Saturday 21 September 2013

Cheeky Caroline greets Labour in Brighton with 'Greens are the REAL opposition' message


Labour Party members attending their conference in Brighton this weekend, in the constituency of the UK’s first Green MP, will be welcomed by a billboard making the case that it is Caroline Lucas who is offering the real opposition in parliament.

The digital advert will be on display prominently on Queen’s Road – one of Brighton’s main thoroughfares. The street is the main route down which Labour delegates and lobbyists who arrive by train will travel to reach the conference at the sea-front Metropole Hotel.

The ad starts with a check list, against a red backdrop, reading: “Saving the NHS, Fighting Austerity, Railways in Public Hands, Scrapping Trident.” As the screen turns green, the billboard says “Brought to you by the Green Party.”

The final screen displays a photo of Caroline Lucas MP and reads: “Welcome to Brighton – Home of the True Opposition in Parliament. p.s. Labour is down the hill on the right.”

Rob Shepherd, Chair of Brighton and Hove Green Party, said, “We know a lot of Labour members want their party leadership to stand up to austerity and NHS privatisation, and to support progressive policies such as public ownership of the railways.

“We wanted to remind them that there’s an MP already fighting for these causes in Parliament. It would be great to see Labour members using their conference to encourage Ed Miliband to follow Caroline’s lead on standing up for these causes, and bring together a powerful coalition of voices to reverse the consensus that austerity and privatisation are the only game in town.”

The Green Party’s own autumn conference took place last weekend, also in Brighton.  In her conference speech Caroline Lucas criticised cuts to welfare and local services, and argued that it is the Green Party, rather than Labour, that is offering the real opposition to the Government's agenda of austerity and privatisation.

She is speaking at two events at Labour’s conference – a Compass panel discussion called ‘Labour – an open tribe?’ and an Institute for Public Policy Research event titled ‘The Condition of Britain’.

Her Private Member’s Bill to bring the railways back into public hands is due its second reading next month.

1 comment:

Trevor said...

Well,
after listening to Ed Milliband's Speech on the radio yesterday It reminded me of Labour's Manifesto for 1997 in which they gave the impression of being on the side of the public.
but when given the chance to prove themselves they failed to live up to the following... Over the five years of a Labour government:

Education will be our number one priority, and we will increase the share of national income spent on education as we decrease it on the bills of economic and social failure
There will be no increase in the basic or top rates of income tax
We will provide stable economic growth with low inflation, and promote dynamic and competitive business and industry at home and abroad
We will get 250,000 young unemployed off benefit and into work
We will rebuild the NHS, reducing spending on administration and increasing spending on patient care
We will be tough on crime and tough on the causes of crime, and halve the time it takes persistent juvenile offenders to come to court
We will help build strong families and strong communities, and lay the foundations of a modern welfare state in pensions and community care
We will safeguard our environment, and develop an integrated transport policy to fight congestion and pollution
We will clean up politics, decentralise political power throughout the United Kingdom and put the funding of political parties on a proper and accountable basis
We will give Britain the leadership in Europe which Britain and Europe need.
someone once said that Talk is Cheap...cheap in the sense that it is easy to say whatever it takes to win the confidence of another person.
but it is much harder to live up to all the promises one makes
and that is exactly what happened in 1997.
many promises we made but few were kept if any?
for example how can a political party talk or promise to build stronger families and communities when within every community the government makes sure that most shops stock and sell cigarettes?
smoking causes 100,000 preventable deaths every year
now is that an example of helping to build stronger communities?