The blood-curdling advance of the Fascist BNP in the Euro elections will make every reasonable person feel extremely uneasy. My joy at hearing that George Lyon was going to be Scotland's newest MEP was quickly tinged with horror that he would be accompanied by a Fascist from Yorkshire. Waking up this morning to see that Nick Griffin had in fact taken the last seat in the north west region filled me with anger. It's not even as though more people voted for them this time round. Their total vote actually stayed around the same but the collapse in the Labour vote in those regions helped elect them.
Then I got to thinking about why this had happened, and wondering what we could do about it. Up here in Scotland, neither the fascist BNP, nor UKIP got close to taking a seat, in fact, the BNP only got 2.5% of the vote with UKIP struggling to get just over 5%,and I wondered whether there was anything in the way we do politics up here that could help defeat them in other parts of the UK.
Now to give them their due, Labour saw this coming but they dealt with it in entirely the wrong way. Their entire Euro campaign seemed to be based solely on the message "if you don't vote for us, you'll let the BNP in". It's fine to warn, but you also have to offer something positive, too, and there was nothing remotely attractive about Labour's campaign and the ideas it offered for the future.
Liberal Democrats know from our experience of fighting the BNP on the ground that they can be beaten with strong, local, grassroots campaigns. If you offer people the chance to make their views known, give them the feeling that they will be listened to and keep them informed and involved in the democratic process, the extremist parties can be kept back.
Then I got to thinking about why this had happened, and wondering what we could do about it. Up here in Scotland, neither the fascist BNP, nor UKIP got close to taking a seat and I wondered whether there was anything in the way we do politics up here that could help defeat them in other parts of the UK.
I was fizzing mad to see William Hague use their election to argue against PR for Westminster. We need to burst that bubble quickly because, to be blunt, he is talking absolute nonsense - it's a cynical, dishonest misrepresentation of the truth. We have 3 different proportional systems for all elections except Westminster in Scotland and we don't have either the BNP or UKIP elected (although there is a UKIP councillor who defected from the Tories in Fife). Interestingly, James Graham said on Twitter this morning that if the Euro elections had been held by STV and not this ridiculous closed list system, there would be no BNP and the Greens (who seem to like closed list systems) would have an extra seat.
I'm not for a minute suggesting that Scots are fantastically satisfied with their Governments, but could it be that there is less anger and more empowerment up here? Could the way we do politics be healthier? Note I don't say healthy, but it's all relative. The devolved parliament and STV-elected local Councils encourage both co-operation between parties and engagement with the electorate. The Scottish Parliament also has a much more robust committee system with more powers that Westminster and these committees regularly consult and involve ordinary people in their deliberations. It's also much easier for deeply unpopular government initiatives to be defeated. The SNP have had to look again at their plans to ban under 21s from buying alcohol, to privatise Scotland's forests and even had to compromise when it came to getting their budget through. The system encourages a more consensual approach and it gives the opposition parties real power. Even in the days of the Labour/Lib Dem coalition, the Government had to modify some proposals in the face of actual or likely defeat and even the Socialists who at the time only had 2 MSPs were able instigate the abolishing of poinding (the sale of personal goods to pay debt) in 2001.
The fact that that Government was a coalition meant that we ended up with much stronger freedom of information legislation - which in turn meant that Holyrood had its own expenses issues a few years ago, leading to tighter new rules then.
In Westminster, the opposition has no such chance to properly hold the Government to account. The electoral system for all my political life has delivered huge majorities to one party or another, which is then faced by an opposition that spends so long ripping itself apart in defeat and taking over a decade to build themselves up again. Commons defeats, or the need for Governments to rethink unpopular legislation, are relatively rare. The recent defeat of the Goverment over the Gurkhas led by Nick Clegg and the Liberal Democrats was a rare event. Perhaps it is the inflexibility and remoteness of both Westminster and local government south of the border and its electoral system that caused the deep sense of alienation that many people feel from mainstream politics.
I'm aware that what I'm going to suggest is controversial and I don't do so lightly, but I wonder if it's time that we as political parties, all of us, stopped pussyfooting around and actually debated these people. Labour and the media gave them heaps of publicity, and credibility, and dismissed them as nasty, but didn't pin them down on the issues. Is it time that we started referring to them by what they are, as racists and fascists? I have never been comfortable with the principle of no platform - the idea that you don't give publicity or credibility to an extremist party - because it allows their ideas to flourish, unchecked, behind closed doors. Is it time to actually debate these people and forensically dissect their bile? In recent weeks they've had unchecked publicity which may have led people to think that they were a legitimate vehicle for a protest vote.
Some BNP voters, their core support are undeniably racist thugs and use the party a sa vehicle for pushing their hate filled agenda. Then you have the angry and alienated, who may be living in terrible housing, unemployed or poor and who see inaccurate reports in the Sun or the Daily Mail using language like "bogus asylum seekers" as if there are no legitimate ones. How many times have you seen a headline like that? The tabloids have been known to whip up hysterical frenzies against particular groups of people, from single mothers to people who have come to live in this country from abroad, making it sound as if they are some sort of drain on our resources. At times, they have been helped by mainly Tory politicians in their scapegoating of people. This is complete nonsense and should not go unchallenged any more because it turns people into prey for the likes of these extremist parties. The mainstream political parties should all be ensuring that this stuff is rebutted. You can't stop a free press saying that stuff, but you can make sure that their innuendo is challenged. They should also be trying to reconnect with those angry and alienated people while leaving them in no doubt about what the BNP are and what they stand for.
I guess we have to get this, horrid though it is, into perspective. We are only talking about a couple of MEPs and councillors across the country who in the end of the day don't have much political power and everyone in decent politics needs to make sure that they heed the wake up call that this has given. Otherwise you could find some rich racist thug bankrolling them to the extent that they start making further progress. The fact that they were elected now is an indictment of the failure of politicians to engage and deal with people's concerns. It's a consequence of people feeling powerless and angry and further makes the case for urgent, radical political reform. Others might want to take lessons from the Liberal Democrat experience in Burnley where they joined battle against the BNP and last night topped the poll there.
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Showing posts with label European Elections. Show all posts
Showing posts with label European Elections. Show all posts
Monday, June 08, 2009
European Results - Lib Dems' reasons to be cheerful
If there's anything worse than going to bed knowing that a Fascist has been elected to a Parliament, it's waking up to see Nick Griffin’s odious little mug over the news,celebrating his win in the north west. I want to write a separate post about those rather sinister developments to explore some ideas about how we could deal with them and whether there is anything that the rest of the UK can learn from the Scottish experience.
My first reaction on seeing our vote was that, well, we'd done ok. Going into this campaign, even before the expensses stuff, I thought there was a real danger of going down to 9 MEPs - we probably wouldn't win the second seat in the north west after Saj Karim's defection, and he has in fact, unfortunately, been re-elected as a Tory and it was by no means certain that we would retain our seats in both Scotland and the East Midlands, given the reductions in the numbers of seats in those places. In fact, George Lyon is on course to win the fifth of the six seats in Scotland and I'm thrilled that Bill Newton Dunn has been elected in the East Midlands. That is the most spectacular results because effectively it is an LD gain - if the 2004 result had been repeated, he would not have got in.
So far, so good. However it is deeply frustrating that only 3.5% would have had us in second place behind the Tories. Over the whole country that's only around 75000 extra votes to have given us that prized position and perhaps elect Jonathan Fryer in London. He only missed out by 8000 votes and had put so much hard work in. That's probably my biggest Lib Dem disappointment of the night. Only 1.5%, or around 30,000 extra votes, would have had us ahead of Labour. In Wales we were not that far away from electing our first MEP there. We need to look at what extra we could have done in the last few days to both on the ground and within our campaign strategy to maybe have bridged those small gaps. It feels so much worse to lose by small margins than to be absolutely whomped so we need to see if there was any fine tuning that would have made a difference.
We can take some comfort in that for the first time in a long time, we have fought the European elections on a very positive, pro European message. We were unashamed to say that we were Stronger Together and Weaker Apart. And it's not as if that message was overshadowed by the expenses stuff because Nick Clegg plugged it at every opportunity he got and he looked entirely comfortable with it, too. We were really the only lone pro-European voice in a pretty sceptical climate so we did well not to be punished for that. I'm reminded of what the Observer was saying last week - that we often took minority stances that were later proved to be right. Perhaps we should have started earlier with those messages, highlighting the dangers of the isolationist stance of the Euro-sceptic parties.
We don't tend to do that well in Euro elections - it wasn't until 1994 that we had our first directly elected MEPs and you can't really extrapolate what's going to happen in any other election from them - and that applies to all parties. You only need to look at our emphatic second place in the County Council elections, where we got 28% compared to Labour's 23%, which equalled the share we got in 2005, held on the same day as our best general election result in decades.
If the British public are looking for an answer to current woes, both sets of elections, European and local, show that they are not confident of getting it from the Tories. Only 38% voted for them in the Counties - way short of what they would need to get an overall majority in a Westminster election and not much more than a quarter chose them for Europe. William Hague, whose leadership of the Tory Party provided them with some dark days, actually got 6% more of the vote in 1999 than nice shiny new reforming leader "Call me Dave" Cameron could muster now.
The Labour result was so excruciatingly bad across the whole country. 15% across the country is bad enough, but, bloody hell, less than 21% in Scotland, turns electoral disaster into an art form. They're a mess. Enough said.
And, ok, yes, the SNP did get the highest share of the vote in Scotland, credit where it's due, but I'm not sure why given that they were almost invisible. I live in what is effectively a Labour/SNP marginal and I didn't get one single thing from the Nats. Given how deeply unpopular Labour are, their failure to meet even their 2007 vote of 32.9% is somewhat surprising. Jeff has been predicting that we'd be sending 3 Nats to Brussels for months and that's simply not happening.
So, there are reasons to be cheerful, and proud, to be a Lib Dem. It might not be a spectacular result, but we did, in the circumstances, quite creditably.
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My first reaction on seeing our vote was that, well, we'd done ok. Going into this campaign, even before the expensses stuff, I thought there was a real danger of going down to 9 MEPs - we probably wouldn't win the second seat in the north west after Saj Karim's defection, and he has in fact, unfortunately, been re-elected as a Tory and it was by no means certain that we would retain our seats in both Scotland and the East Midlands, given the reductions in the numbers of seats in those places. In fact, George Lyon is on course to win the fifth of the six seats in Scotland and I'm thrilled that Bill Newton Dunn has been elected in the East Midlands. That is the most spectacular results because effectively it is an LD gain - if the 2004 result had been repeated, he would not have got in.
So far, so good. However it is deeply frustrating that only 3.5% would have had us in second place behind the Tories. Over the whole country that's only around 75000 extra votes to have given us that prized position and perhaps elect Jonathan Fryer in London. He only missed out by 8000 votes and had put so much hard work in. That's probably my biggest Lib Dem disappointment of the night. Only 1.5%, or around 30,000 extra votes, would have had us ahead of Labour. In Wales we were not that far away from electing our first MEP there. We need to look at what extra we could have done in the last few days to both on the ground and within our campaign strategy to maybe have bridged those small gaps. It feels so much worse to lose by small margins than to be absolutely whomped so we need to see if there was any fine tuning that would have made a difference.
We can take some comfort in that for the first time in a long time, we have fought the European elections on a very positive, pro European message. We were unashamed to say that we were Stronger Together and Weaker Apart. And it's not as if that message was overshadowed by the expenses stuff because Nick Clegg plugged it at every opportunity he got and he looked entirely comfortable with it, too. We were really the only lone pro-European voice in a pretty sceptical climate so we did well not to be punished for that. I'm reminded of what the Observer was saying last week - that we often took minority stances that were later proved to be right. Perhaps we should have started earlier with those messages, highlighting the dangers of the isolationist stance of the Euro-sceptic parties.
We don't tend to do that well in Euro elections - it wasn't until 1994 that we had our first directly elected MEPs and you can't really extrapolate what's going to happen in any other election from them - and that applies to all parties. You only need to look at our emphatic second place in the County Council elections, where we got 28% compared to Labour's 23%, which equalled the share we got in 2005, held on the same day as our best general election result in decades.
If the British public are looking for an answer to current woes, both sets of elections, European and local, show that they are not confident of getting it from the Tories. Only 38% voted for them in the Counties - way short of what they would need to get an overall majority in a Westminster election and not much more than a quarter chose them for Europe. William Hague, whose leadership of the Tory Party provided them with some dark days, actually got 6% more of the vote in 1999 than nice shiny new reforming leader "Call me Dave" Cameron could muster now.
The Labour result was so excruciatingly bad across the whole country. 15% across the country is bad enough, but, bloody hell, less than 21% in Scotland, turns electoral disaster into an art form. They're a mess. Enough said.
And, ok, yes, the SNP did get the highest share of the vote in Scotland, credit where it's due, but I'm not sure why given that they were almost invisible. I live in what is effectively a Labour/SNP marginal and I didn't get one single thing from the Nats. Given how deeply unpopular Labour are, their failure to meet even their 2007 vote of 32.9% is somewhat surprising. Jeff has been predicting that we'd be sending 3 Nats to Brussels for months and that's simply not happening.
So, there are reasons to be cheerful, and proud, to be a Lib Dem. It might not be a spectacular result, but we did, in the circumstances, quite creditably.
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Sunday, June 07, 2009
Euro Results - First impressions
I will not last much longer tonight because I'm not feeling very well - way too much excitement for me to cope with. The one result I don't want to find out is the Apprentice one, but I doubt I'll be able to avoid that.
This is just a snapshot of how things are at the moment.
Anyway, I am so delighted that Fiona Hall has kept her seat for the Lib Dems in the North East of England. It was the only region, I think, not to elect a Lib Dem in 1999 so her place was not secure by any manner of means. It's a great result for us.
I'm hearing rumours that we are doing reasonably in both Fife and Perth and Kinross -with Labour clinging on to a wafer thin lead in Fife over the SNP. Labour seem resigned to losing one of their MEPs and word on the ground say that the Greens are doing well in Glasgow.
Also good news is that the Lib Dems topped the poll in Burnley where the BNP were expected to do well and it looks like the odious Nick Griffin is not going to get a seat. I read on Twitter that he had arrived at the count in a Japanese car so it's clear that he doesn't even understand the vile message of hate and division that he spreads.
It all seems very patchy - the Labour vote in Leicester has actually gone up. The Tories are apparently 4th in Islington and Haringey and we seem to be holding our own pretty well.
Just seen a weird interview with Glenys Kinnock on Sky News - Adam Boulton was trying to pin her down on exactly whether she's a minister or an MEP or a member of the House of Lords or not. She says she only got the call from Brown which came out of the blue just before Gordon's press conference. Apparently she's sitting out her mandate as an MEP until July, won't be drawing a ministerial salary but will be a minister but not a member of the House of Lords. Clear? I think not.
Just heard via Stephen Glenn that we were beaten into 5th place in Falkirk by only 6 votes.
As rumoured earlier, Labour could only muster just over 8000 votes in Cornwall, coming 6th behind even the Cornish nationalists. We are third, but I guess we have to remember how many MPs we have in Cornwall who were elected a year after the last Euro poll in 2004.
No doubt things will be clearer in the morning. I hope that we will have done enough across Scotland to have elected George Lyon as MEP. Certainly the party has run the most active and positive campaign in Scotland that I have ever seen and whatever happens, I think we can be proud of the huge effort that was put in.
I'm off to bed before I completely collapse in a heap - so will catch up with you all tomorrow.
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This is just a snapshot of how things are at the moment.
Anyway, I am so delighted that Fiona Hall has kept her seat for the Lib Dems in the North East of England. It was the only region, I think, not to elect a Lib Dem in 1999 so her place was not secure by any manner of means. It's a great result for us.
I'm hearing rumours that we are doing reasonably in both Fife and Perth and Kinross -with Labour clinging on to a wafer thin lead in Fife over the SNP. Labour seem resigned to losing one of their MEPs and word on the ground say that the Greens are doing well in Glasgow.
Also good news is that the Lib Dems topped the poll in Burnley where the BNP were expected to do well and it looks like the odious Nick Griffin is not going to get a seat. I read on Twitter that he had arrived at the count in a Japanese car so it's clear that he doesn't even understand the vile message of hate and division that he spreads.
It all seems very patchy - the Labour vote in Leicester has actually gone up. The Tories are apparently 4th in Islington and Haringey and we seem to be holding our own pretty well.
Just seen a weird interview with Glenys Kinnock on Sky News - Adam Boulton was trying to pin her down on exactly whether she's a minister or an MEP or a member of the House of Lords or not. She says she only got the call from Brown which came out of the blue just before Gordon's press conference. Apparently she's sitting out her mandate as an MEP until July, won't be drawing a ministerial salary but will be a minister but not a member of the House of Lords. Clear? I think not.
Just heard via Stephen Glenn that we were beaten into 5th place in Falkirk by only 6 votes.
As rumoured earlier, Labour could only muster just over 8000 votes in Cornwall, coming 6th behind even the Cornish nationalists. We are third, but I guess we have to remember how many MPs we have in Cornwall who were elected a year after the last Euro poll in 2004.
No doubt things will be clearer in the morning. I hope that we will have done enough across Scotland to have elected George Lyon as MEP. Certainly the party has run the most active and positive campaign in Scotland that I have ever seen and whatever happens, I think we can be proud of the huge effort that was put in.
I'm off to bed before I completely collapse in a heap - so will catch up with you all tomorrow.
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Tuesday, June 02, 2009
Why voting Lib Dem on Thursday is a good idea
Well, of course I'm going to recommend that you vote Lib Dem - my viewpoint is not what you would call objective given that I've been involved in Liberal politics for over quarter of a century.
You might want to listen to these people, though.
That's a fair amount of praise for the Party won not only because of things Nick and Vince has said in the past few days - but because of things they and their predecessors have been saying for years about economic responsility, the environment, open government and empowering people for decades.
I'll give the last word to the Independent from yesterday
"But it is the Liberal Democrats who have been the most consistently constructive British party on the European Union, a stance which has given their honest criticisms of Brussels' shortcomings all the more credibility.
Yet party considerations aside, the imperative this week is participation. Decisions taken in the cockpit of European democracy will affect all our lives. We hope that Britons will be able briefly to raise their eyes this week from the row over MPs' expenses and cast their vote with some of the grave challenges facing us all, as Europeans, in mind."
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You might want to listen to these people, though.
That's a fair amount of praise for the Party won not only because of things Nick and Vince has said in the past few days - but because of things they and their predecessors have been saying for years about economic responsility, the environment, open government and empowering people for decades.
I'll give the last word to the Independent from yesterday
"But it is the Liberal Democrats who have been the most consistently constructive British party on the European Union, a stance which has given their honest criticisms of Brussels' shortcomings all the more credibility.
Yet party considerations aside, the imperative this week is participation. Decisions taken in the cockpit of European democracy will affect all our lives. We hope that Britons will be able briefly to raise their eyes this week from the row over MPs' expenses and cast their vote with some of the grave challenges facing us all, as Europeans, in mind."
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Why UKIP are really bad news
This is not an exhaustive list by any manner of means - but they have seriously annoyed me with the leaflet they put through my door this morning because it's just basically complete nonsense. Here's some reasons why they aren't worth voting for on Thursday:
1. Their leaflets hurt my eyes - they think pink goes with yellow - enough reason for them to go straight in the recycling.
2. They tell huge great enormous lies. And they can't even get those lies straight. Nigel Farage said on Question Time the other night that EU membership cost us £40 million per day. The leaflet I got today suggests £30 million per day. Well, if their estimates on cost can be out by 25% to start with, it calls their credibility into question.
In any event, either figure is complete horse manure. In actual fact, each person in the UK contributes around 18p a day - you couldn't even buy a bag of crisps for that - or £1.29 per week - not even the cost of a latte on the way to work for membership of the EU.
And what do we get for it? Well, around 3 million jobs directly linked to trade with the EU, hundreds of millions of extra people to sell our products to at no extra cost to start with.
3. They have the nerve to go on about how if we left the EU it would make it easier to deport criminals. These are the same people who oppose measures like the European Arrest Warrant which would make it easier to catch criminals and which has been responsible for bringing around 90 paedophiles to justice. Yes, that's right, 90 paedophiles would have stayed free if UKIP (and the Tories for that matter) had their way. I don't want to have anything to do with parties who want to make it easier for people to enslave women and kids in drugs and prostitution rackests, thanks very much.
4. This leaflet even blames the EU because we are now paying 5 times more for low energy light bulbs - without realising the long term saving because they last for ages and ages and ages.
5. They want to restrict EU citizens coming here to work. Hmmm, so what does that mean for the many more UK citizens who work in EU countries? They would be chucked out and sent back here to fight for an ever decreasing pool of jobs.
6. And if you are thinking that, well, you want to give the main parties a kicking cos of MPs' expenses, don't bother with this lot because of the 12 MEPs voted in last time, one did time for benefit fraud and another has had issues with their expenses. And, more importantly, the UKIP MEPs have consistently voted against openness and transparency with MEP expenses. So, they whinge about how much the EU costs but jump enthusiastically on the expenses gravy train. By their deeds shall you know them and all of that.
Their isolationist stance would bring disaster for this country - we live in a global economy, criminals and climate change know no borders. If they (and the Tories for that matter) had their way, it would make it so much more difficult for us to regulate the financial institutions whose irreponsibility brought our economy to its knees, to effectively tackle climate change and to catch criminals.
They have nothing positive to offer - their literature is a seemingly potent cocktail of half truth and scare story with no solutions to anything. The recycling is the best place for it.
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1. Their leaflets hurt my eyes - they think pink goes with yellow - enough reason for them to go straight in the recycling.
2. They tell huge great enormous lies. And they can't even get those lies straight. Nigel Farage said on Question Time the other night that EU membership cost us £40 million per day. The leaflet I got today suggests £30 million per day. Well, if their estimates on cost can be out by 25% to start with, it calls their credibility into question.
In any event, either figure is complete horse manure. In actual fact, each person in the UK contributes around 18p a day - you couldn't even buy a bag of crisps for that - or £1.29 per week - not even the cost of a latte on the way to work for membership of the EU.
And what do we get for it? Well, around 3 million jobs directly linked to trade with the EU, hundreds of millions of extra people to sell our products to at no extra cost to start with.
3. They have the nerve to go on about how if we left the EU it would make it easier to deport criminals. These are the same people who oppose measures like the European Arrest Warrant which would make it easier to catch criminals and which has been responsible for bringing around 90 paedophiles to justice. Yes, that's right, 90 paedophiles would have stayed free if UKIP (and the Tories for that matter) had their way. I don't want to have anything to do with parties who want to make it easier for people to enslave women and kids in drugs and prostitution rackests, thanks very much.
4. This leaflet even blames the EU because we are now paying 5 times more for low energy light bulbs - without realising the long term saving because they last for ages and ages and ages.
5. They want to restrict EU citizens coming here to work. Hmmm, so what does that mean for the many more UK citizens who work in EU countries? They would be chucked out and sent back here to fight for an ever decreasing pool of jobs.
6. And if you are thinking that, well, you want to give the main parties a kicking cos of MPs' expenses, don't bother with this lot because of the 12 MEPs voted in last time, one did time for benefit fraud and another has had issues with their expenses. And, more importantly, the UKIP MEPs have consistently voted against openness and transparency with MEP expenses. So, they whinge about how much the EU costs but jump enthusiastically on the expenses gravy train. By their deeds shall you know them and all of that.
Their isolationist stance would bring disaster for this country - we live in a global economy, criminals and climate change know no borders. If they (and the Tories for that matter) had their way, it would make it so much more difficult for us to regulate the financial institutions whose irreponsibility brought our economy to its knees, to effectively tackle climate change and to catch criminals.
They have nothing positive to offer - their literature is a seemingly potent cocktail of half truth and scare story with no solutions to anything. The recycling is the best place for it.
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Thursday, May 28, 2009
Libertas kicks UKIP with funny You Tube video
Nice to see that all is happy and friendly in Euro-Sceptic Land....
Interesting that the Libertas website has not one single item about the real problems facing the world - not a thing on how Europe needs to work together on financial regulation, jobs, climate change, reducing and preventing crime and bringing its perpetrators to justice.
What we need in Brussels is a team of people who are going to devote time and energy not to kicking lumps out of the EU, but making it better, more transparent and accountable and able to deal with the huge challenges facing all of us.
The Libertas video is a bit of fun, but have a look at this letter Ed Davey wrote to UKIP's leader Nigel Farage challenging him on some interesting facts about UKIP's voting record on things like capping MEPs' salaries and transparency on expenses.
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Interesting that the Libertas website has not one single item about the real problems facing the world - not a thing on how Europe needs to work together on financial regulation, jobs, climate change, reducing and preventing crime and bringing its perpetrators to justice.
What we need in Brussels is a team of people who are going to devote time and energy not to kicking lumps out of the EU, but making it better, more transparent and accountable and able to deal with the huge challenges facing all of us.
The Libertas video is a bit of fun, but have a look at this letter Ed Davey wrote to UKIP's leader Nigel Farage challenging him on some interesting facts about UKIP's voting record on things like capping MEPs' salaries and transparency on expenses.
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Thursday, May 14, 2009
Conversations with Nick Clegg - Part 2
Nick gets passionate about justice, reducing crime and the EU.
Good to see that the European Elephant has been welcomed into the room. We've spent too many European elections when our campaign strategy has been to avoid talking about it as much as possible. We've come out this time quite bullish about how essential it is that we should work together with our neighbours on issues like crime, trade, jobs and climate change. There's no point in trying to tackle international crime or global warming on our own - we need the sort of co-operation with our neighbours that the Tories can't even begin to imagine. We won't get anywhere with their isolationist view.
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Good to see that the European Elephant has been welcomed into the room. We've spent too many European elections when our campaign strategy has been to avoid talking about it as much as possible. We've come out this time quite bullish about how essential it is that we should work together with our neighbours on issues like crime, trade, jobs and climate change. There's no point in trying to tackle international crime or global warming on our own - we need the sort of co-operation with our neighbours that the Tories can't even begin to imagine. We won't get anywhere with their isolationist view.
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Friday, April 10, 2009
EU undermines breastfeeding on Election Poster
I am disappointed to see that the EU is using a baby bottle to illustrate the campaign in the forthcoming elections.
The presentation of this image is a clear violation of The International Code of Breastmilk Substitutes, a Code introduced to protect infant health. The Code provides minimum standards to be implemented in their entirety in all countries to protect breastfeeding and ensure breastmilk substitutes are used safely if they are needed.
According to the World Health Organisation 1.5 million infants die every year because they are not breastfed. While the risks of bottle feeding are greatest in areas of the world with hot climates, lacking refrigeration and adequate fuel to prepare the product safely, breastfeeding reduces the risk of illness in all countries. Even in the UK, a bottle-fed baby is up to ten times more likely to be admitted to hospital with gastro-intestinal illness than a breastfed one.
Using a bottle to represent family life undermines breastfeeding and supports the flagrant disregard for the Code displayed by the formula milk industry.
It is ironic that the EU is claiming to campaign on 'green' issues when bottle feeding is creating an environmental disaster!
I think that the EU should recognise their mistake and withdraw this poster immediately. It is depressing to think that they have totally failed to appreciate its inappropriateness.
I have e-mailed six of the seven Scottish MEPs to raise my concern. If you would like to, you can find them here.
I am not impressed with David Martin who does not provide an e-mail address and in fact the only Scottish contact is a PO Box address in Edinburgh.
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The presentation of this image is a clear violation of The International Code of Breastmilk Substitutes, a Code introduced to protect infant health. The Code provides minimum standards to be implemented in their entirety in all countries to protect breastfeeding and ensure breastmilk substitutes are used safely if they are needed.
According to the World Health Organisation 1.5 million infants die every year because they are not breastfed. While the risks of bottle feeding are greatest in areas of the world with hot climates, lacking refrigeration and adequate fuel to prepare the product safely, breastfeeding reduces the risk of illness in all countries. Even in the UK, a bottle-fed baby is up to ten times more likely to be admitted to hospital with gastro-intestinal illness than a breastfed one.
Using a bottle to represent family life undermines breastfeeding and supports the flagrant disregard for the Code displayed by the formula milk industry.
It is ironic that the EU is claiming to campaign on 'green' issues when bottle feeding is creating an environmental disaster!
I think that the EU should recognise their mistake and withdraw this poster immediately. It is depressing to think that they have totally failed to appreciate its inappropriateness.
I have e-mailed six of the seven Scottish MEPs to raise my concern. If you would like to, you can find them here.
I am not impressed with David Martin who does not provide an e-mail address and in fact the only Scottish contact is a PO Box address in Edinburgh.
LibDig This!
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