Speech from debate on the UK budget

Inverness and Forres

Meetings in Inverness and Forres today, where our top Euro candidate Elaine Morrison and I met with local community activists, organic farmers, Green Party members, and assorted others. Some good questions came up on the economy, on food, and about the Scottish Government’s record on transport and energy efficiency.

NGOs welcome Holyrood’s Climate Change report

Just a day after the climate change rally at Holyrood, the parliamentary committee which has been examining the Climate Change Bill has published its report.

The committee covers transport and water infrastructure as well as climate change, and although it brings some interesting opportunities there is also the problem of the many huge contradictions between most parties’ transport policies and their rhetoric on climate change. But since taking on the convenorship of the committee it’s been an interesting ride.

Today Stop Climate Chaos, the umbrella group of NGOs which has been lobbying on the Bill, gave their response to the report. It looks as though they’re pretty happy with the recommendations to strengthen the Bill - but the report itself is by no means the end of the story.

The Parliament will debate it in a couple of weeks’ time, and we then move into the amendment stage. Over several weeks our committee will debate the various changes which MSPs propose. Those will be the votes which count, if we want to see the Bill strengthened before it’s passed.

Keep in touch with the SCC website if you want to help lobby your MSPs.

Climate change rally

Yesterday the campaign to Stop Climate Chaos came to town, and there was a really great buzz about the place. Every political party is now behind the effort to pass the Climate Change Bill, putting long term targets in place to cut Scotland’s emissions. There even seems to be a growing majority for annual targets.

The Scottish Government has agreed to bring the interim target in the Bill forward from 2030 to 2020, but won’t say anything so far on the annual targets which lead up to that date. They will clearly need to be toughened up, but that might be left to the committee if the Government won’t act.

But my real concern right now is everything that’s not in the Bill. We’ll all agree the long term cuts which are needed, but SNP, Labour, Tories and Liberals seem to think these days that we can get there without real change of policy. They’re all still happy to vote for new coal fired power stations, airport expansion, new roads and bridges, and all the rest.

There has been some great work done on the Bill by the NGO and activist community. It seems crucial that we keep that energy up once the Bill is passed, and use the network of supporters to build an unstoppable momentum for change in policy.

I don’t think the Scottish or UK Governments really have a clue what’s going to be needed to achieve 80%-plus cuts in emissions, and especially on transport we’re still at the stage where people are talking a good game but changing nothing. Today’s debate on transport infrastructure was a good example of that.

If you’ve written to your MSPs, or signed a petition, or joined the campaign on the Climate Change Bill in any way, thank you. But please don’t rest there - keep the pressure up once the Bill passes so that long term targets turn into immediate and radical action.

Letter to the Scotsman, re Etiquette

Following the comment from a Mr Peter York at the end of this article:

Being only vaguely aware that such people existed, I am very grateful to you for securing the services of an ‘etiquette guru’ to comment on my Twitter habit. However I can’t agree with the suggestion that a few discreet under-the-table text messages represent “the worst sort of behaviour”, especially when that suggestion comes from someone who can, apparently in all seriousness, ask me to “think back to the 1950s”.
If I had sent messages which betrayed a confidence or insulted other guests, of course that would be antisocial. If my blog was full of innuendo, scandal and outright lies (I assume that I needn’t Labour this point) then I’d understand the outrage. But a few harmless tweets at the level of smalltalk really don’t merit condemnation.
I can assure Mr York that I was fully engaged in the conversation (certainly enough to annoy Tavish Scott, whose distaste for hearing Green politics expressed out loud is very clear) and found the experience useful. But I would remind him that the people “on the other end” of those messages are indeed the important ones - members of the public who ultimately paid for the delightful dinner we enjoyed at the Prime Minister’s home. The feedback I’ve had from people who read my posts on Twitter, on Facebook or on my own website was very positive.
Mr York should accept that these new technologies are out there and will only grow easier to engage with in every situation. It’s quite right that politicians should experiment with them. Perhaps we do need to develop some kind of ‘tweetiquette’; social rules about what’s expected. But they won’t be rules grounded in the 1950s, you can be sure of that. If anyone at the table was offended, I’m very sorry. But I’d ask them whether we can’t just all relax a little instead of taking offence. Life’s too short.

Newsnight Scotland, on coal & nuclear

On dinner with Gordon

Quite a few people have been keen to know a bit more about how last night’s dinner went. Apparently half a dozen tweets aren’t really enough…

It’s not something that happens every day of course, but in general I think it was a worthwhile event. Not a meeting of minds as such, but very often an informal relaxed environment without an audience to play to allows a different kind of dialogue to develop.

Getting ready to go there, I have to admit that I felt a little odd - I think mostly because the venue was the Prime Minister’s own home. How should I approach this? Should I plan out a series of interventions or just play it by ear? Should I keep quiet and just take mental notes all night? Most importantly, when invited to a working dinner at the Prime Minister’s home… does one take a bottle?

Frankly whatever the reason for the dinner, if I was feeding people at my flat they’d better not show up without some booze, so I grabbed a decent one I’d bought the other day from Inverarity (what do you mean you’ve never been? You must!) and took it along.

But before getting there I had a mysterious phone call to make - I’d been told that I had to call Inspector Something-Or-Other when I was five minutes away from the place, and I’d be given further instructions. So I found myself standing at the station platform (it looked pretty close on the map) and being told to head for the bloody great big silver BMW over the road. What is it with governments? Not only do people lose the power to walk anywhere when they become Important; they also seem to think that nobody else is able to walk either. Of course I didn’t know the way exactly, and a friendly Liberal who happened to be nearby said that it was quite a long way up the hill, so I took my seat in the back.

The trip must have taken all of fifteen seconds! It’s bad enough to run these energy-hungry beasts at all, but to lay them on for what would otherwise have been a pleasant saunter up the road simply proves the absurdity.

Anyway, up the hill, past the cameras, into the house, and it was immediately obvious that I was the only one with a bottle in my hand. Hey ho, might as well hand it over anyway.

After some drinks and nibbles and a mixture of football talk and baby talk, neither of which are my hot topics, there seemed to be some sort of hidden signal at which we went through to the dinner table. Sitting there, it was suddenly so much harder to ignore the fact that we were nine middle aged guys in suits. Hey, it’s only forty years since the sexual revolution, what did you expect?

Well I say suits… I was wearing a rather nice waistcoat from Mr Ben’s, but no jacket. Does that still make me a middle aged guy in a suit? (36, since you ask)

Now some people have been asking what the house was like. I’m not going to give you any detail there I’m afraid. It’s the guy’s home after all, and that makes it his business. Suffice it to say that if you were expecting a modest, even reserved ambience you wouldn’t be far wrong. But the welcome was warm enough.

Similarly I don’t really want to go into great detail about the discussion. There was nothing specific mentioned about ‘Chatham House rules’ or anything like that, but if this kind of event is going to be of any value I think people really ought to be able to feel that they can speak without having every detail reported outside. A discussion like this could all be held on the record, or even on TV. But it would end up simply as another bout in the endless fight between performing politicians. The point of an event like last night should really be to find out whether there is *any* scope at all for moving beyond that.

There really should be. I spend much of my time loudly disagreeing with all the other political parties on issues like energy, transport, the economy… sometimes it seems like the whole political agenda. On the fundamental objections I have to ‘mainstream’ politics, there’s barely room for a fag paper between Labour, SNP, LibDem and Conservative parties. But even I can happily sit down and work together with others when we do find issues in common. Actually it’s a far more satisfying way to work. In the current circumstances, as we face the perfect storm of an economic crisis, a climate crisis and an impending energy crisis, we should be willing to work harder than ever to find even a small patch of common ground.

So while a few surreptitious tweets about the small-talk are pretty harmless, I’m not going to go into the detail of what everyone said.

My own contribution, of course, I can talk about. You won’t be surprised. That perfect storm requires a transformation in our economy, in our society, and in our politics. If you haven’t looked at the Green New Deal yet, please do. That would give you a pretty good flavour of what I tried to get across.

Was it any use? I have no idea. I don’t expect the PM, the FM, or anyone else to suddenly do an about turn and start developing a sustainable economy or ploughing up the runways for cabbages. But Green ideas should at least be heard by those in power, and as yet they’re not heard in the Westminster debating chamber. So I was glad of the invitation to take them into Mr Brown’s house, and I’m glad that I accepted.

Oh, and about those tweets. Perhaps I should have mentioned at the time that I was doing it, but it seemed pretty harmless to me. It’s still a new enough medium that we maybe need to develop a shared etiquette here. Apparently the PM was “utterly relaxed” about it, but one other guest called it “pathetic”. Takes all sorts, eh? Now let me guess…

Visit to LambHill Stables

A visit to Lambhill Stables this morning, where a small band of ‘mini gardeners’ were on hand to help talk up the role which local food production has in Glasgow. The project is a really interesting one, and they will find out soon whether they can get their hands on the funding to develop the old building into a community facility.

We were joined by my colleague Kieran Wild, the local Green Party city councillor, Patricia Ferguson, the constituency MSP (pictured), and a host of people from the local community and other organisations.

The idea of bringing unused land in our towns and cities into productive use has been around for a long time of course, and with long waiting lists for allotments in some areas it’s something we could be doing so much more of. Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall has been promoting the issue recently, both on his TV series and on the Landshare website. While the Scottish Government haven’t yet taken up the idea I’m hopeful that they can be persuaded, as Glasgow City Council have been - they accepted Green proposals in last year’s budget to get some work going along these lines, and I was delighted to find myself getting the bus back to the city centre today with the guy whose job it is to scout out possible locations for a big market garden in Glasgow.

Meanwhile community groups like the people at Lambhill and others like our friends at Toryglen Community Gardening Club, are cracking on with this work in their local areas, and more power to them. I’ll be keeping my fingers crossed for the Lambhill funding bid.

On blogging

I suppose it goes without saying that anyone with a website is required to publish some opinion or other on the blog_gate saga (sorry!) which has dominated Westminster headlines for a few days now. Let’s deal with a few of the basics first – there is of course a big red line between on one hand ordinary knockabout stuff, or even material which pushes the boundaries of ‘knockabout’, and on the other hand brazenly inventing outright lies.
Various Labour types have been busy making the defence that the Tories have been guilty of dirty tactics in the past, for example recalling the ‘demon eyes’ placed on Tony Blair’s face for an election poster some while ago. Fair enough, if you’re left with the alternative of Ed Miliband’s line “that’s just not the Gordon I know”, you need to reach for something else.
Not that Labour finds it too demeaning to stoop to that level and then stoop a little further – remember that YouTube animation of Salmond as a petulant wean in the 2007 campaign? This is simply the reason why you need a thick skin in politics.
But no, the kind of stories being worked up from within Downing Street contained outright lies, attacks on the mental health of family members, and accusations which if they had any factual basis at all should have been taken to the very standards authorities which Labour appointed.
This was not simply a party stooping to the level of their opponents. It was a party – indeed a government – stooping to the level of the ignorant, puerile, paranoid and bigoted comments which anyone who’s spent five minutes online will have come across.
So here’s where I come to my point. Lots of us are getting all fired up with enthusiasm for the power of the internet and its potential to create new and exciting aspects to our democracy. But while we can hope that it will lead to a political culture which better serves the public interest we shouldn’t blithely assume that will happen by magic. If we don’t take care it could just as easily lead to an even shallower, coarser, and more fear-driven form of politics. Do we want political parties and governments, instead of chasing the next tabloid headline, to simply chase the next Twitter trend?
I guess what I’m driving at is that alongside the potential for technology to bring new dynamism to democracy, there is also a huge amount of utter crap out there. For every radical or progressive voice there appear to be at least a few endless streams of bile. While taking the piss can be great fun of course, is it really enough?
I’m by no means the first person to point out this tendency, and I’m doing so more to raise the question than to answer it. But this vast and unbounded space is not only filling up with political chatter, it’s also coming to influence the political culture it’s discussing. If we want that influence to be a healthy one we should be no more forgiving of bigotry, ignorance or outright lies online than we are from governments, elected politicians, political parties or anyone else.

Backing the NUJ

I’ve just come back from speaking at a rally outside the Trinity Mirror offices, where striking journalists were putting their case.

Here, Paul Holleran of the NUJ explains a little of the background: