Poppy on Privatisation

Here is my video of the demonstration outside the town hall on 6th December 2012.  What happened next is well-documented by Barnet bloggers.

fix my street .com

Big thanks to mysociety.  First I uses their site for contacting my MP and David Cameron about the omnishambles that is Osbourne (see Chris Atkins video on GreenPeace). Then I looked at fixmystreet.com  If I were a local councillor this would be an invaluable tool.  Finally I wrote to my local councillor to urge Labour to ask questions about Pinkham Way.  It's no secret this local issue led to a great vote in Coppetts in 2012.  In the next 4 years I'm campaigning on parking issues taken straight from fixmystreet.com

Debate with Hendon Labour

I bumped into Adam a minor hack in Hendon Labour party at Hendon Station Sunday morning. We debated until I got off after two stops.  I disagreed with almost every point he made, so it's good to know I joined the right party.

- Green Thinking from Crop to Crumb

Green Party members Natalie Bennett (left) and Ben Samuel (right) visited the Bread Factory this week to show their support for this important project providing healthy food to local people while investing in a fleet with zero carbon pollution. The Green Party passed new policy at its recent National Conference offering more support to local food initiatives. The Greens recognised the vital role they can play in providing fresher, more healthy food, addressing growing food poverty and greening local communities. Of course the new fleet is also more environmentally friendly, relying less on dirty diesel (£110 a tank) and making our food distribution systems less reliant on fuel. Ben Samuel, 25, who lives in the Brent Cross community said ‘We would like to see more of these fleets and see them getting better infrastructure from Barnet Council. The Council should be supporting local food by ensuring their procurement process makes use of local produce. The Brent Cross Cricklewood regeneration should also be used to encourage the inclusion of food growing spaces that can be used by the community and unused land should be made available for people to grow their own food, whether you're into rocket or coleslaw sandwich fillings’. 
The director of the Bread Factory said,  "This initiative came out of thinking about how we take care of the environment.   We have here two electric vans.  We hope to get two more.  The other thing is the electricity it is fed by is now fed by solar or wind, so as I was saying to the Green Party it is zero emissions.  We hope to do our small change from our small perspective here in Hendon"
Alon from Oreo V representing the new vans said... I think this is an historic movement.  We believe the revolution of electric cars starts here.  Electric vehicles are more efficient.  All trains are now electric.  It is very brave to be taking that first step.
Natalie Bennett, said "John Lewis had electric delivery vans.  Back then there was hundreds and hundreds of different sorts of vehicles on our roads, especially adapted by their manufacturers to be suited to the job.  We got away from that with mass production and so what you have now is vehicles that are probably designed for running around motorways at high speed and high energy capacities and I was hearing earlier today lots of them do 60-80 km a day around London and the average speed in London is 7 mph (12 kph).  So what you are doing is going back to the future! Back to the right vehicle for the right job which means that we are also producing on a small scale with the right thing for the right job.  Now this is the sort of industry that we in the Green Party believe we need and that of course mirrors what you are doing with bread too because you are employing lots of (300) people and you said earlier that you value your people too.  And what we need is we need jobs, we need energy efficiency and we need quality products and you are delivering all of those, congratulations."
The manufacturer told me informally the battery now weighs only 150 kg, and I asked him if there was evidence that it goes 100 miles; of course the answer was yes.  I also asked them if the Bread Factory had any plans for green roofs.
Stop press: The Greens are now the third party in London ahead of the Lib-Dems, according to the last Assembly Poll which uses a proportional system.  The Green constituency candidate for the Assembly got nearly 11% of votes cast, behind local Tory Brian Coleman, but ahead of the Lib-Dem.

Make Barnet sustainable - and save money

Barnet Council's Conservative leaders have given themselves until December to come up with ideas to turn their Future Shape strategy into a serious policy rather than just a collection of political soundbites.
Here's my proposal: Abandon the dogma about 'cuts' and 'privatisation', which might end up costing more money rather than creating savings. If they want genuine buzz words I suggest 'sustainability' and 'solar panels'.
Birmingham Council has agreed a 100 million pounds scheme to create jobs and sharply reduce the city's carbon emissions. The project will start by giving an energy efficiency upgrade to 10,000 existing homes and energy savings in the retrofitted homes will generate funding for similar work on thousands more homes in the city.
Birmingham is a Conservative-Liberal Democrat administration so why can't Barnet's Tories come up with a similar plan that would create jobs, improve the lives of occupants of the improved homes and lead to a sharp reduction in energy costs and carbon emissions?
Before anyone asks where Barnet would get the initial funding, can I point out that Birmingham Council itself is only putting up 25 million pounds, ie roughly the amount that Barnet Council handed over to Icelandic banks.
I'm sure banks (British not Icelandic ones please!) would be eager to lend Barnet Council the money for an equivalent energy savings scheme and there might be ways of reducing the council's proportion to an even smaller percentage of costs.
The feed-in-tariffs which energy companies pay for power from sustainable sources mean, for instance, that photovoltaic panels can generate surplus electricity every year worth up to 10 percent of the cost of their installation. After ten years the panels are paid for and the electricity is pure profit.
Companies and syndicates are starting to spring up to develop rooftop “sun harvesting” operations and Barnet Council's thousands of homes, schools and other buildings would be an extremely attractive resource.
That's the kind of project that Future Shape should be looking at: dynamic, exciting, forward-looking, job-creating and sustainable.

Future Shape is so... shapeless

Barnet Green Party calls on Barnet Council’s Conservative administration to cancel its notorious Future Shape strategy after auditors Grant Thornton criticised the policy as lacking direction.

The damning report to the council’s audit committee by a team of expert professionals highlights that council leader Lynne Hillan and her cronies don’t have the faintest idea how much money Future Shape might save, nor do they have a serious programme for implementing the scheme.

“Grant Thornton’s report shows that Future Shape, better known as easyCouncil, is a complete mess,” says Andrew Newby, who was Barnet Green Party’s candidate for Hendon in this year’s general election.

“Barnet Conservatives’ concept seems simply to be: ‘Let’s privatise as much as we can and hope it saves money’,” Newby said.

“I call on Barnet Council to cancel Future Shape and go back to the idea that local authorities exist to provide accountable, democratically-controlled services, assessed according to the needs of local residents rather than treated as a trial ground for baseless political dogmas.”

Grant Thornton’s report spells out clearly that the easyCouncil idea is all talk and no substance. The experts wrote: “The council needs to develop and agree a more fundamental mandate for the programme by developing a programme level business case that sets out the planned costs, benefits, time scales, risks and outcomes of the programme.”

Councillor Brian Coleman this week launched a typically childish tirade of insults against the organisers of the Barnet Alliance for Public Services but his outburst was no more than a desperate bid to distract attention from the fact that Future Shape is a shambles.

Newby said: “Grant Thornton’s report provides proof if any were needed that Future Shape is merely an attention-grabbing attempt to implement political dogma without a scrap of evidence that it could achieve real savings and efficiencies. Future Shape? It is definitely Shapeless and let us hope it has no Future.”

Even Coleman might be taken aback if he had any real idea of what happened at Thursday’s launch of the Alliance at the North London Business Park. Not only was the meeting well organised with a panel of prestigious speakers including film director Ken Loach, but more than 200 local people crowded the Emerald Suite to express their anger at the current threats to local schools, hospitals, social services and libraries. Hardly the “lone voices” imagined by Coleman.

Everyone went away fired up to campaign to save our vital local services and facilities.

“It became clear to me that though Tory councillors are eager to slash jobs and cut budgets, what really motivates them is privatising as many of the council’s services as possible. Council workers told the meeting of how they had asked fruitlessly for details of how outsourcing their particular operation would save money – it was obvious that there were no details,” Newby said.

Unfortunately, outsourcing privatisation often leads to greatly increased costs rather than savings, as Private Eye magazine spells out in case studies in almost every issue.

“It is far from proven that Barnet Council needs to make the humungous spending cuts that a being talked about but even if savings are necessary the first priorities should be to save jobs and avoid any hardship to people who use council services. Those are definitely not uppermost in the minds of Barnet’s Conservatives, who simply want to make a name for themselves with massive privatisations,” Newby said.

Barnet Greens earn 20,000 votes but still denied seats

Barnet Green Party would like to thank everyone in the borough who voted Green in the national and local elections last week and we would particularly like to thank the dozens of people who helped out, some of whom contacted us out of the blue.

The number of Green votes in the Barnet borough elections almost doubled from 11,637 in 2006 to 20,388 this time, which would have entitled us to several councillors under a proportional election system. Unfortunately, the current winners-take-all system continues to deny us any seats on the council, demonstrating at a local level the urgent need for major electoral reform.

Thankfully Caroline Lucas managed to win the Greens’ first ever parliamentary seat when she triumphed in Brighton Pavilion constituency, while across the country additional Green councillors were elected in Bristol, Cambridge, Reigate, Reading and Hull, though the vagaries of the dreadful voting system and linking of the parliamentary and local elections meant we lost a few seats on some councils in London.

“As I monitored the count for East Finchley, the ward where I was a candidate, I saw that an enormous number of people had voted for names from two or three different parties, rather than backing three candidates from a single party. Judging from my strolls around the marquees where the votes were tallied, the trend was the same in other wards,” said Barnet Green Party press officer Andrew Newby.

This proves that a large proportion of people in Barnet borough really would like to see a balanced council, with a fair representation of all the political parties rather than the overwhelmingly Conservative administration that we are lumbered with.

Let us hope that the new British government, in whatever shape it may take, brings in a truly proportional voting system for local councils as well as for parliament.

Meanwhile, Barnet Green Party will continue to campaign on the many urgent local issues, not least our efforts to persuade the council to adopt a 20 mph speed limit in all residential streets in the borough. This would not only reduce accidents but make side streets more pleasant to walk or cycle along, improving people’s quality of life and boosting community spirit.

We will very much need your help in future and hope you will continue to support us as we begin preparations for the next major electoral challenge, the London Assembly elections in 2012, when we and activists across London will be fighting to increase the number of Green members of the London Assembly. Greens have played a key role in shaping policies on the assembly and could have even more influence if we win additional seats.