Why zero carbon homes aren't enough

Another great round up on MSN Money - this time about greening your home and how Labour are failing to use the tax system to promote green action.

Google Adwords

My domain name renewal came with a voucher from Google Adwords - something I've been meaning to try for some time - so I've just set up my first ad. Hopefully some of you will be reading this post as a result.

I'm not planning to turn this into a navel-gazing-techy blog but I will post a occassionally about how well this works in driving traffic to a non-business site.

Whatever happened to Green Gordon?

Once again the Greens are setting the agenda, with the first-ever carbon-costed budget. Even MSN are critical of Gordon Brown's failure to take serious steps to tackle climate change.

"If you were hoping for a green budget, you might be disappointed. In Gordon Brown’s 11th budget, the cut in the basic rate of income tax was the main event; green taxes were a mere sideshow."

Catching up before Conference

I've been a bit lax in my posting since last week's Trident vote - taking time to catch up with things other than anti-nuclear campaigning (my day job) and the London Assembly selection.

I'm off to Green Party conference in Swansea tomorrow where I have the dubious pleasure of co-chairing the debate on a motion which would initiate a membership consultation and ballot on a proposal to replace the current positions of Principal Speakers (one male, one female) with a Leader and Deputy Leader (or co-leaders). The exact proposal that would go to the membership if the motion were passed will be determined by a number of amendments to the original proposal. It looks set to be at least as heated as the last conference session I chaired (in Hove, last autumn) which agreed the procedure for membership ballot such as the one proposed here.

Tories prop up Blair to push Trident vote through

The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament today strongly condemned parliament’s decision to support the government’s plans to replace Trident, Britain’s nuclear weapons system.

The government’s motion to replace Trident passed despite a significant rebellion by backbench Labour MPs. The government was forced to rely heavily on the Conservatives in order to pass the controversial motion. This was the biggest rebellion during Blair’s tenure other than the Iraq war.

An amendment tabled by Jon Trickett, Sir Menzies Campbell, Dr Gavin Strang, Nick Harvey, Peter Kilfoyle and Joan Ruddock, which stated that the case for Trident replacement is not yet proven and expressed doubt about the need for an early decision, was also defeated by the Blair – Cameron alliance.

Kate Hudson, Chair of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, said:

"This decision represents a serious democratic deficit. A recent poll shows that 72% of the British public do not want the government to replace Trident now. How is it that so many MPs, and the government itself, is able to so wilfully ignore those they are meant to represent?"

"It is a significant moral and political victory that the vast majority of the public oppose Trident replacement. We welcome the principled stand of the MPs who voted against the government’s motion, and we encourage them to continue pressuring the government to reverse its shameful position."

"The government never allowed a genuine consultation and debate to take place. Six hours of debate on the day of the vote is an affront to the vast majority of people in this country and around the world who oppose nuclear weapons proliferation."

CND will continue campaigning against British nuclear weapons, and will continue to push for multilateral initiatives to achieve complete nuclear disarmament. A draft Convention banning all nuclear weapons is already lodged at the United Nations.

The nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty preparatory conference next meets in May 2007. There is still time for Britain to reverse its decision to replace Trident and fulfil its obligations under Article VI of the NPT to disarm.

The best way to improve Britain's national security would be to reject Trident

Apologies for posting the whole of Johann Hari's excellent comment from today's Independent, but they have an annoying habit of removing their best articles from the public section of their website and reserving them for paid subscribers. This is one of the best articles I've ever read on the issue of Trident replacement.

Published: 12 March 2007

A metaphorical mushroom cloud will hang over Westminster this week. On Wednesday, the House of Commons will debate whether Britain should breach the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and buff up our stockpile of weapons of mass destruction for another generation. Already, one government frontbencher has announced he will resign, and a majority of Labour backbenchers in a BBC survey have declared they will rebel.

The Prime Minister has slapped down a challenge to his opponents: "Those who question this decision need to explain why disarmament by the UK would help our security." He's right. So let's show how insisting Britain maintain nearly 200 nuclear bombs on hair-trigger alert floating around this island, each with eight times the explosive power of the bomb that incinerated Hiroshima, makes us less safe.

There are three ways Britain is threatened by nukes from the outside. Nuclear Threat One: A fundamentalist group could smuggle a nuclear weapon into this country and detonate it. A tiny but determined band of people would like to carry out this plan: Osama bin Laden has declared that the acquisition of an "Islamic nuclear bomb" (presumably followed by Islamic radiation poisoning) is "a religious duty," and he tried to buy one himself in the mid-1990s.

The will is there, and the knowledge is not too hard to get. The only (massive) obstacle to these ambitions is getting hold of highly enriched uranium or plutonium. In theory, these essential nuke-ingredients are kept locked away - but there are recorded instances where they have been guarded by men armed only with garden rakes. The US Council of Foreign Relations explains that in the former Soviet Union, "Even basic security arrangements such as fences, doors and padlocks remain inadequate in many locations."

The head of the Democratic Republic of Congo's collapsing nuclear reactor plant was arrested last week for flogging off his enriched uranium to the highest bidder. (Nobody knows how much is missing).

Trident is, of course, useless against this sort of threat. Non-state actors leave you with nowhere to retaliate: after 9/11, would you nuke Hamburg? Besides, jihadists welcome death. For them, mutually assured destruction isn't a deterrent; it's an incentive.

But does Trident make this situation worse? I think it does, for one reason. Every penny we spend on the illusory "safety" of Trident is a penny we are not spending on securing collapsing nuclear facilities around the globe. John Kerry calculated it would cost £8bn to get all the world's enriched uranium and plutonium sealed away. Replenishing Trident will cost at least £20bn. So let's lock up the nuclear materials instead, and spend the £12bn-change on tracking down the maniacs who want to use them.

Nuclear Threat Two: A regional nuclear war could break out somewhere else in the world and trigger a nuclear winter. This is by far the biggest nuclear danger to us, and the least discussed. There are 30,000 nuclear weapons on earth, and the use of barely a dozen could cause irreparable environmental damage. This is not a wildly implausible scenario: only five years ago, Britain had to advise its citizens to leave India and Pakistan because of the real risk of a nuclear war, and it's not hard to imagine a similar situation soon between Iran and Israel.

There is only one route out of this. It is the NPT, created in the 1960s after the world came within inches of consuming itself in fire during the Cuban Missile Crisis. The NPT is based on a simple deal: the existing nuclear powers slowly scale down their nuclear arsenals, in return for the non-nuclear powers agreeing not to tool up.

The renewal of Trident violates this, our last best hope. As Rabinder Singh QC and Professor Christine Chinkin say in a legal opinion, the renewal of Trident "constitutes material breach" of Article VI of the NPT, which pledges "nuclear disarmament" pursued "at an early date".

A global momentum towards disarmament is the best way to sway Iran and other countries in the Middle East from going nuclear. Of course, only the criminally naive believe the deranged anti-Semite Mahmoud Ahmadinejad will wake up the morning after Britain disarms and realise he doesn't need a nuke after all. Gandhian moral suasion has little effect on religious fundamentalists. But we need to be playing a long game here, appealing to the Iranian people themselves. Most estimates suggest it will take a decade for Iran to have a working nuclear weapon, and Ahmadinejad's domestic popularity is already dissolving. Unless the US and Israel bolster him by attacking, he will be gone before he has access to a weapon.

But the problem will remain: the Iranian people will still want a nuclear bomb, with around 80 per cent demanding one in opinion polls. In their situation, it's not hard to see why. They are ringed by nuclear neighbours, and traumatised by the memory of the CIA overthrowing their democratically elected Prime Minister in 1953 and installing a fascistic dictator.

If we want to change this pre-and-post-Ahmadinejad wish for nukes within Iran, we need to change the external situation. In a world that is ramping up its nuclear arsenals, the Iranian people want a weapon of their own. In a world that is steadily decommissioning its nuclear weapons, they probably would rather spend the money on schools and hospitals, like everyone else. Renewing Trident diminishes the chances of that ever happening - and, therefore, our safety.

Nuclear Threat Three: Some as yet unidentified state will one day emerge and threaten us with nuclear annihilation. This is unlikely, but not impossible: in the 1920s, few people saw Nazism on the horizon. But there is a better way to guarantee against this than Trident. It is known as "the Japanese option".

At the moment, Japan has a virtual nuclear arsenal. They have a civil nuclear programme and advanced rocket technology, so they could put together a nuclear weapon in three months if they needed one. Britain could do the same: retain the capacity to assemble a weapon, but not have one day-to-day. By going Japanese, we would simultaneously strengthen the NPT and retain a guarantee against nuclear blackmail.

So yes, Prime Minister, these are three solid ways in which disarmament would make Britain safer. You talk about Trident as an "insurance policy", but as Bruce Kent of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament has warned, it is as though you are taking out an insurance policy against subsidence of your house that contributes to that very subsidence. Let's cling to the naive hope that the fall-out is, in the end, only political

Guardian calls for delay on Trident vote

Today's Guardian leader is calling for a delay to allow proper debate on Trident replacement.

The balance of the argument runs in the rebels' favour. The case for renewing Trident at all is weak and the case for renewing it now is even weaker, more to do with the timing of Labour's change of leaders than with military or industrial requirements for an immediate decision.

The defence white paper describes Trident as an insurance "against an uncertain future" but is of course no such thing. Insurance carries with it a guarantee of protection. The renewal of Trident is simply a bet that the best protection for Britain over the next half-century will be a small, very expensive and US-dependent nuclear system. But the evidence for this is questionable. The low-intensity debate that has followed the paper's publication has not tested the relevance of nuclear deterrence to a changed strategic environment. When they debate this week, even MPs who accept nuclear weapons in principle should ask the government to delay and offer better evidence. Those who oppose them altogether can vote against secure in the knowledge that there is no longer any certain conflict between their moral position and the security of the country.

The editorial starts by quoting my local MP, Emily Thornberry, who seems to be less worried about rebelling than might be expected from someone who is clearly hoping for a government job when Gordon Brown becomes Prime Minister. But the first comment online comes from the infamous MarkGreen0 (a notorious NewLabour Troll on the Guardian site) who seems more in line with Labour policy:

Labour created the bomb for this country; Blair and Brown will ensure we keep that great Labour legacy.

And we've just had the first resignation over Trident - Deputy leader of the Commons, Nigel Griffiths. Indications are that he won't be the first to resign a government post over this issue, but it seems that none of Labour's rebels feel so strongly that they will resign the whip on this issue of principle.

Selection Results

The count for the Green Party London Assembly list selection was held yesterday. The result is subject to validation by the London Green Party at its meeting on Monday 19 March, so I'm not publishing the result here, but the good news is that it looks like I've made it onto the list (just).

First Green on Northern Ireland Assembly

Great news from Northern Ireland. Brian Wilson has just become the first Green to be elected to the Northern Irish Assembly.

Drug laws in Britain: "not fit for purpose"

As a fellow of the RSA, and a member of the Green Party, I welcome the launch today of the report of the RSA Commission on Illegal Drugs, Communities and Public Policy.

The report comes hot on the heels of comments from Alan Jones, President of the Association of Chief Police Officers, who called for a return to the prescription of heroin for addicts.

The report recognises that the drug economy runs like any other economy, despite being illegal. For example, a police crackdown that is effective in reducing supply leads to an increase in prices and a consequent increase in crimes by users stealing to fund a habit. While the report does not go so far as to call for legalisation, it does call for drugs policy to

"be better integrated into broader policy, not ghettoized in some ways as it is now. Policy on substance misuse needs to remain a high priority but in a different way: not singled out for separate treatment but absorbed into the policy mainstream. That said, care needs to be taken, especially in the early stages, to ensure that the special needs of problematic drug users are taken fully into account. Drugs policies should be better integrated into policies in such areas as social exclusion, housing and homelessness and regeneration, just as they are increasingly being integrated into policies on children and young people."

It also calls for the replacement of the Misuse of Drugs Act, which it deems "unfit for purpose".

"The Misuse of Drugs Act 1971 is no longer fit for purpose. It should be scrapped and replaced with a new Misuse of Substances Act that:
– sets drugs in the wider context of substance misuse alongside alcohol, tobacco and other psychoactive substances;
– is linked to an evidence-based index (reviewed on a regular basis) that makes clear the relative risks of harm from individual substances;
– seeks to focus punishment mainly on harmful behaviours stemming from drug use rather than the simple possession of drugs."

The end of Patronage

In a shock result the Commons has tonight voted for a wholly elected second chamber to replace the House of Lords. Perhaps not as surprising as it first seems given the ongoing cash for peerages investigation, but an incredibly important step towards a representative parliament.

Once the upper chamber is elected on a proportional system (even if it's the least democratic closed list system, which seems to be the current proposal) it will be very difficult to maintain "first past the post" for the Commons.

A representative parliament would mean the end of market-led politics, where the main parties chase an ever-shrinking number of swing voters in marginal seats, while ignoring the views of the majority of citizens who's votes count for little or nothing because they are cast in safe seats.

Don't forget to vote

Attention London Green Party members. The deadline for voting in the selection for the Green Party Mayoral candidate and London Assembly list is this Thursday (8 March), so you need to get your ballot papers in the post today if you haven't already.

Don't forget that the incumbents and well-known figures will receive lots of first preferences anyway, so the best way to ensure new blood in the winnable places at the top of the list is to give candidates like me your first preference rather than just putting us in your top four.

But whoever, you vote for, please do vote. Thanks.

Manor Gardens Allotments vs. Olympics 2012

Unfortunately I wasn't able to make yesterday's Fight for our Land protest to save the Manor Gardens allotments from destruction as part of the 2012 Olympics, but there is a good report on the LifeIsland website.

The campaign was also featured in this BBC London report...

Microsoft goes Green?

It's a sign of just how mainstream Green messages are becoming when the MSN homepage main link is to an MSN money article entitled Ten ways our spending destroys the environment which goes beyond the usual "don't leave your TV on standby" message and looks at the energy costs of food and the damage done by non-biodegradable shampoos and household cleaning products.

Oddly there was no mention of the Vista layer which about to be created as millions of PCs are sent to landfill by consumers upgrading to new hardware in order to run Microsoft's new Vista operating system.

NHS Day of Action - This Saturday, 3 March

Health unions, NHS campaigns and pensioners’ groups are joining together on a Day of Action in defence of our NHS on Saturday 3 March. There will be marches and rallies throughout the country.

BRENT Assemble 11 am Brent Town Hall for a demonstration (contact 07951 084 101, roundwood(AT)redmail.com)
LAMBETH, SOUTHWARK, LEWISHAM Assemble Camberwell Green 11 am to march to Kings College and Maudsley hospitals (contact southwarkkonhsp(AT)googlemail.com, 07765 848 444)
TOWER HAMLETS Assemble Royal London Hospital (Whitechapel Road, London E1 1BB) 12 noon to march to Hackney (contact 07950 575 731)
HACKNEY Assemble Hackney Town Hall 12 noon for a rally and march (contact NHS Together, c/o Staff Side Office, St Leonards, Nuttall St, N1 5LZ)
HARINGEY Assemble for a demonstration 11am Hornsey Central Hospital, Park Road, N8. (Also on Thursday 1 March, 7.30 pm: Public Meeting at West Indian Cultural Centre, Clarendon Road N8 (off Turnpike Line by 41/144 bus stop)
WANDSWORTH, MERTON, SUTTON Assemble 12 noon open space opposite St Helier Hospital, Wrythe Lane, near Rosehill, Carshalton.
ENFIELD Save Chase Farm Hospital demonstration Assembles 2 pm War Memorial, bottom of Windmill Hill, Enfield Town (More details: www.savechasefarm.co.uk)

There will also be a RALLY in Friends Meeting House, Euston Road (opposite
Euston Station) at 1.30 pm on 3 March - organised by NHS Together In London

Keep Our NHS Public, NHS Together

London's Green Fuel Source?

This week the Mayor of London and the Greens on the London Assembly launched the London Climate Change Action Plan, a key component of which is a switch to combined heat and power stations (CHP).

Local CHP plants are far more efficient than centralised power plants supplying a grid, for two main reasons: a) the heat produced when generating electricity is used for domestic or industrial heating rather than being treated as waste (so more of the energy released from the fuel is used) and b) because the electricity is used locally, the huges losses due to transmission over a vast national grid are reduced dramatically.

So even if they are powered by coal, oil or gas, CHP plants are a massive improvement on the current centralised generation system. But we can go one better and today's Guardian carries an excellent article spelling out the benefits of locally produced wood pellets, which are near carbon neutral.