Green Wolff

God Rest Ye Merry Money-Men

2011-12-12T15:44:00.000-08:00

A little broadsheet ballad for the 2011 Christmas season :

1.
God rest you merry money-men; let nothing you dismay :
remember that our government will not stand in your way.
However much you foul it up you'll still get bonus pay

. . . so it's tidings of comfort and joy for Bullingdon Boys, (1)
yes it's tidings of comfort and joy!

2.
You've got the politicians tamed like monkeys in a zoo;
Besides, an awful lot of them are wheeler-dealers too!
You're "all in it together" — so there's little we can do.

. . . but it's tidings of comfort and joy for Bullingdon Boys,
yes it's tidings of comfort and joy!

3.
If tax is inconvenient there is no need to shout.
Your Man in Inland Revenue will help you sort it out
with dodgy deals in Switzerland — the tax-avoider's tout.

. . . yes, it's tidings of comfort and joy for Bullingdon Boys,
yes it's tidings of comfort and joy!

4.
You had an anxious moment when an obstacle you dread —
tighter European regulation — raised its head,
but Cuddly Dave has gone and got you off the hook instead

. . . so it's tidings of comfort and joy for Bullingdon Boys,
yes it's tidings of comfort and joy!

5.
So Christmas has come early for financiers one and all.
Mervyn King can fulminate but, safe in marble halls(2)
the one per cent can celebrate; the rest go to the wall

. . . and it's tidings of comfort and joy for Bullingdon Boys
yes it's tidings of comfort and joy!

Dick Wolff

(1) the Bullingdon Club : an élite Oxford University drinking and dining club in which the Prime Minister, Chancellor of the Exchequer and Mayor of London were contemporaries

(2) an old music hall ballad : "I dreamt I dwelt in marble halls, with vassals and serfs at my side; and of all who assembled within those walls, that I was the hope and the pride."

1930s Appeasement revisited?

2011-12-07T15:04:00.000-08:00

So the moment of truth is approaching. Before long we will find out whose side David Cameron is on. Is he on the side of the people of Britain, some of whom sort of elected him? Or is he a puppet of the unaccountable 1% in the City, who bear a large measure of responsibility for the debt-ridden mess we find ourselves in and who are still heads down in the trough?

Europe is a potential economic powerhouse but - for all the fulminations of the little-Englander nationalistic media - it is a political David when facing the Goliath of international finance. Big Mammon has exploited the political weakness of European institutions for its own ends and brought it to its knees. It's a pathetic sight.

Clearly if the EU David is to get to his feet, Goliath is going to have to be reined in somehow. There are going to have to be Europe-wide agreements on fiscal policy, if not a single European fiscal policy and financial regulation régime. Otherwise, Big Mammon just picks off nations one by one, starting with the weakest. The process has long since started. Cameron may think that Britain is more secure because Big Mammon lives here, but it's tosh. With something like 30% of GDP dependent on the City of London, Big Mammon has got us over a barrel. Luke 14 : 31 -

"What will a king do if he has only ten thousand soldiers to defend himself against a king who is about to attack him with twenty thousand soldiers? Before he goes out to battle, won't he first sit down and decide if he can win?"

Britain can't go it alone. Even Europe, united, can't go it alone. To bring Big Mammon under control, global political muscle is needed. OK, with a dysfunctional USA, we're not going to get that, but there's nothing we can do about that. There is something we can do about Europe.

It's beginning to look like Merkel and Sarkozy are bowing to the inevitable : proposing tighter political coordination in the fight against Big Mammon, and as part of that, a Tobin tax.

If Cameron refuses to cooperate in order to protect (the people he thinks are) his chums in the City of London, what he will effectively be doing is refusing to fight for the British people, and capitulating to the malign outside interests of global capital. What's so pathetic is that he will do it claiming some kind of victory over "European domination", when actually he'll be selling us all down the river and capitulating to a far worse enemy that is wrapping its squid-like tentacles over the face of whole nations.

There was a word for that in the 1930s : appeasement. The Conservatives were the appeasers then, and for the same reason - an inability to identify the real enemy because they could only see things from the perspective of the ruling class. They sold the Czechs down the river then — this time it's the Greeks, then the Irish . . The sorry difference is that Labour have joined the right-wing appeasers this time.

"First they came for the Jews, and I did nothing because I wasn't a Jew. Then they came for the trade unionists, but I did nothing because I wasn't a trade unionist. . . Then they came for me, but there was noone left to fight for me." The rules of subsidiarity suggest to me that you must fight your battles at the level at which the enemy is operating. If the destructive power of international capital is to be brought to heel (only when tamed is there a chance of it bringing blessings rather than a curse) there simply has to be international political cooperation and solidarity.

Whose side are you on, Bullingdon boy?

What Leveson will not reveal

2011-12-07T04:43:00.000-08:00

The Observer's Nick Cohen has written strong articles about 'dodgy' Dave Hartnett, the Inland Revenue chief, and what the remit of the Leveson inquiry means it is covering up : "The inquiry they have established under Lord Justice Leveson is a minor scandal in itself. "We will focus primarily on the relationship between the press and the public and the related issue of press regulation," Leveson declares. Not, I hope you notice, the specific relationship between ministers and News Corporation, or on the specific charges now heading to the courts, but on the dangerously nebulous subject of press freedom."

Full article here.

The triumphal march of the Fortnum 145

2011-11-17T12:50:00.001-08:00

So, ten of the protestors that 'occupied' Fortnum & Mason to highlight the company's tax avoidance have been done for 'aggravated trespass' - a new law introduced by a 'Labour' government in 2003. I'm not sure how entering a shop during opening hours and sitting down, and then leaving when requested (clearing up as you go) can be described as 'aggravated trespass'. Video footage taken at the time shows shoppers continuing to shop during the 'aggravated trespass', and a police inspector telling them that they will be allowed to go shortly provided they turn left out of the store so as to keep them separate from a more aggressive demonstration up the road. They were then 'kettled', all arrested, and many kept for 15 hours or more in the police station.

The understanding of the Atonement that is most powerful for me is that which Paul (if it is indeed Paul) describes in Colossians 2 : 14, 15 where Jesus's ignominious execution by the 'principalities and powers' is recast as those same powers being led as captives in Christ's triumphal procession - Roman imperial imagery turned on its head. What he describes as being 'nailed to a cross' we might describe as 'being outed' . . "now we can see The System as it really is, with all its injustice and ugliness exposed for all to see, and know that for all its pomp it cannot stand."

That, I am sure, will be the effect of this abuse of power by the Met Police and the courts - it will rebound in the form of a generation radicalised, with any cosy illusions about the British State shattered. While senior government officials run off to Switzerland to do backhand deals with global companies to allow them to avoid paying billions of UK tax, while investment bankers rob a generation of its prospects and pay themselves obscene bonuses for doing so, while their political stooges run behind them collecting their ordure and tipping it on the heads of the poor and vulnerable, those who dare to shout that The System is broken and no longer fit for purpose are done for aggravated trespass. Now we see it : no more illusions.

It's true that I lost my illusions about the British State - and especially the Met Police - years ago. A generation ago, in fact. The war waged on the people the prime minister of the day called the 'Enemy Within', and the covert operations against peace activists, destroyed my faith in the beneficence of the State for good. But just because we see here power doing what power will always do - protect privilege, protect its own power, victimise the weak - doesn't mean that it doesn't still make me angry.

Donate to the appeal costs to keep that triumphal march rolling.

thank you, Giles Fraser

2011-10-27T14:09:00.001-07:00

letter posted today to Revd Dr Giles Fraser, until today a Canon of St Paul's Cathedral in London :

Dear Dr Fraser,

I write to express my appreciation of the stand you have taken over the protest mounted by the 'Occupy London Stock Exchange' at St Paul's, which is echoed by similar protests across the world.

Over the last thirty years we have seen another 'occupation' going on : a progressive 'occupation' of supposedly democratic structures by financial power. An 'occupation' very much more damaging to the 'health and safety' of vast numbers of people. I trace the start of this 'occupation' to Margaret Thatcher's prime ministership — a Prime Minister who believed that business people were the sort of people who knew best how to run things. As indeed they did : they ran things so well that they took much of our manufacturing industry overseas. The financiers took their place, but by the time this happened finance had gone truly global, breaking the human bonds that bound it such that powerful financial institutions could bring whole countries to their knees. These institutions have proved adept — with a little assistance from HMRC — at offshoring their profits to avoid tax responsibilities, accountable to no one save themselves.

We have ended up with the sorry spectacle of our elected politicians running scared of the press and even more scared of the markets. For myself, I believe that we elect politicians (of which, in a humble way, I am one, as a Green member of Oxford City Council) to provide the ethical rules by which finance and business run. I'm not sure what else politicians are there for, really, apart perhaps from avoiding wars. Maybe I am naïve in believing that in fact it is in business's interest to have the playing field marked out and the rules defined and policed. An ungoverned financial sector (which is pretty much what we now have) was inevitably going to lead to mayhem; and it always was going to rebound hardest on the people at the bottom of the pile who (according to my understanding of the Hebrew scriptures) are precisely the people 'kings' are there to defend.

The penetration of financiers into the corridors of power is very deep. If some of the blogs I read are to be believed, their penetration into the corridors of power in the Church of England — and St Paul's Cathedral in particular — is also significant.

As a United Reformed Church minister, I have been brought up to believe in the separation of powers of Church and State. Perhaps the equivalent of this for our time needs to be the separation of powers of State and the New Religion of the great god Mammon whose temples rise to the sky around St Paul's, asserting their dominance.

When the 'Occupy' protest first began outside St Paul's I felt that this would be a crucial test of the Church's witness against the principalities and powers. We prayed for you at Temple Cowley URC that Sunday morning, as we reflected on the Gospel reading, "Render to Cæsar . . ." I prayed that the cathedral would stand the test, because its witness was not just its witness only, but on behalf of the whole ecumenical Church in these islands. (Most of those watching the protest from a distance have little sense of the distinctions between churches.) When, to my dismay, comments leaked out that St Paul's was concerned about its loss of revenue, I hoped that the Church of England would step up to the plate with its backing, and made a small donation myself. But it was an ominous sign. In recent days, it was becoming increasingly clear that the cathedral was going to 'revert to type' as a pillar of the Establishment, the church of kings and princes — confirming every stereotype and hampering the Christian mission for another generation.

Your resignation restores my hope that there is some Christian faith lurking in the Church, even in its most Establishment bastions . . . and even if those with that faith have to resign to prove it. I hope the brothers and sisters you leave behind will reflect hard on their priorities and 'decide this day whom they will serve'. And I wish you the very best for your own future.

a letter to the Bahraini ambassador

2011-10-22T06:39:00.001-07:00

posted Saturday :

Her Excellency Mrs. Alice Thomas Samaan
Bahrain Embassy - London
30 Belgrave Square
LONDON, SW1X 8QB

Dear Mrs Samaan,
You will be all too aware, as are many in this country, of the 15 year sentences passed against a number of doctors and nurses in Bahrain for treating casualties of disturbances earlier this year. I believe that their appeal commences tomorrow (Sunday).

I imagine that as Bahraini ambassador in the UK you must be deeply embarrassed by this treatment of medical staff for doing what every doctor in the world knows is a doctor's primary responsibility, regardless of circumstances. The fact that, it seems, your country's government and legal profession seem unaware of this basic promise speaks volumes about their understanding of what it means either to be a nation or to be a human being, let alone a doctor. I can just imagine how many people will want to serve in Bahrain's hospitals now . . . I hope that other countries' hospitals will gain from Bahrain's loss.

I cannot imagine that there is anything in the moral code of any of the world's main religions that would consider the treatment of casualties a punishable offence. I am sure that there is no such teaching anywhere in Islam, and there is certainly nothing of this in my own Christian tradition. Even if the people they treated had been enemy soldiers at war with Bahrain, the Geneva Conventions would require the wounds of enemy combatants to be treated by Bahrain's doctors. I need to make this clear, because the claims of some in your government that the injured were effectively enemy combatants is utterly irrelevant, even if it were true (which I don't know). Is Bahrain not a signatory to the Geneva Conventions?

It is true that those conventions have been sorely breached by US and British forces in Iraq and elsewhere, but you will be aware that this led to an outcry of embarrassment from the public and disciplinary action against those responsible — although that disciplinary action did not, in my view, go nearly far or high enough. It is the responsibility of those in the highest positions to make clear what standards are applying. Any suggestion that abuse of prisoners will not be dealt with immediately and robustly creates conditions lower down the chain of command where abuse is almost guaranteed to happen. That is why it is particularly alarming to see a government not only tolerating brutal treatment of its own people, but even penalising those who do their duty to the wounded.

I have to say that, inevitably, this is a sign of the beginning of the end for any state, because it has started to cease functioning as a state. Instead it is starting to function as an élite at war with its own people. Its days are inevitably numbered because it cannot last. The end may come swiftly, or after many years of misery and brutality, but come it will.

I did not know much about Bahrain before, although I have passed through briefly en route for India. The little I now know about it is that it is a state that is beginning to fail, cut off from the world and living by values that reflect no understanding of what makes a nation's life worth living, and no respect for individual human life — even the human life of its own citizens.

I hope you will speak into the closed world of your country's rulers and at least tell them what an embarrassing position they are putting you in. In your position, I would be resigning, I think : I couldn't bear the humiliation. But maybe it is not too late to prevent the inevitable decline into a failed state, if you can persuade your rulers to overturn these bizarre convictions.

Yours sincerely,

About-face on Whistleblowing

2011-08-04T14:45:00.000-07:00

Back in 2009, the Nursing & Midwifery Council struck off a care nurse, Margaret Haywood, who four years before had blown the whistle on neglect and abuse of vulnerable elderly residents in a care home. She was struck off for life for breaching her professional code of conduct, having gone undercover to help Panorama produce a programme exposing the home.

Radio 4's Jenni Murray had written in The Guardian protesting, and there was apparently a massive public response. In late 2009, following the Royal College of Nursing's appeal against the decision, the NMC effectively apologised and reinstated her.

This week, The Independent reports chairman of the government's Health Select Committee Stephen Dorrell as saying he wants the regulators to show "real leadership" in changing the culture to ensure whistleblowing is seen as a professional obligation and not a choice!

I hope Margaret Haywood feels her four years of misery were worth it, and wanted to post this blog as a tribute. Now, more than ever, when the fat-cat-induced cuts are slashing resources for the care of the most vulnerable, we need all the whistleblowers we can get.

Radical parking enforcement

2011-08-03T09:28:00.000-07:00

The Mayor of Vilnius in Lithuania adopts a radical solution to the problem of cars parked in cycle lanes : http://bit.ly/oDyoU7

Fortnum Fiasco

2011-07-19T03:33:00.000-07:00

As predicted in my 4th April post "Lack of police intelligence", all charges against the Fortnum & Mason protestors were dropped : http://bit.ly/oiuNft

What is it with the Metropolitan Police? No wonder they're so keen to have the media on their side.

Will Labour tribalism waste the once-in-a-generation opportunity?

2011-07-18T15:56:00.000-07:00

How disappointing. For the first time in a generation the nation has a window of opportunity to break up the incestuous relationship between Government, Met Police and Murdoch media in which the Murdoch press has abused and dominated the political process and intimidated politicians in the name of its imaginary great British readership. (To say nothing of the Royal Family - and I'm no royalist). An abusive relationship in which politicians have felt they had little choice but to humour them and do what they can to limit the damage; maybe even (in the run-up to an election) get their approval. Rebekah Brooks is no doubt very charming, but even she, surely, didn't think she'd have got the invitations to all those dinner parties unless her hosts felt they had little choice but to invite her.

And now the Labour Party, sensing party political advantage, is on the point of throwing it all away.

I would be surprised if there is a single MP in the House who wouldn't be delighted to see Murdoch tamed, and his grubby hands got out of their knickers. Yet on Newsnight tonight, Murdoch was forgotten. The spotlight is of course on the Met - quite rightly, as my previous post predicted - and is starting to swing round on to the politicians. And as it does so, the squabbling and tribal name-calling starts to break out.

The sight of Harriet Harman desperately trying to extract short-term party political advantage from it is pretty pathetic. I understand that Opposition has a job to do, but this isn't the Opposition we need just now. This is a time for a bit of statesmanship from all parties.

Besides, the idea that this incestuous culture is the responsibility of David Cameron is laughable - although of course he's up to his neck in it, as they nearly all are. He couldn't have got to be Prime Minister if he weren't. Thatcher, Major, Blair (especially Blair, and his minder Campbell) and Brown were all responsible for the collective political failure to cage the beast. And the great British public is responsible too, for continuing to buy Murdoch's papers. (Why is it that really good journalism just doesn't seem to sell? I write as someone who has never 'done Murdoch' - fortunately I'm completely uninterested in televised sport.)

Harman kept squeaking about how awful it was that Millie Dowler's phone got hacked, seemingly forgetting that it happened on her watch. It was Tony Blair that sidelined the Labour Party membership - first he consulted focus groups, and then tried to buy the public's affection directly through media manipulation. Riding the tiger.

Which reminds me of a poem we used to read with our children when they were young :

Algy met a bear.
The bear met Algy.
The bear was bulgy.
The bulge was Algy.

I really hope that the Labour Party doesn't squander the opportunity that MPs collectively now have to put Parliament back in control. It may be pretty inadequate as a democratic institution, but God knows it's better than the Murdoch press. And of course it's not just the Murdoch press. The heart sinks at the prospect of the Daily Mail and Daily Express picking up the dropped baton.

Gotcha!

2011-07-13T07:42:00.000-07:00

for those with long memories, one's tempted (on hearing that Murdoch's withdrawn his B Sky B bid) to say "GOTCHA!"

Murdoch's only doing what comes naturally - it's our politicians that have failed.

2011-07-08T12:30:00.000-07:00

There is no such thing as 'business ethics'. The essence of business is making money : that's all business is. We shouldn't complain too much if a business like News Corporation scours the gutters, abuses human rights and bribes policemen to beat its rivals in the marketplace. Like a cat with a bird, it's only doing what comes naturally. We're dealing here, not with human beings, but with what the Apostle Paul called the 'principalities and powers' (Ephesians 6:12) :

"We are not fighting against humans. We are fighting against forces and authorities and against rulers of darkness and powers in the spiritual world." (The 'rulers of darkness' are not humans like Rupert Murdoch; these are 'spiritual' forces, beyond any single human.)

Any ethics in business has to be supplied by human beings. Yes, we can hope that the human beings employed in the business have ethical standards and apply them. Realistically, though, that isn't going to happen unless ethical behaviour is rewarded. It has to be rewarded from within - the people at the top must define the ethical position. In News International that clearly doesn't happen and hasn't happened for a long time. Rebekah Brooks is absolutely implicated. Murdoch's (and her) ethics are 'do what is necessary to make money'. He and his underlings don't need to instruct junior journalists to hack voicemails. They don't even need to know they're doing it. As long as those journalists could be confident that they would be commended for anything that steals a march on rival newspapers, some of them were bound to do it - like the soldiers that torture prisoners because there is a top-down culture of impunity. Or like the famous assassins of Thomas à Becket, who overheard the king wishing his Archbishop dead, and murdered him on his own altar steps. The king - according to the story at least - had himself whipped through the streets of London as a public penance. I can't wait . . .

Of course, every purchaser of the Sun and the News of the World has also rewarded Murdoch's empire with their custom. The 'customer is always right' in business. As long as someone is prepared to buy gutter journalism, gutter journalism will exist. But it's not realistic to hope the market for gutter journalism will dry up, any more than it is realistic to hope that people like Coulson, Brooks and Murdoch suddenly see the light.

So if it's too much to hope that media moguls in a competitive world will behave ethically, because it's too much to hope that their market will dry up, who will supply the ethics?

Isn't that what we have politicians and judiciary for? In fact, isn't that almost their sole function?

What we have had for the past thirty years is a political culture of hand-washing and avoidance of responsibility.

The old Tory ideology is "You can't expect the common people to know how to run a country. The best people to do that are those who already know how to run a country estate, keep the peasants employed and all that." In the 80s that culture changed and went downmarket. Now it was big businessmen who were likely to be the best at running things (except, of course, they did that so well they shifted most of our manufacturing industry to the Far East because it was more profitable). That meant the only real big businessmen left in the country were the financiers. And how the Blair government feted them! Now of course we know that the financiers weren't terribly interested in running the country either - much more interested of getting as much of their tax liability offshore as they could.

In this whole sorry mess, then, the real culpability lies with our political leaders for failing to govern - for failing to do the job we put them there to do. For failing to supply the ethics to a fundamentally unethical world of business and finance - in fact, for doing the exact opposite and transferring responsibility for governance on to them. And alongside them - and this is a tawdry story yet to fully emerge - stand the police. It seems pretty clear that investigations into phone hacking were blocked at a very senior level in the Met. And unless it was just one rogue policeman passing on phone numbers (like it was 'just one rogue journalist' Mulcaire) I expect to see heads roll at top level in the Met - a police force that's shown itself stunningly short of ethics in recent years and tried to spit out the only Commissioner who showed signs of having any.

400 years ago, bloody civil war fuelled by religious bigotry led to a separation of the power of the Church (the Rupert Murdoch of its day) from politics. Well, theoretically. Now it is time for an enforced separation of powers between politics and big business and finance. Rebekah Brooks shouldn't be allowed anywhere near the gates of Downing Street - or Cameron's dining table. All MPs - or if not that, at least Cabinet members - should automatically be required to resign from their business interests.

And David Cameron, rather than Rebekah Brooks, should be the one 'considering his position'. We need a clean sweep and a culture change at the heart of British politics.

lack of Police intelligence

2011-04-04T01:12:00.000-07:00

Police intelligence - at least, that of the Met - is not all it's cracked up to be. Sometimes it reveals downright political ignorance.

The heavy-handed rounding-up of 138 UK Uncut activists in Fortnum & Mason on March 26th, and the confiscation of their mobile phones, indicates that they are seen as a sinister threat to society. No doubt police agents are already deployed to infiltrate this 'dangerous' movement. If the story of the infiltration of the eco-activists in the Midlands is anything to go by, this shouldn't be too much of a concern, since the police informers themselves came to see the police as more of a threat than the activists when they were violently assaulted by their own colleagues, and found themselves largely supportive of the activists' cause. And that unit was planning criminal trespass. Still, it is inconvenient to have large numbers of police itching for some action waiting for you every time you turn up for an action because they've been tipped off.

It can be fairly safely predicted that no charges will stick to any of those arrested. UK Uncut is a peaceful movement that simply seeks to draw attention to a far bigger 'crime' : the deliberate avoidance by many large companies, with the connivance of a craven Inland Revenue, of paying billions of pounds in tax, at a time when millions at the bottom of the pile are going to be experiencing the impact of public spending cuts. Whilst not technically illegal (since it has Inland Revenue approval) this massive tax avoidance is theft from the British public for political reasons : it's about bribing big companies to stay here in Britain - companies that are happy to send the message that 'we'll go elsewhere' unless you look after us.

Meanwhile a small but highly organised anarchist anti-capitalist movement has made quite clear that it will, under cover of large public demonstrations, cause as much criminal damage to certain capitalist targets as it can, and is quite happy to attack the police while they're at it.

In the 'intelligent' police mind, these two radically different movements seem to be one and the same thing. Which papers do the police chiefs read? Is there any 'intelligence' here?

It reminds me of when, in the early 80s, I attended a World Development Movement lobby of Parliament. At the time I was a member of CND - still am - but CND wasn't involved in the lobby. CND was perceived as the Enemy Within at the time. I had had my phone tapped. As I walked through the back streets from Victoria I was surprised to see twenty or so green buses full of riot police waiting. Steel barricades had been erected everywhere, and despite the fact that I was wearing a clerical collar I was assaulted by a young policeman as I attempted to take a picture of the lobbyists for our church magazine. There were about 250 lobbyists in all, mostly over 50 (since it was the middle of a working day), a high percentage of them churchpeople and Quakers meeting their MPs by appointment. That must have cost the taxpayer a bit in police overtime. The BBC news that night reported that there had been a "CND demonstration at the Houses of Parliament" that day, so the police and BBC news team had presumably decided the story in advance. They must have been disappointed there was no violence. Maybe that was why the young copper tried to start some.

Meanwhile, as government is willing to spend billions bribing fat capitalists to stay in Britain another story unfolds.

The Council of World Mission is a network of 31 national churches around the world. It is the successor to the London Missionary Society - the oldest of such movements, founded in 1795, since when its headquarters have been in London. But mission has changed since the days of the LMS's David Livingstone : the missionaries now tend to come here rather than vice versa. Following the departure of its General Secretary, Revd Dr Des van der Water (a white South African), CWM appointed a Jamaican minister Revd Dr Collin Cowan. Unfortunately, the UK Borders Agency has refused Dr Cowan a work visa - not once, but five times finding different reasons every time and changing the rules a couple of times in the process. The message to 13 million Christians round the world is clear : you're welcome in Britain if you're a white South African but if you're black - forget it.

As a result, CWM is having to consider relocating its headquarters to Johannesberg.

Doesn't it all make you proud to be British?

How the NHS is being abolished

2011-03-14T05:09:00.000-07:00

Dr John Lister explaining what the ConDems NHS 'reforms' actually mean. Alarming.

http://vimeo.com/20855112

The Big Tax Avoiders

2011-02-08T03:39:00.000-08:00

UK Uncut have published the response of Boots, Tesco and Vodaphone to the charge of massive tax avoidance at http://www.ukuncut.org.uk/blog/our-response-to-their-pr

They are not accused of tax evasion, of course, which would be illegal. The issue is the willingness of the Inland Revenue to come to such generous arrangements.

Capitalism (in the sense of unchecked ability of organisations and individuals to compete in a market in which they can buy up the 'means of production', use their weight to crush competition etc), whilst dynamic, is ultimately self-destructive. It leads to exploitation, and in the long run inefficiency, waste, social divisiveness and once-free markets destroyed by monopoly power; ultimately it implodes, destroying any who are vulnerable in the process. It actually depends on regulation for its survival. (Business people were strong supporters of the minimum wage, for instance, because it protected them from being undercut by exploitative 'cowboys' . . that's not to say the minimum wage is anything more than a nudge in the right direction).

The absolutely basic role of political governance in a nation state - the one which even the most right-wing people accept - is maintaining law and order and 'defending the nation'. The state has a legitimate monopoly on the use of force. (That's not to say I believe it should be used - only that the use of force by any other agency is even more wrong). That means that regulating the markets and business is the key task of government.

This primary responsibility has been evaded by UK governments since Thatcher - Thatcher, who actively promoted the interests of capitalists. The failure to hold the power of large capitalist enterprises - most especially the so-called financial 'services' industry (who, actually, does it serve, other than its own interests?) - in check has been a hallmark of the Blair/Brown governments. There are a number of excruciating speeches by Brown on YouTube where he is wooing the City and telling them how beautiful they are.

Is it that transnational corporations (like Boots, operating from a PO Box in Switzerland and paying 3% tax) are so powerful that no national government dare challenge them? Well, how did they get to be so powerful in the first place? But actually, I don't believe it. Regulation (which doesn't have to lead to reams of trivial red tape) is essential for healthy business.

A Pretty Penny

2011-01-27T14:45:00.001-08:00

At my band rehearsal tonight ('Three Pressed Men') we decided we're going to have to cover Steve Tilston's remarkable song A Pretty Penny, written (amazingly) a few months before the banking crashes of 2008 :

There's some men in this city who are paid a pretty penny
Just for guessing where the money flows.
Certain handshakes, knowing smiles in this City mile :
that's the way you know the bonus grows.

We should be so lucky they're such plucky fellows
Only right they pluck the sweetest plums.
If we don't knock such wisdom, rock the boat or rock the system,
if we're good, we'll get to pick the crumbs.

Chorus :
And behind their hedge they don't plant wheat
they don't cut corn, they don't pick tea
they don't dig coal, they don't forge steel.
They just push numbers all about. They push too far - we bail them out,
keep their fingers firm on fortune's wheel.

Such fine aspirations, their justifications.
Where's the justice I would like to see?
It seems the simple fact is : keeping rules and paying tax
is just for simple fools like you and me.

The sky's the going rate; they want it on a plate,
they'll relocate should we dare to decline.
Well it's a global market : they can take their jet and park it
somewhere where the sun refuse to shine.

Steve Tilston 2008
recorded on the album 'Ziggurat'
http://www.stevetilston.com/home

A sad day for politics

2010-12-09T17:14:00.000-08:00

In the May elections in Oxford, the Greens lost two council seats to LibDems in student-dominated areas - one by 14 votes - and failed to take a newly-created seat, again pipped at the post by the LibDems. During the campaign, the LibDems had taken every opportunity to make out that the Greens were "anti-student". They made great play of being the party that backs students all the way. On election day, students in East Oxford turned out in large numbers to vote for Nick Clegg, who had made a point of visiting Brookes University. Many we spoke to on the street that day knew nothing about the political set-up in Oxford, so simply voted the same way in the local election that was running concurrently.

So the spectacular LibDem U-turn on tuition fees in the Commons today is particularly galling for us. If it is true that Clegg was already minded to support the rise in tuition fees before the election then the message is, "Lie your way to power".

This could and should rebound heavily against them. It should mark the first step in their journey to political oblivion. As Lou Reed once sang : "Stick a fork in their ass and turn 'em over - they're done."

But what causes me most exasperation is the likelihood that the lesson the younger generation will have learned is that all politicians are liars whose word cannot be trusted. There is no excuse for what they have done, and there was no need for it. Every politician of integrity, of whatever party, is tainted, polluted by it.

2010-12-06T01:29:00.000-08:00

The more information that comes out about the many wondrous ways big companies find of not paying tax on income generated from the British public, and the more the evidence accrues that the banking sector is being financially rewarded for its colossal failures, the more convincing are the messages that public sector cuts (Oxford City Council - 28% reduction in 4 years) are unnecessary.

The BBC and media generally - always (in true British style) happy to ramp up stories of gloom and despondency unless it's 'Weddings of Mass Distraction' - have colluded in this talk of 'hard choices' to be made. It's this sort of talk that got the ConDems elected.

Once it starts becoming apparent that we have been conned, and that there were ways of addressing the economic mismanagement of New Labour that didn't require an assault on ordinary people, the more the public anger will build. We're seeing signs of it already. But it may only be the tip of the iceberg.

For me, tax avoidance by big capital (with the connivance of cabinet and the Inland Revenue) is the issue that tips me over from frustration to downright anger. Private Eye has been reporting on Vodaphone's £6,000,000,000 tax avoidance scam via its 'flag of convenience' operation in Liechtenstein for months. Philip Green's Arcadia empire scam (see photo above, taken in Monaco I believe) is starting to result in occupations of Topshops, Burtons &c. Technically, I suppose I should say that Arcadia is his Monaco-resident wife's operation . . . What makes Green such a hate figure is of course that he's had the gall to accept a government advisor post to help Osborne the hard-right ideologue push through "efficiencies" for the rest of us.

Maybe he will suggest the British government set up its operating base in the Cayman Islands, where Tory donor Ashdown buries his own 'pieces of eight'.

Kraft, who bought out Cadbury's whilst promising to retain the Bristol plant then immediately closed it with the loss of 400 jobs, have now set up a scam in which a holding company in Switzerland 'sells' the products to Cadbury's UK, who then also have to pay the 'Swiss' operation for use of the branding. All of which significantly reduces (by hundreds of millions) Cadbury's tax liability in the UK.

Are there any major companies that aren't playing this game? Every day, the list of tax-dodging companies grows. How long will it be before the total tax avoided equals the total amount of cash needed to balance the nation's books without the need for any cuts, I wonder.

I find myself wondering how, if MPs - many of whom have seats on the boards of these companies I wouldn't mind betting - are going to be so limp on this issue for fear of upsetting their donor friends, whether there are ways in which, at local government level, we can claim back some of our stolen money. After all, the money came from their local outlets in the first place.

Growing Pains

2010-11-26T01:49:00.000-08:00

A new series of 'In Business' returned to Radio 4 last night. The first programme explored the idea of 'economic growth' and asked whether this was what the world needed. Surprisingly, for a programme that tries to present a range of perspectives, the message was clear : 'growth' (defined as growth in GDP or GNP) is a crude, fairly recent but already outdated and misleading measure of economic performance. Even the speaker drafted in to argue for growth (the author of 'Ferraris for All') said it can't be seen as an end in itself. Will this mean that we no longer get excited BBC News headlines such as "economic output fell by 0.3% today . . fear of recession . . blah blah"? (Meaningless headlines that make me want to throw the radio out of the window.)

The half-hour programme is served up as a podcast at http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/worldbiz but I reproduce my rough notes below :

Government loooking for alternative indicators : 'happiness'

Andrew Simms (Policy Director, New Economics Foundation and author of "Economics as if People Mattered) : extraordinary . . . how recent an artefact of economic thinking it is. Only appeared in run-up to WW2, and in that context - re-gearing towards a war economy. Kuznetz, the architect of it, himself said "don't see this as the only . ."

PD : Who's responsible for elevating 'growth'?
AS : we need better indicators. A huge natural disaster, crime wave, war - 'growth' indicator would tell you it's all 'good'.

Professor Tim Jackson (Centre for Environmental Strategy, University of Surrey and Author: Prosperity Without Growth) Confirms 'growth' is a recent development as an indicator.
We had to persuade people to go out shopping because they were getting tired of it. Post 9/11 : "Mrs Bush and I would like to encourage everybody to get out shopping."

PD : isn't growth good?
TJ : we did need to improve living conditions, yes. Growth - for the 'haves' - has delivered good stuff. But as long ago as the 1970s it was pointed out that resources are finite. And we still haven't lifted the poorest out of poverty.

Sustainable Development Commission loses its government funding next year.

Daniel Ben-Ami (Author, 'Ferraris for All'.) 'they all say 'we need growth' but then add loads of caveats'
PD : the monetisation of everything.
DB : for the benefit of humanity we need more prosperity, an end of scarcity. I don't support it as an end in itself.
PD (leading him on) : what about the 'hair shirts'?
DB : there's a real elitism behind the hair shirts. They don't like chavs with big flat screen TVs. It's a rich elite that's promoting this anti-growth thinking. They want the poor in the developing world as pets - they're filled with horror at the prospect of Chinese and Indians having their own cars.

John Kay (Economist and Author of 'Obliquity') : It's dumb how people obsess about GDP. If you ask people what it is they don't know what it is. It's not an objective fact, it's a construct.
Alan Greenspan said 'GDP doesn't weigh any more'.
Most important thing we can do is divert human ingenuity into things we actually want, not (e.g.) sub-prime mortgages. GDP doesn't measure human ingenuity.

To Totnes (transition town).
Hal Gilmore and Ben Brangwyn (Transition Towns Network).
Lots of listed buildings makes it difficult to install double glazing. Only river crossing for miles - lots of traffic.
Looking for a longer-lasting change - not obvious what's happening on the surface.
Small business closure doesn't register in traditional measures.
Working in schools : asking kids 'what do you think is important?'.

PD : era of cheap energy coming to a close.
Ben Brangwyn : we get 'transition pilgrims'. Some are disappointed we don't have goats on the roofs.
If we wait for the government it will be 'too little, too late'. If we leave it to individuals it's 'too little'. If we do it at community level we may just manage it.
Wouldn't it be good for health to grow?
Economic wealth and happiness are not linked once you reach a certain level.
Economic no-growth is an inevitability in the long term : we need to learn how to work with it.

John Kay : people have been telling us for three or four centuries that things would stop as resources ran out.
PD : what about poverty - don't poor countries need to grow?
JK : of course. China has grown and it's pulled millions out of poverty. They are not poor because we are rich, but because their economies have not been as productive as ours.
Human ingenuity is what is creating growth. Growth doesn't have to mean that we use more stuff. In Britain we are consuming better and more interesting stuff .

Andrew Simms : Ruskin, Smith, Mill. All assumed that economies would grow to a certain point and then level off. Even though advanced economies have continued to grow, the happiness the deliver is tailing off . . dimishing returns.

PD : yet we sigh in relief when GDP expands. GDP is ridiculous.

PD : is the human race not ingenious enough?

Tim Jackson (Univ Surrey): we're making assumptions so heroic about our own ingenuity . . . We're not that clever - we need to concentrate on our economic measures.

Thomas Carlyle : economics, the 'dismal science'.

Lobby for Financial Reform, Nov 19th!

2010-11-08T03:08:00.000-08:00

On Nov 19th the Financial Services (Regulation of Deposits and Lending) Bill has its second reading in the House of Commons. Although it's being brought by two back-bench Conservative MPs the issue should be able to secure cross-party support. We have a financial system in which the greatest proportion of money in circulation is effectively counterfeit, and as it circulates (your average deposit being lent onwards 15 or more times over) it requires interest payments. The private economy has to grow simply for us to stand still, with all the knock-on implications for global warming that that entails.

Quite why this bill isn't getting more media attention I don't understand. A brief account of it is found lower down the page at http://www.moneyreformparty.org.uk/. The summary includes the following :

"The Bill proposes ending the privilege currently held by the retail banks whereby they may create credit based solely on their borrowers' debts. In the future, bank lending will be limited to the amount deposited with them by their savers (as many people wrongly suppose to be the case at the moment).

"This will prevent the further expansion of the money supply over and above the amount created by the Bank of England. It will therefore permit the Bank of England to move towards increasing the amount of positive, debt-free money within the economy without fear of inflation.

"As the Bank of England is a government agency, this money will be available for the Government to pay off its debts without the need for public spending cuts, tax increases, reducing the nation's money supply or for more households or businesses to go ever more deeply into debt."

Lobby your MP!

C4 : "What the green movement got wrong"

2010-11-04T16:35:00.000-07:00

For those that watched tonight's Channel 4 documentary (see http://www.channel4.com/greenmovement) this is my quick response :

The debate revealed that the film alone - without the debate - would have been a disaster. The documentary was ideologically driven, contained serious factual errors, and omitted key information.

The debate revealed that the 'green movement' left its hippy origins behind 20 years ago and has grown up, whereas documentary makers are still stuck in the past.

The debate revealed that the green movement is broad, more united than the documentary suggested, and much more interested in solutions than personal point-scoring and partisanship.

In fact the documentary itself was largely unnecessary.

Overpopulation

2010-10-22T02:37:00.000-07:00

Recent Guardian headline: "Baroness Amos: Population growth could lead to non-stop food crisis . .
Returning from Niger, the UN humanitarian chief says education on family planning must be part of the development agenda."

Overpopulation causes poverty and environmental degradation and it is right to draw attention to this fact; but above all (surely) it's the other way round : poverty causes overpopulation and environmental degradation.

If there is no financial security in old age, children are your 'pension' and your support system in old age. If infant mortality is high, and you don't know know until your child has safely reached ten years old that it will survive into your old age, you have an incentive to keep having children. War and disease increase this pressure.

So although education and empowerment for women is essential, and there are cultural and religious pressures that are no longer appropriate, the most effective way of stabilising population growth is good health care available to all (but especially children), ditto support systems for the elderly.

Isn't this why population growth has slowed significantly in Europe. I believe that Italy - a Roman Catholic country - has a negative indigenous population growth rate.

A waste of time and effort?

2010-10-19T02:45:00.000-07:00

I suppose councillors get used to it and stop questioning it, but reflecting on last night's Full Council meeting it seems to me that only about a quarter of the meeting time was spent doing anything that might make a difference to anyone in Oxford. Three quarters of it was largely a waste of time. That's if you include in the quarter reports from the administration telling us what they are doing or planning to do - but all the opposition can do is praise or criticise it. Such is the system, they're not going to change anything by doing so. A one-seat majority means the Labour administration will do it anyway. Probably the most productive time of the evening was sharing a meal together half-way through.

It's a far cry from the church meetings I'm used to where something more akin to consensus decision making happens. Does any actual decision-making actually happen in Full Council meetings, or is it simply a bit of political theatre?

I used to think that the advantage of political parties is that when people vote they can have some idea what they might be voting for. They might not know the individual whose name is on the ballot paper, but they would have some idea what they might stand for. Many who voted LibDem will be wondering about that, now. And when the elected renege on their manifestos within weeks of being elected . . That's where the other side of it - the candidate as a person with their own integrity (rather than as party stooge) - is important. Has the party system become so degraded that we'd be better off all standing as independents? Certainly, from last night's experience, we'd have had better decision-making if there had been no whip. (The Green Party isn't 'whipped'). Is it cynical to say that it wouldn't last, and that parties would inevitably re-emerge? They don't in my own national church - alliances and coalitions happen all over the place, but they shift according to the issue in hand.

I'm also used to more tightly-chaired meetings where people who speak at great length off the point are invited to either address the issue in question and not stray - or sit down. We had a lot of lengthy irrelevant speeches last night, and it's hard not to believe that there was filibustering going on, in the hope that my motion on Temple Cowley Pools would be 'talked out'.

By withdrawing my motion on the need for better cycle routes under the railway at Frideswide Square we were able to claw back the time necessary to address it. But the suggestion that closing, demolishing and selling off the Temple Cowley Pools site for housing - probably another hall of residence - will further downgrade a Temple Cowley District Centre that needs enhancing and improving, not being pulled to pieces, well - it fell on deaf ears. It's all about a quick fix and money, not about long term strategy for people and communities.

Myths about the cuts

2010-10-07T03:42:00.000-07:00

short notes from Red Pepper Aug/Sept 2010 recirculated by Sarah Lasenby :

Economists have spelt out with alarming clarity the dangers of a double-dip recession increasing cost of unemployment benefit and lowering the tax take.

The International Monetary Fund has also warned that the proposed cuts are too rigorous and will lead to an economic crisis in the UK

Myth – the debt is the highest it has ever been
At 70% of GDP [the total of goods and services produced in one year] this is high but far from unprecedented.
From 1920 – 1960 our debt never fell below around 100%
At the end of WW11 our debt reached 250% and the Welfare State was set up plus nationalisation of the health service and major industries.

Myth – the UK's debt is the worst -
UK has the lowest percentage of Government debt of all the G7countries.

Myth – Our Government debt is unsustainable
Interestingly the nature of our debt is helpful as 70%- 80% of our debt is held within Britain and held on a long term basis – over 12 years on average. This makes our debts more sustainable than those of Greece and Portugal.

Myth – Public spending got out of control under Labour.
Levels of public spending are at the same level as in the early 1990s, during the last economic crisis. This is usual as spending always rises during a recession as result of welfare spending on unemployment and lower tax take.

Myth- UK has a bigger public sector compared to other countries
UK public spending is lower, as a proportion of the economy, than in France, Italy, Austria and the Scandinavian countries.

On Health UK spent 8.4% of GDP in 2007. roughly half of that spent in USA and well behind Germany and France.

Dr Alex Nunn of Leeds Met. Uni.+ Transpennine Working Group wrote the article this comes from.

Unison's Alternative Budget
£4.7 billion could be raised by a 50% tax on incomes over £100,00
£5 billion from tax on vacant housing.
£25 billion could be raised by closing tax loopholes. The Tax Office says its more like £42 billion and some experts say its £120 billion.
All these taxes would be progressive in contrast to the increase in VAT

the Root of the Problem?

2010-07-20T04:01:00.000-07:00

Unashamedly nicked from James Robertson's website and newsletter at http://www.jamesrobertson.com/newsletter.htm :

The UK Coalition Government's Emergency Budget proposals of 22 June ignored a huge potential source of expenditure saving and public revenue. It has been estimated at £200 billion (click here).

It consists of: the hidden subsidies that we all pay to commercial banks because our governments give them the privilege of creating our national money supply as part of their profit-making business; and the lost money we would be benefiting from if new money was created as public revenue and spent into circulation by the government on purposes that meet public needs.

Political and media reporting and debate about the recent UK budget has been limited to conventional questions: does it strike a proper balance between rich and poor, between tax increases and public spending cuts, and between a Keynesian and a Thatcher/Reagan economic response to our potentially disastrous prospects? Decision-makers and mainstream commentators appear to be totally unaware that monetary reform could change our prospects dramatically for the better by providing a very significant contribution to paying back our huge deficit.

As well as that contribution to our immediate needs, there are other overwhelming arguments for monetary reform. They require no academic economic teaching to understand, just common sense. They include the following.

(1) In a more "normal" context, if the banks are allowed to create over 95% of our money as interest-bearing debt, the only way to maintain a financially sustainable situation is to let them create more money continually, in order that borrowers can pay the interest on the debt already created. That systematically creates inflation, a more indebted society, and a growing gap between rich and poor.

(2) "Normal" situations can't last very long when money is created that way. As profit-making businesses competing with one another, commercial banks are inevitably under pressure to create too much money; that causes recurrent booms which end in busts; in busts the banks will not create enough money to meet society's needs; then they can hold the government to ransom to bail them out with enough taxpayers' money to enable them to lend us what should be our own!

(3) Allowing the banks to decide how almost all the money in society is used on its first entry into circulation, and to be paid interest on it as it circulates until it is repaid,

- distorts the economy in favour of activities profitable to the banks,

- imposes a hidden charge on everyone who uses money, and

- subsidises the banking industry, and so reduces the efficiency of the services it offers.

All these problems could be avoided by transferring to an agency of the state (the Bank of England) the function of:

- creating all the national money debt-free to meet the monetary objectives laid down by the government; and

- giving it to the government as public revenue to be spent into circulation under democratic budgetary procedures.

The present out-of-date, undemocratic way of managing national money supplies is a central part of how the world's money system now operates perversely as a whole, nationally and internationally.

Citizens of other countries also suffer unnecessarily from it, as the G8 and G20 meetings last month in Canada confirmed.

Cuts : the Big Lie

2010-06-30T04:02:00.001-07:00

On radio the other day I was treated to a clear explanation of ConDem economic theory. (I can't remember the name of the speaker, who I think was an economist). He said "It's only the private sector that creates wealth". i.e. the public sector doesn't; the public sector consumes wealth. So in order to get us out of the enormous hole in the country's wealth that, er, the private sector has created, we've got to swing an axe through the public sector and stop it consuming so much.

The private sector, you see, is good (according to the ConDems) because it produces all the things that people want (like cars and gadgets and entertainment) and is subject to the honest discipline of the market which makes sure that companies make the maximum profit for their shareholders who can award enormous bonuses to the bosses (for them to bank offshore to avoid paying taxes) whilst at the same time keeping prices competitive by employing as few people in this country as they possibly can and paying producers the least they can get away with.

The public sector is bad (say the ConDems) because it takes people's money away against their will to produce all the things they don't want (like health care and social services, roads infrastructure, schools, rubbish collection, oh - and benefits for all the people the private sector doesn't feel it needs any more). And of course the public sector is so undermining of freedom, isn't it? : Whereas in the private sector you can rejoice in the freedom to choose from fifty different brands of yoghourt in your supermarket (but don't worry your little heads about who is appointed to run the company or at what salary, or whether the company trades ethically, uses its weight to crush other small businesses or any of that 'do-gooder' stuff) the nasty public sector just takes your money away and you have no choice. Don't worry about citizen rights or voting or anything like that - "they're all as bad as each other", your vote is worthless. (Anyone who finds themselves agreeing with that has just swallowed the big lie).

So here's a brilliant idea for getting us out of the deficit. Take the city council's leisure facilities, say, and privatise them (as Oxford has done). At a stroke, a £700,000 "saving" in that nasty public sector spending (except that, being no fools, the private company refused to take responsibility for those leisure centres that the council had failed to maintain properly - so the council tax payer is left to pick up the 'toxic assets'). At a stroke, the leisure service is now creating £700,000 of wealth rather than consuming it. That's a net swing of £1,400,000 to the country's wealth for doing nothing except passing the buck. Yay! Brilliant!

But hang on a minute, the company is 'non-profit'! Doesn't that mean it isn't generating any wealth? Now I'm getting confused.

Oh well, it's still £700,000 shifted off the council's books, isn't it? It still means the country isn't spending £700,000 that it was before. Doesn't it . . ?

No it doesn't. The whole idea that only the private sector produces wealth is utter rubbish. Worse, it's a lie told to justify passing on the costs of gargantuan failure in the spoiled and unaccountable upper echelons of the private sector to the most vulnerable in society by way of cuts to essential services. "Firm but fair", Mr Cleggeron? It's morally, spiritually, economically bankrupt. It's a lie propagated by most of the mainstream media, including the BBC. It's a lie that most of the population has been manipulated to believe. There is plenty of actual wealth in this country, most of it generated by the public sector, on which the upper echelons of the private sector are nothing more than a parasite. It's that parasite that needs cutting out. Never mind selling off Oxford City Council assets : I wonder what those buildings in the City of London are worth?

2010-06-22T00:07:00.000-07:00

Haven't posted for a while because life's been so busy. The issues I've been immediately drawn into :

* the closure of one of the busiest swimming pool and leisure centres in Oxford despite massive public opposition (6,500 petition signatures so far) and public consultation that tried as hard to avoid actually consulting as it could, leaving it until they hoped the plan was a fait accompli. The feasibility study will only be published days before the Executive Board plans to make the decision. In the midst of the heat generated, a very interesting proposal for a replacement pool using reed-bed water filtration has emerged.

* the issue of nightmare all-night parties in student houses. My researches reveal that the Environmental Development people do have the power to act with fixed penalty fines whilst the problem is occurring, but that a call-out involves young female staff being summoned from their bed 20 miles away at 3:00 in the morning after having done a day's work, to deal with the problem on their own. It's a serious matter : there are signs that long-term residents are starting to move out of the areas with high student concentrations, which will destroy the delicate balance that makes East Oxford great.

* the turning-over by the Council of a large chunk of the only publicly-owned green space in East Oxford for a builder's compound for two years, again without consulting the East Area Parliament as they were obliged to do.

* the proposed licensing of HMOs (houses in multiple occupation) and discussions about what anti-social behaviour conditions might be applied to the licences.

* a series of public meetings about the problems of far too many cars in East Oxford, which was not designed for cars at all. Is a Controlled Parking Zone the way forward? The more one goes into the issue the more complex it gets.

* I have created and started to build an online resource - an interactive website along the lines of Wikipedia, facilitating the building-up of an information base that members can add to and search. Up to now, a lot of key information has been locked in the heads of a very few people. It's at www.wolffs.info/tikiwiki but most of its content is restricted to Party activists.

* how to get a missing section of what could be a very valuable cycle route into the city from the south established. Unfortunately it runs across Christ Church College land, and previous attempts have not been successful.

* membership of the Standards Committee (currently examining complaints the City Council receives), the Value & Performance Scrutiny Committee (equivalent to a parliamentary select committee) and a sub-group of that, the Asset Management Group, which is currently scrutinising proposals for a radical reordering of the council's ways of working, introducing home working and hotdesking, selling off two of its offices and pulling all the staff into two places, and restructuring the council to create a single customer interface (instead of people having to find out which department they need and deal direct).

Alongside this is the more routine 'casework' - dealing with complaints and planning applications. All in all, it's been a bit of a shock. It hasn't helped that I've only just managed to get the IT equipment I wanted, and still don't have access to the Council intranet. But I'm glad to be involved and feel I can be useful.

Finding my Feet

2010-05-25T02:35:00.000-07:00

Since being elected to Oxford City Council for the Green Party the learning curve has steepened. At a new councillors' training event last week I came away with 3.9 kg of paper with brochures from several similar-sounding organisations (e.g. the 'Oxford Strategic Partnership', the 'Oxfordshire Partnership') each with their own list of thematic priorities to add to the existing priorities declared in Oxford's own Core Strategy and Development Plan.

All good stuff, and partnership is doubtless a good thing, but the danger is that it removes accountability and gives power to an inner circle of people (few of whom are directly elected) who decide the 'big vision'. It's no wonder that there's a growing feeling on the ground that planning (that is, the long-term planning policies not the small, local planning consents) is out of control, top-down and unaccountable. I don't think these things are mere talk-shops : they are actually setting the 'rules' by which more local planning decisions are bound. i think.

I do not make a virtue of ignorance, but one thing I bring to this political world is a very recent memory of being an 'ordinary member of the public' who has very little idea about any of this. It's easy for political hacks to imagine that everybody thinks as they do, but I'd be surprised if more than 5% of Oxford's population had much idea which political parties were actually running the city.

Energy efficiency may increase carbon emissions

2010-05-12T14:15:00.000-07:00

A fascinating paper (almost, but not quite, incomprehensible to this very amateur economist) cited in James Robertson's newsletter http://www.jamesrobertson.com/newsletter.htm argues that without an 'ethic of sufficiency' and above all monetary reform that removes the role of providing the money supply from the banks, energy efficiency may do little to reduce humanity's environmental impact, and may worsen it.

In the course of the argument there are one or two moments of real clarity where Steve Sorrell breaks into 'plain English', and on p.14 a table contrasting Conventional with 'Green' models of economic development. To hear Cameron and Clegg preaching the accepted wisdom as they describe the need to 'restore economic growth in order to overcome the deficit', it becomes increasingly clear why we need Caroline Lucas in Parliament. Who else is going to challenge this 'accepted wisdom'?What they are describing is a world spinning out of control.

The vicious cycle created by the privatised money supply is described in Section 6, where he says :

". . most of the money in circulation only exists because either businesses or individuals have gone into debt and are paying interest on their loans. While individual loans may be repaid, the debt in aggregate can never be repaid because
this would remove virtually all the money from circulation. The health of the economy is therefore entirely dependent upon the continued willingness of businesses and consumers to take out loans for either investment or consumption. Any reduction in borrowing therefore threatens to tip economies into recession." (p.16)

Or, as Jethro Tull had it :

"In the shuffling madness
of the locomotive breath
runs the all-time loser
headlong to his death.
He feels the piston scraping -
steam breaking on his brow -
old Charlie stole the handle
and the train it won't stop going
no way to slow down"

('Locomotive Breath', from the album Aqualung)

Sorrell's closing paragraphs :

"Over the long term, continued economic growth can only be reconciled with environmental sustainability if implausibly large improvements in energy efficiency can be achieved ..

Instead of encouraging further growth and greater consumption, the benefits of improved efficiency need to be increasingly channelled into low carbon energy supply and improved quality of life. Quite how this can be achieved remains far from clear since a credible ‘ecological macroeconomics’ has yet to be developed. Most importantly, a crucial element of that macroeconomics - namely monetary reform - remains almost entirely overlooked. It is hoped that this paper will at least stimulate some thinking in that direction."

The paper in question is directly downloadable from www.sussex.ac.uk/spru/documents/sewp185.pdf

from 'New Labour' to 'New Tory'

2010-05-12T12:24:00.000-07:00

So our prediction was right : a vote for the Lib Dems was a vote for a Conservative government. We wait to see how much of the Lib Dem programme will get lost on the way, and whether we will get any kind of chance for voting reform. The Greens argue for Additional Member System of voting as preferable to Proportional Representation or the others (AV, STV).

Is this in fact the beginning of the end for the Liberal Democrat party, as their key players are absorbed into New Conservative? And what are the prospects of Old Libs joining with many Old Labs (of the 'small-scale socialism' Cooperative variety) who are already in the party of the future - the Green Party?

Trying to look on the bright side, the most promising outcome of a New Conservative government might be getting centralised planning development objectives for the South East region off our backs, and with it a chance to bury Oxford's 'Core Strategy' once for all, and start again from scratch with proper consultation with the people of Oxford this time.

Or should we say 'peoples' : Oxford has so many discontinuities in it that there is no such thing as a typical Oxford citizen. Whether Oxford's peoples could ever agree on a coherent vision for our city . . . .

an auspicious encounter

2010-05-11T10:58:00.000-07:00

A strangely auspicious event this (Sunday) afternoon : two days after being elected to Oxford City Council as a Green Party member, my wife Karen and I were cycling back from our county councillor's birthday party in Iffley along the Isis towpath. We got separated when I stopped to take a picture for two foreign visitors and after finding each other again ended up taking an unintended route back across the grassy Port Meadow.

As we approached the Trap Grounds allotments we saw a group of twenty or so parishioners and choirboys from St Margarets Church processing in their cassocks and choir vestments behind a large silver crucifix, swinging incense as they went. It was like something out of Monty Python's 'Holy Grail'.

We stayed with them as they blessed the vegetable allotments and prayed for their fruitfulness, then the meadow and river, then back over to the canal, blessing the railway en route to the children's playground next door to the school where Karen teaches. It was very moving to hear the famous Gospel passage "Jesus said . . let the little children come to me" in the context of a playground, and to see the swings and climbing frames censed.

Somehow everything about it reflected the spiritual heart of the Green vision; the simple liturgy and ritual with its completely serious intent (in years gone by, lives depended on those prayers being answered) was the 'carrier' for a light-hearted and inclusive social occasion that gathered the curious as it went. The bizarre nature of the encounter and the amazing coincidence of the timing seemed to augur well for the service that lies ahead of me.

Lib Dems last chance to make a mark?

2010-05-08T07:05:00.000-07:00

It is absolutely essential that the Lib Dems use this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to drive a change in the UKs hopeless electoral system. It is so poor it is almost impossible to interpret with any real confidence the results it delivers, as people vote for things they largely don't believe in. It is specifically designed to drive smaller parties out. What that means is that the frightened huddle of parties in the middle doesn't have the courage to publicly address hugely important but divisive issues : migration, desperate inequality, climate change (climate change addressed fully and properly, that is - not just tinkering with a runaway economic system).

It is the single most important contribution the Lib Dems could make to the political life of this country in the present moment. I believe it will do them no electoral harm, whereas failure to drive for this change and succumb to Conservative overtures stands to obliterate the Lib Dems for ever.

David Cameron must be given no opportunity to drive for a re-run election : only the Conservatives have the financial backing to withstand another campaign, and I'm sure they know it.

See http://bit.ly/aBSqrL

In by a whisker

2010-05-07T09:57:00.000-07:00

The Oxford City Council count is over. Labour took one very marginal seat off the LibDems and claimed one place off the Independent Working Class Association whose candidate withdrew, Lib Dems took two seats off the Greens - by 14 votes. But not the seat I was contesting, which we held by 79 votes (it went to a recount). That was 32% of the vote.

In some wards the Green Party made a very strong showing (17%) in a formerly strong Labour ward with minimal input and 14% and 15% in safe Lib Dem territory on nothing more than a single leaflet.

It leaves Labour with an overall majority of 1, from having no overall majority.

"What do we want?" "No idea!"

2010-05-07T02:15:00.000-07:00

What a great voting system! I've been looking through a somewhat random selection of Parliamentary election results and find it impossible to discern what signals the voters have wanted to send. The only clearly discernible trend across the board is the small, steady but remorseless rise in single(ish)-issue anti-EU and anti-immigration vote of BNP and UKIP. (Our local UKIP candidate was a fervent climate change denier, too - don't know whether that's party policy.)

It's all very well having a system that delivers (supposedly) a 'clear winner' - but if the 'clear winner' actually has no idea why - or even whether - they really won, what kind of mandate is that? In what sense can they claim to represent 'the British people'? Yet Prime Ministers can send our armed forces into battle without even going to Parliament.

On the streets of East Oxford (I was canvassing students all afternoon) it seemed the Labour vote was collapsing and Lib Dems were surging. In fact, the opposite happened.

In Oxford West & Abingdon, I've just learned that the Green Party strategy of putting out a single, carefully crafted brochure/leaflet (instead of the very un-green reams of glossy bumf and 'personal' letters from Lib Dems and Tories) backfired : the Royal Mail simply failed to deliver them to much of the constituency. But then to those of us who suffer the vagaries of the local postal service perhaps that should have come as no surprise.

As I write, the city election ballot hasn't been counted; but we fear the Greens may have taken a hit.

2010-05-05T09:53:00.000-07:00

"Meet the new boss - same as the old boss"

2010-05-05T01:20:00.000-07:00

Until my mid-30s there was a clear ideological difference between the two main parties. At gut level, you knew what they stood for. With the Lib Dems it wasn't so clear — they seemed to me as some sort of fudge in between although, being in origin far older than socialism, that couldn't be quite right.

Thatcher's assault on the old working class — the dismantling (and eventual banishing overseas) of nationalised industries, the forced sale of council housing, the intimidation of trades unionists through fear of litigation or unemployment — roundly and permanently defeated the (old) Labour Party. In order to preserve something of its past glories New Labour had to abandon socialism, and left behind a large chunk of its membership.

What the 'first-past-the-post' system has delivered is three grey parties competing for a narrow middle ground that most of us know instinctively has had its day. The rise of Nick Clegg's LibDems is not exciting. It does not usher in anything particularly new. I have reached the point where I am not only bored by the BBCs election coverage but angered by it.

Only the parties on the fringe are addressing the real issues in people's minds. The BNP, UKIP and the Greens are not afraid to speak their mind on migration, and the gulf between the latter and the other two is almost total. People instinctively know that there is something horribly wrong with financial systems that have nearly bankrupted the country yet continue to pay eye-watering sums to those responsible for their failure. They know that capping bonuses will do nothing to address the fundamental sickness, even though they can't put their finger on what that sickness really is. Many fear that serious attempts to address our carbon-hungry lifestyle will be 'too little too late' for their grandchildren, and that electric cars and green technology on its own is an inadequate answer. Oxford probably has the highest-qualified wine waiters in the world — young people taught they have a 'right' to aspire to something 'better', but unable to access housing and the promised exciting jobs with prospects. The Cabinet Office's recent publication "Unleashing Aspiration" says we need to see how parents 'could be empowered with a new right to choose a better school for their children'. The absurdity of this statement is laughable. As Stefan Collini's excellent article in a recent issue of the London Review of Books says : 'If all parents have a right to choose a 'better' school, won't we have to maintain in each locality a number of ghostly 'worse' schools to which no children are actually sent, whose function is to show that some schools are 'better' than others?'

What is most galling is that the same parties that promote such 'aspiration' have actually delivered a society in which, of all the world's rich societies apart from the USA, parental levels of wealth are by far the single biggest determinant of a child's life chances in the UK. Indeed, it's the father's income that most determines the child's. And this is the conclusion of a January report from the government's own Equalities Office! If this is what New Labour delivered, can anyone seriously imagine the Conservatives or even Lib Dems delivering anything better? 'Fairness' is on all their lips, but only the Green Party talks robustly about equality.

'First past the post' has delivered a debt-ridden, politically disenfranchised electorate torn apart by inequality, where people with less chance of economic self-improvement than ever in living memory are given sermons on their duty to aspire to 'better'. A 'brave new world' for electoral politics emerging? I hardly think so. Which shade of black do you prefer? Until we can get the real questions addressed by politicians with some political courage it will only get worse — and 'first past the post' saps political courage. That is the reason, amongst a hundred others, why I'm throwing my weight behind the Green Party. The BNP and UKIP claim to be 'telling it like it is', except that they're 'telling it how it seems' to disenchanted, largely white, little-Englander Tories of working class and middle class (respectively) who think that human-induced global warming is a European plot. The Green Party alone actually 'tells it like it is' and knows how to begin tackling it.

To Let in Manzil Way

2010-04-30T15:28:00.000-07:00

Following my earlier blog post "Not to Let in Manzil Way" about the 20 empty apartments in the Manzil Way Health Centre (built under PFI) - they've just appeared on the private market. (See http://premieroxford.co.uk/product_details.php?&product_id=913)

This despite a planning condition fought for by Green councillors that the apartments should be affordable for the use of medical staff and other key workers. (See planning condition 7 at : http://planning.oxford.gov.uk/WAM/doc/Decision-580829.pdf?extension=.pdf&id=580829&appid=911&location=VOLUME1&contentType=application/pdf&pageCount=7)

The cynicism of the developer is astounding - it's an insult to the citizens of Oxford that its planning decisions should be treated with such disdain.

It's thanks to outgoing Green councillor Craig Simmons that this has been picked up. I sincerely hope that any future planning applications from the developer in question are refused on principle.

Jobsworths and meaningless growth

2010-04-22T07:13:00.000-07:00

What's not coming out in political debate - because far too much attention is being given to the pasty pastel parties and the 'past-times parties' (UKIP and BNP) - is that we are heading for disaster because of a toxic addiction to a version of 'economic growth' that doesn't understand what 'the economy' actually is, and doesn't understand the difference between 'good growth' and 'bad growth'. I mean, cancer's a growth.

They all think that 'the economy' is about money and jobs. No, the economy is about the distribution and sharing of resources to maintain and enhance quality of life for all.

Money can help that happen, but the worship of the golden calf, which The System has forcibly recruited most people into, has now brought the inevitable curse. Except for its high priests, that is.

A 'job' is work that you do when you help some employing organisation fulfil its own objectives. Some jobs are economically valuable (in the true sense) and rewarding. But many people hate their jobs and don't care tuppence about their employer's objectives which often entail producing pointless products and services, or (in Gordon Brown's constituency) weaponry, or (in the dangerous Disneyworld of finance) making money out of borrowed money out of borrowed money. Many live for the precious time they can grab with their families and doing the things they really love. Which often involve hard work!

Many people - I'm thinking of carers - are doing immensely valuable work which could actually be life-enhancing for them as well as the loved-ones they care for, if they weren't isolated and punished by The System because they don't have jobs. And in the 'leaders debate' the pastel parties agreed that they're scared of this issue - quite rightly, because their model of money-economy and jobs doesn't know how to handle it without immense and wasteful complexity.

The Green Party, on the other hand, with its Citizens' Income proposals inextricably linked with a whole lot of stuff about health care, transport and access, exchange of goods and services independently of the money system and so on have a handle on it because we're not blinded by The System and its insatiable appetite for meaningless 'growth'.

It's the difference between managerialism and practical vision.

Dream Oxford

2010-04-20T02:38:00.001-07:00

On Sunday, at a hustings, candidates were invited to imagine their dream Oxford in 20 years' time. I struggle to imagine what a New Labour city might look like, and in a Tory city I can imagine you might want to pull Magdalen Bridge down and let the worlds of north and east Oxford drift apart. But a green Oxford . . that's easy!

How about (in no particular order):

> a quiet city without the roar of petrol and diesel engines

> . . . or the smell and air pollution

> a brilliant place to cycle, walk and get around by wheelchair/buggy. Reclaim the streets for kids. Maybe a tram system east-west and north-south.

> with no one in substandard accommodation, being ripped off by unscrupulous landlords or intimidated by neighbours

> thriving and varied grassroots cultural life of dance, music, poetry, theatre

> no commuters because everyone's able to find gainful employment and the shops and services they need within walking distance. Big local farmers' markets.

> no great disparities of wealth, with rich and poor moving in different worlds and never meeting

> perhaps our own Oxford currency so we can raise two fingers to the fairyland of the money system . . most people banking with the Oxford or Blackbird Leys Credit Unions

> open and transparent city and county government that puts genuine energy into building relationships with people, not imposing "consultations" on them; where at the click of a button people can see what their councillors are proposing and supporting (rather than being fed versions manipulated for party political ends)

> much stronger and better-attended Area Parliaments with a buzz about them, keeping the big players (including the City and County Councils themselves) in check

> the universities taking much more responsibility for their impact on East Oxford

> more rather than less green space, with the colleges granting better access to local residents (e.g. a cycle route into Oxford that doesn't have to go via the Plain/Magdalen Bridge . . .

> no corruption and bullying in local politics

> hydro power generation at Osney, Iffley, Wolvercote; attractive wind turbines to north, south, east and west rather than great ugly pylons striding across the view from Cumnor Hill

> a thriving hub of creative green technological innovation in small workshops and offices across the city (not dumped in green belt periphery)

> no one caught in the benefit trap - a Citizen's Income encouraging everyone to contribute to building a better city

> world-class palliative and end-of-life care for all who need it.

> the hospital wings and health centres, privatised under PFI, brought back into public ownership.

> a City of Sanctuary - a city that 'thinks global, acts local'

> so-called 'faith schools' teased away from the control of religious institutions (and private corporations) so that every school can be a 'school of faith and hope', and every parent, whether religious or not, can trust that their attempts to impart lasting values to their children won't be undermined by the school.

Where do I stop . . . . ?

I could go on . .

Politicians Not Welcome Here

2010-04-17T08:05:00.000-07:00

'Politicians not welcome here' is the BBC strapline for its 'The Politics Show' broadcast from Oxford tomorrow, Sunday. It's an apt title from the Biased Broadcasting Company : the Green Party is not welcome on the programme. UKIP has been invited, but not the Greens, despite the Green Party polling 6 points ahead of all other rivals in the city's Euro election and setting the City Council agenda with its seven city councillors.

And UKIP!? After the offensive performance of Nigel Farage (the politician who the BBC does welcome) in the European Parliament where he treated President van Rompuy to a tirade of personally offensive remarks. It made me ashamed to be British, and yet this is the party that trades on that very sentiment.

Green Party manifesto

2010-04-16T03:32:00.000-07:00

People have some funny ideas about what the Green Party stands for. Find out by reading the manifesto : http://www.greenparty.org.uk/assets/files/resources/Manifesto_web_file.pdf

Beware the Grey/Green New Deal

2010-04-12T15:27:00.000-07:00

It's a curious thing : Green policies on Economy, Education, Defence, Taxation, Transport, Energy, Animal Rights etc (see http://policy.greenparty.org.uk/policypointers/index.html) are immediately recognisable and distinctive. But the other parties are so keen to claim the climate change vote that to hear them speak you'd think they were there first.

In all the hot air, don't be fooled! Whereas, for the main parties, the carbon agenda has been bolted on to the side of the manifesto (inevitable, since their political philosophies evolved between 100 and 300 years ago - and are now fossilised) the Green manifesto arose out of concern for humanity's relationship with its environment. Our short climate change policy document contains 23 links to other Green policy areas, it's so thoroughly stitched-in.

The other parties are still saddled with an addiction to a debased model of economic growth that has lost touch with the reality of people's lives. They have turned us from citizens into consumers until (we're told) we've got to shop to save the nation. (Was Napoleon right to call us a 'nation of shopkeepers'?)

What this means is that all the talk of 'green jobs' means little more to the grey parties than shopping for green technology - a fad that will quickly be ditched if it doesn't make massive profits for investment bankers. Indeed, we recently had a Conservative Party glossy brochure round that seemed to think green energy meant helping customers find the cheapest energy supplier! For the Greens it's a far more fundamental shift than that. The difference is, we mean it.

'Wealth' versus 'Money'

2010-04-07T05:28:00.000-07:00

Listening to the heated arguments about increasing National Insurance contributions (as New Labour, the "party of the middle class", are proposing), I'm struck by a number of assumptions that noone from the three largest parties are challenging :

1) that the public sector is grossly inefficient, whereas the private sector isn't. I struggle a bit to understand how companies that pay the salaries to their board members that they do could possibly be 'efficient'.

2) that investment in the NHS, schools and policing wouldn't create (or protect) jobs, whereas holding back on National Insurance increase would. I'd have thought that if creating jobs was the objective, hospitals and schools in particular create proportionately far more jobs per pound of investment. Many private sector companies are falling over themselves to outsource their employment to the developing world. You can export manufacturing and finance jobs, but you can't export nursing and teaching jobs.

Oxfordshire County Council, Oxford University, the hospitals/PCT and Brookes University account for 58,500 jobs in Oxfordshire, by far the biggest provider of employment. Remember - that's direct employees : you can easily double the figure if you include all the subcontractors and indirect jobs created.

3) that the only people who create wealth are people in the private sector who make things. (Well, who used to. Increasingly, they make their profits by selling things made elsewhere, or by selling financial services. Are we to become a 'nation of shopkeepers'?) The assumption seems to be that doctors, nurses, teachers, cleaners, social workers etc etc don't create wealth. But wealth is not money. Wealth is a roof over your head, warmth in winter, food on the table, healthcare, being surrounded by people who care for you, security and having an opportunity to contribute. It's also about having a healthy relationship with the planet. A lot of profit making enterprise actually undermines true wealth.

4) And besides, don't hospitals and schools pay National Insurance employer's contributions, too?

For me, the fact that these assumptions - which are fundamental in Green thinking - are not being challenged is further proof that the main parties have lost the plot.

Andrew Smith suggests: "Vote Labour! . . . I don't!"

2010-04-04T08:04:00.000-07:00

The Labour Party have just put out a striking campaign newssheet around East Oxford. It's striking for the absence of red ink and the presence of green. The banner headline is Andrew Smith's (sitting New Labour MP)'Green New Deal', complete with requisite photo of MP on bicycle.

It explains how Andrew has voted against Heathrow's third runway, for carbon emissions targets, against Trident etc. All good stuff.

But it also points out that on many of these occasions he voted against his party whips. In other words : "Vote Labour! I don't!"

Or is it that he was given special permission to vote against the whips, knowing that the Green Party are a serious threat to the Labour vote in Oxford East?

Either way, the message is : if you're actually concerned about green issues, vote Green. What actually works is voting Green, because every Green vote drives the changes, whoever actually ends up getting elected. If it's the Green agenda you support it's only a Labour or Lib Dem vote that's wasted.

Accessibility not Mobility

2010-03-11T02:05:00.000-08:00

Sushila Dhall's fronted the Greens opposition to the proposed Westgate development in the city centre for a long time now. Does Oxford need more shops and cars in the centre when what it clearly really needs is affordable housing? And (as Sushila pointed out in a recent residents meeting) that area was originally 'affordable housing'.

I've just realised that in the 18 years I've lived in Oxford I've never been into a single shop in the current Westgate. OK, so I'm a bloke and shopping isn't my thing, but even so . . . In fact, the only times I've ever been into Westgate at all are to go to the management suite to negotiate a busking spot under the canopy during Christian Aid Week.

The Greens have a slogan : "Accessibility not Mobility". Instead of trying to bus people to big shopping centres or out-of-town supermarkets and leisure facilities with massive car parks people need these things within walking distance if at all possible. East Oxford doesn't do too badly, with a wide range of shopping and leisure facilities all within easy walking distance. It's one reason why it's a great place. Let's keep it that way.

Oxford's budget

2010-03-10T02:49:00.000-08:00

link to the Greens report on the recent Oxford City Council budget meeting, to give some idea of the practical issues the Green group of councillors are trying to address : http://www.greenoxford.com/content/view/1081/229/

'Not to Let' in Manzil Way

2010-03-10T02:15:00.000-08:00

Whilst doing an OxClean litter pick in Manzil Way on Saturday it was pointed out to me that the top floor of the new NHS building is vacant.

This building was financed under PFI - the Labour government's 'Private Finance Initiative' - in other words, privatised under what we in the Greens have taken to calling 'The Mortgage From Hell'.

The top floor was meant to be 20 flats for key workers; four years on, and it's still vacant space. The café on the corner of the building, which presumably hoped to draw custom from the residents, seems to have folded.

Even though this is supposedly an NHS facility, noone seems to know which shadowy organisations own it, or under what terms. Surely the key worker accommodation was part of the deal? In which case, how is it that it isn't happening?

If anyone knows the answer . . .

Russian roulette with the grandchildren

2010-03-01T03:05:00.000-08:00

Graciela Chichilnisky, on this morning's Start the Week (Radio 4) claimed that whilst US politicians in the Senate and House of Representatives are inclined to challenge manmade global warming as an unproven hypothesis, and accordingly the federal government is slow to prepare for impending crisis (albeit 30 years away), over in the Pentagon it has been identified as the single biggest threat to US national security.

She is the first person I have heard to spell out clearly what I have been saying on my blog at www.blog.wolffs.info for over a year: that when considering the probability of the hypothesis being correct (currently at least 85% I should think) it is also necessary to take into account the extreme consequences if it is indeed correct. Also, the costs and risks involved in acting to avoid the danger (costs and risks that are relatively low).

When you've spun the chamber of a revolver loaded with just one bullet, there is nothing particularly clever about saying you're fairly sure it's safe to point it at your head and pull the trigger. But a more accurate analogy would be to load five (83%) of the six chambers - and then fire the revolver at your grandchildren.

Oxford fit to burst

2010-02-26T08:00:00.000-08:00

Excellent meeting last night of various residents groups from Headington and East Oxford at the town hall. Must have been a couple of hundred there, and a lot of energy for getting a grip on future planning of Oxford.

The second half saw the four parliamentary candidates for Oxford East doing an 'Any Questions'. Green Party candidate Sushila Dhall was the only one to consistently draw a round of applause. She clearly had her finger on the pulse and the local knowledge. The Lib Dem candidate wasn't even aware that the city council had area committees that had planning powers.

There was a strong sense in the meeting that Oxford is suffering from regional and national planning decisions, taken remotely, requiring Oxford to grow : 'growth at all costs' and that this is now putting intolerable strains on the city, its housing, its green spaces, its transport infrastructure and is in danger of destroying its neighbourhood communities.

The biggest round of applause Sushila got was when she pointed out that the 'brownfield sites' that other candidates had suggested should be developed for housing are instead being developed for commercial use with the support of all the other parties. She was referring specifically to the currently-stalled Westgate development, a massive and unneeded shopping centre in area that was formerly affordable housing.

Greens the only effective opposition in Oxford

2010-02-23T01:37:00.001-08:00

At last night's Council budget meeting it became clear that the Greens are the only effective opposition party in Oxford. Cllr Ed Turner (Labour) admitted as much by complimenting the Greens' budget as workable but too 'green' for the Labour group to even negotiate over. It was less effort for them to agree a compromise with an unimaginative Liberal Democrat budget that hardly differed from Labour's anyway.

Amongst the items the Labour-Lib Dem pact could not be bothered to consider were :

- support for programmes that draw in additional funds to insulate domestic properties

- a feasibility study on a city centre 'cycle hub'

- a Sustainability Officer post. There are good ideas being floated for cost-effective carbon reduction schemes but the Council has no staff resources to explore them. They are content to be a talking shop.

- taking up a new scheme that offers guaranteed income from sale of renewable energy by installing solar PV panels on the Council building.

- support for a programme to prevent the most vulnerable being made homeless

For Labour and Lib Dem, it would seem, such things are not worth considering. They take the line of least resistance and offer unimaginative 'business as usual'. They can't be trusted to prepare Oxford for its most serious future challenges without robust opposition from the Green Party.

welcome to Green Wolff

2010-02-23T01:28:00.000-08:00

My existing blog http://www.blog.wolffs.info started as the reflection of a Christian Reformed Church minister on issues to do with the relationship between religion and secular society from a theological perspective.

Increasingly, as my involvement with the Green Party in Oxford has deepened, my posts have taken the blog away from this and into different territory.

The Reformed Church asserts that the church, as an institution, must not directly hold political power; and within the life of the Church itself people should not be discriminated against on party political grounds. However, individual members and ministers are encouraged, as part of their personal witness, to be politically engaged - as individuals.

It is important, then, as a minister, to maintain a separation between my 'professional' life and my political life. Hence this blog.