Winning Estates

Dear Editor,
Casually re-reading Green World 61, a line about the Solihull local election win jumped out at me. It states “The ward’s demographic is not of the type where the Greens traditionally score their successes”. Says who? The ward’s council house demographic is precisely where we do well in many of our West Yorkshire urban seats. Wortley in Leeds and Newsome in Huddersfield are both wards with high concentrations of council housing or ex-council housing and in Heaton (Bradford), where we held a seat for three years until 2007, a significant part of the ward is a council estate and this is where we picked up the highest percentage of our vote. If it had all been the council estate we would have won in 2007 and 2008 with a huge majority. It was the middle class voters who let us down.

It has been proved over and over again that we can do extremely well in wards like these, as Solihull demonstrated, yet even Green Party spokespeople keep repeating the belief that our wins are exclusively in the urban shires, in the veggie box student enclaves.

We can prove we can do it and where we gain the support and trust of the disenfranchised in council estates and poorer areas we very often keep that support and loyalty by proving we can do the business and work our socks off as ward councillors.

So no more lines like the one in the write up in GW61 please!!
David Ford
Shipley




Phrasing Failure

Dear Editor
There are a couple of instances of unfortunate phrasing in the article “Going Renewable” in Green World 63.

The sentence “But the nuclear industry, having touted the CO2-neutral virtues of the technology....” is missing a qualifier like “falsely claimed” before “CO2”. As Prof. Busby states on p.21 of the same issue, nuclear power is not carbon neutral. Anyone who thinks that absence of emissions at the point of generation makes nuclear CO2-free presumably also thinks that the NHS, free at the point of use, costs nothing.

Your comment on a 50% reduction in personal energy use, “that level of sacrifice would not come easily”, is unduly negative and risks playing into the hands of those who claim that action is “unrealistic” or “politically impossible”. As Rupert Read says on p.13, the actions needed to combat climate change are those we need take to become happier. That is also the positive message of the Transition Towns movement (sadly lacking coverage in Green World 63): the impacts of climate change and peak oil mean that we must change our ways - but that is an opportunity to change such that we get to a better place.
Steve Plater
Sevenoaks




Public Water

Dear Editor,
In GW62 your feature on water rights stressed the human right for “sufficient, safe…accessible and affordable water”, but didn’t emphasise the need for public-public partnership in supply of it.

Over a decade, private companies only managed to connect 600,000 households to a water supply in the developing world. With over 1bn people lacking access to clean water, this was only a drop in the ocean. Michael Coffey did not mention that many private companies which entered into contracts (e.g. Suez in Bolivia, Biwater in Dar es Salaam, and Severn Trent International in Guyana) have had to pull out after a few years of starting the contract, or before starting, because they were overcharging customers (in E. Manila over 750%) and failing to expand water services to poor neighbourhoods. It is not profitable for companies to invest in increasing access for the poorest and most marginalised people. But these are the people for whose benefit the Millennium Development Goal was intended!

In April 2007, our MPs’ International Development select committee on sanitation and water reported that “there can be no substitute for public finance and public expertise when it comes to getting clean, affordable water to the world’s poor”. In that year, Unison joined the World Development Movement in calling for public-public partnerships that “can play a really important role in building capacity in the public sector to turn the human right to water into a reality”. This is what the Green Party should be pressing for.
Cllr Susan Greene
Dorset




Dear Editor,
Samir Chaterjee (‘Rochdale Windfarm Redeemed’, GW63) wants to inscribe “the Green Party’s name” on the turbine blades of Scout Moor. Well ‘not in my name!’. There are many members who do not believe that turning our few remaining wild spaces into industrial zones is good green politics. Reducing carbon emissions should not be used to trump preserving our natural heritage. We can and should have both.
Alastair Bonnett
Newcastle




Dear Editor,
I fully agree with most of Di McDonald’s article on nuclear warhead transport. I do however strongly dispute that slowing the convoys and increasing the escort would add very much to safety. I notice also that there is no mention of involving local police, fire brigades and medical emergency services. If the things must be moved, it should only be by rail and, where available, inland waterway. The packaging should be publicly tested to the same standard as the nuclear flask at Mickelover.
J.R.Batts
Banbury