Parburypolitica

I find bike culture blogs fascinating. I think my all time favourite has to be Copenhagenize which is about cycling in, you guessed it, Copenhagen but today I found this wonderful one based in Bristol a little closer to home. Made my day it did.

It’s something of an understatement to say that the by-election in Crewe and Nantwich on 22 May is an important one for us.

The Tories are working hard and David Cameron is urging voters here to “Send Mr Brown a message”.

We’ve never needed your help more.

The Tories think they have it in the bag. But - as results last week in Slough, Oxford, Hastings and Ipswich show - when we work hard on the ground we win elections.

That’s why I’ve set our (small) campaign team here a huge challenge - on Saturday and Sunday we want to deliver 20,000 leaflets and talk to 4000 voters.

We can’t do it without you.

If you can spare any time at all this weekend PLEASE come to Crewe and give us a few hours of your time. I promise it’ll be fun - there’s a great spirit here on the campaign because we know how important it is to show the Tories that we are still the right Party for the people of Crewe and Nantwich.

Turn up any time at our campaign HQ - 173-175 Nantwich Road, Crewe, CW2 6DF.

Via Labourhome

You may have noticed that I posted earlier about possible Labour London mayoral candidates but I have to confess to committing the most atrocious sin of omission  when Konnie Huq the former Blue Peter presenter failed to make the final cut.

Still a grassroots effort to get her to run has already started on the ubiquitous facebook. The group lists her many qualities but misses out the pertinent point that she does seem to attract rather a lot of generally male *ahem* interest but that is the lot of the Blue Peter presenter who are thrust upon an unsuspecting populace just as they discover there is more to life than sticky back plastic.

My formative years watching Blue Peter missed the Konnie phenomenon. Diane-Louise Jordan was more my era but as she’s doing Songs of Praise the chance of her getting her kit off have to be considered minimal but my generation do have fond memories of Janet Ellis so you can imagine my *ahem* gratitude when I found this

Still i’m not convinced about the Konnie candidacy. For one thing it would help to win the Labour nomination if she was actually a party member which she’s not. There is an alternative however. Fortunately her sister is not only a party member but also a sometime candidate and as you can see from her blog has like her sister missed a beating from the ugly stick. All she needs now is a gig on Blue Peter…

Before anyone starts this is not a post about the leadership but about transport policy. I noticed this article in the Times. Frankly I’m not surprised because we know how to fix the transport problems. What we don’t know is how to fix the political problems of those solutions.

It’s quite simple if we want transport to improve take a stack of cash and do the following:

• Announce an initial five year moratorium on road building and put the savings into alternatives.

• A wholesale adoption of Dutch and Danish cycle culture in combination with urban renewal prioritising walking and cycling.

• Pay councils more than the cost of implementation say 10% for high quality, high useage urban cycle paths and watch them spring up all over the place.

• A revolution on the railways with high speed trains used for decades on the continent becoming the norm here. The fares should also be made to be significantly cheaper than the equivalent car journey.

• Light rail and tram systems across all urban conurbations and investment and extensions to ones already operational.

• Serious amounts of state intervention in the bus industry as well as plenty of guided busways.

• Serious increases in the cost of car useage. I think the more legitimate way of doing this is through national road pricing rather than fuel duty because road pricing can be vary depending on how congested the road are.

• Wholesale rewriting of the traffic laws which would be much, much harsher on careless and dangerous motorists. Lifetime driving bans should become a routine punishment.

• 20mph should be the standard urban speed limit and the speed limit zealously enforced.

The reality is that we are never going to get everyone out of their cars but that should not stop us from providing alternatives that a significant section on the population would use. It is realistic to aim for a situation where car transport has gone from being the overwhelmingly dominant mode of transport to one where it may be the largest but accounts for less than half of all journeys.

I think the key is to treat people as rational actors if you build alternatives to the car which are quicker, safer, cheaper, greener and more fun then they will come. You also have to explain the vision so that people can buy into it. What is going to be crucial is enough cash, though increasing the road network is far from cheap itself, and political drive. If you can manage that combination you are half way there already.

I put Hillary Clinton into google blog search earlier to see what bloggers think her chances are of winning the nomination and the answer is not much. The consensus is that she’s toast for the nomination. Personally I don’t this will be the end of HRC at all. She’d add real strength to the ticket as VP or she could well be senate majority leader or governor of New York but first female President of the United States in 2008 isn’t happening.

Check the reaction yourself:

Here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here

Energy independence is a debate that is much more well formed on the other side of the Atlantic. I think this has a lot to do with the significantly higher numbers of casualties that the Americans have sustained in Iraq which is widely perceived to be a war in which oil has played a  central role. Frankly it should be a much bigger issue on this side of the Atlantic as well.

Michael Meacher was never going to be leader of the Labour Party but at least he had the balls to run. (Is that the cabinet looking at their toes?) Still it is perfectly possible to fulfil a useful role in politics without being a party leader. One area that backbenchers can make a difference is in highlighting undervalued issues. Paul Flynn is a drug companies MP from hell for his campaigns and not the Home Secretary’s drugs policy cheerleader by a long chalk while Michael Meacher has been a consistent voice in favour of greening the Labour party. A move that I think not only makes political sense but it also the right thing to do not just for this country but also the rest of the globe.

He has done a great article on the need to move away from our dependency on old fashioned hydrocarbon technologies (oil and gas) to greener alternatives. As he points out this is not a theoretical debate. Either we move to a greener post oil economy where we benefit form being world technology leaders or we have to pay a much higher price in monetary terms for our oil and in our foreign and defence policies as well. I hope Brown is listening.

Frankly if someone told me that Andrew Gilligan was if the pay of the Iranian government I would have a hard time believing them but apparently he is according to Sunny at Liberal Conspiracy. So with one Boris operative on the payroll of a state that according to the US state department is “the most active state sponsor of terrorism. Its Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS) were directly involved in the planning and support of terrorist acts” and another a convicted criminal in serious denial about his drink problem it hasn’t been the best of starts to the Conservative takeover of the capital.

In other news I have found a brilliant blog Tory Troll about the nefarious Bojo. It’s impartial just like Gilligan although of a different political inclination and with less money from terrorists

To help in Crewe, contact the Labour Party office on 01270 589 135, or you can send a cheque to “Crewe & Nantwich Labour Party”, 171-173 Nantwich Road, Crewe, CW2 6DF.

If you do send a cheque, please do include in your cover note a statement saying “I am a registered elector in the UK” together with the postal address at which you are a registered voter.

Via Labourhome

Arms control wonk has a great graph that summarises the debate about terrorists and nuclear weapons. Basically the consensus view if that if terrorist get hold of nukes they will use them and that is a view that I share.

The implications of that are significant in foreign policy terms because the international community is going to have to work together in dealing with all nuclear , chemical and biological powers to make sure that their systems are secure against against a variety of terrorist threats from theft to corruption.

What this debate avoids however is the ingenuity of necessity. Bin Laden didn’t nuke New York, he used planes instead. Other tactics I think are serious possibilities are dirty bombs, attacks on nuclear power stations, gas attacks on underground systems, biological warfare, truck and ship bombs and dam sabotage to name but a few.

With such a wide range of attack methods the reality is that we cannot stop every single attack on a military basis and anti terrorism policy has to encompass soft power as very much a key weapon in the armoury.

When I commented to Guido Fawkes’s story about Lee Jasper I thought that he might let it through comment moderation after all the amount of depraved, mindless and venal comments that he does let through I don’t see why he should stop a comment pointing out his utter hypocrisy.But no. Perhaps he was to busy being a Tory stooge?

The thing is Lee Jasper has been convicted of no crime. While Paul Staines has and not for the first time either. It’s fine to hold criminals up to scorn and ridicule but having convicted criminals take pot shots at people who haven’t even been charged is bang out of order.

Just for the hell of it here is Mr Staines famous appearance on Newsnight.