Thinking GREEN?
Vote GREEN
Vote MACDONALD
And just in case you are not thinking Green, let me put some thoughts your way.
A wasted vote? A Green vote is not wasted: in the Witney constituency, it’s a Tory vote that’s wasted. David Cameron took nearly 50% of the vote last time. He hardly depends on your vote.
What he does need is your support for his convictions. David Cameron is a decent local MP with Green inclinations. He means well. The same cannot be said for the Tory barons backing him.Give David Cameron proof that the Witney constituency takes Green values seriously.
Do you realize that Witney is one of the few towns in the country that is actually anti- Fairtrade? David Cameron supports Fairtrade, but cannot influence even the local Conservatives on Witney Town Council. What chance has he got against the really bad guys?
David Cameron needs your help. Support Cameron by voting Green. Some of his best friends do.
- A Labour vote in the Witney constituency? – a triumph of hope over experience
- A Lib-Dem vote? – a triumph of piggy in the middle over what remains of right and left
- A Conservative vote? – a triumph of Conservative Central Office over David Cameron
But a Green vote? It just makes sense.
The environment Greens care about our environment. We all know we must:
- emit less carbon
- use less energy
- adopt other ways of generating energy
It just makes sense.
By changing our lifestyles, we can do a great deal to sustain our environment. We can:
- reduce pollution
- recycle more
- waste less.
It just makes sense.
But individuals can go only so far. There is no point us all retreating to tree houses to live off nuts and berries from the hedgerows. Greens are not fanatics.
The Green Party is not into telling people what to do. The Green Party is into tackling the root cause of the problem, which is the unequal distribution of resources. It does not expect you to give up your car or your holiday.
The Greens are a modern political party with a radical agenda, and the only party that puts the environment at the heart of radical change.
We all benefit when resources are used wisely. Most people now realise this. Just as drink driving became socially unacceptable, green behavior is now socially sensible. The Green message is accepted just about everywhere.
“I always suspected that there was something wrong with this picture …” Clive James, March 2008
Beware Greenwash! The other parties have sought to exploit this surge of Green feeling. Beware their greenwash. It is superficial, inadequate and insulting. Their proposals do not address the underlying problem.
So, what is the underlying problem? Actually it’s the environment again, but the social and economic environment. As the Tories say, we live in a ‘broken society’. They should know, they helped break it. To its shame, Labour has done nothing to mend our broken society.
The rich and privileged live totally separate lives from the rest of us. No wonder they are astonished by public outrage at their mega salaries and astronomic bonuses. No wonder they just do not get it.
It is up to you to demand a fairer society, one where resources are distributed so that the rest of us – not just the privileged – can make choices.
Choices Many people still think in the public interest, not just in their own. They want to choose what is good for everyone, not just themselves.
But choices demand information if they are to be rational. At the moment, most of us know only what we are told, and we are told what others want us to know. Do you understand the financial derivatives market, or even your own pension prospects? Do you know what a credit default swap might be? Of course not. You are not meant to.
Democracy What remains of democracy when decisions are made on our behalf by a privileged few? We are told that benefits for the privileged few will trickle down to benefit everyone. We have let the privileged few make the choices, and we have meekly accepted the results.
Trust We are expected to trust our leaders, but they do not trust us. We are to be controlled, managed by performance indicators. Like trained poodles, we are to be rewarded for performing correctly. Mindless tick-box systems discourage individuality and innovation. They drain all the satisfaction out of doing a job well. A society without trust really is broken. Let teachers teach and nurses nurse.
- Last month, two policemen left a drunk to walk along a motorway. They had not been trained for motorway duties. The drunk was killed.
- Appointments to see a doctor are often delayed in Witney because only the doctor may book a hospital bed or make an appointment with a consultant. Because no one else is to be trusted, the doctor must negotiate personally.
- There are more security cameras in the UK than in any other European country. CCTV does nothing to reduce crime or increase convictions. Its purpose is to reassure a docile electorate. Witney town councilors recently expressed alarm that there was a blind spot in Corn Street.
The mixed-up economy For 30 years now, under both Tories and Labour, the cult of growth through greed has run riot.
There is nothing good about mindless growth, and only the privileged few still believe that greed is good. The rest of us will not tolerate more huge bonuses and unreal Parliamentary expenses. And yet, neither bankers nor politicians seem to understand this. They just do not get it. They cannot see the need for really radical reform of a really rotten system. Tinkering just will not do.
“… some financial activities which proliferated over the last ten years were ‘socially useless’, and some parts of the system were swollen beyond their optimal size.” Adair Turner, Chairman, Financial Services Authority, August 2009
Let us look at what has become a circular system:
the government depends on the market to set it straight
the market depends on the government to prevent it failing.
The mixed economy has become the mixed-up economy.
- War in Iraq and Afghanistan is a tragedy, but once a government decision has been made to fight, we should not let the market decide how. What sort of society sends its soldiers to the front with the cheapest equipment? And then expects them to fend for themselves in the market when – if – they return?
Who benefits from this mess? Whenever resources are free for the taking, it is the powerful who grab most, be this leisure or health services or education. Where does power lie in Britain? In remarkably few hands. A few thousand businessmen, celebrities, and politicians run the country. They know each other well.
There is precious little difference between the Labour set in Primrose Hill and the Tory set in Notting Hill. Which is why there is precious little difference in policy between Labour and Conservative. They employ the same public relations companies to spin the same story that Greed is as Good as it ever was, that all it takes is hard work to enjoy the good life. Rubbish!
In ‘Labative’ Britain, how good your life will be depends on where you were born and to whom. By the time you are 20, your future is just about determined.
Merit and hard work count for little these days. How much effort is required to make money from borrowing at 0.5% and lending at 8%? The privileged few are the real social cheats, not the disadvantaged:
Total annual cost of fraud in UK – £30 billion
- fraud – £1.1 billion
- tax fraud – £15.2 billion
National Fraud Office, January 2010
The result
- The rich get ever richer. The gulf between rich and poor is now greater than it was in Dickensian England. Because the rich have much to leave their children, and the poor much less, the chasm gets wider and wider.
- For the first time in 100 years, children will be worse off than their parents. Can you afford to send your children to university?
- Unemployment among those aged 16 to 24 now runs at 39%. What a waste of young lives! So much talent written off in the Tory tradition:
“A man who, beyond the age of 26, finds himself on a bus can count himself a failure.”
Margaret Thatcher, 1986
- Those in employment work longer hours than workers anywhere else in Western Europe – and with the least job security. Some of us have far too much to do: some almost nothing. Many have given up all hope of a work-life balance.
- Social mobility has stagnated:
% attending private schools:
whole population – 7%
judges – 75%
Disjointed Each policy is the separate product of disparate interest groups and self- interest. Nothing is joined up. For example:
- Children get fat because they have little exercise and poor diets.
- But their school playing fields have often been sold off, and physical education has been marginalised in the school curriculum to make more room for test preparation.
- Domestic science has often been dropped from the curriculum so a whole generation has no idea how to cook.
- Sales of ready meals soar, and fast food packaging is littered with a bewildering array of incompatible and incomprehensible healthy eating symbols.
- Those healthy enough to reach retirement must convert a personal pension into a compulsory annuity. They then find they will be paid more if they smoke, drink and are really obese.
Surely we have had enough of the rampant self-interest embraced by both main parties over the last 30 years. The ideology that sought to encourage bright young entrepreneurs to change the world through their energy and determination has been hijacked by those able to exploit our ignorance to make themselves rich. In their hands the promise of the information economy and high technology has become Enron, the Dot.Com bubble and the credit crunch.
Greed has been good, very good indeed, for these few – and very bad for the rest of us. They led us to believe that their activities create wealth: all they really do is consume wealth.
Whose fault? Whose fault is all this? It is our fault. We have put up with this nonsense by voting for it, or by not voting at all. 30% of the Witney electorate never votes. Half of those who did vote in 2005 wasted their vote on the Conservatives.
The solution No matter how good our intentions, we are not going to be able to take better care of our environment unless we have the power to make changes. At the moment, that power lies elsewhere.
We also need the information to make sensible choices and we need to be trusted to make them.
We must see both the market and government regulation as our tools, not our masters. Why should we make do with whatever the market and regulation throw at us.
WE should decide what WE want, then use the market and government regulation to help us get it.
Imagine a society in which public transport was better than private. Who would drive from Witney to Oxford if there were a decent light railway service?
Imagine a society in which there was little demand for private health care or private education because public provision was so much better.
Who am I? I have had enough of a rotten system and want a radical alternative. I have lived nearly 20 years in Witney and know the constituency and its people well. I work in a university management school.
My turning point came when I watched someone take out his own tooth in a Witney pub. He could not find a National Health dentist and could not afford a private one.
Enough is enough are you ready to turn?
Thinking GREEN? Vote GREEN Vote MACDONALD
Green Party UK
