There are times when you just have to despair at the degree of selfishness that people (even/especially important people who have to make big decisions) can display at times. I wrote the other day about the Polish objection to tougher CO2 emissions reduction targets, but now today the European Parliament decided that lunch was more important than voting on a report on raising emissions reductions targets.

Lets get this straight: some MEPs thought that it was more important to go for lunch, than to do their job, finish voting from this Part Session, and make progress on an important report on a hugely important topic. I don’t know what was in the canteen today, but judging from the usual fare they offer up, I struggle to see how those hungry MEPs were unable to resist it.

Unfortunately my schedule meant that I couldn’t take part in Blog Action Day yesterday (exam revision and travelling), but I’ll try to make up for it once my mid-term exams are over next week. Before that though, I have to get through the rest of the European Green Party’s council meeting in Malmö. There is quite a lot of discussion of our performance in the European Parliament elections earlier this year, and hopefully I can make some of it into an interesting post later on. I’m tweeting stuff as I go along under @tredford01, with the #EGP hashtag that a few others here are using.

The European Greens have had an anti-Barroso campaign going for a little while, as can be seen if you go to 09:50 in the video below (though the whole thing is quite interesting). It seems though that there might actually now be some hope of getting someone other than Barroso into the Presidency of the Commission when the post is elected. If the European United Left/Nordic Green Left can be won ’round, then it seems support from other groups behind Guy Verhofstadt, the former Belgian PM, could be enough to win the secret ballot in the EP. One to watch, I think.

My last post was resolutely negative, but I said I was doing two posts, so here is the second, and it’s thankfully a lot more positive. In the UK, we held our two seats: there are still two loud Green voices from the UK in the EP. True, we didn’t manage to increase our seats as we had expected to do, but we held our base firmly, and the UK-wide increase in the Green vote was 50%. In other words, the electoral system is just a tad crap for us, but we did pretty well. Now we need to build on that and make sure that we get those extra seats next time. One of my favourite set of numbers for the night was Brighton & Hove, where we took the most votes, beating all other parties. Lets hope we can have a repeat performance when it comes to the general election.

Looking elsewhere in Europe, the state of the greens is rather good. In France, we saw a gain of 8 seats, taking us to a total of 14. In Belgium, Groen! (Dutch-speaking greens) suffered at the hands of Vlaams Belang (far-right), but Ecolo (French-speaking greens) won two seats in the EP (up one from last time), and are also the third largest party in the Brussels Capital Region Parliament. Not all results are in, but by my estimates, we’ve gained 13 seats across Europe, making the European Greens a stronger force in EU politics. I’ll try and keep that pan-European thought in mind, rather than the UK results.

I’ve never witnessed a European election count before, so my idea of live-blogging it may be a bit presumptuous, but I’ll give it a go anyway. Proper live-blogging should start from about 21h30 CET. The spreadsheet below is my attempt to gather together the green results from the European Parliament; Belgian and Luxembourgish legislative; and Irish, English, and Maltese local elections. Tweet in my direction (@tredford01) if I’ve missed anything out. Results in italics are provisional, and all information is as correct as I can make it, but there may be errors.

02h46 CEST: Well, that’s all I can manage for now. It seems that the European Greens have so far gained 12 seats against the 2004 session numbers. With the fresh light of day, I’ll hopefully be able to complete my results spreadsheet and put together some coherent comment on things, but just now I have mixed feelings. I’m happy for the overall gain, but the far-right’s gains in the UK, Belgium and the Netherlands, our losses in Austria and Italy, and our failure to increase our number of seats in the UK is very disappointing. Goodnight.

02h27 CEST: So in the last two results from UK South East and UK South West, Greens have beaten the Labour Party. Shame we aren’t managing to increase our seats.

02h25 CEST: UK South East results: 4 Conservative, 2 UKIP, 1 Green, 1 Labour, 2 Liberal Democrat. Greens on 12%, 4% ahead of Labour.

02h21 CEST: UK South West results: 3 Conservative, 2 UKIP, 1 Liberal Democrat. Greens on 9%, 1% ahead of Labour.

02h01 CEST: Apparently there is a recount going on in Manchester. That explains the delay in results.

01h53 CEST: East Midlands results: 2 Conservative, 1 Labour, 1 UKIP, 1 Liberal Democrat. Greens on 7% with no seats.

01h41 CEST: London results: 3 Conservative, 2 Labour, 1 Liberal Democrat, 1 Green , 1 UKIP. Our first Green to be re-elected this time round.

01h32 CEST: BBC are now predicting that the BNP will win 2 seats, and Greens will also win 2 nationally. So UK North West could easily go to the evil nazis, while we just manage to hold our two existing seats.

01h25 CEST: Re-Tweeting @AdamRamsay “Report from NW count: Greens 5,000 behind in final tally ”

01h22 CEST: And there is a computer failure in the count for UK South East. Wonderful: more delays.

01h20 CEST: BBC are predicting that we will take a 9% share of the vote UK wide.

01h03 CEST: Italian result seems to have sneaked past the BBC. According to the European Greens, we’ve lost our MEPs from Italy. Federazione dei Verdi down to 3% of the vote.

01h01 CEST: Irish results forthcoming. No seats for the Greens.

00h54 CEST: So to tot up UK results so far, we have 7 Conservative, 4 Labour, 3 Liberal Democrat, 4 UKIP, 1 Plaid Cymru, and 1 evil fascist BNP nazi.

00h47 CEST: Greens on 6% with no seats in UK Wales, and Plaid Cymru will join the Greens/EFA group in Brussels.

00h46 CEST: UK Wales results: 1 Conservative, 1 Labour, 1 Plaid Cymru, 1 UKIP.

00h41 CEST: Welsh results should be through shortly.

00h32 CEST: Greens on 9% in UK Yorkshire & Humber.

00h29 CEST: Fascist BNP have their first seat in UK Yorkshire & Humber. Horrible

00h28 CEST: UK Yorkshire & Humber: 2 Conservative, 1 Labour, 1 UKIP, 1 Liberal Democrat, 1 BNP.

00h22 CEST: UK Yorkshire & Humber result should be through shortly.

00h10 CEST: Greens on 9%, no MEP from us for East of England.

00h09 CEST: 3 Conservative, 2 UKIP, 1 Liberal Democrat, 1 Labour from UK East of England.

00h05 CEST: UK East of England result just coming through.

23h58 CEST: Apparently the Italian result is about to be announced. Also, there is a potential for BNP seat in UK Yorkshire & Humber.

23h36 CEST: Worrying news from the count in the UK North West, BNP may be 2,000 votes ahead of the Greens with 14 out of 39 areas in the region announced.

23h04 CEST: Argh, maddening religious population of Western Isles in Scotland refuses to count votes on a Sunday. Northern Ireland also waiting until Monday.

22h58 CEST: Tweets are suggesting the BNP are going to do badly in the UK North West. Still could be very tight, and still big chance Greens might not get a seat there.

22h45 CEST: 1 Labour, 1 Conservative, 1 Liberal Democrat in the UK North East region. Greens were up 1% to 5.8%.

22h43 CEST: First results coming in from the UK North East. Will post results very soon.

22h32 CEST: Discrepancies between the BBC’s reporting of results, and what I’m getting through SMS, Twitter and European Greens. We may have 1 or 2 MEPs from Spain.

22h15 CEST: RT @patrickharvie Rumours of 18% Green vote in Glasgow.

22h09 CEST: Finally getting some proper results in. Great results from France, and Germany.

21h08 CEST: Will be taking a short break in live-blogging to cycle to an election party now. Back online in half an hour or so.

20h56 CEST: Lebanon has apparently also voted in national elections today, so I’ll try to slot those results in as a little bonus when they come through. I’m not sure how strong the green party is over there.

20h53 CEST: Apparently low turn-out in France (surprise, surprise!), but Europe Ecologie (Les Verts and Regions et Peuples Solidaires) seems to be on 14.8%.

20h39 CEST: Closer to home, I’m also hearing good things about the Scottish Greens in Edinburgh. Let’s hope it’s enough to get Elaine to Brussels!

20h36 CEST: I’m hearing word that we may have our first MEP from Οικολόγων Πράσινων (Eco-Greens) in Greece. Looking for more information just now.

19h45 CEST: Getting mixed information from Belgium. Ecolo (French-speaking greens) seem to be doing quite well with 16 seats in the regional parliament for Brussels. Groen! (Dutch-speaking green), on the other hand, appear to be suffering, with few gains, and lots of far-right gains for Vlaams Belang. Very worrying, and I hope not an omen for our performance in the North-West region of the UK.

So I spent the weekend at the European Green Party Congress in Brussel at the European Parliament, as the lone Scottish Green Party delegate. It’s the first one I’ve attended, and I really must say, it was brilliant!

I don’t know how other party groups do these things, but most of us Greens seem so open to really working in a pan-European way, which I think is fantastic. As is usual with international conferences, I ended up meeting a load of great people from all over the place, and sort of avoiding any other Brits who happened to be around. There was even the highlight of being able to sit in one of the MEP seats in the Hemicycle (yes, as you can probably tell from the rest of this blog, I’m most certainly a politics geek).

I really feel both exhausted and energised. It is great to see just how enthusiastic people all over the continent are for getting greens elected to the EP, and how much effort is being put into the campaigns. Three very long days of the Congress, and not too much sleep have taken their toll though, so I’ll write something more political about the Congress once I’ve had more than four hours sleep. That might be a bit tricky though, as I’m currently on the Thalys train to Münster for a model United Nations event all this week.

There’s been an interesting situation simmering in Mexico. The Partido Verde Ecologista de México recently came out in support of the death penalty, prompting concern from the European Greens. Initially, there was a call for the Mexican Greens to be expelled from the Global Greens, on the grounds that they had transgressed a core principle of the green movement, expressed in the Global Greens Charter as:

6.10 Demand that the death penalty be abolished worldwide.

Personally, I would agree that some action ought be taken against the Mexican Greens if they are willing to show disregard for the Charter, which sets out the fundamental ideas of the green political movement. This view is of course open to accusations of ideological imperialism, exporting the sensibilities of Europe to an advanced developing state, and naturally these accusations were made.

I have to say, this seems to me to be somewhat patronising. The fundamental respect for human life enshrined in Article 6.10 should be universal. It is not something for which I can see any argument for Mexican exemption. The idea that a stated opinion from Europe to Mexico is an imperialistic one merely reinforces the idea that Mexico, and the Mexican Greens are not equal to European states.

It was announced today that the European Green Party does not any-longer consider the Mexican Greens to be part of the green political family. I’m inclined to agree, at least until the views on the death penalty are reconsidered.