Excitement at the Hustings

So far in the campaign to win Harrogate and Karesborough for the Greens, the hustings have been good natured and rather quiet affairs. That seemed to be the way last Thursday's event at the Cedar Court Hotel was going, until the subject of TTIP emerged. The Greens are confident that the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership proposals are bad – bad for business, bad for Britain and particularly bad for the NHS. My assertion to this effect invoked a flat denial from the Lib Dem candidate, and the cry of 'liar' from someone in the audience.

So, what's the story?

In February this year, BBC Scotland revealed a leak from the EU negotiations, purporting to show that NHS services are exempt from the TTIP negotiations, currently being negotiated in great secrecy in Brussels. Now, one person's leak is often another mischievous plant, deliberately designed to misinform. This latter option is, I think, the situation here.

The leaked document has, in reality, been in the public domain since May 2014. So this is, in the words of War on Want, less of a news story and more of a spin operation. It confirms that the position of the NHS in the TTIP negotiations is worse than I described, the government knows this, and is deliberately trying to misinform the public to allay concerns. The whole rebuttal of the implications of the 'leak' can be seen here

Rather than being branded a liar, I should be applauded as a whistleblower!

We must demand proportional representation

We have had many queries since the election, asking why the Greens didn’t do better at a time when most people are now aware of the very real issues which only the Green Party has been seriously addressing - for more than 35 years!

It became quite clear as we approached polling day that people were going to vote tactically. Many people said to us, apologetically, that although they wanted to vote Green, they would in fact be voting Lib Dem or Labour because they wanted rid of the Tories and they wanted proportional representation. Even the far right wing parties did better than the Greens because those voters are typically less reflective and so tend not to vote tactically.

Knowing that we could not win this time in this very conservative area, a lot of the energies of the local party were focussed on supporting the Greens' campaign in Brighton Pavilion – where, at 6am on May 7th, Caroline Lucas was elected Britain's first Green MP . She is the first Green MP worldwide to have been elected under a first-past-the-post system: a spectacular achievement. There are of course, many Greens in government in other countries, as well as in the European Parliament. In the UK, Greens are in the Scottish Parliament, London Assembly, on many councils – and, at last, in Westminster!

So thank you to all those who voted for a fairer world (whichever box you put your cross in). The next job for us all is to push for a fairer electoral system which will make every vote count, so that people can vote from the heart, and the real issues can come to the fore and be addressed in the interests of people and planet instead of in the interests of corporations and the very rich.

comments welcome to shan@voice.karoo.co.uk