When I heard the news, I was just gobsmacked. I could not believe it. I had thought we didn’t any longer punish people who were suffering from mental ill-health, for trying to kill themselves.

It appears that the recommendation of the probation service which advised that Steven shouldn’t go to prison has been ignored.

A vulnerable person who was seeking to end his own life, and who is no threat to the community, should not be sent to prison. What is so hard to understand in that?

But it is apparently too hard for our punitive culture — as embodied in this case in this judge — to get its head around. (This is also about capitalism and the law: the reason why Steven’s case went as gravely it did in court was partly a result purely of the financial scale of the damage done to the property.)

Steven has suffered from severe depression and he attempted suicide last year in an incident which led to this court case. At no time did Steven intend to harm anyone other than himself and he had no intention of causing damage to anybody’s property.

Although Steven has made a good recovery, depression can recur and he needs support to maintain his recovery. Especially after his girlfriend died of a heart-attack last weekend.

Over the last year, Steven has had difficulty finding appropriate support from health professionals. I know this from personal experience; I saw Steven and his other close friends really struggling to get him the support he needed. His recovery thus far is testament to his own determination. It is obviously now severely jeopardised, by the criminal ‘justice’ system.

This story of a microcosm of the dismayingly outdated attitudes in our society to mental ill-health. It is political; and it isn’t over yet. I am sure that Steven will not take this sentence lying down, and nor will I, and nor, I hope, will you.

I’m proposing another radical idea: that future generations be formally represented within our existing parliamentary democracy.

The idea is presented in a report entitled ‘Guardians of the Future: A Constitutional Case for representing and protecting Future People‘, launched yesterday at the House of Commons.

I suggest the creation of strong ‘guardians’ to protect future generations’ basic needs.

Building upon a Burkean conception of democracy, of society as a partnership “not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born” – I propose the creation of a ‘super-jury’ to be placed above the upper house.

Members would be selected by chance (as juries are) from the population at large, in order to ensure independence from present-day party-political interests. The Guardians’ central powers would be a veto over new legislation that would damage/compromise the basic needs of future people, and a right to force a review of existing legislation that is already damaging their basic needs.

Society’s chronic short-termism, evidenced in the creation of legislation as virtually everywhere else, may have extreme consequences for future generations. My proposal would give future people a powerful proxy voice in such matters, and for that reason I believe that it should demand consideration and informed discussion.

It isn’t going to be implemented next week; but perhaps think-tanks too often focus only on what can be brought in next week, rather than what might change the agenda so that, next year or next decade, we can finally get the kind of change that we actually need, rather than mere technocratic tinkering.

The idea has already been welcomed on Guardian Environment, where a huge debate has been going on. I also wear with a badge of pride that Brendan O’Neill at the Torygraph is annoyed – I must be getting something right!

—
Rupert Read is the chair of the new think-tank Green House. The launch event was hosted by Green leader Caroline Lucas MP, and addressed by Labour MP Jon Cruddas MP and Libdem MP Norman Baker.

I chaired the meeting, at which we launched our first two papers.

- Sustainability Citizenship by Prof Andrew Dobson, Keele University, urging politicians to involve people in decision making as morally acting citizens; and
- Mutual Security in a Sustainable Economy by Molly Scott Cato, Green Economist and Brian Heatley, a former senior civil servant. This paper sets out how we should redefine poverty, disconnect welfare from the labour market and reconsider the retirement age.

Both these papers are now available on our website: http://www.greenhousethinktank.org

The Green House Advisory Group, whose membership makes clear that this is far more than just a Green Party initiative.

It is also far more than just a metropolitan organisation. Our board so far includes:

» Michael Meacher MP, the former Labour Environment Minsister;
» Bea Campbell, the feminist, journalist, playwright and broadcaster;
» Tim Jackson, Professor of Sustainable Development at the university of Surrey and author of the influential book Prosperity without Growth;
» Jean Lambert, London’s Green MEP;
» Victor Anderson, a former member of the London Assembly and green economist;
» Mary Mellor, leading eco-feminist;
» Jonathan Porritt, former chair of the Sustainable Development Commission;
» Geoff Tansey, a leading expert on creating a fair and sustainable food system; and
» Simon Thomas, former Plaid Cymru MP for Ceredigion, and member of the Welsh Assembly.

Green House expects to publish further papers this Autumn the food price crisis and the future of banking.

I hope that LC readers will welcome this new development.

Green House is interested in joint initiatives with progressives; contact me offline (or in the comments, below), if you have ideas.

Our website: http://www.greenhousethinktank.org

But, Lords reform might be severely hampered if it is perceived to be bringing in a variation of the very system that the British electorate has just voted down. This makes AV-Plus or STV (which is simply AV in multi-member constituencies) extremely undesirable as potential methods for use in elections to the upper house.

So I was dismayed to see that Clegg is contemplating STV as his preferred method.

This could invite contempt from the media, the public, and from the Lords themselves!

This is not just a techy or dweeby point. Picking the wrong voting system for Lords reform could kill it. All the opponents of reform are looking for is an excuse.

As I recently argued on LibDemVoice, surely instead we have to look either to AMS (e.g. in the Scots version, or better still in the classic ’1 vote’ version that is Green Party policy: where you simply have a large-enough top-up to ensure proportionality) or to a fully list-based PR-system.

The worry that the latter would lead to party-domination can be countered by having open lists.

Do we really want to wait another 100 years to reform the upper house, just because of a poor choice of voting system for electing it with?

Some obvious and crucial points first.. Clegg was of course an albatross.

Plus, the right-wing-press simply decided that it wasn’t going to tolerate AV. They had more money (still undeclared) and money can be used to buy votes.

The plain lies of the No campaign and senior Tories to confuse the voters as much as possible seems to have paid off.

But the failure of the Yes campaign to make much progress is also down to various factors, over which there should be a little more breast-beating.

Some of these are the responsibility of the official Yes campaign; some are more widely-distributed around the ‘progressive’ movement:

» The deep overall failure to message adequately, as my colleague Matt Wootton has argued here on LC. The problem began with the failure of the YES side to establish that there was a profound problem with FPTP. That’s the first step any campaign needs: ‘Here is a serious problem that needs fixing’. YES failed at that first hurdle. (more here)

» The official YES campaign was over-centralised. Large numbers of leaflets etc. were dumped with relatively little warning onto people ill-equipped to utilise them in a timely manner. We thus had the terrible irony of the side with less money (Yes) ending up with large numbers of undelivered letters/leaflets – the printing for which had of course been paid for out of that thin war-chest…

» The YES campaign made a horrendous mistake in not doing a freepost leaflet to the whole country, instead focussing its resources extremely selectively. For just half a million pounds, everyone could have received a substantial focussed high-production-values leaflet, to counter the unpleasant propaganda that the official NO campaign DID push through every letterbox in the land.

They told me they had decided to spend their money elsewhere. Bad decision. As it was, there were many people who had been convinced by the NO material that they had received, and who simply had nothing from YES to counter it or to reframe.

» The failure of HopeNotHate to endorse the #Yes2AV campaign: such an endorsement was said to be ‘in the pipeline’ but never materialised. HopeNotHate’s gargantuan email list could have greatly bolstered the Yes campaign, instead of being frittered away on short-termist efforts to campaign against the BNP in particular localities.

» The failure of 38degrees to endorse the #Yes2AV campaign: This is the dreadful fence-sitting job they came up with in the end.

» The preponderance of the NO voice in Labour, which raises a serious question: IS there really a ‘progressive movement’ in this country? Electoral reform – a referendum on which Labour itself promised in its manifesto – is a sinequanon of a site like Liberal Conspiracy, a pluralist centre-left, a potential rainbow ‘progressive alliance’. LabourNo’s squatting tribally in its way, and providing thereby some ‘legitimate’ cover to the Murdoch-Dacre-Elliott-Griffin-Cameron alliance leading the fight against reform, was depressing in the extreme.

Here’s a real challenge for Labour NO supporters: Put your money where your mouth is, and if you are so against AV, then propose that future Lab Leadership elections take place by FPTP.

And what a bad joke that would be, were it to happen, if Labour members had to decide whether (to take the example of the Leadership election we have just had) to ‘tactically vote’ or not.

E.g. Diane Abbott supporters would have had to decide whether or not to abandon her and just vote straight for Ed, without being able to vote for who they really wanted, or whether to risk David winning…

I put it to you, everyone in Labour NO, that this thought experiment pretty thoroughly demolishes the case for a NO vote on May 5. It is clear that FPTP is a broken system, in multi-Party / multi-candidate contests. It really is quite hopeless, to try to defend it, outside of a 2-Party system context.

If you are so clear in your own minds that AV is a bad system, you need to draw the logical conclusion: you need to get rid of it for your own internal elections. That I hear no-one proposing to do so speaks volumes to me.

The most crucial argument in favour is that the free Libyans, at least as manifested in the Transitional National Council in Benghazi (the fledgling caretaker-government-in-waiting), have themselves called for.

I have just been talking with a Libyan friend of mine who is fresh back from Benghazi. He tells me that the people of eastern Libya are strongly united on two points:

(1) They oppose absolutely any foreign ground troops in Libya.

(2) They support absolutely a no-fly-zone, to be imposed upon Gaddafi’s air forces, including the necessary attacks on Gaddafi’s ground-based air defences and against the mercenary forces that will enable the no-fly-zone to function. And they want it NOW.

This is because huge numbers are dying in Libya, far more than has yet been reported: several hundred virtually every day, according to my friend, and that is excluding those who may be dying in the areas still held by Gaddafi.

Of course a no-fly-zone isn’t all that is needed, there are other non-violent options too.

And there is much that we can do as individuals to help: for example, donating to the splendid Avaaz, who are supplying revolutionaries across the Arab world with the resources to document and organise democracy protests.

Gaddafi’s air superiority is the only thing keeping him in the game. But it is leading to carnage, and could enable Gaddafi yet to win.

Just as we supported sanctions against South Africa because it was what the black South Africans themselves called for, so we should do what the free Libyans are calling for.

The responsibility to protect is unavoidable. This time, we are going to have to do what we didn’t do in the Spanish Civil War, and didn’t do in Rwanda: we are going to have to use some smart targeted military intervention to help stop this ‘civil war’, by giving the Libyan people the opportunity to save themselves from genocide and to free themselves.

And after all, haven’t the LibDems in the past suffered a good deal from the ‘wasted vote’ argument, which AV would put an end to?

But there are two good reasons why this might not happen.

1) In general terms, First Past the Post (FPTP) suppresses the vote of LibDems in places where they are weak (where they are perceived as a ‘wasted vote’) – but it artificially bolsters their vote in places where they are already strong (where they benefit from tactical voting). What does this mean?

It means that introducing AV would (ceteris paribus) increase the 1st preference LibDem vote in places where they are weak – places where they have no chance of winning – and decrease their 1st preference vote in places where they are strong – where at present they benefit from tactical votes.

2) For the first time ever, there will be large-scale deliberate anti-LibDem voting, at the next General Election. There will for instance be many Labour (and Green, and Nationalist, etc.) 1st preference voters who quite deliberately do not put the LibDems down as their 2nd or 3rd or even 4th preference…because they are so disgusted with the LibDems’betrayals.

People looking to give Nick Clegg one in the eye at the next General Election will have ample opportunity to do so, under AV. They can deliberately put the LibDems bottom of their preference-list (or leave them off it altogether).

Studies
But what of the academic studies that tell us that AV will benefit the LibDems?

These studies, very rashly, and unprofessionally, work on the basis of what voters’ second preferences were last May – thus ignoring that the LibDems will now very likely garner less second preferences than in the past.

The answer is YES. Under AV, if you simply place a ’1′ next to your favoured candidate (rather than a cross), then you are voting as if it is FPTP (the current system), and that is completely allowed.

In fact, there is a very important point here: It really is unnecessary for FPTP-lovers to oppose AV at all. FPTP is ‘contained within’ AV.

FPTP-supporters can simply vote using a ’1′ instead of a cross, and could lobby for everyone else to do so too. There really is no need and no reason for them to oppose the new system.

It would just be nice if they were to let those of us who would like to rank candidates by preference to be allowed to do so.

It is really rather illiberal of them to stop us from doing this, when we are perfectly happy for them NOT to list candidates in preference order (below ’1′) if that is their preference.

I questioned Charles Clarke (then my MP) about this in the run-up to the criminal attack on Iraq in 2003.

To my pleasant surprise, he insisted in reply that depleted Uranium would not be used anywhere at all where it could harm civilians, in Iraq, and suggested to me that it was unlikely to be used at all by the British Armed Forces.

To my unpleasant surprise since, these claims turned out to be entirely false.

Roddy’s article rightly speaks of Britain’s involvement in nothing less than nuclear war in the Mid-East. Our government committed what is (according to the Nuremberg tribunal) the supreme international crime, a war of aggression, in 2003, on the basis of the lie that Iraq had WMDs. But Britain and the U.S. did have WMDs, nuclear weapons – and they used them.

Depleted uranium – i.e. in effect micro-nuclear-bombs, weapons that spread ultra-long-lasting nuclear death, wherever they are used - may well, as Roddy argues, kill hundreds of thousands or in the end maybe millions of people, in Iraq and the Region, and will contaminate it in a deadly fashion for tens and hundreds of millenia.

This is the sickening truth. And they did it in our names.

That sounds an extraordinary thing to say, given the sustained attacks they are suffering over it, and the apologies that they are being forced to make.

But consider the following three points:

1) As they deal with these attacks from the Mail et al, and are forced over and over again to respond to criticisms from broadcast journalists, what do the top Tory brass say? Over and over, they say: ‘Look; with this deficit we have to make tough choices; and it is only fair that the richest 15% give up this benefit in order that there is more money to go around.”

It enables Tories to identifying themselves with fairness and remove the impression that they are all about helping the rich. If they have to suffer a few days’ media discomfort in order to rebrand themselves in this way, it is a price well worth them paying.

Contrary to Sunny’s argument here, this attack on child benefit for the rich may be the way that the Conservatives finally escape the label ‘the nasty party’.

2) Meanwhile, the frenzy that the Mail et al are lathering themselves into works tacitly to the Tories advantage too: because the Mail are going on and on about protecting ‘Middle England’, while quietly ignoring the fact that someone earning £45k a year (the very least that someone now about to lose child benefit will earn) is earning twice the median income.

Twice the median: that is hardly the middle. So, the media furore is quietly stoking a sense of the country as richer than it really is, and of the rich as just part of the ‘middle class’: perfect for Tory ideas of how to reposition Britain’s sense of who it is, and of who matters.

3) Most crucially, all the attention on those poor parents earning anywhere between £45k and £Infinity is taking attention away from what really matters about this: the negative impact it is going to have on the welfare state because of a universal benefit being taken away from the rich. The poorest welfare states are in fact those which are designed only for the poor.

Thus the Tories get the best of both worlds: they get to look tough but fair, while actually doing something that profoundly undermines fairness and the entire Beveridge / Attlee agenda. Truly a masterstroke.

Lefties/greenies etc need to stop gloating on about how the Tories are shooting themselves in the foot and about those poor stay-at-home Mums, and start talking simply about defending the principle of welfare state universalism.

Otherwise, this cut will be the thin end of a very large wedge, and before we know it we will be looking at taking away NHS provision from the richest, on the grounds that they can afford private healthcare… I hope it is at least obvious to readers why THAT would be bad for us all. But it is nothing more than an extension of the logic of Osborne’s clever move here on child benefit.

If they then form a minority administration, it would be the first time they would have an opportunity to govern in their (in our) own name.

OK, it would would be a minority Green administration in a City Council with relatively few powers and desperately strapped for cash. Challenging times. How would the first Green administration in Britain attempt to rise to the challenge?

I’ll give the two top examples of how.

Top of the Norwich Greens’ agenda is their plans for making Norwich an ‘Open Council’. Green councillors will make decisions in public more than has ever happened in Norwich before. See our manifesto on that promise. Participatory budgeting will be just the beginning of this.

And a Green-run Council will seek to create a Council-run Energy Services Company, offering local people the chance to choose green energy without having to pay an exorbitant price, or being pestered by every energy or renewables company that comes knocking on their door, is also high on the Greens’ agenda. (See here for a precedent).

Again, this can be done for very little money, because the ‘ESCo’ takes the financial risk, while citizens (and the Earth) gain.

If you are interested in the details of all this and more, then see the manifesto for yourself here.

Lefties, progressives and g/Greens may not have seen this coming, but Sept. 9th might just end up being as significant a day for the ‘liberal conspiracy’ in Britain as was General Election Day this year.

After all, a Green Council will presumably be able to achieve more than a lone Green MP can do in practice.

These pleas were welcome. But, at the same time, there was plenty of evidence of continuing tribalism lacing them: both from the platform and from some parts of the hall. Alex Smith from LabourList told us with disarming honesty of how the current attacks on the LibDems from David Miliband and others are calculated expressions of tribal self-interest.

How can the vision of a pluralist broadly co-operative politics of ‘the Left’ – central to the strategic mission of Liberal Conspiracy – actually be achieved?

One absolutely central obstacle to the growth of what would be such a genuinely new politics is our electoral system.

So long as we lack AV or PR, then different political Parties will always be playing a zero-sum-game against each other at election time, and talk of pluralism is mostly empty idealism. For the knowledge of the nature of such electoral contests poisons and undermines pluralist efforts in advance.

A hint of what is by contrast possible with AV was clearly visible in London’s Mayoral election two years ago, as the Green Party candidate Sian Berry (also present at Blog Nation) and Labour’s Ken Livingston cross-endorsed one another.

Like many on LC, I have robustly criticised the decision of the LibDems to form a coalition with the Conservatives rather than make a serious effort to form a ‘progressive majority’ government; and strong criticism of this regressive budget is also necessary and inevitable.

But James Graham of the Social Liberal Forum made a very good point in his talk: if our criticisms of the LibDems result in their weakness to such an extent that the political reforms that Clegg is tasked with become hobbled or defeated, then this will be a disastrous own-goal.

For all that the coalition’s economic policies are regressive and disastrous, their promised reforms of the electoral system could yet transform the possibilities of British politics for the better.

We on the Left will be hoist on our own petard, if we undermine changes in the electoral system without which the mission of Liberal Conspiracy will remain mostly a pipedream.

This is why, for example, I have drafted a motion for the Green Party Autumn Conference expressing support for AV, in a referendum on it. Moves such as this are not without their opponents – Jim Jepps of the Daily Maybe for example spoke with me at yesterday’s event of his concern that working for AV may get in the way of achieving PR.

If we are to have the chance to really overcome tribalism, then there is one further electoral reform that we must try to help the governing LibDems achieve. Without proportional representation in local elections, then the great majority of electoral contests in this country, the Council breeding grounds for the politicians of the future, will remain at heart tribal.

But the reality, given their actions when leading various government departments, is that their rhetoric masks a lot of inaction.

1. That effort is being successfully conducted if emissions are going down. But most people don’t realise that our Co2 emissions are still going up.
   
   A key reason is that the Milibands, David and DEFRA and Ed at DECC, have repeatedly suggested that Britain’s CO2 emissions are going down.

2. David Miliband has often claimed that the UK has achieved major cuts in greenhouse gases since 1990. He sometimes says Britain is on course to achieve 25% reductions in CO2 emissions by 2012. But the figures that Miliband and his successors at DEFRA/DECC (including most notably Ed) are using leave out embodied energy, the inclusion of which would make it very clear that this cannot be so.

   Even on the most generous figures available to govt (not only excluding embodied energy but also international transport), CO2 has more or less flatlined since 1997, rising in recent years, and thus showing an overall small rise. It is only slightly (a few percentage points) below 1990 (Kyoto baseline) levels. When those factors are included, then there has been little or no reduction even since 1990, and a significant increase since 1997.

3. There has been and remains a further systematic under-estimation of Britain’s contribution to CO2 emissions from air travel, because only aircraft taking off from Britain are counted. That sounds reasonable, until one notices that almost 70% of the passengers taking off and landing in Britain are Britons. DEFRA/DECC ought to be attributing 70% – not 50% – of the emissions of planes taking off from and landing in Britain to the UK. Between 1990 and 2003, estimated CO2 emissions from aviation rose by 90%, a staggering increase.
4. Furthermore, the government statistics do not take into account most of the effects of ‘radiative forcing’ – the increased global heating effect of emissions at high altitude, with the cocktail of gases and water vapour that planes emit.

To be fair to the Milibands, they both pushed for transport to be included in Copenhagen and in the EU ETS.

But this doesn’t excuse their not having acknowledged the realities bullet-pointed above, which were repeatedly pointed out to the Milibands during their time in office, by Monbiot, by myself, and by others.

If the Milibands wish to be seen as ‘green-leaning’ Labour-leadership candidates, then surely they ought to repair their rhetoric on emissions, and concede that the reality is that the Labour government did not reduce climate-dangerous emissions, but in fact saw them increase.

And that the party needs to do a lot more to deal with the problem of man-made climate change.

Most of those reacting negatively to this key intervention from the leading voice of contemporary policy-engaged climate-science don’t appear to ‘get’ the very good reasons why James Hansen of NASA has said that a mediocre agreement at Copenhagen – which is all that we could possibly get now – would be worse than no agreement at all.

The ‘solutions’ on offer at Copenhagen are almost exclusively based around carbon offsets and carbon trading. These would make no meaningful contribution toward tackling the climate crisis for all sorts of reasons (a superb inventory of why can be found at The Corner House, but most crucially because they would mean that, just like with Kyoto, there is no ‘hard’ cap on total emissions.

A carbon trading system that allows offsets against emissions that allegedly would have happened without the system being in place, even if it works, offers no guarantee at all that overall emissions will fall, let alone fall at the rate that they need to fall at if we are to have a chance of keeping the world to within 2 degrees of over-heat.

Thus it may in one important respect be serendipitous that the Copenhagen talks seem in any case likely to fail.

The CRU hack at the University of East Anglia may even have a silver lining.

For, though it is utterly ludicrous to claim that the ‘revelations’ from these illegally-hacked emails cast any substantive doubt over the facts and the science of global over-heat (see this and this), nevertheless we can (ironically) be grateful to the deluded hacker if his/her actions undermine the prospects of a useless agreement emerging at Copenhagen.

A pretence of effective action is worse than no action at all. So it is time to Seattleise Copenhagen.

Rather than pursuing the chimera of an agreement based on carbon trading, it is time to fight for an agreement that would actually be worth having, such as for instance the ‘cap and dividend’ scheme recommended by Hansen, which includes a ‘hard’ cap. Whether on the streets or on the laptops and phones, we should all do our best to bring the talks next week to a standstill, rather than allow our leaders to sign up to an agreement which offers only the shadow, and not any substance, of securing our common future against climate chaos.

After The Wave yesterday in London, I helped the impressive folk of Climate Camp set up their protest-camp in Trafalgar Square.

They are among the voices now openly joining Hansen and Naomi Klein and the New Internationalist co-operative and more each day in saying that we must seize the opportunity of Copenhagen – to create a true and successful climate justice movement, just as Seattle was a key moment in the emergence of a successful global justice movement, a decade ago.

This was obviously very disappointing; but what made it worse was the knowledge that a systematic campaign by the LibDems to stop me from winning may have been what made the difference between me winning and not. Of course, there is nothing wrong with one Party trying to stop another Party from winning; to some extent, one might even say that that is what Parties are for (though it is unfortunate, to say the least, that the ‘FibDems’ did this when they had little prospect either of losing their seat nor of gaining a second seat – and when the all-too-predictable consequence of what they did was letting in a second kooky climate-denying UKIP MEP, instead of a Green…). But what is wrong is to stop another Party from winning by systematically misrepresenting the facts about the electoral arithmetic…

The FibDems may well have defeated me simply by spreading via 3 million leaflets the untruth that the Green Party allegedly ‘couldn’t’ win in Eastern Region.
What happened was this: The FibDem ‘freepost’ leaflet, delivered to all households in my Region, included passages such as this:

Sadly, we know that the FibDem disinformation campaign worked. We heard reports from across the Region of people saying that they weren’t going to vote for us because they had read a leaflet saying we could not win. Other people, more gallingly, came to us after they had voted saying that they were sad that – according to the FibDems – we lacked the strength to win a Euro-seat, and so they had voted FibDem. When we told these people the truth they were gutted/furious.

How many people have been influenced in this way? We can’t know; but the number of anecdotal reports was significant; and if just one in 300 recipients of the 3 million FibDem misinformation leaflets voted FibDem rather than Green as a result, then that makes the difference between my having been elected or not.

It might be said, in the FibDems’ defence, that maybe they simply judged that we were not going to perform as well as in fact occurred, and that they were making an innocent mistake. This possible exculpation is ruled out by what happened in the final few weeks of the campaign. By then, national opinion polls were repeatedly showing the Green Party running at between 9 and 15% – as usual, we had risen in the polls in the run-up to the Euro-election itself. Yet the FibDems continued to pump out exactly the same misinformation, regardless (here is a prime example). They continued to use the very phrases quoted above in their leaflets. They systematically misrepresented the situation. They ignored the opinion poll evidence that in one case even put us ahead of them nationally (and regionally), and that repeatedly showed that we were in very real contention.

To many observers of or participants in the British electoral scene, these tactics will be depressingly familiar. It is a well-known fact across the Parties that, by and large, FibDems are systematically the worst liars and manipulators of all. This sits oddly with their somewhat cuddly and fluffy national image. The latter is sustained I think by their distance from power; on the local level, on the ground, most FibDems fight dirty.

I know this from personal experience both as a victim and as a former perpetrator: I used to be in the FibDems… As young FibDems, we were trained in the ‘best’ ways to do things such as these: Create dodgy graphs that showed our support as stronger than it really was; Select irrelevant statistics to make our case for being in the race and the best tactical option sound as strong as possible, and; Pull opponents’ leaflets out of letter-boxes without being caught, among other things.

Why are the FibDems so dirty? I think the underlying reason is that they are more a vote-seeking franchise than a party with any real convictions. They lack consistent policies around the country; what FibDems do share with each other in my experience is an insatiable desire to pile up votes, no matter what the cost to others or to their own consciences.

Why have I written this article? Out of anger at the injustice that I have just suffered, of course; but, actually, I was determined to write this article anyway, whether or not I was elected. Because I just cannot bear any longer the harm that the FibDems are doing to our political system. And at this time, above all others, it simply appals me that they might get away with it… I consider running a clean campaign every bit as important a part of the ‘clean up politics’ agenda as having a clean expenses sheet. The people of this country are earnestly and desperately looking to politicians to clean up politics, in the wake of the dreadful MPs’ expenses scandal, which has so badly implicated many trusted ‘honourable members’ from all three main Parties.

The FibDems, at this election just gone, have therefore betrayed the voters’ trust at the worst possible time. This was a pre-determined, deliberate attempt to undermine the Green campaign using indefensible statistics all across the Region (And they waged similar campaigns elsewhere in the country – e.g. in West Midlands Region, and even in London where, absurdly, they insisted that ‘the Greens can’t win’ even when we HAD already won! Jean Lambert has been a Green MEP for London for 10 years). Rather than compete with us on policy, they chose, deliberately, to misrepresent the voting system and our prospects.

Such a betrayal of trust will not easily be forgiven; at least, not without an expression of contrition and a sincere promise not to re-offend.

I throw down this gauntlet to the FibDems: Please mend you ways, and make clear now your intention to do so… If you do not, then we will never let you – nor the public – forget the wrong that you perpetrate, each time you draw a misleading graph, cite an irrelevant statistic, deliberately mislead readers about another Party’s chances…

And, as part of the reforms that politicians are hoping to make to start to restore badly-damaged public trust in the political system, we need I believe some kind of system of regulation of what Parties say in their election leaflets. A start would be for political parties at least to have to meet the minimal standards demanded by the Advertising Standards Authority.

In the meantime: Who now would trust the claims in a LibDem election leaflet… ever again?

UPDATE…

The election leaflet referred to in this article has been uploaded to ‘The Straight Choice’ and can be viewed in its entirety here – please feel free to judge for yourself [Unity].

In fact polls ahead of European elections usually underestimate the actual Green performance. It’s worth remembering that before their historic 2.2 million-strong vote in 1989 the Greens were polling at about 7-8%, but the actual vote turned out to be 15%.

Then, under first-past-the-post, the Greens returned no MEPs. Now, under a proportional system, a smaller vote than this would give the Greens MEP seats in several more regions beyond their existing foothold in London and the South East. If we get 15% plus, then look for a Green landslide.

The polls do very much seem to show UKIP as a major beneficiary of the current deep disenchantment. But of course there is a powerful irony in the notion that UKIP might benefit from an anti-sleaze vote. UKIP, the party that five years ago set out to clean up Europe, and since then has lost a quarter of its MEPs in unhappy circumstances, including one who was jailed for fraud. And it still sends nine MEPs to a parliament it considers pointless. I wonder what do they do there, besides collect their expenses?

What about trust? A YouGov poll commissioned by the Green Party asked which party’s politicians would be most likely to put their own financial interests before their country’s. A staggering 45% said Labour and 40% said the Conservatives. Next there were the BNP, The LibDems and UKIP, on 20%, 16% and 15% respectively. Only 5% thought Green politicians would put their own interests before Britain’s.

We have also been encouraged that newspapers as far apart as the Guardian and the Sun have been publishing articles calling for fundamental constitutional reform to make British democracy more accountable, more responsive, more representative. The Green Party has had such reform on its agenda for a generation.

A ComRes poll this weekend put the Tories at 28%, Labour at 20%, the Lib Dems on 14%, below UKIP’s 15%, with the Greens on 11% and the BNP on just 4%. A YouGov poll out yesterday showed that could be the tip of a more radical, positive mood: 34% said they may vote Green at this election.

But here’s the funny thing: the primary focus of the media, and the BBC in particular, has been on the BNP. It remains a party that appears to be falling short of expectations for them.

The BNP are a risk in their key seats, particularly the North West. So why is the BBC talking up the threat? Perhaps they think that the prospect of fascists gaining an MEP is a sexier news story than a whole new swathe of clean, Green politicians.

It might be the case that much of the media have a particularly low opinion of the public, believing, quite wrongly, that just because people are angry they will automatically vote for racists, liars and scumbags.

The irony of an anti-corruption vote going to UKIP has not been lost on many political activists (see link 1, and link 2) – although it is obviously preferable to have a do-nothing UKIPer than a British Nationalist MEP who will actively promote their malign politics.

No one has to vote for the fake patriotism of the BNP in order to help shake up UK politics, but the BBC have already dubbed them the likely main beneficiaries of the sleaze scandal. Even if the polls don’t indicate that.

And anyway, obviously, this election isn’t just about stopping the BNP or Parliamentary corruption – although that is the all important backdrop. When we elect MEPs for the next five years they will be called upon to tackle dangerous climate change and the impacts of Peak Oil in the context of an economic collapse. Half-hearted measures from a comfortable elite or backwards xenophobia cannot challenge social inequality and injustice.

The BBC and many of our newspapers may think the main story is the BNP and tend to sideline the Greens, but the UK is so much more than just the status quo on one side and angry racists on the other.

(thanks to Jim Jepps for helping)

So what?, some of you may ask. “What has all this got to do with me? What do I, as a Socialist / Labour supporter / LibDem / independent care about the Green Party’s performance next June?”

The answer lies bang in the centre of the ‘remit’ of Liberal Conspiracy: because of the electoral system that the Euro-elections are fought under, and because of the arithmetic.

If we look at Eastern Region first. Last time around, in June ’04, the Tories won 3 seats, UKIP 2, Labour and the LibDems each 1.

Even if they have a very good election UKIP are extremely likely to lose one of their two seats next June- they are short of money, completely internally-riven, bereft of Kilroy-Silk, and beset by corruption scandals. They will lose the seat in question either to the Tories (who might be able to advance to having 4 seats, if they have a very good election); or, conceivably, to the BNP (who claim to be targeting the Region); or to us.

There is pretty much zero chance of Labour or the LibDems gaining a seat: can you really imagine either of those Parties gaining a substantial number (in the LibDems’ case, several tens of thousands) of votes relative to what they got last time around? Are they more popular than they were in 2004?

So those are the options: either the Tories or just possibly the BNP gain in Eastern, or (just possibly) the UKIP holds onto one seat — or the Greens make a gain. In the battle for that final seat, we are the only progressive option capable of stopping the right-wing candidate at next June’s Euro-elections, here in Eastern.

About 10% of the vote in Eastern would likely be enough to displace that second UKIP MEP with a Green, rather than a Tory (or a fascist). We already have 26 Councillors in this Region, and our vote in the local elections in Eastern Region is running at the 10% level – and that is under first past the post.

The slightly larger North West region also deserves scrutiny. In 2004 the BNP polled just over 6% and the Greens just under. The Kilroy-Silk surge propelled UKIP ahead of both, leading to a result where 3 Labour, 3 Tory, 2 Lib Dem and 1 UKIP members got elected. The region is now down to 8 seats like London: which means around 8 to 9% of the vote will be enough to gain the final seat.

A 4th placed party gaining that share of the vote will certainly win a seat, but a 5th placed party finishing just behind them will be left out in the cold. When we talk about stark choices, they don’t come much clearer than this. A very small number of votes will likely make the difference between and fascist or a Green being elected, in NorthWest.

Make no mistake that the North West region is the principal target for the BNP. Nick Griffin, their Chairman, is the lead candidate. His ambition for far right politics in the UK is modelled on the successful personality cults developed by Jean Marie Le Pen and Jorg Haider. His election as a Euro MP will give him the profile (and taxpayer-funded salary) he craves.

We’ve seen Le Pen get to the second round of the French presidential elections and Haider force his way into Austrian government. There is no reason to assume that an organised and electorally-established BNP couldn’t in due course do the same. The flip side for Griffin is that a failure to win a seat this time would almost certainly spell the end of his political career, if the recent internal discord and infighting in the BNP is anything to go by.

The Euro-elections are ‘traditionally’ our best election: in 1989, we scored 15% nationwide; in 1999, we got our first two MEPs elected; in 2009, with Caroline Lucas MEP as our inaugural Party Leader, we are aiming to at least double our numbers of MEPs.

You can play a significant role in preventing the rise of Conservatism, rabid anti-Europeanism, and outright racism, in British and European politics, over the next 7 months. Backing the Greens at the Euros, where we hold seats or can expect to gain, may well be your best way of doing this.

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This is fleshed out a bit more at my blog. Peter Cranie explains the North West situation a bit more too.

It is good to see these Tories lining up in support of her. It makes pretty clear just how skin-deep the Cameron ‘revolution’ has been.

Let’s remind ourselves of some of what Palin stands for:

* Palin opposes abortion even in the case of rape or incest. She believes, that is to say, in (for example) the right of a father who rapes his under-age daughter legally to ensure that his daughter bears his grandchild. Yes: Palin believes that rapists and incestuous predators have the right to see their babies sired, as long as they succeed in forcing conception. (Her 17 year-old unmarried daughter Bristol is pregnant); Palin would insist on the law forcing Bristol to take the baby to term, whoever its father was, whatever the circumstances of the conception.)

* Palin doesn’t believe in evolution, and thinks creationism should be taught in state schools.

* She’s doesn’t think humans are the cause of the climate chaos that is currently melting the Arctic to an unprecedented degree and that has just given New Orleans another narrow escape (such that the Republicans have had in effect to delay the start of their Convention). One would be grateful for such an act of God, were it not for the fact that Gustav is more an act of man.

* She’s solidly in line with John McCain’s “Big Oil first” energy policy: She’s pushed hard for more oil drilling and says renewables won’t be ready for years. She also sued the Bush administration for listing polar bears as an endangered species – she was worried it would interfere with more oil drilling in Alaska.

It’s good to know that many of Britain’s Tories are happy signing up to support such a person: it’s good to know where they stand.

It is also extraordinary to see the depths to which McCain has gone in his personal sell-out to buy the active support of the ‘conservative’ movement in the United States. He has placed a heartbeat away from his potential Presidency a paleo-con who disagrees with him on fundamentals (McCain himself has no sympathy with any of the first three of the four points asterisked above; for instance, he claims to be absolutely serious about stopping global over-heat — …and yet he is willing to put a climate-denier in the White House!).

This is how Obama can win: if he stops selling out, and is truer for the remainder of the campaign to his progressive instincts.

McCain should increasingly come over as the desperately-opportunistic phony that the Palin choice once again proves that he really is.