Rupert's Read

People sometimes ask me where my roots are. I was brought up mostly in London, and I've lived in Norwich for a little over a decade now - but my family roots in this region go back much much further. One branch of my family originated from East Anglia . My great grandfather was Francis John Thorn, born in 1873 in the small market town of March , Cambridgeshire. In 1908 he married Mabel Grace Thorn, née Morris, who was born in 1880. They married in the church in March in 1908. Together they ran the family grocery business and soon moved to Peterborough where they opened a grocery store. On March 21 st , 1909, my great grandmother gave birth to Freda Frances May Thorn. She was the eldest of four children; her siblings were Leslie, Reg and Margaret. They all lived in half a manor house in Woodstone on the outskirts of Peterborough . Freda went to school in Peterborough and then went to St Peter’s teacher training college in Peterborough in the 1920s. So, when I vis...

The interview below is reproduced from The Crab Line, North Norfolk newspaper of distinction -- to see the original, goto p.12 of http://www.crab-line.co.uk/download/issue_126_web.pdf It May Well Be Two Years Away Rupert became a Norwich City Councillor in 2004, representing Wensum ward, and was re-elected in 2007 with 49% of the vote. Rupert serves on the Joint Highways Committee of the City and County Councils, where he is a strong advocate of Norwich Green Party's Transport Policy . He is the Green Party's representative on Norwich Peace Council and has been a prime active opponent of the Government's aggressive foreign policy. Rupert is also the spokesperson on Transport for the Green Party City Councillors. Naturally Rupert has a great deal of groundwork to get his name out to the wider Norfolk community and to get his message out for people like you and I to end up voting for him, as MEP. How Rupert are you going to do this? I’ve always been a campai...

It is sometimes said that greens have made 'prophesies' of environmental doom, prophesies that have turned out to be exaggerated. And some headline-grabbing greens have sometimes done a bit of this; but, mostly, the allegation against us here is simply untrue. Prophesising is not a rational activity, and never makes sense where what is concerned is human action. For we always have a choice as to what we do. What environmentalists have done is made _hypothetical_ predictions: If x isn't stopped, then y will be much more likely to happen, etc. . The problem with the argument that goes 'There hasn't been environmental catastrophe, therefore the greens are wrong', is that the first time a hypothetical turns out very badly, very few people will be around afterward to have the discussion... We only have one chance to get this world right. What the controversial and brilliant 'limits to growth' analysis of 30/35 years ago said was that if human habits di...

I am a local Councillor. In most strong local Green Parties, Green Councillors are our representatives in the governing of the land. Across the county, over a hundred of us are slogging their guts out to make the Green message a reality. When as a Green activist you are looking to get a first Councillor elected, and when that wonderful moment arrives, and when your Group starts building in numbers, you want the national Green Party to be doing everything that it can to give more power to your arm. The Party nationally ought to be as robust and as media-savvy as our Parties with Councillors are locally. That means Leadership. It means getting the front page of the _Guardian_ as often as we get the front page of the Norwich Evening News , the Brighton Argus , or the Lewisham News . It means having the same impact nationally, with a charismatic figurehead, that we do locally, through people like Adrian Ramsay, Keith Taylor, and Darren Johnson, who lead their Groups on their Councils...

I've been on the radio quite a bit and we've had national coverage too in the last 24 hours because of our call, as Eastern Greens, for an end to the silliness of putting the clocks back in October... BST should be extended in England and Wales; Scotland can have its own devolved arrangements, should a longer BST period raise problems with mornings becoming too dark north of the border. BST ought to be extended until at least mid-November and to start again by no later than mid-February in England and Wales. If I get elected in 2009, one concrete result that I will try to bring home is a major change to ‘British Winter Time’: the outdated practice of putting the clocks back to Greenwich Mean Time, each October. It is unfortunately an EU rule that keeps our clocks back right through late into springtime: as an MEP, I would work to overturn that rule. Putting the clocks back for 5 months or more each year means more lights on for more of people’s waking hours: it there...

Jim Jepps, of the excellent leading Green blog, THE DAILY (MAYBE), has just interviewed me about RUPERT'S READ. You can find the interview by going to: http://jimjay.blogspot.com/2007/10/interview-with-new-green-blogger-rupert.html

Check out my latest online post on the Green Party leadership issue; goto: http://ourkingdom.opendemocracy.net/2007/10/23/the-possibility-of-green-leadership/