Cuts in Croydon - council lobby video

Demonstrators lobbied the last council meeting. Greens were there in force.
The facts are that the Council is planning to cut upto one third of its workforce and to privatise many services. As many as 2000 jobs could go as the Council tries to cut its budget by £70 million over the next few years.

Lib Dems join in the attack on our freedoms and public services

With friends like the Liberal Democrats, our beleaguered public services, reeling from a miserable thirteen years under New Labour’s right wing economic agenda, need no enemies. Business secretary Vince Cable has announced plans to privatise up to 90 per cent of the Royal Mail, and has said he would happily see it bought up by foreign companies. Far from acting as a brake on the gung-ho free market capitalism of the Tories, LibDem members of the coalition are enthusiastically Con-Demming us to the further decimation of public services.
What’s interesting about the draconian cuts in the spending review, as George Monbiot points out in the Guardian (October 19th 2010) is not so much what is being axed as what isn’t. Public bodies whose purpose is to hold corporations to account are being swept away. Public bodies whose purpose is to help boost corporate profits, regardless of the consequences for people and the environment, have sailed through unharmed. Whether the LibDems are having the wool pulled over their eyes and are innocently unaware of the Tory agenda, or they are simply now revealed for the illiberal right wing party that many of us suspected they (or at least their leadership) are, we’ll have to see. But it follows a series of defeats for the leadership at their conference on the coalitions’s plans for so called ‘free schools’, which of course in no time will become semi privatised ‘academies’ with no democratic local control. This from a party that likes to tell us how keen they are on localism and accountability. Ha ha. But they were at it before the election too. Lib Dem peers Razzell and Clement Jones, back in March, ameded the lready illiberal Digital Economy Bill to allow site blocking for copyright infringement. Rushed through by the illiberal Labour Government this tawdry Act opens the door for the blocking of sites accused of copyright infringement, including sites like Youtube. Any site with user generated content could easily fall foul of provisions like this. And we all know who can afford the expensive lawsuits which attach to any conflicts, and who can’t.
Even the environment is under attack from LibDem members of the coalition: this week we have the bizarre spectacle of a Tory, Tim Yeo, chairman of parliament's cross-party energy and climate change pleading with a LibDem minister, Chris Huhne, the Climate Change Secretary, not to slim down commitments to sustainable technology. Huhne has said: "nothing was safe" in his department.
There's plenty more; it all adds up to a depressing picture of continuing whittling away of the public sphere, with the Tories set to get their way nearly everywhere supported by their junior partners, still too intoxicated by the scent of power to know how to use it properly.

Prominent trade unionist and former Labour candidate backs Greens

Geoff Martin, Labour's parliamentary candidate in Sutton and Cheam in 1992 and a leading campaigner in the fight to save services at St Helier Hospital today called on local voters to back Sutton's Green Candidate Peter Hickson.

Geoff Martin, who lives in Sutton and who was expelled by the Labour Party last year, said: "Voters sick and tired of the spin and sleaze of the main Parties have a real choice in Sutton and Cheam and I would urge them to vote for the Green candidate Peter Hickson and give the political elite a real kick up the backside.

"The Greens oppose privatisation of services like the NHS and support workers rights and decent pay and pensions. I would call on all trade unionists and socialists in Sutton to make a positive decision and give Peter Hickson and the Green Party your vote. The Labour Party in this area is dead in the water and traditional Labour voters who feel badly let down by 13 years of Blair and Brown have a real alternative in Peter Hickson and the Greens. My advice is don't stay at home getting angry on May 6th - get down the polling station and vote for Peter."

On clean campaigning..

We really would love to believe that Nick Clegg and the LibDems are serious about wanting to 'clean up politics'.
But we can't.
Take the sordid episodes from the Norwich by-election last year, where our candidate Dr Rupert Read, himself an ex Lib-Dem, got the full tratement from his old friends. Oner leaflet put out by LibDems had a banner headline: "Residents shocked by Green Party candidate's terror views", and went on "Little is known about Rupert Read, but one thing is certain, local people have taken against his extreme views."
Dr Read, said the flyer, believed that "Britain simply had the terrorist attacks on 7 July coming to us". One safely anonymous "local resident" was then quoted as saying: "What planet is he on?" Another, equally shy, "Norwich resident" opined: "I can't believe that anyone could think that."

The voters of Norwich would have been right not to believe it, since it was a wholesale distortion of something Dr Read had written, four years earlier, equating terrorism with acts such as the Iraq war, but very clearly condemning both and calling for an "ethic of non-violence", as practised by Martin Luther King and Gandhi.

Dr Read, a philosophy lecturer, said: "The whole Liberal Democrat campaign was sickening. I look now at Nick Clegg promising to clean up politics and I remember that he was specifically asked to criticise his party's tactics in Norwich, and he refused."
Dr Read was also the victim of bogus Green party leaflets, produced by the LibDems in Green and in Green party style, urging voters to vote LibDem!
"People were telling me on the doorstep: 'I got your leaflet telling me to vote Lib Dem, so that's what I'm doing'," says Dr Read. "Anyone who's in politics knows that the Liberal Democrats are the dirtiest in their campaigning techniques, and I'm saying that as a former Lib Dem. It's one of the reasons I left."

In York, the Tory website was hacked into and redirected to the local Lib Dem one; in Cornwall, a Lib Dem candidate distributed flyers calling his opponent a "greasy-haired tw*t"; in Liverpool, a Lib Dem councillor was caught stuffing letterboxes with leaflets supposedly from a fringe party which smeared his Labour rival as a "lap-dancer". In Liverpool they have even accused the Green Party of wanting to limit the number of children people have!

Lest we think these merely local excesses, it may be worth quoting from an official Liberal Democrat election manual, Effective Opposition, obtained by The Daily Telegraph, published by the Association of Liberal Democrat Councillors in 2002 and still in use, judging by the techniques seen around the country. On page 21, it instructs Lib Dems to "be wicked, act shamelessly, stir endlessly". Page 23 advises: "Don't be afraid to exaggerate. For example, responses to surveys and petitions are always 'massive'. If a council is doing something badly, public expressions are always of 'outrage'." Page 4 advises: "Positive campaigning will NOT be enough to win."
if this sort of stuff is clean, what is dirty?

Sutton Green local election candidates

Follow this link for information about our local candidates for May 6th

Party election broadcast online

Watch the Green party broadcast here