Monthly Archives: December 2010

Greens to contest Oldham East and Saddleworth By-election

Posted on December 24, 2010 by | Leave a comment

A by-election has been called in the Oldham East and Saddleworth constituency, with polling on 13th January, 2011. Derbyshire Green Party member Peter Allen from Glossop, who stood in the High Peak in May, has been selected to represent the Green Party. The election follows the resignation of the former Labour MP Phil Woolas, who was debarred from Parliament for electoral mal-practice.

This contest will be the first electoral test for the coalition Government, and interestingly, both the LibDems and the Tories will be standing. The LibDems were 103 votes short of taking the seat from Labour in May, and under normal circumstances, they would be expected to take the seat comfortably. However, these are not normal circumstances, the LibDems are taking flack from the Tory press, and they are set to reap a bitter harvest over their U-turns on student fees, nuclear power and other issues. The word on the street is that Labour will hold the seat.

Media interest in the campaign will grow considerably in the New Year with the coalition partners competing against each other. The Tories will be keen to out poll the LibDems and they will work hard to get out their vote in the Saddleworth part of the Constituency. If they can do this, it will strengthen the hand of those in the party who want to break the coalition and go for an early poll before the advent of AV. These backwoodsmen will try hard to discredit the idea of coalition government, and as the Telegraph has done, will use any tactic how ever underhand, to convince the electorate that coalition is inherently unstable and delivers weak government. They do not want to share power – ever, they want absolute control to protect their vested interests.

This contest will also be seen as an early evaluation of Ed Millibands leadership of Labour and of his attempts to repair the damage done to the Party by Blair’s flirtation with American conservatism. He has yet to establish himself as a leader with a clear profile and agenda, and Labour has much to live down. They will find it difficult to criticise the cuts agenda that they would also have followed. They can hardly vigorously oppose the rise of student fees that they introduced, and in power, they were very keen to get private companies involved in both education delivery and the NHS.

There is also a dark side to the campaign. Oldham was the scene of serious rioting in 2001 and following that, the BNP did particularly well in both Oldham constituencies, polling 11% in Oldham East in the 2001 general election. Since then their vote has fallen back to around 5%, they did save their deposit in May. Since the riots, the causes of which remain controversial, much work has been done in the town to address the issue of segregation within the borough, but still the extreme right consider this to be fertile territory and both the BNP and the National Front have indicated that they will stand.

Many in Oldham do not accept that the riots of 2001 were race riots. There is a belief that the national media decided that this was the explanation and sensationalised events, so drawing in extremists from out of the area looking for a fight. People of Oldham are no more racist than in any other part of the country and do not welcome the inference that riots were due to local bigotry. They will probably not welcome the presence of extremist candidates in the by-election.

Greens clearly will work hard to out poll the negative extremists. Our aim is to focus the campaign on the issues that will affect the livelihoods and well-being of all people in the constituency and to offer positive alternatives to the ruinous ConDem policy of cuts. This includes the Green New Deal, a costed programme of investment in Green technology and the public sector to create thousands of sustainable jobs. We go in to the contest as the only party supporting free education at the point of delivery, knowing that it is through education that people can escape poverty and build self-confidence and a sense of self-worth, which the progressive private sector also requires.

Greens apply the same principle to the National Health Service, knowing that all people must have access to healthcare according to their needs and not their wealth. We will tell the electorate that the Green Deal is the pathway to creating thousands of new and sustainable jobs, that through a programme of home insulation we can cut energy bills, saving people money and providing work for local businesses. We will tell the electorate that the climate is changing, that the weather will become more extreme, but by addressing this issue now, we can create sustainable work and businesses now and avoid serious costs in the future. Greens will offer a positive message of hope in the face of the negative petty political point scoring of the other parties.

To keep updated with the campaign, visit http://www.oldhamgreens.org.com. If you can help this campaign in any way please contact, [email protected]

[Mike Shipley 23 December 2010]

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Greens now the only political party fighting for free education

Posted on December 15, 2010 by | 1 comment

Green Party education policy states: “education is a right and an entitlement and should be free at the point of delivery to people of all ages”. Education does not just benefit the student; by developing skills and knowledge, it benefits society. It is reasonable that society should enable all its members to receive a good education. It is not reasonable to limit good education to those who can afford it. Education is an investment in the future. If that investment is limited, the future will be poorer. Making higher education once again a privilege for the affluent is socially divisive; it will also exclude many people from careers that require graduate training. Inequalities within society will increase which will affect everyone’s quality of life. This will be the outcome of the ConDem Governments policy on financing higher education.

Speaking after the House of Commons vote on tuition fees, Caroline Lucas said: “This is a dark day for the future of higher education in this country. The huge hikes in tuition fees, together with the scrapping of Educational Maintenance Allowance and proposed cuts in college funding, amount to nothing less than a Government assault on our young people – and an attack on the principles of universal education. Many people may be priced out of going to university as a result of today’s vote – and those who do go are likely to be saddled with massive debt. This is unacceptable for a society which values social mobility and inclusiveness.”

There are alternative ways to fund education, including a more progressive taxation system. For example, raising UK corporation tax to the G7 average would generate the funds needed to abolish tuition fees and still leave our main corporation tax below that of the USA. A business education tax levied on the top 4% of UK companies, as proposed by the University and Colleges Union, would require business to pay its fair share for the substantial benefits it receives from higher education and would allow us to raise investment in our Universities to the average for a developed country.

The Conservative Party is aggressively pursuing a policy of privatization, aiming to disconnect Government at all levels, from the supply of services to the public. They have both health and education clearly in their sights and the Liberal Democrats are not opposing them. The withdrawal of funding to arts and social science courses, and the hike in fees is part of this policy. Our Universities are to be run as businesses, selling their product – education, at a profit. Courses offered will be those that run at a profit as required by their corporate sponsors and investors. Their customers will buy their product with the principle intention of getting a well-paid job. Education will no longer be about developing the mind, or about intellectual challenge. Students will no longer experience the excitement of discovery, the joy of learning, the profound satisfaction of understanding new and challenging concepts. In the sterile learning factories of the ConDem world, they probably will not even be much interested in their fellow students beyond simple sensual gratification.

Greens believe that Higher Education is essential in developing a civilized society. Education is a process, not a product. It should be available to anyone who wants to study for a degree regardless of his or her age or background. Its purpose is to challenge ignorance and prejudice, to raise and answer questions and indeed if necessary, to challenge orthodoxy and authority. This will prevent the fossilization of society and the emergence of a new dark age.

Mike Shipley 14 December 2010

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Free Membership For Students And Young People

Posted on December 12, 2010 by | Leave a comment

Join the Green Party here.

In an unprecedented move, the Green Party today offered free membership to people under 30 or in full-time education.

Any student or young person who applies to join the Green Party before 31st January 2011 will pay no subscription for the coming year. Green Party leader Caroline Lucas MP said today:

“I want students and young people to know there is a political party that still cares about their future, and that will keep fighting for a fairer future and will not give up on doing the right thing.

“We have to keep fighting, because we can’t leave the future of our country and our planet to people who want to run things primarily in the interests of big business and the wealthiest people.

“Politics is important and it’s time to reclaim it. I want to extend the warmest possible welcome to all new members, but not least to students and young people who are having such a difficult time at the hands of the other political parties.”

Greens want “a society which values mobility and inclusiveness”

Caroline, who was elected as Britain’s first Green MP in this year’s general election – and who has stood strongly by the Green Party’s policy of universal free education – said last night after the tuition fees vote:

“This is a dark day for the future of higher education in this country. The huge hikes in tuition fees, together with the scrapping of Educational Maintenance Allowance and proposed cuts in college funding, amount to nothing less than a Government assault on our young people – and an attack on the principles of universal education. Many people may be priced out of going to university as a result of today’s vote – and those who do go are likely to be saddled with massive debt. This is unacceptable for a society which values social mobility and inclusiveness.”

Further information

1. Students and young people can join the Green Party free here.

2. Students can normally join the Green Party for £5, as opposed to the standard membership rate of £31. Many people, however, pay higher membership fees to help the party fund its campaigns. Donations are always welcome, as the Green Party receives no financial backing from unions or big businesses as Labour and the Conservatives do, but gets the bulk of its income from members and ordinary supporters.

3. For any enquiries regarding individual membership call 020 7272 4474. For media enquiries only, call 020 7561 0282.

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No Pitch For The Racist Vote, Thanks

Posted on December 5, 2010 by | Leave a comment

Yarl's Wood Immigration Detention Centre

It is certainly disturbing to log on to the Derbyshire Green Party channel on YouTube and find the British National Party among its subscribers, for our party and the BNP have absolutely nothing in common. Quite apart from the fact that the BNP’s position on man-made global warming is that it does not exist, it is a racist party which attracts violent hooligans and sees its remit as stirring up ethnic conflict. The Green Party, needless to say, is not and does not.

In Chesterfield the BNP has no presence. It has never put up a candidate in a General Election and the tiny handful it has put forward in local elections have always been trounced at the ballot box. Unfortunately, however, the extremist BNP is not the only party to attract xenophobes, nor to seek to do so, as we shall see.

The British establishment has a long and ignoble history on this subject and continues to set a shameful example. Wikileaks has revealed that the Foreign Office’s director of overseas territories in 2009 referred to the dispossessed Chagos Islanders as “Man Fridays” in his conversation with his American counterparts while the head of state’s consort has referred publicly to the “slitty eyes” of Oriental people and asked Aborigines in Australia whether they still throw spears. I suppose that off-the-cuff stereotyping and casual racism are the stuff of upper-class japes though, so maybe we should look at a few more disturbing examples:

It was Peter Griffiths, the Conservative Party candidate in the Smethwick constituency on 1964, who became infamous for fighting and winning the seat using the slogan “If you want a nigger for a neighbour, vote Labour.” When, in his maiden speech as Prime Minister, Harold Wilson described new MP Griffiths as a leper, 50 Tory MPs walked out in protest at what they saw as an insult to their colleague. Peter Griffiths lost the seat in a by-election 2 years later but was welcomed as a candidate in Portsmouth and was a Tory MP again from 1979 to 1997 notwithstanding his appalling history.

Individual Conservatives MPs and parliamentary candidates regularly step out of line, apparently failing to comprehend that racist jokes are no longer acceptable or that to refer to Rhodesia’s Ian Smith as a hero might be offensive to non-white people. Recently the Lib Dems’ Jeremy Browne, foreign minister in the coalition government, showed that he at least has gone native since joining up with the Tories by going on BBC Question Time and referring to the French riding bikes and wearing onions round their necks. Before the General Election the Liberal Democrats pledged to end the incarceration of children in immigration service detention centres but presumably this is just another promise they would not have made had they known they would be in government, because kids are still locked up in dreadful places like Yarl’s Wood seven months later.

While the Tories have always provided a natural home for those with right wing views, more recently Labour has been courting the same constituency with some determination. Peter Mandelson was quoted, after this year’s General Election, saying that Labour were defeated because they had failed to engage with the white working class, as if there could be no other logical reason why the electorate should have spurned the Party that gave us the war in Iraq, ID cards and abolition of the 10% tax rate while allowing an unregulated financial sector to cost us billions in bail-out money. You might think that having been MP for Hartlepool Lord Mandelson might have more insight into working class people than to categorise them as racist bigots and thickos, but one man who certainly put Mandelson’s thoughts into practice was Phil Woolas. His campaign of lies against his main rival has led to his making history, seeing his win overturned and a by-election ordered - so grave were his accusations that the Liberal Democrat candidate was a supporter of Muslim extremists. Of course, Phil Woolas’s tactics were bare-facedly an attempt to woo Oldham East and Saddleworth’s racist voters; this in a town where the race riots of 2001 are still fresh in the memory. “If we don’t get the white vote angry, he’s gone” was the advice of Woolas’s agent after canvassing voters, and there followed a torrent of rubbish through the letter boxes of Eastern Oldham including made-up tales of death threats and a fake picture of his opponent being arrested. Phil Woolas has not gone quietly into the political wilderness and still proclaims to have done nothing wrong.

Before Woolas was cast out of parliament, new Labour leader Ed Miliband appointed him Shadow Immigration Minister. A Tory opponent described this appointment as representing an appalling lack of judgment on Ed Miliband’s behalf, and on this occasion I think I agree. A nicer example of a leader putting a metaphorical fox in charge of a chicken shed would be hard to imagine.

In Barking, joy at the drubbing dished out by the voters of Barking to BNP Nick Griffin was only slightly tempered, but tempered none the less, by the fact that his conqueror, Margaret Hodge, has shown herself not averse to appealing to prejudice as potential vote-winner. Her quote in 2008 that 80% of her white-skinned constituents were thinking of voting BNP because “no-one else is listening to them” was part of a clear attempt to create tension by implying, wrongly, that people from non-white backgrounds were being given priority in services and housing. The effect of the remarks was, as she must surely have been expecting and therefore presumably thought worth doing anyway, that the BNP gained both additional respectability and much useful publicity in the area.

So what of the Green Party? We don’t have an open-door immigration policy but we do have one based on compassion and we certainly do not seek to represent those who would like to foment racial tension. We will not be subscribing to the BNP’s YouTube channel! Having grown up and gone to school in a Northern town my fellow candidate Sarah and I have a more balanced view of working class people than Peter Mandelson and we are not expecting people, on their doorsteps, to make race or immigration an issue. There are far more pressing concerns in Holmebrook Ward, notably security of tenure and the area’s relatively high dependency on means-tested benefits, which are due to fall in real terms next year, making the poor even poorer and low paid workers even worse off than they are now in terms of being able to care for their homes and their families. We believe that, regardless of what Peter Mandelson or the proprietors of The Sun, The Mail and the Daily Express may believe, working class people, of whatever colour, are not bigots or thickos, and unlike Peter Griffiths in 1964 and Phil Woolas in 2010 we shall not be peering into the gutter when searching for votes.

Chris Connolly
Candidate: Holmebrook Ward

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The Coalition Government Attacks Animal Welfare Legislation

Posted on December 5, 2010 by | Leave a comment

The ConDem Government has mounted a major assault on animal welfare legislation. Spearheaded by Agriculture Minister James Paice, who owns a farm in Cambridgeshire, they have initiated a series of secretive moves that will scrap or compromise many laws relating to animal welfare, some of which have yet to come into force.

Legislation on de-beaking hens is likely to be delayed indefinitely, allowing the practice of removing part of a chicken’s beak to continue. This is done to control feather plucking in crowded conditions; feather plucking in birds is a sign of stress. The RSPCA described the practice as “an insult to hens’ welfare.”

The use of battery cages was due to be banned across the EU from 2012, but despite having had 10 years to prepare for the ban, the industry is lobbying hard to indefinitely postpone the enforcement date. The Government is attempting to alter the European legislation to allow the sale of battery eggs within the country of origin. They also plan to scrap a law to ban keeping game birds, reared for so-called sport, in small breeding cages outside, in which they have little room to move. Animal Aid’s campaign manager Kate Fowler said: “The Coalition Government has wasted no time in removing a raft of popular measures that provided important protection for farmed and wild animals.”

The Department of the Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) has quietly dropped a series of charges against abattoir operators for animal cruelty. Footage, caught by Animal Aid, showed abattoir workers kicking cattle, pigs and sheep, but DEFRA said that such evidence would not hold up in court as it was obtained by trespassing. Tim Smith, head of the Food Standards Agency, which enforces slaughterhouse standards, said, “the cruelty on show is the worst I have seen.”

DEFRA has also postponed a ban on using wild animals in circuses, preferring instead to negotiate ‘self regulation’ for the industry. There are currently some 40 tigers, elephants, zebras, and other animals forced to do tricks for circuses in the UK. The ban was first put forward by Labour minister Jim Fitzpatrick after a poll showed 95% of the public supported the idea.

Caroline Lucas MP, Vice Chair of the All Party Group on Animal Welfare and former President of the European Parliament’s cross-party Animal Welfare Intergroup, is one of 143 politicians who have now signed a parliamentary Early Day Motion (EDM) 403 calling for the wild animal ban to be implemented. She said - “There is simply no justification in the 21st century for the continued use of wild animals in circuses. I share the concerns of Animal Defense International and other animal welfare groups, that self-regulation of animal welfare in the circus industry is doomed to fail. The Government can only halt the abuse of captive animals kept for so-called ‘entertainment’ via an outright ban, which polls suggest the majority of British people support.”

Caroline has also signed EDM942 - Not In My Cuppa And Cows Belong In Fields. This is critical of the proposal to develop an American style super dairy in Lincolnshire. A factory originally designed to hold 8,000 cows, although local opposition has forced the developers to scale this down to 4,000. The concern is that with a deliberate weakening of animal welfare legislation, the condition for cattle within these factories will be no better than for battery hens or in intensive pig units. With animals kept under stress and in such close proximity, disease will always be a high risk. In the event of an epidemic, of course the taxpayer will bail out the farmers who have willfully neglected the welfare of their animals. One such disease of cattle that results from poor husbandry in crowded conditions is bovine TB.

Farmers like to blame badgers for TB, and they have successfully lobbied the farmer-minister to continue with the annual cull of badgers, a protected species. 80% of bovine TB transmission is from cattle to cattle. Even if the cull made badgers extinct in the UK, TB would remain a major cattle disease. Culling breaks up stable badger communities, displaced animals enter new areas, so spreading the disease. Badgers are a scapegoat for poor husbandry, and sadly, some people like hunting and killing them - they think it a manly sport. These people have the ear of the Minister of Agriculture.

As indeed do those who enjoy chasing and killing foxes. The Conservative Party has said that it will overturn the hunting ban.

All of this is being done in the name of ‘cutting red tape’, scaling back Government and ‘letting business get on with business’. Unfortunately, agri-buisness has little regard for animal welfare; animals are nothing more than ‘products’. Wild animals are there for our benefit, to use as we see fit, to destroy if they threaten profits. To the country landowners, concern for their welfare is sentimentality, the preserve of woolly-minded liberalism.

Greens beg to differ. The way we treat animals says much about our society, just as the way a person treats animals says much about that person. Ghandi said - “The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated.”

Cruelty should neither be tolerated nor treated lightly. Consider the words of humanitarian Dr. Albert Schweitzer: “Anyone who has accustomed himself to regard the life of any living creature as worthless is in danger of arriving also at the idea of worthless human lives.” Do we see parallels between this rolling back on animal protection legislation and the growing disregard for the welfare of the most vulnerable in society?”

There is growing evidence that cruelty is an indicator of deeper psychological disorders. According to Robert K. Ressler, who developed profiles of serial killers for the FBI, “Murderers … very often start out by killing and torturing animals as kids.” In fact, the American Psychiatric Association considers animal cruelty one of the diagnostic criteria of conduct disorder. FBI Supervisory Special Agent Allen Brantley takes the view that “animal cruelty… is not a harmless venting of emotion in a healthy individual; this is a warning sign…”

To quote Albert Schweitzer again - “We must fight against the spirit of unconscious cruelty with which we treat the animals. Animals suffer as much as we do. True humanity does not allow us to impose such sufferings on them. It is our duty to make the whole world recognize it. Until we extend our circle of compassion to all living things, humanity will not find peace.”

Cruelty, and the toleration of cruelty, be it in the name of profit, sport or ideology, should not be accepted. As St. Francis of Assisi recognised - “If you have men who will exclude any of God’s creatures from the shelter of compassion and pity, you will have men who will deal likewise with their fellow men.”

For more information on campaigns against animal cruelty visit:

The League against Cruel Sports - www.league.org.uk

The Badger Protection League - www.badgerprotectionleague.com.

Compassion in World Farming - http://www.ciwf.org.uk

[Mike Shipley 5 December 2010]



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