Rupert's Read

I wanted to take this opportunity to thank you all my readers who are supporters of the Green Party for your continued support and to reflect on all the successes the region has had this year. Having launched our European Elections campaign at the beginning of the year, the momentum has been building. Our members responded generously to our fundraising appeal, raising thousands of pounds. This increases significantly our ability to fight a strong and effective campaign. The local elections in May saw us increase the number of councillors in the region for the eighth year running, and the Green Party now sits on more district authorities in the East than in any other region in Britain. Many Green candidates were only a few votes away from being elected, and we look set to make further gains next May. So far our future looks promising, but we still have a lot of work ahead of us. Our continued success comes amidst fresh reports that the effects of manmade climate change could be...

On the second day of the ‘January’ sales, my girlfriend and I took the bus into the city. I was shocked and disgusted that it now costs £2 to get a single on First from where I live (just inside the Outer ring road) to the city centre. No wonder the bus was mostly empty. Cycling into town next morning, on the third day of the ‘January’ sales, I was struck by the even more dire traffic levels than there had been the day before. The entire central area of Norwich was gridlocked. It is desperately urgent that, with the coming of the long climate crisis, we sort out our transport system. We simply must find ways of encouraging people out of their cars, and onto buses and bikes. But this will obviously never happen while the bus system in cities like Norwich is run by profit-grabbing private companies. The appalling congestion that I have witnessed and that many many others have been caught up in, sometimes for hours, over the past few days, must be the last of its kind. This is why, in 20...

Here is my latest EASTERN DAILY PRESS column, which you can get in print in today's paper. This column was previewed in an earlier incarnation a couple of months ago on this blog. Quite timely, at the Christmas / New Yesar period, I think: http://oneworldcolumn.org/190.html

Goto http://futurefmplatform.podbean.com to listen to the podcast of my Book Review of Martin Bell's 'The truth that sticks' on Norwich's community radio station, 'Future radio'. [It is a little under half way through the programme on Dec. 23 2007]

Further to my posts below on Clegg, check out the letters in yesterday's _Indy_, at http://comment.independent.co.uk/letters/article3266532.ece , on the same topic. The first such letter, 'A bad time for Clegg's liberalism', by myself, takes up the same vein as my posts here and at 'Our Kingdom' (Open Democracy). A little further up in the letters, there is a lovely contrast between the radicalism of Caroline Lucas, Green MEP, and a degree of low horizons from Chris Davies, LibDem, on the question of whether we should move to coal, or alternatively press for lower energy demand, decentralisation of energy sourcing, and big growth in renewables.

Bruce Anderson (See his http://comment.independent.co.uk/commentators/bruce_anderson/article3258031.ece ‘The environmental debate…’, Mon. 17 Dec.) pretends to be a friend of cool dispassion, and spends a fair bit of his article repeatedly and distastefully making fun of the Dutch man at the heart of the UN climate change negotiations who cared so much about what he was trying to do that he broke down in tears while on the podium. He accuses us greens moreover of being devotees of a “fanatical cult”. But Mr. Anderson himself is a devotee of what truly is a fanatical unreasoning cult: the cult of economic growth. He never stops to ask the question why economic growth is presupposed by so many, including himself, to be ‘a good thing’. The answer to the question of whether economic growth actually is a good thing is: It is when it improves quality of life, and it is not when it does not. And the evidence is getting stronger all the time that since about 1970, economic growth in the West...

http://ourkingdom.opendemocracy.net/2007/12/18/cleggs-liberalism-is-not-the-opposition-we-need/