Green Jobs and Energy Meeting In London

"Green Jobs and the Green Energy Revolution: is the government doing enough?"
Start: 07 Sep 2009, 7:00 pm
Where: Conway Hall, Red Lion Square, Holborn tube

A Public Meeting on Monday 7th September, in Conway Hall at 7.00pm.

Speakers will include :
John McDonnell MP (Labour, Hayes and Harlington),
Bob Crow (General Secretary of the RMT - National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers),
Tony Juniper (ex Director, Friends of the Earth, Green Party candidate)
Ian Terry (worker from the Vestas wind turbine factory )
Phil Thornhill (Campaign against Climate Change)

Don't miss this important meeting on the UK's future direction in the era of Climate Emergency - are we moving full steam ahead towards Green Jobs and the Green Energy Revolution at a speed that we can and should?

Green Electoral Victory In Scarborough

Green Party activist Nick Harvey, (who has done a lot of campaigning on issues like public transport in his area) has won a stunning by-election victory in the rural Hertford Ward of Scarborough Borough Council.

13/8/09 result:

GREEN, Nick Harvey, 894
Con 356
Ind 94

Turn out 32.69%

This was a Green gain from the Tories, despite a big Conservative last-ditch polling day effort.

2007 result (The first time Nick stood)

Con 732
Con 709
LD 591
GREEN, Nick Harvey, 508
BNP 212

The Green Party now holds 3 seats on Scarborough Borough Council, the other 2 being in Stepney Ward within Scarborough itself. In a second by-election in Scarborough on the same night an Independent took a seat from the Liberal Democrats.

Food First

I have recently completed reading Food First, the influential book by Frances Moore Lappe and Joseph Collins of the Institute for Food and Development Policy that was first published in the 1970s. The book has lost little of its's power and if anything, the tragedy of the wasted opportunities of the last 30 years make it even more relevant.

The central message, that poverty and hunger are not chiefly about "over-population" or "primitiveness" or "resistance to change", still less about lack of "free trade" or access for Western multinationals. We still read these excuses wheeled out in the daily mass media. The chief causes behind poverty and hunger are the political and economic systems of both the developed and developing worlds that chain the vast majority to the route most favouring the ruling oligarchy. Corrupt local elites and global capitalism work in concert. The continued existence of this state of affairs rests to a large extent on the continued acceptance of a cynical and fatalistic attitude to human nature which is peddled by the mouthpieces of the ruling elites. But Moore Lappe's and Collins' book was a positive intervention by people who believed that ordinary people could, and should, make a difference.

In their postcript they wrote:

We want you to join us, not simply because of the urgent struggle to construct a just and life-giving society, but because through our own experience we have become certain that none of us can live fully today as long as we are overwhelmed by a false view of the world and a false view of human nature to buttress it. Learning how a system can cause hunger then becomes , not a lesson in misery and deprivation, but a vehicle for a great awakening in our lives.

I recommend the book and further reading from the works of the authors and the IFDP.