was quite good in them. Therefore she (not the films) was a danger to the entire bourgeois establishment. Really.

For example, at one point we are told she surpassed her contemporaries because "The beautiful thing about her is that, although she had marvellous breasts, she wouldn't flaunt them like Sophia Loren or Gina Lollobrigida did with plunging décolletages". To the right we have a picture of Bardot not in anyway flaunting her breasts.

Incidentally, when going looking for a picture of her in a tight top I did happen to notice that she did not exactly shun "plunging décolletages" so I'd take that with a pinch of salt as well (you can try your own google search if you like, although why you'd want to heaven knows).

The most outrageous element of the piece though is just that Bardot is held up to be some sort of feminist. AC Grayling that well known feminist philosopher (ummm)says "I think Bardot represents one trend of feminism," Oh, do tell us which trend AC! "She represents the power of women. What's iconic about her is her shape, the way she occupies space." What? She's a feminist because she's got T and A? This would be new feminism would it?

Actually the game is given away when she is praised as "a thing of mobile contours". I mean that was what feminism has always been about hasn't it? The struggle to be seen as a thing with curves. Until men see women as simple objects of sexuality feminism's objects just will not have been achieved, will they?

Look, obviously, I don't object to G2 having lightweight, readable articles on subjects that don't actually matter, like Bardot, but I do not accept that those articles have to be such outrageous bollocks.

In order to paint Bardot as this laudable and progressive figure the author has had to paint over some bloody enormous cracks. For instance we're told that she did "make some ill-advised comments about immigration" which is certainly one way to describe the fact that she has five convictions for inciting racial hatred.

I think five convictions stretching over a number of years is an ideological commitment not a thoughtless, offhand comment frankly. We're told from the start that it would be ludicrous to even suggest she has ever been a sympathiser of the far right Front Nationale (FN), which must have made being married to one of their leading figures and attending their functions a touch awkward (right, pictured serenading fascist in chief Jean Marie Le Pen).

Did her husband have to lean over to her and say "Now don't cause a scene dear, just stick to uncontroversial subjects like your love of race hate. For god's sake don't start on your differences on potato quotas."

Actually she could have also chatted away about gay people because in her book A cry in the silence she bemoaned how modern gay people would "jiggle their bottoms, put their little fingers in the air and with their little castrato voices moan about what those ghastly heteros put them through". Yes, if she just stuck to those subjects she'd be able to get through a fund raising dinner without getting into a row with all those terrible FN people she disagreed with so much.

Come on, does the word feminism mean so little now that a racist who used to wear tight tops in films gets to be lauded as a ground breaking icon of liberation? Has something been lost in translation here? I understand feminism is a broad church and I've no time for gate keepers but Bardot? A feminist? No.

Stand Up for the Observer

This evening I attended the Stand up for the Observer event at the Friends Meeting House organised because, as you may well know, the Observer newspaper's future has been called into question. Not just, of course, hundreds of jobs are at risk but also one of the only left of center Sunday papers in this country (the other being the IoS which sadly can't afford to do actual news anymore).

The meeting was packed out with hundreds of well wishers, mainly plebs like me but also such luminaries as Barry Norman, John Humphreys and the bloke who played Dickens.

Hosted by David Mitchell the event was extremely well run and I highly recommend him to chair any such gathering in the future should you be considering him. I say this because the last time I saw him on TV he was playing a character who sold out a campaign to defend his newly redundant workmates, but obviously that's fiction not real. in reality he's an amusing Arthur Scargill.

A string of Observer stalwarts and union speakers made the case for the Observer, a paper which sells more papers now than they did nine years ago with 400,000 readers. The meeting heard from an NUJ (National Union of Journalists) speaker who'd been organising in Manchester against cuts from the very same newspaper group and she advised us not to assume that because the Observer was a liberal paper that somehow that meant the staff would automatically get a fair deal.

Indeed, although management have 'saved' the title the real battle will be in how many jobs are lost and at what cost to the quality of the journalism. In the long term the Observer will not remain viable if it is only the 'brand' that is saved, the journalists and the commitment to decent journalism needs to be there to make it worthwhile.

Don't get me wrong I'm not overjoyed with any of the Sunday papers in particular, but if the only left leaning Sunday paper that actually delivers news goes then the right's monopoly of the market is reinforced. It doesn't matter if Observer Woman is shit when we look at the big picture of the thing because we're unlikely to see any genuinely left-wing Sunday National spring up any time soon, so the Observer is the best we have - let's save it to improve it is what I'm saying I guess.

Losing the Observer would not just mean that the right's choking grip on the Sunday market is even stronger (and I don't care if *you* don't buy it, I do care that people will buy Sunday papers and the current readers will have to move right to keep feeding that habit if the Observer goes). It also means lost jobs and a lost space where the left can at least get their ideas aired to a wider audience.

If redundancies are announced the NUJ FOC told us there will be an automatic ballot on strike action, but the attacks may be more piece meal through natural wastage, letting the paper whither on the vine. That would be a blow against democracy, because we need a strong liberal press that does things like condemn the attacks on civil liberties in a credible properly researched way. I'm for a more informed electorate, so I'm for the Observer.

In the words of David Mitchell "stopping things getting worse is as good a cause as any" and when the battles ahead take place, which they surely will, I hope people will see past their differences with the Observer, if any, and give it their full support.

Lib Dem conference: the highs and lows

While some think the Lib Dem conference may not have much weight to it, I've still been following it with some interest. As I've done the reading I thought I might as well list what I think are the good and the bad sides of conference so far.

Feel free to add your own (I'd be interested to see Lib Dem members' pro-cons) and I leave it to you whether you feel they balance each other out or not. In no particular order;

Ticks	Tuts
Taxing the richest homes	U-turn on Tuition fees
Scaling back the Severn Barrage	Dissing the Greens
David Howarth on civil liberties	Slash and burn public spending (but not the army)
Interesting debate on Gaza	Clegg demands Brown say something about Megrahi whilst saying absolutely nothing about Megrahi.
At least a little grassroots democracy	New council speak wonks
Lib Dems spurn Tory advances (although why Clegg had to make it a personal attack I don't know).	"The Lib Dems could not enter a coalition government with the Tories because of David Cameron's attitude towards the EU". Is that the fag paper? Bit thin.
Floella Benjamin, dreamy sigh.	Clegg's lack of va-va-voom

Lib Dem leader disses the Green Party

I admit it, I'm deeply jealous. When I heard that Floella Benjamin, one of my childhood idols, had spoken at the Lib Dem conference it sent a pang through me from the green eyed monster.

Then, adding insult to injury, Nick Clegg told the world, or at least the section of it that's listening, not to vote for the Green Party. Oh, the blooming cheek of it.

I know, I know. It's hardly news that the leader of one political party tells voters of a different party that they should vote for him instead but I'm not used to the attention. It makes me blush for a start.

Mr Clegg proposed a love in to conference goers; "This is not a time for people who care about the environment to quarrel between ourselves. This is a time for unity." Unity, for the slow to catch up, means everyone voting Lib Dem. Unless he's proposing standing down in our three target constituencies obviously!

As Sam Coates mentions it seems that the Greens are now the only major party who call for the abolition of tuition fees, there's one reason to vote Green for you. After all the Lib Dems are part of the big three consensus of savage cuts which is slightly different from the Green Party's Green New Deal which proposes, well, the exact opposite.

We also have the Scottish experience of Lib Dem ministers which was sadly not one where the environment came front and center to their political practice.

It's interesting that this indecent proposal comes hot on the heels of Tory head honcho Cameron saying you couldn't fit a cigarette paper between the Tories and Lib Dems. I believe Clegg's response to this began with an "f" and did not end in "antastic", I wonder if the Greens are supposed to make the same response? And should we then pick on someone smaller than us and attempt a similarly vacuous courtship?

Mr Clegg also said that "Only a party that has real power and influence at the heart of government will be able to make it happen [action against climate change]." Despite this he asks people to vote Lib Dem instead. Why he made an argument for voting Labour in the middle of his speech is anyone's guess. Let's not dwell on it.

The reality of the matter is that one Lib Dem more or less in the House of Commons will make absolutely no difference to the government's response to climate change.

Two or three Green Party MPs would be a catalyst for real change. Not just because all three main parties would have to start genuinely taking the environment more seriously to cover their collective electoral posteriors, but also because they would be part of that growing movement that exists in every town and city across the country. There is no clearer environmental message at the ballot box that people can send than a vote for the Green Party, but it isn't just a symbolic vote - it opens up a crack in their system for real diversity of opinion.

Caroline Lucas, in the Guardian letters page, says that "The unedifying spectacle of all three main parties vying to "out-cut" one another, comparing the size and sharpness of their respective butcher's knives, scandalously deflects attention from the real issue. Britain's debt as a proportion of national income isn't particularly high by historical standards. At a time when the number of jobless people is nearing 2.5 million, including nearly a million 16- to 24-year-olds, the subject which should be dominating the headlines is unemployment, not the growing frenzy over the government deficit.

"The Green party is the only party advocating a different way forward. Massive investment in energy efficiency and renewable energy would create hundreds of thousands of tax-generating jobs, and address the climate crisis. Tax increases for the very wealthy, plus a crackdown on bonuses and chief executive pay, would raise billions, and start to address the shameful increase in inequality under Labour. Scrapping Trident and ID cards would save billions more."

Clegg can say what he likes and I'm 100% sure there are many good, committed people in the Lib Dems who care just as deeply about the environment as I do, I even know some of them, but this coy agreement the big three have on cuts in public services and restoring the economy to the way it was simply wont do. A Green vote says more than let's stick up a few turbines, we have to change the way we live. We need to challenge the economic system, and I don't see the Lib Dems doing that any time soon, lovely though they are.

Weekending: 20th September

This slow blogging week comes to you courtesy of a poor connection and a case of 'not wanting to blog much'. Salute! Did we know there was a film The Trotsky coming out by the way? Looks awesome.

New blogs I've spotted;

• Simon Fletcher looks excellent.
• The Rebel Bull a left blog from the rural wilds.
  
• Derren Brown may not be able to predict the lottery, but he has a very fine blog.
  

Posts worth reading, feel free to add your own in the comments box.

• Introducing Charlotte, new Green Ladywell council hopeful.
• Goodinterview at Third Estate with Caroline Lucas.
  
• In Brockley they are doing a before and after climate camp comparison.
• Living with rats on 10:10 and why your 10% is better than his.
• Gayle praises a Lib dem.
• River's Edge asks whether a prison officer can be a socialist.
• Jenny Jones on policing by consent.
  
• The Hudderfield Examiner on the Green plans to save jobs at Kirklees council.
• Cuts could spell the end of the Express says NUJ Left.
• Dogwood tales provides us with Dan Brown's twenty worst sentences.
• Catwalk uses normal sized models - stylist walks out in disgust.
  

Letters of the week come from the good offices of Organized Rage who has done a bit of a round-up.

YouTube of week comes from a bunch of jolly people. God bless them;

Guest Post: The Cultural Poverty of Football

Thanks to Matt Sellwood (Green Party Parliamentary Candidate for Hackney North & Stoke Newington) for this guest post on the murky world of money and football.

Being a supporter of Nottingham Forest (and provided they are never in the same league, Oxford United) I have spent quite a lot of time keeping up with developments at the less glamorous end of professional football. Recently, I was pleasantly surprised to see an announcement from the Premier League of a £1 million donation to non-league clubs, to help support them in financially difficult times.

But then I started thinking. What does it say about the moral, ethical and cultural poverty of football in this country that I was so delighted by what is, in effect, the act of a bunch of Victorian-era philanthropists to 'the deserving poor'? Why, in this field as in no other, was I content at an act of charity from a bunch of corrupt oligarchs and playboys - rather than thinking 'sod giving us a cake - we want the whole bloody bakery'?

The fact is that, in the last few years, I've almost entirely lost interest in football, particularly at the top-flight level. A bunch of billionaires owning their clubs in the same way that they own a jet or a luxury island, watching a bunch of spoilt millionaires diving around pretending to be hurt? Give me a break. I used to love the sport - used to love the community of going to games with my dad, and knowing that everyone around us really cared about the club...and that even some of the players and owners did, too. Now we have AIG United playing Abrahmovic FC, and we're meant to care?

The frustrating thing is, it doesn't have to be this way. Green Party blogger and Executive member Farid Bakht recently published a brief analysis by fellow Executive member Andy Hewett of the way in which Swansea's Supporters Trust is trying to reverse the decimation of one club by speculators and financial mismanagement. As a Forest supporter, I have some serious sympathies! Overseas, there are numerous examples of supporters owning their clubs, the most famous of which is probably that of Barcelona.

Now, there are still problems with their model - constant political maneuvering for the presidential elections and too much influence from the richer fans being only two - but come on...refusal of commercial shirt sponsorship, and donations to UNICEF to match the UN international aid target of 0.7% of GDP! Can we, in our wildest dreams, imagine that of any
current Premiership club?

I was pleased to be the co-sponsor of a motion to Autumn's Green Party Conference in Hove, which recommitted the Party to its principled stand on the desirability and practicality of cooperatives in the economy. Now, in the midst of financial meltdown, and while our sporting clubs continue to exhibit the most stunning greed and avarice - isn't it time that we fans
took control of our clubs back? Lets kick out the Glazers, Hicks and Abrahmovics of this world - it's our sport!

Sports desk: 19th September

After our brief post-conference interlude the sports desk is back. A welcome development I'm sure you'll all agree.

Football

• I've just started following extravagant nonsense a light-hearted blog on all things football.
• The Morning Star on I'm the UEFA President, get me out of here, here.
• Stonewall have a report on homophobia in football. Peter Tatchell follows up.
• The New Statesman is excited about women's football.
• Middlesborough footballers offer their support to laid off steelworkers.
  
• The East is Green explores how football should be run.
  

Big Games

• Just so you know the Common Wealth Games don't need rail links.
• The Olympic budget black hole appears to opening up some new divisions.
• A quick I told you so on the Olympics. According to the Guardian 'Where your money goes' guide to government spending shows that this year the government spent more on the Olympics than the rest of sport put together. I said this in August - ha!
  
• The battle is on for the Rugby 2015 World Cup.
• The South African government is planning a shoot to kill policy for the 2010 Football World Cup. Great.

Caster Semenya

• Athletics boss admits he lied about Caster Semenya.
• We have more on the debate from bloggers Ben Solah, Third Estate, The Nation and Black Looks.
  

And the rest

• Sports retailers in price fixing inquiry here.
• In the US there are concerns on the rise of incivility, the Huff. Post says sport's no exception.
• The LA Times looks at how reactions to Serena Williams' outburst are mixed with gender and race.
  
• The Guardian posts weird pictures from the week in sport.
  

Review: District Nine

As I left the cinema having watched District Nine the woman behind told her partner “I’ve never been to a film that made me want to puke and cry at the same time.” I have sympathy with her but she’d clearly not seen Tim Burton’s atrocity of a remake of Planet of the Apes. Worst – film – ever.

However, when it comes to District Nine we have a powerful film, well executed and inventively playful with what must now be a genre of ‘alien space juggernaut hovering overhead as the city beneath trembles’.

The film sees a host of strange looking alien creatures arrive, bedraggled and helpless, at Johannesburg where the locals welcome them with the open arms of those who know the whole world is watching.

They might take the aliens in but that doesn’t mean they don’t need to house them in anything but shanty town conditions of ‘District Nine’ an obvious echo of the infamous episode in ‘District Six’ where the apartheid regime ethnically cleansed an entire part of the city, but let’s get back to the film.

Lead actor, Sharlto Copley, does an incredible job in his role as fascist scum bag, who through some unfortunate circumstances begins to sympathise with the aliens. We see the casual brutality of otherwise normal seeming men against those who they see as a species apart from themselves, less than animals, simply a problem that has to be managed in the most efficient way possible.

I wont go into detail for those yet to see the film but while there is a substantial amount of gore and violence (hence the puke remark) it is by no means a slasher / effects film. There is a genuine core narrative to the film that is well worth following.

It is very effective as a pulling apart of racism, authoritarianism and the dehumanisation of others. It’s also a bloody great sci-fi film with lots of cool aliens and stuff. As long as you have a strong stomach you will, like me, give the film five stars.

Green blogging moving forwards

Well, we've doubled the Green representation in the top 100 blogs in the Total Politics awards from one to two (well done number 52) and Peter Cranie was within spitting distance at 104.

It's all a bit of fun of course so let's not make it out to be anything other than that (which is why I've never understood the way some people seem to get so grumpy about these things). I've moved up to 34 (from 84 last year) which is all very gratifying but seeing as we're comparing apples to steamrollers here I wont start thinking I'm better than those below and worse than those above, particularly as there are blogs I very much enjoy both sides and blogs I think are tedious balls both ways too.

Anyway, thanks to everyone who voted for this blog, that was very kind of you. I hope next year we'll see at least one green blog in the top ten and a host of us cramming our way into the top one hundred, we can do it people!

Weekending: it's back!

Blogs I've spotted;

• Left foot forwards. Welcome.
  
• Claudia bites who is part of the Harlot's Parlour collective.
• Ben's blog written by a serving prisoner. Very good.
• And now for something completely sectarian. Cool title.
  
• I's also like to say hi to two excellent science bloggers at lay science and punk science.
• Then there's free movement, a blog written by an immigration lawyer.
• The annotated weekender, amusing drawings.
  
• New Green blog A week is a long time. Yo!
  
• Young Greens in the north of Ireland, QUB Greens.
• Camden Green Party has a blog too. Follow it you Camdenites!
  

Recent blog posts for your attention;

• Dave Osler on Afghanistan. Useful.
• Sunny discovers that the Tories saved the economy.
  
• Barkingside 21's Size Matters from was a thought provoking piece on economics.
• Molly continues the theme on economics and co-operatives.
• Pickled Politics looks at ways to reduce volunteering.
• Simon Dyda is blogging from the Plaid conference.
• I'm sending my sympathy to Jennie who's had a rotten time leafleting.
  
• Justin discovers a way to reduce radiation sickness.
• Is the SNP proposing a road tax for bikes? Yikes!
  

A few additional links;

• Maybe I shouldn't link to it, but I thought the Plaid broadcast was interesting.
• Matthew Ledbury is cycling from Land's End to John O'Groats. Sponsor him if you like.
• Just came across the interesting site Yes2Wind.
  

Letter of the week from Monday's Independent;

I spent the 1980s working in the music industry, when record companies considered it fair and honest to expect their loyal customers to pay £15 to re-buy their Beatles albums, while insisting that their artists took a cut in royalties to help pay for development of the new technology. This windfall had the effect of making music executives lazy, and the decline in quality of music, plus the search for "an easy hit", followed.

The new fans now see music as essential but valueless in terms of money; I doubt that anyone under the age of 20 has any idea that music is not freely available.

The good news is that some people will always want to make music and others will always want to listen to it. This is great news for aspiring artists, who no longer have to run the appalling gauntlet of trying to get a record deal.

Richard Evans, Cowes, Isle of Wight

And finally a completely bizarre video about something called Kancho;

Review: 1066 - the battle for middle earth

I watched 1066 - the battle for middle earth last night, all about the last time England was successfully invaded from the eye view of the 'ordinary people' who took part in those events. The first episode dealt with the invasion of the north by the 'Vikingers'.

I'm generally inclined towards this sort of thing so I can't say I regret watching it, but it was rather thin. I don't think it was full of glaring historical inaccuracies (although there was a field promotion to 'housecarl' at one point which seemed unlikely) but the amount of information it contained was minimal to say the least.

We never properly saw either King Harold (Hadrada or Godwinson), which may be accurate for soldiers in a modern army but when the forces were only around 8,000 strong it seemed like a deliberate and strange artifice when the decisions that they took would have had life and death consequences on the heroes of our tale. Our boys seemed to be positively shunning their poor leaders.

Secondly, whilst there were hints of some sort of social stratification going on in the English army historically both forces were riddled with strict social relationships that would have defined every aspect of the participants lives, and what sort of war they had. I'd have liked to have seen that explored rather than summarily glossed over.

For example at one point two groups of English soldiers meet on the way north and to much excitement one has with it 'wife men that are not our wives'. Were these slaves, captives, prostitutes, good time girls, what? All we know is the women seemed generally happy to be there and were up for anything as long as you had a hunk of bread spare.

For something that was over an hour long I came away feeling quite disappointed that there was not even one aside that told me something about the events I didn't know before and I don't regard myself as an expert on the period in any way.

I can't fault the acting, narration or the budget which seemed more than adequate but the tale they told just didn't seem up to the job, particularly when it was implied that Harold marching north to meet the Viking army was a mistake that let the Normans sneak in - surely history would have condemned Harold had he let the Vikings run riot unhindered?

Winston sticks it where the sun don't shine

This story is a bloody marvelous illustration of how, despite claims from some quarters, the internet revolution has not quite made it to even quite developed parts of the globe. A South African IT company based in Durban raced "an 11-month-old bird armed with a 4GB memory stick against the ADSL service from the country's biggest web firm, Telkom."

Guess who won! Winston, the aforementioned pigeon, took two hours to fly 60 miles with the stick whilst the file was only 4% of the way there. Frankly Winston could have walked the stick home and he'd have still won.

I only mention it because Winston has demonstrated with admirable clarity what I was arguing in the Morning Star in July that Africa is not witnessing "a new dawn of connectivity for the masses" despite the inflated claims about the new undersea cable that's just been hooked up.

It's also nice to see people use inventive media stunts to giving big companies the bird. That's a real feather in their cap! OK, I'll stop there.

Anyway, why take it from them when you can check out Winston's website and hear it straight from the pigeon's beak (check out the video, hilarious).

Green World: where next?

As I mentioned previously I'm now on the editorial board of the Green Party's in-house magazine Green World and, as we had very interesting discussion at the hustings, I thought I'd expand on some of the discussion here which also gives people an opportunity to say how they would like to see GW develop.

There were a number of questions about the business model of Green World for example. I'm not gong to go into detail on this as I'm still getting my head round the numbers myself but as the editorial board is actually more of a management board than anything else it's worth looking at a little.

As it stands Green World comes out four times a year, which should mean we'll have three more editions before the general election. It gets sent to all the members of the party and is sold in bulk to local parties as well as selected newsagents, although as a quarterly magazine that side of the distribution is quite limited.

Although the Party benefits in many ways from having an in-house magazine (a few examples being helping with membership retention, drawing new members closer to the party and publicising important events - as well as using our regular mailing to cut the cost of postal ballots and the like) if we could make the magazine self-funding that would be a very good thing. Although there are some revenue streams, like bulk orders, any issue that pays for itself will do so primarily through advertising.

That raises ethical questions I think. I've no problem with accepting advertising from organisations and companies that have some ethical dimension to them, I'd encourage it in fact. Each advertiser should be assessed on their merits and having the financial backing of the party puts us in a better position to reject advertising where we have doubts. What might be more problematic is an unconscious tendency to tone down controversial articles to make an issue more advertiser friendly. I don't think it's much of an issue at the moment but it is something that is worth being aware of, in order to guard against the possibility.

In terms of content I do think Green World has been consistently improving over the years I've known it. It's a far more interesting and engaging read now than the first copy I picked up. One reason for this are the admirable skills of our editor, Phil Sainty, who has ensured the magazine is always readable, focused and has a much lighter feel than other similar publications I've seen that can tend towards the dense, overly worthy, or appear to be a collection of random pieces submitted by members of, cough, varying quality.

That lightness of touch, like pieces by Mark Thomas and fun segments about what activists are getting up to around the country, isn't just about making a readable publication of course, but also to counter the rather unjust stereo-type that greens are po-faced doom mongers, many of us are rather smiley doom mongers.

While the magazine is an organ of the Green Party it also has an independent editorial line and has never sought to be the mouth piece of the party. Again this is essential if we're expecting normal human beings to actually read the thing. It gives us the opportunity to have lively debates, like the one in the current issue on nuclear power. It's been controversial with some members concerned that we've given a page over to someone who disagrees with the party's nuclear position. Expect a lively letters page next issue!

Despite those concerns I'd love to see more debates of this nature in Green World's pages. It's actually quite hard to win the very real debates in the green movement if we don't actually talk to the people on the 'other side' and in terms of encouraging people to argue their point in an open-minded, persuasive way without becoming doctrinaire you do actually have enough respect for your opponent to do them the courtesy of listening to what they have to say - before rejecting it out of hand!

Anyway, comments welcome as always. Any good ideas for articles, debates and topics I will shamelessly steal and take the credit for - you have been warned!

Patrick Harvie MSP on Megrahi

Footage from the Scottish Parliamentary debate on the case of Libyan Al Megrahi who was recently returned to his home country suffering from the last stages of a terminal illness.



In my view Harvie's performance in this debate is exemplary.

Last conference post

Just to tidy things up here's my last set of conference links;

• Graham Wroe is very happy with the Afghanistan motion.
• Dr Richard thinks we're making slow progress.
• Joseph has his own round-up from conference.
• Croyden Greens ask, was this the Bangla conference?
• Adrian couldn't make it, but rounds up the news reports.
• I have a piece in tomorrow's Morning Star - the regular Green Party Bombay Mix.
• Natalie collects some resources together for the prostitution debate.
• Business Green; we blast government for not supporting renewables.
• E-politics Greens look ahead for election push.

Updates;

• Humanists welcome our faith school policy.