Thanks for your reply.

It will be interesting to see what the Greens make of Norwich, should they ever control the city.

>He needs to ditch the persona of an amusing eccentric and become a serious politician.

I wonder if he does. Ken Maintained his “cheeky chappie” persona in addition to being a dedicated machine politician before he went Independent. I’m not calling that one yet.

Thankyou very much for your comments; I do apologise if I was bit, ahem, brusque. In my defence, I wrote the post on the hoof, so it is a bit incoherent.

I’m going to reply to you at greater length in the morning, but I wanted to say that I was really not aware of the restrictions you talk about. I’m going to look into it.

Matt,

There is a question about whether the Greens in the UK are a watermelon party (green on the outside but red on the inside, with little black anarchist bits). If you look at some of the continental Greens, and here I’m thinking particularly of the Italian example, you see a neo-communist party in all but name. While there are some ultra-left people in the Greens here and some who would like it to become a watermelon, it is not, I think, a party ‘to the left of Labour’. I don’t think the left-right continuum holds, for one thing, but their appeal is not just to disaffected socialists so much as people disaffected with the liberal end of UK politics (including the Lib Dems) and so it remains a different beast to Mr Dale’s ‘extreme left’.

The ultimate reason that the Greens cannot be considered part of the traditional ‘left’ is that they are enjoying some electoral success!

Usually, the image issue is a canard. In this instance, I disagree with you. Mayor Johnson has, in the past, put his foot in his mouth and had some difficulty removing it. He needs to ditch the persona of an amusing eccentric and become a serious politician.

xD.

Your “Left” (Dale Blogging Guide: “Extreme Left”), which I would probably call (following the Socialist Unity people) “Left of Labour”, doesn’t include the Greens. Perhaps it should? Certainly that is what some of the Left of Labour people think. I’m not sure what the Greens think.

I think there are some real questions over whether a jump to £25 at a single point in the CC banding can be regarded as acceptable - given that it is highly regressive. Other aspects of the existing transport policy seem to me to be somewhat irrational - does it really make sense to give people free travel in the rush hour, or to have a scheme which *completely* divorces travel from the environmental costs of that travel in an age of Greenery?

The big surprise to me is that we are still - days later - seeing a wide reliance on anti-Boris image arguments (”buffoon”, “toff”, “dilettante”). Those seem to me to be boomerangs, bearing in mind all the other politicians who have precisely similar educations and backgrounds, or less experience.

My current thoughts.

Dave, you are not really accurate in the reason why we decided not to field a candidate for Mayor, and you may have picked up on incorrect rumour which circulated. The reasons, which we announced very clearly, were: first and foremost, there was the ban on candidates writing direct, personally, to the electorate (by means of restricting the amount spent) allied to the state radio and tv guidelines on coverage for smaller parties, issued just prior to our withdrawal and well in advance of any media coverage. These guidelines set a statutory amount of coverage on the basis of equivalence between small parties in two tiers. The rules are entirely different for the 3 ‘main’ parties given the enormous volume of coverage they would get and their protected status.The amount of ‘advertising’ allowed (and that is what it effectively is) for the ‘minor’ parties on state radio and tv was tiny, and the restrictions effectively created in advance a statutory maximum level of coverage: so, in the event that a BBC programme might decide to cover an additional aspect of a smaller party, or include them in an issue, it was obliged to have all the others on in equivalent manner and equivalent times. It is too much like hard work for the broadcasters, so they do not do it, and it also would mean they would sometimes have to give coverage to their boogie man the BNP. So even more they don’t do it. The Greens suffered in exactly the same way, and had very little BBC or independent broadcast coverage at all - we monitored it so I can assure you that the amount of BBC coverage between candidates of the second tier as specified by the guidelines was almost exactly the same. Producers told me at the time it is an absurd process which hampers them from actually covering the elections in any way journalistically. However, the Greens did have the value of being described as a ‘main candidate’ by the Evening Standard and given appropriate coverage. As the Evening Standard is a private business they are entitled to be as biased as they like…but they have to be aware that commercially this can sometimes have an important effect - a usual Tory voting member of staff in my publishing company said on this occasion she was voting for Ken because she felt sorry for “the smears against him in the Standard day after day” (only quoting, I make no comment!). She added that she had gone off the Standard and would be unlikely to buy it again, or at least not as often. And on independent broadcasters there is only the duty of “balance” between the ‘minor’ candidates - the day I pulled out I was on the Nick Ferrari programme and his words were, on air: “it is ridiculous that I could not have you on at all during the mayoral elections if you were a candidate because of the guidelines, but I can now allow you on to hear the reasons why you are standing aside!” Independent broadcasters have no self-imposed duty of minimum coverage so they simply ignore all the ‘minor’ candidates other than maybe for one spot.

Is it not absurd also that the London Assembly elections must be some of the only elections in a democracy where candidates are barred from writing to their potential voters? Again because of spending rules.

“Nonentities”? “Tchhhhhhhhh,” as my Trini aunt would say…

Regards Damian

The perils, Aled, of writing while packing. I’ve put the Greens in!

“… we held onto our 2 seats and weren’t that far off 3″.

Despite the major party Labour-Tory ’squeeze’ which crushed the Lib Dems, we held onto our 3 seats and weren’t that far off 3. Our vote stayed pretty much the same as last time and our constituency votes rose in most places, meaning we saved all deposits except one.

We were also a clear fourth in Mayoral 1st Preferences and came 3rd on 2nd Preferences (however meaningless that is!).