West Hendon Estate

More Tory antics, much of which covered in today's Hendon & Finchley Times.
The claim that 3 tiers of Tory government is good for Hendon is ludicrous, because Cllr Sodha herself betrayed thousands of West Hendon residents who elected her on a Labour ticket to keep the Tories out then she joined the Tories.  What is going on is against the will of the people.

As the Barnet Bugle documents, there was a vote, and most people did not vote for regeneration.
My friend who owns a flat on the West Hendon estate itself says today he will be handed a CPO - compulsory purchase order.  This is to give local people a raw deal.  We should be at the centre of the redevelopment as the local community, not priced out of the new flats, called something posh like Lakeside.  It's not even a lake, it's a reservoir.

The Greens are making housing our number 1 priority these elections and we've spent months in the run up to the campaign on these issues working with local shops, the radical housing network, and the new social media based group, Our West Hendon. (photo from said twitter)

As a member of a genuinely non-racist and pro-immigration party, I am glad that in a recent panel on international students it was said that rent caps are a policy which resonates with migrants.  I have seen it work to gain support on the doorstep from one monk I canvassed in Burnt Oak who was evidently from Tibet.

Ben Samuel - Green Party local candidate for West Hendon

Can Labour save us from the Tories?

I was at that excellent pub by the 240 bus stop at the top of Mill Hill with some friends and left a Green Party "No cuts" leaflet lying around - the one we used on March 26th.  Someone commented well that's just Labour isn't it.
Yes there's a danger of us being seen as a smaller version of the Labour Party but let's just examine what Labour's policies really are.

Do you remember HS2, that grand folly launched by the Labour government?
Look back a bit further and you will see numerous examples of cuts and privatisation; something we on the left oppose.

Labour have been gutted since 1997 and perhaps opposed most labour strikes before that.  They have taken over and illegally co-opted and tamed the big unions.

No doubt controlled by the greatest conservative prime minister ever, Tony Blair, Labour were the only ones brave enough to sell off our rail operators and make unemployment benefits dependant on looking for non-existent jobs, and even displacing real ones.

Before that, Labour were as small as the Green Party.  The challenge is that we have only 40 months to do what Labour did in a century; become the leaders of the opposition and cobble together a decent government; possibly in coalition with Labour politicians such as commentator Owen Jones the activists of Compass but at this stage that's of course not on the table until we have more MP's.  Good green candidates are Surrey, Chipping Barnet, Oxford, Bristol, Warwickshire, Essex, and of course Norfolk ; mostly not Labour seats, the only Labour target being Brighton though our friends on the left of Labour think this is a mistake to fight Caroline Lucas of course.

Hendon is likely to swing to Labour and we haven't selected yet meaning the Lib Dems could cling on to third place here.  I think my Lib Dem friends in Hendon will be voting for us as a second preference in the next big European election in 2014.

And if you have got this far and have time to look into Labour's housing policy, try looking at the top comment on this article http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/11/housing-renting-rising-property-prices
and glance at this week's letters page in the local Press.  Labour built precisely zero in 8 years.

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.