Politics Show

On Sunday 25 April, the Politics Show section for the North will be somewhere in the Leeds Liverpool Canal, and you might get a glimpse of me! The things we do for a little slice of TV exposure. Not sure yet whether to take my goggles and flippers. The topic is Employment and Jobs - if I get a chance, there is plenty to say!

Manifesto lesson 3 - Immigration

I think it is time to get down my ideas on immigration - together with the Greens' policy stance.

This will be the first of a few postings on the issue, 'cos it is a mite complicated. The Green Party manifesto devotes just over a page to the topic (pp 45,46).
In one sense we can say it's quite simple, really. In brief, Greens will

• be fair to all,
• meet our international obligations,
• sort out the issues which are causing people to want to move here, and therefore lessen the demand
  
• sort out the mess inherited from the existing system, and
• make sure children, particularly, are treated humanely.

These wholesome aspirations look a lot more complicated, when other factors and anxieties come in to play. These include worry about overcrowding here in the UK, fear of society being taken over by others with a lack of respect for our values, resentment of incomers getting a better deal than ourselves, fear of jobs being taken by migrants, and so on.

The position in Beverley and Holderness is affected also by the particular 'character' of local society, where for many generations there have been quite small changes compared with the experience in other communities.

And finally, for this posting, I don't think we are very good at hammering out local solutions to knotty problems, and this certainly presents a basket of problems which will need a lot of knocking around before they are resolved. This is a place where leadership has been called for, and been lacking. Greens will offer leadership, if the voters make it possible.

So, this is what happened ...

I was intending to do a piece on another topic, when an article in last Sunday's Observer gripped me. Will Hutton, a respected writer on economics, is saying, in the words of his headline, "Now we know the truth. The financial meltdown wasn't a mistake – it was a con".
This is a story about the implications of the pending prosecution against Goldman Sachs, 'the world's most famous investment bank'. The allegation is that they were selling a dodgy product, while at the same time supporting a hedge fund which was betting on the stock in that product collapsing. The question is, why have no allegations of bankers' misconduct emerged from the UK?
He makes the point, 'We have to live with the fiction that our banks and bankers are whiter than white, and any attempt to investigate them and their institutions will lead to a mass exodus to the mountains of Switzerland. The politicians of the Labour and Tory party alike are Bambis amid the wolves'.
Greens want to regulate this lot - with vigour.

Which policies do you prefer?

It is good to see that when people vote blind for the policies on offer, without knowing which party the policies belong to, there is still a majority in favour of the Green Party.

The Vote for Policies site shows (rounded up to whole numbers):
Greens 25%
LibDems 18%
Labour 18%
Tories 17%
UKIP 11%
BNP 10%

The sample size is 144,000, so these results are pretty robust.
Dear reader, can you please vote according to your reasoned judgement?

Media - news about news

We had this nice bit of cover today in the Hull Daily Mail, and guess what - the web link we had published on the bottom had been hacked & has taken all day to fix. Google still thinks it's a corrupt location. Grrr. Martin Deane and our web host slaved for ages trying to deal with it.

Caroline had a slot with David Vine on BBC R2 this lunch time. He was pretty rough, but C handled it with dignity.