Being freed from academic constraints such as exams means I can now focus on the European election that takes place in the UK on the 4th of June. Bizzarely I’m back down in Manchester as a visitor with a couple of other greens from Scotland to do a bit of ‘Stop Nick Griffin’ leafletting. The Telegraph carried an encouraging poll putting the Greens at 11% and the BNP at just 5%, though those are national numbers, not broken down for the North West, where we’re head to head with the fascists for the last seat. We’ve got a pretty good campaign around the value of tactical voting (www.stopnickgriffin.org.uk), and it’s just a case of letting as many people as possible know we can win, and that they aren’t wasting a vote on us. Anyway, I’m on the bus on my way to our temporary campaign HQ a Pop Boutique on Oldham Street. If you’re up for some leafleting, come along, we should have someone there for most of the rest if the day.

Of course the voting system is really very simple: you just vote for the Green Party. Nevertheless the North West Greens have made a short video explaining why, just in case it wasn’t obvious.

via North West Green Party

Today is the International Day Against Homophobia and Transphobia, and it is just sixteen years since the WHO removed homosexuality from its list of mental illnesses. The fact that I can live openly in an increasingly tolerant and much less discriminating society here in the UK is testament to what has been achieved in the relatively short period of time since the major blocks to this tolerance and equality were removed.

As with many things though, I have been very lucky to be born in western Europe. Yesterday the Slavic Gay Pride march in Moscow was violently broken up by Russian police, while an anti-gay march was allowed to proceed elsewhere in the city. This followed the failed attempts of the city council of Riga to ban the Baltic Gay Pride march. These very public expressions of homophobia are outrageous, but they are the manifestations of homophobic societies, and it is the everyday discrimination and inequality faced by millions of people around Europe and around the world that does the most harm.

I don’t ever think I will actually understand what drives people to hate others like this. Fear of what is different, stoked by misguided religious thought, can be offered as suggestions; to me though, this still doesn’t explain the capacity to actively hate and discriminate in the way that is seen with homophobia—or indeed any other form of bigotry.

What is clear however is that LGBT people, and people with a capacity to accept and respect LGBT people as equals, are the ones who are right. How else would we have made the progress in western Europe that we have made? It might take time, but eventually we will prevail against the homophobic views expressed in Russia and Latvia so recently, and expressed around the world every single day. Gay people will exist in Iran (link), homosexuals in African states won’t have to listen to such words as, “Maybe in European countries, not here. They should not have rights here,” (link), and two men will be able to, holding hands, walk through a park in Maastricht without the fear of being beaten up (link).

Until recently I quite disliked electric cars. This isn’t to say that I prefer the sort that run on fossil fuels, rather that, out of all the technologies available to power cars in a sustainable way, I thought battery-powered electric cars to be a pretty poor choice.

I had two main reasons for this. First is the range issue. I’m quite unapologetic about the fact that I can and do (only occasionally) drive a car; but when I drive, it is for essential trips where public transport or a bicycle wouldn’t suffice. Most commonly, this means going up and down the M6 with a car full of stuff that I need to move from my flat in Manchester to my home in Edinburgh. While it is certainly possible to take quite a lot on a train, I don’t think TransPennine Express would be too pleased with me trying to take furniture or large boxes of books on their trains.

Could I do this sort of trip in an electric car? Possibly yes, but only if I could find a full sized one (more on that in a moment), and only if I had a very long time to recharge the car along the way (in a G•Wiz I estimate the whole trip to take about 40 hours, which incidentally is roughly the time it would take to go from Edinburgh to Barcelona and back by train). Second is the image of electric cars. Would greens be seen driving this?

I suspect the answer is yes. Ordinary people, that great mass of people who need to be won round to the idea of green motoring if it is to have any success, probably aren’t willing to sacrifice a ‘proper’ car for something with a top speed of 80 km/h, a 80 km range, and the appearance of an oversized toy (that is possibly the only time “oversized” will be used in relation to the G•Wiz).

So, what caused me to use the past tense at the start of this post? The Better Place battery swapping station is the answer. The idea is simple, you drive along in a full-sized and normal feeling electric car (complete with space for a disassembled IKEA armchair or desk), when you start to run out of charge, simply pull into a swapping station and the empty is taken out, with a full battery put in its place. Israel and Denmark already have plans for deploying the necessary infrastructure. It isn’t even particularly expensive. Engadget are reporting that deployment of the stations in Israel or Denmark should only cost around about €184 million. Could this, combined with a general reduction in car usage (do you really need to drive to the shops so much that you’ll willingly sit in traffic for ages?), be a significant part of the answer to greenhouse-gas emissions from transport?

G•Wiz photo from joanamary on Flickr, and is used under an Attribution-Non-Commercial Creative Commons license.

Now I know all of the readers of this blog will either be green voters or will be misguided souls who have their votes otherwise committed, but the party election broadcast for the EP elections next month is amazing. Whoever is making these videos, well done!

So Iceland could be an EU member state by 2011. As an expansion of the Union, it’s an interesting one when compared to other recent additions. Culturally Scandinavian, Iceland will have friends already inside, and there are little if any of the corruption problems that have blighted Bulgaria, or the myriad of issues that have come with interest from the other Balkan states.

I’ve posted on this before, and I’m still in a bit of a split mind about expansion of the EU. The problem which is blocking me from taking one view or the other is that I want to think of there being some form of common European identity, which can act as the bond that will keep European states together, and allow more integration. It’s clear that this is present in Iceland, but try as I might, I find it hard to extend this to Turkey. There is much in Turkish society to give it close links to Europe, but just as that may be the case, there is more to distance it from the cultural bond in music, art, language and society that is shared between people and states in ‘old’ Europe.

I said I was in a split mind though, and I’ve just given reasons why I think Iceland should be admitted to the EU, while Turkey shouldn’t. The other part of my mind wants to see Turkey in the EU, along with Iceland, to fulfil the idea of the EU being a way of spreading the values of human rights and democracy.

I still don’t know which argument I agree with more. I guess I have to choose between a tightly integrated cultural Europe, or a looser beacon of all things good Europe.

Little tiny disclaimer: I’m differing from European Greens policy quite a lot here, so even though there is a European Greens election banner at the top of the page, this post in no way reflects the view of the party. Oh, and think big, vote Green!

I’m sure most readers of this blog have already seen the video of Obama’s speech to the White House Correspondent’s Dinner, but I thought I’d share it anyway. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if our politicians in Britain and Europe would have something like this? No matter what office is held, politicians should never take themselves too seriously.

Whenever it was that the news about swine ‘flu broke, I missed it. I missed it because I was at a conference overseas with no connection to the otherwise omnipresent news media save for the occasional glimpse of a copy of The Guardian’s international edition. So it was quite a shock when on my return to Britain, as I was dozing off for the night to the sounds of BBC Radio 4, the presenter was proclaiming the crisis of epic proportions that was presented by swine ‘flu. Did I suffer from not knowing about the first case of swine ‘flu the moment it was found? No, and nor would most people have suffered if they were deprived of such information.

When I did hear about it, I was initially slightly panicked at the idea of a pandemic of a virus which was, according to the Guardian, most lethal to young and healthy people. Over time though, I came to realise that a more peaceful and pleasant life could be achieved by switching off the BBC News Channel and logging off the BBC News Web-site, and limiting my news intake to the World Service (that last bastion of mostly serious news) and the Guardian Weekly.

It annoys me a lot that the press now feels it necessary to sensationalise ‘boring’ (read ‘worthwhile’) stories, taking their coverage beyond all sense of proportion, and stuff the rest of their coverage with trash stories such as whatever it was with Susan Boyle that was so interesting, and the fact that in winter it snowed. The result is a society which is dreadfully informed about what is really happening in the world, satiated on a fast-food diet of celebrity and reality-television trash, where anything serious has to either be ‘deep-fried’ in reality-television oil, as can be seen with the Jury Team’s hideous and thought-free X-Factor style list for the European elections, or sensationalised, as swine ‘flu, and the economic difficulties have been.

Is there an alternative though? Perhaps if it were possible to force all news outlets to behave like the Guardian Weekly, the World Service and the rather good nightly BBC World News, then the public would be excellently informed on the state of the world, engaged with politics and capable of reaching reasonable conclusions on important matters of the day. Unfortunately, though I’d love to see more of the sort of journalism that is found in these publications and broadcasts, it is a sad fact that that would simply turn a lot of people off the news completely. While it is debatable as to whether no news is better than poorly reported news, I can’t see how alienating millions from the news would be beneficial, whatever benefit they are currently able to draw from it. I can’t see how, so long as inequality in education, social status, and income are as sharp as they are now, we can have a mass media which is free from what is essentially prolefeed.

I’ll try to stop this from becoming even more of a premature ‘grumpy old man rant’, and finish by including a knock-off of the well known Keep Calm and Carry On poster. I think it’s quite fitting advice for whatever the next crisis thrown up might be.