An unfair election - we need PR!

Our broken ‘first past the post’ system has failed to deliver the Parliament people dared to hope for.

The breakdown:
Tories 36% of vote, 47% of the seats.
Labour 29%of vote, 40 % of the seats.
Lib Dem; 23% of vote, 9% of the seats.
Greens – 8.7% of the vote when it’s PR like in the Euro elections, only 1% in the general election 2010, and only one MP out of 650!




See http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2010/05/07/low-hanging-fruit-2/
for a great article about the need to campaign now for proportional representation, by George Monbiot. Now is the time!


See http://www.power2010.org.uk/page/s/powerpledge and sign the petition for a fair voting system!

You can also print out a window poster to replace the green, red, or yellow one you're about to put in the bin.

See http://fightpastthepost.co.uk/#posters for a downloadable poster demanding voting reform.

If you want a slightly different 'editable' version just copy and paste the following and change the words and typeface as you wish:-

DEMAND ELECTORAL REFORM NOW

WE WANT PROPORTIONAL REPRESENTATION – DEMOCRACY
NOT A HORSE RACE!

After the election, what next ?

For those of you who haven’t heard already, the Green Party’s success in getting its first MP (Caroline Lucas, who won Brighton Pavilion from Labour) was matched by a battering elsewhere. It was just not an election for smaller parties, with most people who are not Cameron supporters desperate to keep the Tories out. The huge turnout favoured either red or blue and meant Greens found it much harder to meet the 5% threshold needed to keep our deposits. In Tottenham, Lammy’s Labour majority increased substantially and I got a mere 980 votes, compared to the 2035 needed to make 5%. The previous Green candidate, Pete McAskie, got 1457 votes in 2005 when (because of lower turnout) only 1583 votes would have been needed to keep the deposit. There were similar falls in the Green vote in Hornsey and Wood Green, and almost everywhere except Brighton, so that in seven London constituencies where we kept the deposit in 2005, we lost it this time. So at £500 a time this is going to be an expensive election for the Greens!

The count was dramatic and exhausting – it went on all night at Alexandra Palace. The Parliamentary result was anounced at about 6.30am, and the local elections even later. It was the first time a Parliamentary election had been held on the same day as a local one, and the huge turnout - so high there were big queues at some polling stations - meant far more votes to count than usual. You have to hand it to the team of over well over a hundred Council workers who sat sorting and counting ballot papers from before 11pm till the next morning. They had only one snack break and in some cases they had already worked all day at the polling stations. So if you wanted some Council service today Friday and didn’t get much joy from the telephone lines, it was probably because a lot of staff had gone home to sleep. But the manual counting system is so much better than the voting machines used in the USA and elsewhere – there is no chance of invisible machine error, the counting teams are extremely thorough and careful, and the candidates can walk around and see exactly what is going on.

The unforgiveable thing is that some people in Hackney and in northern cities couldn’t vote because the queues were still waiting when the polling stations closed at 10pm. And very sad too that over 200 people lost their vote because they spoilt their ballot paper – mostly because they confused the two kinds of election and the two different ballot papers. They voted for three people on the Parliament paper, instead of one. They didn’t realise the ‘choose three candidates’ system was for the local Council paper. Having two ballot papers with different systems both on the same day might have been confusing enough for people who have always lived here – but for the many Tottenham voters who grew up in other countries with quite different electoral systems, it was especially confusing. It suggests that both officials and parties need to do a lot more to explain to people how the voting system works.

It was a big disappointment that we still have no Green councillors in Haringey, after Green supporters had put in so much work over the last few months.

However, one of the most important things about the election campaign is that it brought people together in the community and got them talking, got ‘political’ and ‘non-political’ people to talk to each other in ways which rarely happen between times. There is a lot more to say about the experiences and lessons of the last few weeks, and the discussions that now need to carry on. I’ll blog some more about that in a day or two when I’ve caught up on sleep!

Meanwhile, thanks to everyone who voted Green and helped with the campaign.

Why's nobody talking about war ?

Watching the ‘leaders’ debate’ on TV this week, I was struck by four yawning gaps in the agenda. Worse, they were the things I most care about. One, Britain is at war, and nobody in the programme seemed to be talking about that except for a question about army equipment – reasonable enough to ask if soldiers have the right equipment to stay alive, but ducking the bigger question of whether British occupation of Iraq or Afghanistan is justified. Two, the world’s leaders miserably failed to get a decent treaty to restrict climate change in Copenhagen, and did anyone on the programme care or even mention it ? Three, nothing about the erosion of civil liberties during the ‘war on terror’ or the steady crumbling of democracy under New Labour. Four, there are almost two and a half million unemployed in the UK and nobody seemed to care about them. I’ll say more about each of these issues in the next few days, but let’s start with number one, Blair’s wars.

In Afghanistan, around 7000 to 9000 civilians have been killed by NATO forces. President Karzai has repeatedly complained of the cruel and indiscriminate nature of these military operations. Several military commanders have questioned whether the ‘mission’ serves any real purpose. Its original target, Bin Laden, may not even be in Afghanistan any more. Did anyone in the leaders’ debate show any signs they really cared about what our country is doing to Afghans ?

In Iraq, civilian casualties due to the occupation run to dozens of thousands; the economy and infrastructure has been wrecked, civil society torn apart and a legacy of disease, poverty and mental trauma will haunt the country for decades. It’s a sure sign of the poverty of democracy in this country that the Blair government carried on with its aggression after a million or was it two million of us came onto the streets to tell them NO.

And whilst potential future prime ministers bicker interminably about a small rise in National Insurance, these wars are STILL costing the UK taxpayer billions of pounds a year.

Blair always denied that 7/7 had anything to do with his foreign policy. All the evidence was to the contrary. A society that engages in this sort of aggression and destruction degrades itself, its reputation and whatever capacity it had to unite around democratic values. There are some striking parallels between British militarism under Blair and American militarism in Vietnam, and who better to comment on that than Martin Luther King. Here are some extracts from a speech he gave in 1967:-

They must see Americans as strange liberators. ….They watch as we poison their water, as we kill a million acres of their crops. They must weep as the bulldozers roar through their areas preparing to destroy the precious trees. They wander into the hospitals, with at least twenty casualties from American firepower for one “Vietcong”-inflicted injury. …

We have destroyed their two most cherished institutions: the family and the village. We have destroyed their land and their crops. ….We have corrupted their women and children and killed their men. What liberators?

I speak for those whose land is being laid waste, whose homes are being destroyed, whose culture is being subverted. I speak for the poor of America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home and death and corruption in Vietnam. I speak as a citizen of the world, for the world as it stands aghast at the path we have taken…This is the message of the great Buddhist leaders of Vietnam. Recently one of them wrote these words:

“Each day the war goes on the hatred increases in the heart of the Vietnamese and in the hearts of those of humanitarian instinct. The Americans are forcing even their friends into becoming their enemies. It is curious that the Americans, who calculate so carefully on the possibilities of military victory, do not realize that in the process they are incurring deep psychological and political defeat. The image of America will never again be the image of revolution, freedom and democracy, but the image of violence and militarism.”

I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a “thing-oriented” society to a “person-oriented” society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered. . .

A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say: “This is not just.”…. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.

The Green Party manifesto is pretty strong on getting out of Afghanistan, leaving NATO, and downsizing military budgets. As well as putting forward an international perspective on fair trade, more aid and cancellation of poor countries’ debt. So if that’s what you want, don’t say there’s nobody sensible to vote for. Give us a chance.

Introducing Anne Gray (amg65amg@googlemail.com)

Preface....this is the post I started with before the 2010 election. This blog will be updated with new posts soon about my forthcoming travels...watch this space.

Having lived in Tottenham since 1983, I am shortly to stand for the Green Party in the general election. So it won't be the last time you see this woolly hat in the next while. Recognise the lady I'm with on the right ? Jean Lambert, our Green MEP - it was at the recent Newroz celebration in Finsbury Park.

I support the Green Party because it stands up for social justice. Getting something done about climate change is an important part of that, because the floods, droughts and storms associated with climate disruption hit the poor hardest, from New Orleans to Bangladesh and in flooded British towns as well. But the Green Party’s policies are about much more than the environment – it’s the party that stands for taxing the rich to sort out the national budget crisis, rather than slashing services for the poor, and it’s the party which opposes handing over parts of our precious public services to be run by big companies for profit.

Before I retired in 2008, I spent several years in social policy research, at London South Bank University and before that in research consultancy. (See below for some examples of my writing) Giving up paid work has offered me time to do many other things. Locally I’m active in Sustainable Haringey and I was co-founder of the Tottenham Food Coop. I also help to run a big allotment site at Tottenham Hale. I’ve also been working with the local campaigns against health cuts - to save the Whittington Hospital A&E and challenge health service privatisation.

For several years I have also been active in the struggle to preserve civil liberties, opposing ‘stop and search’ practices and the various forms of punishment without trial associated with anti-terrorism measures.

International solidarity has always been a big thing for me, ever since I spent much time at university collecting funds for War on Want. I worked as a ‘cooperante’ in Mozambique for three years, in the early 1980s when a post-independence skills shortage hit their civil service. Last year I spent a few weeks helping out with English classes at a community centre in the West Bank.

Over the next few weeks, I'll be posting here comments on current political issues and events. Keep an eye on this site and don't forget to use your vote - both in the local and the national elections!

By the way you can e-mail me at amg65amg@googlemail.com

(Some examples of my publications; see
http://www.plutobooks.co.uk/display.asp?K=9780745320328& or http://www.palgrave.com/products/title.aspx?PID=278655 , or
http://www.socresonline.org.uk/11/3/gray.html )