WEMBLEY MATTERS News and views on local politics, the environment, climate change, culture and local history
I agree that we have to draw attention to the inconsistency between having an "anti-austerity" policy position, whilst being forced to implement austerity cuts locally, which are once again directed at the most vulnerable, in a deliberately discriminatory and disproportionate manner.
e.g. Disability groups have been calling for a 'Cumulative Impact Assessment' (CIA) to asess what the cumulative effects are, of 'multiple cuts' to different services and benefits, on those who (being the most vulnerable) rely on a range of different benefits and services. There are assessments of each individual cut, but no asessment of those who are subjected to multiple cuts over time. This has been requested repeatedly for several years now, and the Government/DWP still refuses to do it. Meanwhile, there has been a rise in the death-toll of vulnerable people, and those people deserve not to die unacknowledged, while their 'deaths' were a deliberate 'colateral-damage' decision, which was made by Tory 'policy-makers'.
"The United Nations is carrying out an unprecedented inquiry into “systematic and grave violations” of disabled people’s human rights by the UK government"
http://www.disabilitynewsservice.com/confirmed-un-is-investigating-uks-grave-violations-of-disabled-peoples-rights/
We need to be behind this move by the UN and seen to be showing solidarity with anti-austerity disabled rights groups around the country, who have been on the receiving end of these deliberately 'Targeted' cuts for 5 years already. Cuts which have potentially contributed to thousands of deaths.
Either Labour are going to be an opposition thorn in this sociopathic government's side, or they are going to continue with the Neoliberal narrative that 'economics' makes it all inevitable because... money, family purse, budget... mixing macro-economics with family economics like the Tories always do, and confusing people's perceptions of how 'money/debt' is created (while the Tories have doubled the 'debt' and handed the 'money' to their old-school corporate chums). The Green Party has a new and important policy around money-creation, and this is also a big opportunity for Greens to push that & to explain it to the public, so as to dispell the 40 year old Thatcherite meme of a family purse budget.
A Green New Deal is beneficial socially, economically and environmentally. It ticks all the boxes as the alternative to 'austerity'. A nation-wide renewable energy and energy efficiency programme (managed at the 'Local' level), coupled to electrification of transport (which would require offshore wind wave tidal development), would be a massive (but increasingly urgent) undertaking, which would both improve 'quality-of-life' for people locally, as well as mitigate some of the damage we're doing to the environment. Voters need to know that the Tory government are letting Britain be left behind in the new global renewable energy industry, which has massive social & economic benefits if encouraged to prosper.
One of Thatcher's biggest crimes, was not investing North Sea oil tax revenues in the renewable energy technologies which were available at the time, like on/offshore wind power, and solar water heaters & insulation for homes etc etc. The 'jobs' thus created could have replaced the coal jobs lost, instead of throwing tens of thousands into unemployment, with no new jobs to go to. Those new sustainable jobs are still screaming out to be created. Austerity is a lie. It is the diversion of Public money into Private offshore accounts without the 'societal' benefits that should come from creating that money.
But let's not forget there are powerful neoliberal forces in Labour still. The first Bail-Out was under Brown and that alone was enough to pay off every single mortgage in the UK at the time. Those people haven't just gone away because Corbyn became 'Leader' and there hasn't been a huge shift in policy position by the Parliamentary Labour Party as far as I can tell - so far.
Earl Bramley-Howard
West Mendip Green Party
Wembley Park is home to the iconic Wembley Stadium the SSE Arena Wembley and the Hilton London Wembley.
Savvy shoppers will find retail heaven in the super smart London designer Outlet where there are 50 fashion brands of generously discounted prcies, 20 restaurants and coffee shops and a 9 screen 1800 seat cinema comple. The new Wembley Theatre, an innovative revolving auditorium with 1300 seats, opens in May 2016.There were only a few apartments left unsold from this phase of the development. This is a plan for one of the two-bedroomed apartments:
We are committed to building homes that meet the lifetime homes standard and follow the GLA’s housing design guidance. Discussions are underway with Brent Council regarding priorities around borough-wide infrastructure and affordable housing.
■ Around 4,000 much-needed new high-quality homes for Brent
On the Guardian thread about teacher shortages and how they could possibly have come about, I posted some government policies to keep teaching recruitment and retention down:Yesterday, Kevin Courtney (who also retweeted the letter as @cyclingkev ) Deputy General Secretary of the NUT spoke at the London Green Party Annual General Meeting on 'Fighting for the Education our young people deserve.' This is an extract from his speech that was delivered with as much passion as demonstrated by Colin Harris and Michael Rosen.
1. Encourage the press to run stories saying that teachers are lazy and that there are thousands of bad ones.
2. Get the head of Ofsted to say the same.
3. Keep this up for decades. (both main parties)
4. Bring in hundreds of measuring and assessment systems, levels, targets, tests, exams, which then breed more 'rehearsal' tests and exams.
5. Bring in a punitive, rapid, unsupportive inspection system which ignores the fact that scores are attached to children so that if you're in a school where there has been turnover the inspectorate say that has nothing to do with us.
6. Run a new kind of school where the salaries of management are not open to public scrutiny.
7. Allow interest groups to open schools which take on proportionally fewer SEN, EAL and FSM pupils than nearby LA schools.
8 Allow covert selection and exclusion process to take place around these new kinds of schools because the LA schools have to pick up the pieces.
9. Use international data as if it is holy writ and ignore evidence that suggests that comparing countries does not compare like with like, that some countries which are 'top' are selecting. Obscure the differences between the countries by only talking about 'places' in the table, without ever making clear whether these differences are 'significant' or not.
10. Use China as an example of utopia in education without making a comparison between the two societies - as if education exists separately from the societies that produce the respective education systems.
11. Make sure that very nearly all the people running the state education system from government have no, or very little, state education experience themselves.
A pro-TTIP European Union, eager to impose the imperatives of capital against people, determined to evacuate democracy in Greece and other member states of its meaning, is not an EU we should wish to be part of.
Just in case you hadn't noticed: something is rotten in the state of Europe.
The EU is becoming a dictatorial imposer of austerity and deregulation, uncaring about its impacts on the wellbeing of people and planet, and determined to derail any elected government that dares dissent from its neoliberal ideology.
I write as a Green who has stood for the European Parliament on a mission of EU reform. I acknowledge that the EU can be and has been a powerful force for good - for example, in keeping the peace among member states, and in its impressive role in social and environmental regulation - now tragically at risk from the drive to 'deregulate'.
But I believe that the general support of the EU by the Green Party, and the Left, and bien-pensant intellectuals, and 'progressives', needs to come to an end, to be replaced by a more honest willingness to face up to the very serious flaws besetting the EU.
The two key events of the last few days that have made starkly clear that something is rotten at the top of our continent are first, the EU moving a big step closer to backing TTIP, the starkly anti-democratic and pro-corporatocratic 'TransAtlantic Trade and Investment Partnership'.
And second, last night's imposition on Athens of a programme for privatisation and savage cuts even worse than that rejected by the Greek people in the referendum last week onto Greece with its decisive 'NO' vote.
Secret corporate lobbying over the heads of the people
The TTIP is the EU-US 'free trade' agreement currently being negotiated, to which the European Parliament, tragically, gave its provisional approval last week.
The Green Party is united against TTIP. And the Green Party argues strongly in favour of the EU. Is there any tension between these two facts? We think that there is. The TTIP
- enables the democratic will of the people to be struck down by big business;
- is in its very essence a project of secretive lobbying;
- is about gigantic corporations being able to break open and gobble up public procurement and public services.
My case is simple: this should not be viewed as some kind of aberration from EU standard practice. It is EU standard practice.
The EU has been from the beginning (but also increasingly, the key examples here being the Lisbon Treaty and the 'Stability and Growth pact') a pro-business front, a vehicle for organisations such as the European Roundtable of Industrialists to get their way.
There is far too little democracy in the EU: for example, the Council of Ministers operates almost entirely in secrecy and holds the whip hand over the Parliament on most issues; Brussels is dominated by corporate lobbyists who outnumber NGO lobbyists by about 15:1, while wielding immense powers of hospitality and patronage. EU rules would make it very difficult for (e.g.) the railways to be brought back into full public ownership in this country.
It is an illusion to think that TTIP is anything other than a natural extension of the logic of the EU as it is currently. Greens, being serious about our outright opposition to TTIP, need to be serious also about radically reforming the EU.
Anything less than truly radical reform - democratisation, an end to the culture of lobbying and secrecy, prioritisation of public service over private profit, prioritisation of one-planet ecological sanity over business profit - would leave the EU more of a hindrance than a help to Green objectives.
Greece - you call this 'negotiation'?
The imposition on Greece of harsh and unwanted measures that eliminate its sovereignty and strip the people of the democratic power they exercised last week in the referendum is not a departure from business as usual for the EU.
It is, on the contrary, a manifestation of the EU's long-standing disrespect for democracy and the sovereignty of its member states, and the determination among EU elites to impose a business-friendly vision onto any recalcitrant government and people.This deal forced onto Athens - on pain of a forced crash out of the Euro - is a massive wake-up call to democrats everywhere. It is increasingly clear that the EU, far from standing up for Europe's people against overweening corporate power, are doing the exact opposite: ganging up with corporate and finance capital to suppress democracy and popular aspirations.
As if to underline the point about strange bedfellows despite Jones' stricture on the 'pro business front' the 'Vote Leave' campaign she is supporting is also supported by 'Business for Britain' , former Chairman of Dixons Lord Kalms, former Channel 4 Chairman Luke Johnson and millionaire donors to the Conservatives, Labour and UKIP LINK
Above all, the huge power of business lobbyists in the EU - who can usually get what they want, unless the European public puts its foot down (as happened, thankfully, over ACTA - but that is a very rare event) - simply must end.
Moreover, systemic problems are caused by the 'four freedoms' that are at the core of the Treaty of Rome: the freedom to move capital, products, services and labour all over the EU. The four freedoms add up to a 'bosses charter' giving capital one great supranational freedom - that to exploit labour anywhere in Europe on the most favourable possible terms. There is no Leftist case for an unreformed EU.
That referendum - in or out?
There are tremendous structural difficulties in the way of reforming the EU to address these problems and recreate it in a Green image. But unless they can be achieved we may have to support withdrawal in the UK's 'in or out' EU referendum.
Just as Syriza's negotiating position has been fatally undermined by its refusal (in my view deeply mistaken) to countenance leaving the Euro, so we - Green and progressive voters - will lack any leverage so long as we tolerate a bad EU, for fear of something even worse.
Meanwhile we have to contend with David Cameron's own campaign to 'reform' the EU, backed by other right-wing governments like Poland's: for them, the EU's main problem is that it is not pro-business enough, and imposes intolerable shackles on the pursuit of corporate profit as a result of its social and environmental legislation.
Leave the reform agenda to Cameron and friends, and the EU will only become an even more anti-democratic, anti-ecological, pro-growth, pro-big business centralising organisation than it already is. We must be forceful in opposing and denouncing that dystopian vision of a corporate Europe.
And make no mistake: a pro-TTIP European Union, eager to impose the imperatives of capital against people, determined to evacuate democracy in Greece and other member states of its meaning, is not an EU we should wish to be part of.
Caroline Lucas made the case for staying in the EU strongly at the recent Green Party conference and released the following statement yesterday on her website about her decision to join the board of the 'In' Campaign:
I’ve joined the board of the ‘In’ campaign because I believe we are stronger when we work across borders on the challenges we face.As the debate develops inside the Green Party and on the left it is clear that the issue of the party's position may need to be revisited at the 2016 Spring Conference. The Emergency Motion called for a 'run a distinct Green campaign in favour of the EU in addition to cross-party campaigning.' Whatever positions leading members take on the EU it is the members who eventually decide. There may well be arguments put forward that a vote at conference is not enough as people's attendance is limited, by both time and money, and that a vote of the whole membership is needed. There is also a difficulty that the Green Party has a two year limit on discussion of motions that have been passed or lost at Conference if the new motion reverses principles of the original. A motion modifying the Green Party's position could be ruled out of order on that basis so would need to be subtly worded.
In particular I want to give young people a reason to engage with a referendum that will shape their futures, both in terms of protecting our shared environment and our basic rights, and by helping define the kind of country we want to be.
Britain in the EU is open and forward looking. It's about our identity: confident, vibrant, inquiring, open minded. A community that welcomes opportunity, celebrates diversity and is passionate about the power of collective action."
Though I don’t see eye to eye with every member on the board on every issue we all share a commitment to Britain remaining in the EU. I will make a truly progressive case for a more democratic and accountable European Union.
A different kind of EU is possible: one where power is held locally whenever it can be, where citizens have a real say in decisions made in Brussels and where corporate lobbyists are banished from the halls of power.
This referendum campaign is a chance to reimagine what democracy looks like, reshape what having a say really means and reinvigorate our politics.
I look forward to working with people across the political spectrum and across our communities to make a positive case for our continued membership of the European Union.
Emergency motion on Green EU campaignConference notes:
· That the Queen's Speech in May announced that a Referendum will take place by the end of 2017.· That the EU Referendum Bill is currently being debated in Parliament.· The Green Party has a long standing policy of wanting a referendum on EU membership, remaining in the EU, and pushing for major reforms.· The European Union is in urgent need of reform to make it more democratic, sustainable and accountable.· The Green Party is an internationalist party. We believe in working across borders to solve the shared challenges we face.· The recent members survey stated that 78% of members consider the UK’s membership of the EU ‘a good thing’ while only 6% think it ‘a bad thing’.· That Green MEPS use their position in the European Parliament to make EU institutions more democratic and accountable – and to vote against damaging policies which harm workers and the environment.· That the Green Party has been at the forefront of the fight against damaging free trade deals – including TTIP.
Conference instructs:
· The Green Party to run a distinct Green campaign in favour of the EU in addition to cross-party campaigning. The Green campaign should highlight our support for an EU which, among other things, helps protect workers’ rights, tackles climate change and promotes peace.· GPEX and elected representatives to use the referendum campaign to highlight the major reforms we need to the EU, and to bring about a better understanding and engagement among members of the public of how the EU works and how they can influence it, including through the election of MEPs· GPEX and elected representatives to work together with Green Parties in other EU countries and other partners to build the campaign for real reform in the EU both during the referendum campaign and after.· GPEX and elected representatives to look at forming campaigning partnerships with grassroots organisations, like-minded politicians and others.
