Alexis Rowell with Maya de Souza (second left) and other Camden Green Party campaigners

If can help in the campaign contact Alexis at alexis.rowell@greenparty.org.uk

The Green Party has chosen former Liberal Democrat councillor and Camden Eco Champion, Alexis Rowell, as their candidate for the Highgate by-election on Thursday 15^th September.

The Green Party’s Maya de Souza topped the poll in Highgate ward in last year’s council elections and the Greens are going all out to get Alexis elected so that he can help Maya with the great work she does.

The by-election follows the resignation of a Labour councillor who was only elected last year.

Alexis was a leading Lib Dem councillor in Camden from 2006 to 2010, and is widely credited with having significantly raised the profile of environmental issues in the council and across the borough.

But, shortly after winning a national Sustainability Councillor of the Year award, he stood down at the May 2010 elections.

Alexis said: “I have been growing increasingly disillusioned with the Lib Dems since the party joined the coalition government. My principal reason for leaving was Chris Huhne’s support for nuclear power, but I have also been completely unimpressed with the coalition’s overall environmental record and appalled by what their policies and cuts are doing to the social fabric.”

In the past the Greens have held all three seats in Highgate.

Maya de Souza said: “We are delighted to have such an experienced and energetic candidate standing for us in Highgate. It is largely thanks to the work Alexis did last time he was a councillor that sustainability is such a key concern at Camden Council. But he’s also got a great track record as a ward councillor responding to residents’ concerns. His energy, enthusiasm and hard work will be a great asset to Highgate.”

The Chair of the Camden Green Party, Natalie Bennett, said: “At a time when the Conservatives and the Lib Dems are creating havoc nationally, and Camden Council’s Labour administration is closing libraries and playgroups, Alexis is a strong candidate for anyone who cares about the environment and progressive issues generally.”

The leader of the national Green Party, Caroline Lucas MP, said: “Alexis’s move from the Lib Dems to the Greens shows that it is the Greens who are leading the way on progressive and environmental politics in the UK. I encourage all Lib Dems to take a long hard look at what the coalition is doing and to ask themselves whether they really support what’s happening.”

Pointalls allotments off Squires Lane in Finchley

Barnet Council is proposing that rents should be increased from the current rate of £6 per pole to £17 per pole for Barnet residents, £34 per pole for non-residents, with effect from April 2012. Here’s the URL for the petition against the increases. Please sign it:

www.gopetition.com/petition/42281.html

Barnet councillor Daniel Thomas says allotments are just a middle class hobby. That is utter rubbish. The 4,000 families who have allotments in the borough of Barnet  include people from all walks of life. Many plotholders are genuinely dependent on their allotments for fresh vegetables and fruit.

It’s also rubbish that it is better if allotment sites are self-managed and independent of councils, as Barnet’s Tories would like. What happens when problems arise? And councils have specialist people and equipment (and insurance) for cutting down trees, ploughing overgrown plots and so on. In Barnet, the council’s allotment budget has been zero for several years but income from rents has paid for a member of the council’s green spaces team to provide certain services to allotment sites. What has happened now is that the council has made a political decision that all sites should be self-managed and is jacking up rents to encourage sites to accept the new policy.

We all know that allotments are much more than just a place to grow vegetable, fruit and flowers, though those things themselves are vital. Allotments provide pleasure from fresh air, sunshine and green surroundings, they provide exercise, keeping people healthy and saving NHS costs and perhaps most of all they provide a space of one’s own to get away from it all without spending money on travel and hotels – they boost our well being without damaging the planet.

NB, in case you were wondering: One pole is about 10 feet by 30 feet. Allotments are usually 10 poles, to the standard rent will rise from £60 a year to £170.

Barnet Green Party's Andrew Newby checks the solar panel at his former home in Nicosia

Here’s Barnet GreenParty’s proposal: Abandon the dogma about ‘cuts’ and about ‘privatisation’, which might end up costing more money rather than creating savings. If they want genuine buzz words we suggest ‘sustainability’ and ‘solar panels’.

Birmingham Council has agreed a 100 million pounds scheme to create jobs and sharply reduce the city’s carbon emissions. The project will start by giving an energy efficiency upgrade to 10,000 existing homes and energy savings in the retrofitted homes will generate funding for similar work on thousands more homes in the city. Solar panels are already being fitted to homes in four areas of the city. (http://birminghamnewsroom.com/?p=12704)

Birmingham is a Conservative-Liberal Democrat administration so why can’t Barnet’s Tories come up with a similar plan that would create jobs, improve the lives of occupants of the improved homes and lead to a sharp reduction in energy costs and carbon emissions?

Before anyone asks where Barnet would get the initial funding, can we point out that Birmingham Council itself is only putting up 25 million pounds, ie roughly the amount that Barnet Council handed over to Icelandic banks.

Banks (British not Icelandic ones please!) would be eager to lend Barnet Council the money for an equivalent energy savings scheme and there might be ways of reducing the council’s proportion to an even smaller percentage of costs.

The feed-in-tariffs which energy companies pay for power from sustainable sources mean, for instance, that photovoltaic panels can generate surplus electricity every year worth up to 10 percent of the cost of their installation. After ten years the panels are paid for and the electricity is pure profit.

Companies and syndicates are starting to spring up to develop rooftop “sun harvesting” operations and Barnet Council’s thousands of homes, schools and other buildings would be an extremely attractive resource.

That’s the kind of project that Future Shape should be looking at: dynamic, exciting, forward-looking, job-creating, sustainable and potentially highly profitable after an initial investment.

Barnet Green Party chairman Noel Lynch asks 'Where's the sense in Future Shape?' Green MEP Jean Lambert's insulation block at least HAS a shape.

Barnet Green Party calls on Barnet Council’s Conservative administration to cancel its notorious Future Shape strategy after auditors Grant Thornton criticised the policy as lacking direction.

The damning report to the council’s audit committee by a team of expert professionals highlights that council leader Lynne Hillan and her cronies don’t have the faintest idea how much money Future Shape might save, nor do they have a serious programme for implementing the scheme.

“Grant Thornton’s report shows that Future Shape, better known as easyCouncil, is a complete mess,” says Andrew Newby, who was Barnet Green Party’s candidate for Hendon in this year’s general election.

“Barnet Conservatives’ concept seems simply to be: ‘Let’s privatise as much as we can and hope it saves money’,” Newby said.

“I call on Barnet Council to cancel Future Shape and go back to the idea that local authorities exist to provide accountable, democratically-controlled services, assessed according to the needs of local residents rather than treated as a trial ground for baseless political dogmas.”

Grant Thornton’s report spells out clearly that the easyCouncil idea is all talk and no substance. The experts wrote: “The council needs to develop and agree a more fundamental mandate for the programme by developing a programme level business case that sets out the planned costs, benefits, time scales, risks and outcomes of the programme.”

Councillor Brian Coleman this week launched a typically childish tirade of insults against the organisers of the Barnet Alliance for Public Services but his outburst was no more than a desperate bid to distract attention from the fact that Future Shape is a shambles.

Newby said: “Grant Thornton’s report provides proof if any were needed that Future Shape is merely an attention-grabbing attempt to implement political dogma without a scrap of evidence that it could achieve real savings and efficiencies. Future Shape? It is definitely Shapeless and let us hope it has no Future.”

Even Coleman might be taken aback if he had any real idea of what happened at Thursday’s launch of the Alliance at the North London Business Park. Not only was the meeting well organised with a panel of prestigious speakers including film director Ken Loach, but more than 200 local people crowded the Emerald Suite to express their anger at the current threats to local schools, hospitals, social services and libraries. Hardly the “lone voices” imagined by Coleman.

Everyone went away fired up to campaign to save our vital local services and facilities.

“It became clear to me that though Tory councillors are eager to slash jobs and cut budgets, what really motivates them is privatising as many of the council’s services as possible. Council workers told the meeting of how they had asked fruitlessly for details of how outsourcing their particular operation would save money – it was obvious that there were no details,” Newby said.

Unfortunately, outsourcing privatisation often leads to greatly increased costs rather than savings, as Private Eye magazine spells out in case studies in almost every issue.

“It is far from proven that Barnet Council needs to make the humungous spending cuts that a being talked about but even if savings are necessary the first priorities should be to save jobs and avoid any hardship to people who use council services. Those are definitely not uppermost in the minds of Barnet’s Conservatives, who simply want to make a name for themselves with massive privatisations,” Newby said.

The Green Party has won an extra seat on Norwich City Council, maintaining the progress it has made at every local election since 2002.

Norwich now has 14 Green councillors, the party’s highest number ever on any UK council.

Yesterday’s election gain came in Thorpe Hamlet ward, at the expense of the Lib-Dems. The Greens also saw a substantial increase in their vote in Lakenham ward.

Councillor Adrian Ramsay, deputy leader of the Green Party nationally, will be taking news of the positive result to the party conference which begins in Birmingham today (Friday). He said:

“I am delighted that the Green Party has once again moved forward in Norwich. We have successfully defended all our seats that were up for election and made a fantastic gain in Thorpe Hamlet. It is clear that lots of former Lib-Dem supporters have voted Green this time. They voted for hard working local councillors and a constructive opposition on the city council.”

Our bid to fly a kite to the height of the proposed incinerator chimney really irked the Brent Cross Cricklewood developers

Barnet Green Party would like to thank everyone in the borough who voted Green in the national and local elections last week and we would particularly like to thank the dozens of people who helped out, some of whom contacted us out of the blue.

The number of Green votes in the Barnet borough elections almost doubled from 11,637 in 2006 to 20,388 this time, which would have entitled us to several councillors under a proportional election system. Unfortunately, the current winners-take-all system continues to deny us any seats on the council, demonstrating at a local level the urgent need for major electoral reform.

Thankfully Caroline Lucas managed to win the Greens’ first ever parliamentary seat when she triumphed in Brighton Pavilion constituency, while across the country additional Green councillors were elected in Bristol, Cambridge, Reigate, Reading and Rochford in Essex, though the vagaries of the dreadful voting system and linking of the parliamentary and local elections meant we lost a few seats on some councils in London.

“As I monitored the count for East Finchley, the ward where I was a candidate, I saw that an enormous number of people had voted for names from two or three different parties, rather than backing three candidates from a single party. Judging from my strolls around the marquees where the votes were tallied, the trend was the same in other wards,” said Barnet Green Party press officer Andrew Newby.

This proves that a large proportion of people in Barnet borough really would like to see a balanced council, with a fair representation of all the political parties rather than the overwhelmingly Conservative administration that we are lumbered with.

Let us hope that the new British government, in whatever shape it may take, brings in a truly proportional voting system for local councils as well as for parliament.

Meanwhile, Barnet Green Party will continue to campaign on the many urgent local issues, not least our efforts to persuade the council to adopt a 20 mph speed limit in all residential streets in the borough. This would not only reduce accidents but make side streets more pleasant to walk or cycle along, improving people’s quality of life and boosting community spirit.

We will very much need your help in future and hope you will continue to support us as we begin preparations for the next major electoral challenge, the London Assembly elections in 2012, when we and activists across London will be fighting to increase the number of Green members of the London Assembly. Greens have played a key role in shaping policies on the assembly and could have even more influence if we win additional seats.

Noel Lynch, Barnet Green Party chairman and a candidate in East Finchley ward

Next Saturday is your final chance to put your questions to local Green Party candidates in a ‘Meet and Greet’ session in East Finchley.

Some of Barnet Green Party’s candidates for parliament and for the Barnet Council election will be at our stall outside Budgens on East Finchley High Road from around 10 am to 1 pm to respond to your queries and hear your views.

If you can’t make it on Saturday you are welcome to send in a question or a comment to info@barnetgreenparty.co.uk and we will reply as soon as we can.

On Barnet Council, our pledges are:

We’ll fight for: jobs, homes, insulation, a 20 mph speed limit, better public transport, good policing.

Nationally, a Green MP from Barnet would:

Save tens of billions by scrapping British nuclear weapons, withdrawing at once from Afghanistan, cancelling ID cards and scaling back other ‘Big Brother’ projects.

Candidates, members and supporters of Barnet Green Party gather at Tally Ho Corner.

For more information visit our Council Elections Page.
Press coverage: MEP Jean Lambert backs Barnet Green Party’s campaign launch at Tally Ho today

Barnet Green Party is prioritising job creation in its pledges for both the national and local elections. Here are our pledges for the Barnet Council election on May.

Jobs: We will press Barnet Council to do more to help prepare local 16-24 year old people for the world of work and to help them find jobs.

Nationally, the Greens want to create a million new jobs through the Green New Deal.

Homes: We will work to ensure that Barnet Council takes serious steps to encourage the building of affordable homes to buy or for rent.

Barnet’s performance in meeting local housing needs is among the worst of all the London boroughs.

Insulation: The Greens’ national ambition is for free insulation in all homes. We plan to submit proposals to Barnet Council for improved policies on insulation for public and private homes.

20 mph Speed Limit: Barnet Green Party is proposing a 20 mph speed limit on all residential and shopping streets in the borough.

Lower limits lead to a sharp reduction in accidents and also reduce people’s sense of fear and danger. People walk and cycle more and feel safer about letting their children walk or cycle to school.

Public Transport: Greens will continue to campaign for better local bus services and will fight any threat to Tube services or ticket office staffing at stations in the borough.

Green Party councillors in Barnet will also:

• Support community services such as libraries and post offices.
• Fight any new plans for major supermarkets in the area.
• Protect local parks, green spaces and allotments.
• Propose measures to help local businesses continue providing vital services to local people.
• Encourage a high visibility by local police and support officers to deter crime and make people feel safer.
• Spur Barnet Council to adopt a more sustainable approach

For further information contact: Andrew Newby

Noel Lynch and Steve Norman of Barnet Green Party with Jean Lambert MEP at Tally Ho Corner during the Council Elections campaign in 2006

Barnet Green Party will launch its 2010 Barnet Council election campaign at 11.00 am on Saturday 10th April at the pollution monitor at Tally Ho Corner in North Finchley. Green Party candidates from across the borough will be joined by Green Party MEP, Jean Lambert.

Why not come along and meet us?

For further details contact: Andrew Newby

Then on Sunday 18^th Donald Lyven, Green Party parliamentary candidate for Finchley and Golders Green, and Andrew Newby, Green Party candidate for Hendon, will attempt to fly a kite to 140 metres, the height of the chimney at the incinerator which the Brent Cross Cricklewood developers propose to build.

The attempt will take place at Clitterhouse Playing Fields at 1.00 pm and should be a spectaculr sight. Why not come and join us?

Contact: Donald Lyven.

In the Barnet Council elections, the Green Party is fielding its strongest team ever.

Seasoned campaigners Noel Lynch, Andrew Newby and Steve Norman are contesting the party’s target ward of East Finchley, where Lynch achieved the party’s highest Barnet vote in 2006.

Another impressive Green Party line up is in Mill Hill Ward, where locally-based twin sisters Dilan and Dilem Kurt are lining up alongside former borough councillor David Williams. (pictures attached).

In Totteridge Ward, Katie Margolis and Julie Rosenfield are aiming to build on the high vote achieved by Andrew Newby in 2006, when he posted the second highest Green vote in the borough, beating Labour and Liberal Democrat candidates.

The pollution monitor is the place where the party launched its council election campaign in 2006 and the Greens have chosen it again because they say nothing has been done in the past four years to improve the situation.

“In January, the monitor showed that nitrogen dioxide levels at Tally Ho Corner averaged 80 microgrammes per cubic metre, double the World Health Organisation’s recommended maximum level,” said Gardi Vaswani, the Green Party’s lead candidate for Woodhouse Ward, which includes North Finchley.

“Emissions in North Finchley may be no worse than other places in the borough – we just don’t know as it is one of only a handful of monitors across the borough. Probably many other places are as bad for pollution and the council has no budget for reducing emissions levels,” Vaswani said.

Lyven and Newby’s kite flying plan aims to mock the Brent Cross Cricklewood developers’ denial that the 140 metre chimney will spew fumes across the whole of North London.

“Of course it will,” said Lyven. “140 metres is an enormous height. The legal maximum height for flying a kite is less than half of that – 60 metres in fact. If anyone tries to stop us we’ll ask how come the developers expect to get away with building a polluting chimney 140 metres tall when we can only fly a kite to 60 metres.”