The Final Weekend

So far, we've canvassed most of Mickleton, Stanway and Huntingdon, and half of Styvechale, Mayfield and Earlsdon Avenue South. We're excited going into the final weekend. We figure we can canvass 15 streets over the three days, and we're printing 50 posters for people to put up in their windows. We'll begin canvassing today after a meeting at 1030am at a colleague's house on Beechwood, followed by a 12noon start tomorrow (with hopefully some Green colleagues from Leamington). The Earlsdon Festival will be on May Day, and one resident suggested that, since Earlsdon was a "drinking village," to try and visit the pubs as well.

Again, if people want posters for their window, give us a call: 07906 316 726, or email earlsdongreens@yahoo.co.uk.

20 Years Since Chernobyl

In 1986, my secondary school had an exchange with a school in the Arctic circle. The arctic kids came down for a week, saw Niagara Falls, et cetera, and then my school-mates went up to see how the other half lived. When they returned, they naturally asked, "what world events did we miss when we were up north," and we replied, "oh, not much, a nuclear reactor only burnt for days and days in the Ukraine."

20 years, and our memories have faded so much that there is this push for a nuclear revival ... even though it will cost £70 billion to clean up the nuclear waste that we do have ... even though Sellafield is already a terrorist target twice as big as we could imagine.

A great book is "Voices from Chernobyl" by Svetlana Alexievich.

The wife of a Chernobyl firefighter:

We were newlyweds. We still walked around holding hands, even if we were just going to the store. I would say to him, "I love you." But I didn't know then how much ... One night I heard a noise. I looked out the window. He saw me. "Close the window and go back to sleep. There's a fire at the reactor. I'll be back soon"... I didn't see the explosion itself. Just the flames. Everything was radiant. The whole sky. A tall flame. And smoke. The heat was awful. And he's still not back ... The smoke was from the burning bitumen, which had covered the roof. He said later it was like walking on tar. They tried to beat down the flames. They kicked at the burning graphite with their feet ... They weren't wearing their canvas gear. They went off just as they were, in their shirt sleeves. No one told them.

Public Transit and Women

It's important to have a transit strategy that takes into account the different needs of the population. For example, women make 61% of shopping trips and 71% of escort trips to school. Women are more likely to feel unsafe travelling at night (especially those 60 years and over).

We should have better facilities to be provided at taxi ranks, with information on fares, contact numbers for taxi companies, shelters and seating. Buses should have adequate space for prams. Displays that give real-time information on bus arrivals would also help if people are waiting for buses in Earlsdon.

Young Greens in 2006

There are nearly 80 Green Party candidates who are 27 years of age and under running for us in the local election campaigns this year. It's important not just to advocate on issues relevant to young people, but also to involve them and interest them in the political process. Public transit, fair trade, crime, councillors sitting as governors of local schools, health inspections of takeaway restaurants, taxi ranks with information on competing companies and fares, library facilities ... all of these are determined by local councils, and all of our votes count.

The Perfect Storm for Labour

It was going to be hard in any case, with the traditional vote against an incumbent government in local elections, but the amount of recent scandal engulfing Labour is astonishing:

- Patricia Hewitt getting slow-handclapped every few days over her claim that the NHS has had its "best year"
- Police investigations rumbling on about donations to Labour and appointments to the Lords
- Cherie Blair's hairdressing costs
- The release of foreign inmates and the Home Office simply losing track of hundreds of offenders
- New revelations over John Prescott and an affair

Not to mention policies on Iraq, PFI, railway privatisation, city academies, tuition fees, and foundation hospitals that have alienated segments of the trade union movement and Labour itself.

Bike To School Week

Matt Seaton in the Guardian highlights that only 2% of children in Britain cycle to school. It's Bike To School week this week but, he points out that:

What we really need are more bike lanes, bus lanes, and strictly enforced 20mph zones within two miles of every school. Until then, what sane parent is going to let their child cycle to school?

Door To Door Canvassing

Door-to-door canvassing is fun. I mean it. For the most part, people are polite and engage with you. It's a real buzz to hear the phrase, "I'm going to vote for you."

People seem fed up with "the main parties" or with a particular one (left-wing Labour voters, especially). There are folks who say, "I know what my politics are, goodbye," or "I'm going to be boring and vote Labour," but there are a surprising number of maybes.

Thatcher succeeded in moving the centre of politics to the right in a durable, medium-to-long term, way, and the Green Party needs to move the centre of politics towards our point of view. What we would like to create, and it won't obviously happen overnight, is more a situation where people are voting Green because they like our policies, rather than "we'll try you lot since we've got no use for the rest." Even if we maintain only 10-15% of the vote, but 3 years from now, the electoral debate in Earlsdon is centred on key environmental issues, that's an achievement.

Jane Jacobs Passes Away

Jane Jacobs died this morning in Toronto. She was key, throughout the 60's, 70's and 80's, in redefining how people perceive cities, and what urban planners prioritise within city planning. She was 89. From the Toronto Star:

Her first book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities,
published in 1961, became a bible for neighbourhood organizers and what she termed the "foot people". It made the case against the utopian planning culture of the times -- residential high-rise development, expressways through city hearts, slum clearances, and desolate downtowns. She believed that residential and commercial activity should be in the same place, that the safest neighbourhoods teem with life, short winding streets are better than long straight ones, low-rise housing is better than impersonal towers, that a neighbourhood is where people talk to one another.

Peak Oil and Earlsdon

We could be seeing the end of the era of cheap oil. That is, half of the world's oil has been extracted, and the remaining half will be harder/more environmentally damaging/more expensive to extract. As well, world demand, rising year on year, may not match up with month-to-month supply.

We should start preparing for an era that is profoundly and intensely local.

- We'll do more walking, or take more public transport, since we will see less car use.
- We'll have less food distribution centred on driving to-and-from supermarkets. Supermarkets themselves may face challenges (finding petrol for all those lorries of refrigerated fruit and veg).
- Consumers should be able to choose food produced closest to their home, and to know the “energy content” of the food (was it flown, was it sent by rail, was it sent by boat, were alternative energy sources used at the source farm?).
- We need more food preparation skills (to avoid processed food) on a mass level. This will mean more classes in school on food preparation and nutrition, and incorporating food gardens into the design of new schools.
- Greens in Coventry would work towards an expansion of urban space for allotments.

Changing Our Carbon-Crunching Lifestyle

Andrew Rawnsley is always worth a read in the Observer.

You would not know it from the huge amount of attention that has recently been lavished on the BNP and the virtually non-existent coverage of the Green party, but the Greens will win many more seats in the local elections than the BNP.

The environment is rarely at the top of pollsters' lists of what is bothering voters, but it does feature strongly in the concerns of women and the liberal middle classes, constituencies that the Tory leader is most actively seeking to woo.

Both [Gordon Brown and David Cameron] are trying to argue that we can have a healthier planet without making any sacrifices to carbon-crunching lifestyles. The two aspirant Prime Ministers only differ about what label they apply to their attempt to find a new Third Way. Mr Cameron calls it 'green growth'; Mr Brown talks about 'the new synthesis'.

I am sure they are right when they contend that technology can help to make growth less harmful to the planet. I am even more certain that they must be wrong if they are arguing that there is a cure for global warming which is entirely painless.

The politician who is really serious about saving the planet is not the one who promises that you won't have to make any sacrifices. The politician who means it is the one who tells you where and how much it is going to hurt. David Cameron and Gordon Brown are both still suggesting that we can have our planet and eat it.

Renewable Heat and Earlsdon

I’d like to see a lot more discussion in Coventry about renewable forms of heat.

Worcestershire County Hall is powered by a wood-fuelled boiler. This carbon neutral process saves around 250 tonnes of CO2 per year.

Gloucestershire’s police headquarters has a geothermal heat pump. Heat pumps move heat from a low-temperature source to a high-temperature space for heating. With geothermal, the heat source is the warmth of the earth, through a series of trenches and piping. One of the industry leaders in the UK is right here in Earlsdon (along Albany Road).

We need to concentrate more on how our homes are powered, not just switching off the TV from standby or recycling.

A Green Group for Coventry City Council

A city council with 54 councillors should have at least one Green.

Where Greens hold the balance of power on a council (in Norwich, in Oxford), Green councillors have been able to secure funding for:

hiring sustainable planning officers,

bringing empty homes back into use,

extending energy efficiency measures,

implanting anti-litter campaigns,

planting more city-centre trees, and,

expanding door-step recycling programmes.

Electing a Green in Earlsdon would be the first step towards showing what the influence of Green party policies can do at the council level in Coventry.

Leafletting Complete / Phase 2 to Begin!

So, we've distributed leaflets to 6000 of the 6300 households in the ward. The remaining leaflets will be done by Monday/Tuesday.

In the 10 days remaining in the election, we're going to try and visit as much of the ward as we can for a 2nd time to find out what people think about the election and the choices facing Coventry. If anyone reading this would like a poster for their window, just give me a call, 07906 316 726, or email earlsdongreens@yahoo.co.uk.

In contrast, after 9 days of our campaign, I saw the first other campaigners for any other political party today, two Labour canvassers on Rochester Road. We swapped leaflets in a friendly way with the Labour people. I haven't, however, seen any Conservatives or Lib Dems. It's kind of like a western ... it's quiet ... too quiet. I'd rather have a street-to-street struggle and be constantly running into rival party canvassers.