Thursday, August 12, 2010

Today's picks

  • Iain Dale hosted the first broadcast, hour long, debate between the two hopefuls vying to be Labour's London Mayoral candidate Oona King and Ken Livingstone here (click latest and then Labour mayoral candidate debate). Oona describes herself as a socialist and then goes on to describe what she thinks socialism is. Hold on to your hats.

  • Ben Six has an excellent post on the case for and against the Libyan man jailed for the Lockerbie disaster, Megrahi.

  • Red Pepper has a useful guide to myths about cuts.

  • The CPS has decided to prosecute four police officers. Sits down, gasps for breath.

  • On Friday 20th (7pm) there is going to be a hustings for the deputy leader candidates organised by the Young Greens at the Party HQ. If you want to come you need to book your place with the organiser j.m.buckner@hotmail.com

  • Continuing my tracking of the deputy leadership race on facebook Derek is currently on 82 and Adrian has, drum roll, 82. Honestly. I wonder if it will be this close on the actual vote? There will be more than 164 people voting...

5 comments:

Adam Pogonowski said...

Currently Derek has 87 to Adrian's 86. Not sure a Facebook group membership is a good poll though.

I expect many voters will be influenced by the "Caroline Adrian 'we are a team'" thing.

Jim Jepps said...

I've been doing updates every other day - naturally the total changes so it's only a snap shot.

You're the third person to comment in my hearing on Caroline and Adrian running as a team. I think some people think this is inappropriate, but it seems ok to me (after all we can ignore the team slate and vote CL and DW if we choose, or even AR and RON).

People seem to be saying that Caroline's influence is disproportionate and so she should have stayed neutral on the deputy - is that what you think? I'm yet to be convinced, but I'm interested if it is seen as a problem by some people.

Adam Pogonowski said...

Yeh, various people have said that they are *THE* team, and that we owe them so much, and it'd be great to keep them. Now, we do, as a party, owe them much, but to correlate that with an effective Dep Leader in my view is wrong. Caroline can endorse who she likes, but I'm really not a fan of this whole joint ticket. It's looks VERY PR-like too. And whilst the well informed Greens could ignore the slate, most "ordinary" members will probably go "yeah we got an MP, let's not fix what isn't broken" without perhaps, thinking about what we want as a party, and where we want to go ultimately.

Also, I'd like to see more members in the Green Party news. It's very South focused, and only about 4/5 people ever talked about. Bit depressing. I agree with you on the target election seats btw, as you talk about in your other post.

I don't even know what Adrian's policies are (and I guess that's why there is a hustings), but ability to really spend lots of time engaged with local Green groups around the UK, and even abroad, for we are a global movement, is imperative. That's why I think DW is best. Plus he's been at it for 30 solid years, and has millions of contacts! He's also very human and charismatic, and a good Dep Leader to really challenge, hold our party to account, and to complement CL.

Jim Jepps said...

Isn't there an element of honesty though if he is her preferred candidate it's probably good for people to know that.

I personally am in favour of markers that let you know where people stand when they stand in elections. Whether that's a slate name (most often in union and student elections) or a clarity about who's part of a proposed team.

It's doesn't just help me decide who to vote for but also who to avoid giving my vote to.

I wouldn't want to see permanent factions, as it were, but ad hoc slates of this kind could be quite helpful in internal elections I think

BenSix said...

Thanks for the link, Jim.