It feels like every second conversation I hear on the radio, or see on the tv, about the UK election is focussed on immigration. Yet I’ve barely heard any discussion of the actual merits, the pros and cons of immigration. The conversation has been entirely about counting people in and, preferably in the opinion of many people it seems, out.

Being a sort of immigrant myself, and being from a family that moves around a lot, this pointless scaremongering with statistics annoys me. Right now, I’m taking advantage of the right to live in another country that is granted by the EU. I’m restricted, as is anyone working in another EU state, Polish plumbers, Greek grouters, and Romanian researchers included, from being a burden on the Dutch state. Soon, I hope to work in Brussels, paying tax to the Belgian state, and ultimately my dream is to settle in the Netherlands and take part in Dutch society, contributing my fair share, and receiving my fair share. Amongst itinerant Europeans and migrants in general, I don’t think this desire to be a contributing member of society is unusual. So why don’t we cut the repetitive statistical nonsense aimed to massage the fears of people. There are many things that immigrants do that contribute to British society, and there are many thing that British emigrants do to contribute to other countries. This isn’t where the big challenges facing society today are.

So this isn’t the freshest story, but it doesn’t make it any less acceptable. I’m referring to the NY Times report on a British woman who was spied on by her local council. Why is it so hard to realise that if you give people in local government the ability to pretend to be James Bond, then naturally, they will get a bit excited and start mounting covert operations on targets, or to translate into normal English, spy on people who, in most cases, at worst are committing minor crimes.

Any level of government that has these capacities to observe must remember that there needs to be an element of trust between people and their government. Sure, bad people can take advantage of the space that the element of trust gives to do bad things; this is simply something that has to be put up with though. In the case of the woman in the article, there are myriad possibilities to investigate whether she was breaching rules on school admission that wouldn’t have involved a report with the words, “target vehicle”. There is a time and a place for surveillance, but it must be limited, obvious, and most importantly, it must allow for a private space, beyond the reaches of most of the state. Without it, we may have better security and fewer crimes, but we will lose more than we gain.

“We’re making it clear that we are completely equidistant between Labour and the Conservatives”

Vince Cable, Liberal Democrat Treasury Spokesperson on ‘The World This Weekend’, BBC Radio 4, 20th of September

Seriously, what is the point of the Lib Dems? I know lots of people are asking the same question at the moment, driving it to become a cliché, but it’s a question I have to ask. I’m not basing this question on the assumption that British politics should be a two-party affair, but since it is, there seems to be no point at all in having the Lib Dems as they currently stand.

I should declare before I go on that I’m sympathetic to liberalism; it’s my political background and where I would be if environmentalism didn’t exist, so I want the Liberal Democrats to be a decent party at the UK level, and I’d love to have a proper liberal government (lets face it, the Greens aren’t going to be able to form a government in Britain for a long time, if ever*). So it pains me to hear statements from senior Lib Dems such as the one at the head of this post.

Just as I think Labour needs to rethink what it really is, so I think the Lib Dems need to forget about trying to maintain an equidistant position between the other parties, practicing the worst campaign tactics imaginable, and selling their souls for power at every opportunity, and come up with a proper sense of liberalism, domestically and internationally, that can be applied through a coherent set of policies to tackle the problems that we face, from climate change to the financial crisis and everything in between. Carrying on as they are now can only help the mediocrity of British politics.

Talk about papering over the cracks: apparently we are to see a new ‘brand’ and a ‘policy plan’ to go with it from Labour this week. To be fair, it’s about time we started talking policy again, but when the Financial Times uses lines such as, “Lord Mandelson is characteristically confident of seeing off leftwing pressure” to refer to the drawing-up of the plans, I’m not sure how much confidence I have that the result will be recognisable as the new revitalisation of social democracy that Labour needs if it is to have anywhere near a remote chance of limping into a fourth term, or perhaps more realistically, if it is to be able to defeat the next Conservative government in a few years time. I’m not desperately keen on Labour, but they’re still much preferable to the wolf in sheep’s clothes that is the Conservative Party.

I love cycling. It’s my main form of transport, and I’ve put lots of effort into making my bikes as practical as possible for riding to work, the shops, or wherever. But despite this I get incredibly frustrated by the way that cycling is seen here in the UK. I’m not just talking about how ‘ordinary people’ see cycling, but also the image that cyclists have cultivated for it. Having had the privilege of riding in the Netherlands and Münster in Germany, I’ve seen what a proper cycling culture can be, and we are so far from it over here.

So first, what’s wrong with the image cyclists have created? Well, think cycling in the UK, and it’s either mountain bikes, lots of effort, arriving sweaty and with an unusually contoured hair-style from wearing a helmet, or road bikes and too much garishly coloured lycra. I was looking at the web-site of the cycle maker Giant earlier and it was quite interesting to compare the UK and Nederlands versions of the site. In the UK shop, the “Lifestyle” section had three hybrid, derailleur bikes and one folding one; switch to the same page on the Dutch site and you are presented with the folding bike plus a mix of eight town and hybrid cycles, almost all with useful features such as chain guards, and three of which exhibited that incredibly useful invention: the hub gear. To Giant, the British everyday cyclist is not interested in a truly practical bike; instead, they will make do with hybrids.

It is the planning approach to cyclists that is really shocking when making comparisons though. When I was riding in the Netherlands I rarely used main roads. Instead, I was able to glide along peacefully on off-road paths—there was even a cyclists-only roundabout in Leiden! Riding around, the entire way in which the roads were designed and built included cyclists as important road users, not an after-thought. This even extended to inter-city cycling. I was able to ride from Leiden to Den Haag mainly on high-quality off-road paths: a similar sort of journey in the UK, even on the National Cycle Network, would either involve large diversions for the benefit of leisure cyclists or sharing a country road with car drivers who don’t expect to see a cyclist there.

I don’t for one minute believe we could replicate Dutch road standards for cyclists in Britain. Rebuilding the entire road network might be a tad expensive. We should be giving far more emphasis to cycle facilities though. Numbers of people cycling are rising, but they won’t start rocketing (and they need to rocket for the benefit of all cyclists) until you can just hop on a bike, free from the hassle of getting tangled up in a pile of high-visibility clothes, safe in the knowledge that the road network won’t direct you along off-road paths which vanish into nothingness, and without the worry of what to do with the bike when you arrive at your destination. Perhaps something like Copenhagenize or Amsterdamize would be useful here to highlight and promote what practical cycling might already exist.

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.

Try as I might, I couldn’t find the exact quote, but I remember that in The Prince, Machiavelli writes something along the lines that when open attacks against a prince start to build up, it is inevitable that the prince will find himself off his princely throne fairly shortly thereafter. As a piece of political insight, this one has held up pretty well since the 1530s; I have a feeling it will hold up this time as well: I’m going to hazard a guess that Gordon Brown will either go on Monday, or secure himself in office for a month or two.

Frankly, if he does go, I’d say good riddance. The government has lost any appetite for politics based on improving the UK and tackling the big global challenges. Instead it has opted for—or been co-opted to—the politics of power and survival. The problem is, even with a new prime minister, there will be no change or revitalisation in policy.

It is almost inevitable that we will end up with a Conservative government for at least one term of office, but the Labour Party need that time if they’re to have hope of reassuming power again in future. It would be interesting to think what Democrat government in the United States instead of George Bush could have meant for Barrack Obama’s chances of becoming President. I’m not an expert on US politics, but I think there’d be less chance of his election if Gore had won in 2000. He was able to use the discontent with the sitting government to present a coherent set of policies for his presidency, and differentiate himself from past Democrat administrations. Labour need to do the same. They need to reconnect with their grass-root activists, find an ideology of some form, and present that to the country with a new leader, showing that they can be a fresh force on the centre-left.

Of course, a Green government would be ideal, and what I really want is for our policies to be the ones which people want for the country, but in the electoral system that we’re stuck with, it’s Labour or Tory, and I’d probably always prefer Labour as the best of a bad pair.

And so Lisbon stumbles and limps onwards towards that hopeful day when it might finally be ratified. Tomorrow could see the lower house of the Czech parliament having another go at voting on the treaty, though given their past record I don’t hold out much hope of the vote actually taking place. If it does though, it will have to be in reference to the news from Ireland that with 51% of voters now supporting Lisbon, the second referendum may be moved to June, to coincide with the EP elections.

I’m generally in favour of Lisbon, though my understanding of exactly what it says is marred by the fact that it is an amending treaty, rather than the originally coherent constitution, and is filled with paragraphs such as:

the words ‘this Treaty’ and ‘the present Treaty’ shall be replaced by ‘the Treaties’, the verb, where applicable, shall be put in the plural and any necessary grammatical changes shall be made; this point shall not apply to the third paragraph of Article 182 and to Articles 312 and 313; 

Now clearly this makes sense, but only if you happen to have copies of the Treaty on the European Union, and the Treaty Establishing the European Community to hand, coupled with a lot of patience. To be fair, the protocols later in the treaty are more readable, but European citizens are still presented with a largely incomprehensible and highly technical document. Of course, as with most legislation, citizens themselves rarely see the raw material. But the barrier to entry on something as important as Lisbon means that the alternative way of participating in the political discourse—through the media—is vulnerable to the sort of lies and scare-mongering which was seen in the Irish ‘no’ campaign, and which will likely be seen again in June or October, and in any referendum held in the UK.

The aims of Lisbon are frequently ignored in debate on the treaty, and should it ever be fully ratified, we’ll be able to enjoy a better and more democratic Union, but I’m certain the legitimacy of the treaty will be called into doubt after so much of a muddle has been made over its implementation.