Thursday Briefing – Political Blog

Tom, 8 June, 2009

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.

Tom, 8 June, 2009

There are so many things I want to say after what happened in the elections last night, so I’ll try fit it all into two posts here. First is the disaster that was the results from the UK. In the North West and Yorkshire & Humber, we’ve managed to elect BNP MEPs. I think this is one of those times that proves that it is easier to spread politics of hate and division when times are tough, than to promote politics of hope and optimism for what we could do with our future.

In the North West, the leader of the BNP, Nick Griffin, was elected with only a 0.3% lead over the Greens. Whenever things are that tight, the first question most activists in the North West will probably be asking is, “could we have done more?” I suppose we have to remember that, while we could have done more, and things didn’t turn out as we’d hoped, we made a tremendous effort which we can build on for next time, and use in national and local elections in the region.

The second I heard about the BNP’s gains, my mind jumped to all the things it could blame: the media for reporting the election on national issues instead of making it a European election; the voters for being such blithering idiots as to be taken in by the new face of the BNP—I don’t for one minute believe all those BNP voters are proper racists, just cretinous fools; the other parties for being so arrogant as to forget the people and their underlying ideologies; and us for not campaigning harder. The simple fact is that, as much as I desperately wish it were otherwise, the BNP have two seats in the next European Parliament, and we just have to get used to that, and do everything we can to make sure that it is us with at least a 1% lead over them in 2014.

Tom, 3 June, 2009

A tad busy today what with elections tomorrow and all, but I noticed a piece on the front page of the Guardian about the British Conservative leader’s decision to join with a bunch of homophobic and climate denying freaks from Poland and the Czech Republic in forming a new right-wing grouping in the next European Parliament.

Obviously this new group is going to be just a bit repulsive, and it seems mad for David Cameron to be doing this when he’s also trying to present the image of a new and fresh, inclusive Conservative Party in the UK, but there is one promising aspect of this: it will pull a few MEPs out of the European People’s Party, potentially giving the Party of European Socialists the dominating position in the Parliament. Frankly the PES is only a tad better than the EPP, but at least it’s something.

Anyway, I guess we’ll have to wait for the results of the elections before knowing for sure how things will turn out. In the mean time, I’m off leafleting. Several streets worth of tenements await me.

Tom, 13 April, 2009

I’m sorry, I just couldn’t resist writing that title for this post, even if it sounds like something Nigel Farrage would write. Anyway, an interesting project by the name of Europatweets.eu has sprung up, sort of after the model of Tweet Congress and TweetMinster, to bring all MEP’s tweets together on one site. There is a certain degree of criticism of politicians using Twitter as a way of communicating with constituents, but I’d say that any way to increase the number of people who can communicate and interact with their representatives, is probably a good thing. Clearly when politicians meet Web 2.0 technologies and there is an en masse adoption of those technologies, we won’t always end up with everyone making the best possible use of them—as Nancy Pelosi demonstrates in the clip below—but there are plenty of examples of Twitter, blogs, and social networks being put to really good use alongside traditional communication channels. I don’t know how many of his constituents read it, but the Bickerstaffe Record is a great example of using modern tech to actually tell people what is going on (even if there are just a smidgen of partisan thoughts in there).

Anyway, back to Europatweets. Is it going to become as popular and well known as Tweet Congress or TweetMinster? Almost certainly not, but even if it’s just for the politicos, a dash more personality and conversation in European politics might be a good thing.

Tom, 29 March, 2009

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.

Tom, 10 March, 2009

SNP Tactical Voting has posted an interesting guide to the EP elections from a Scottish perspective, which is well worth reading. It’s always nice to see someone in the normal political world writing about Europe.

Tom, 20 February, 2009

Just a short post today, as I should really be researching the EU’s climate change policy instead of blogging, but I was quite surprised by the remarks of Václav Claus in the EP yesterday, where he attacked the institution for not having legitimacy. Certainly there are arguments that the EP lacks legitimacy, but these are mainly based on low voter turnout at elections. Claus’s argument was that the lack of a government and opposition in the model of a more traditional parliamentary system led to the deficit of legitimacy. Being familiar with the pointless trading of insults and jeering that comes from that system at Westminster PMQs, I can’t say I’d like to see it replicated in Brussels.