An important development today in the London Mayoral race. Sian Berry, the Green Party's impressive candidate, has urged her supporters to vote for Ken Livingstone as their number two choice in the 1 May election, when voters in the capital will be allowed to cast two votes.
Mayor Livingstone, who shared a platform with Berry to trumpet their common policies on the environment, urged Labour supporters to return the compliment by making the Greens their number two choice. "It is very important that people don't waste their second vote," a Ken aide told me.
This is clearly a "Stop Boris" operation. Boris Johnson, the bubbly Tory candidate, appears to be making the running in the contest. But the voting system is all important: if no candidate wins more than 50 per cent on first preference votes, the two leading candidates go into a run off and the second preferences of the remaining candidates are reallocated to the top two.
According to a YouGov poll this week, Berry is fourth on people's "second votes" - behind the three main parties but with 9 per cent support. It might just be enough to save Ken's skin.
This election is increasingly about green isses. Our USBCELL EcoMan is standing to help londoners save waste, energy and tax.
Posted by: USBCELL EcoMan | Wednesday, 19 March 2008 at 01:46 PM
Surely Londoners can see that the low emission zone will hit THEM in the pocket. No -one in a van or lorry drives into the London for fun, they do it to make deliveries and carry out services. The extra costs WILL have to be passed on to the customer and ultimately the end user.
As soon as Ken starts charging low emissions taxes on vans, every time i send my engineers into London, the added costs will be put on the final bill to the customer.
Unless good old Ken wants to give me a grant to buy a lower emission van, thats how it will be until it comes time to renew my vehicles. But then whats the bet in a few years the goal posts will be moved to incorporate those vans that are currently classed as low emission vehicles.
However you dress it up, it's a ploy to screw more money from people
Posted by: Kieran James | Wednesday, 19 March 2008 at 02:36 PM
Considering the C-charge as the sole basis for *not* voting for Ken and the Greens is a weak argument, and a bit of a red herring really. Ken and the Greens would make a powerful team, elevating the Greens to a high profile, giving them the political experience to sharpen their policies and the implementation thereof. Of course, I am one who thinks that in the real world - i.e. away from our consumer culture and our "democratic" "freedom" (to choose one product brand over another) and the spin doctoring of ExxonMobil and the likes who want to convince us that living in a smog-drenched toxic world with ever-decreasing resources is "progress" - we cannot afford to vote Labour nor Tory (nor even LibDems) and pretend that we can carry on under the illusion of "business-as-usual". We have passed that particular luxury. Furthermore, as peak oil approaches we are going to have to buck up our ideas about what our future is actually likely to look like. And it isn't pretty if the idea of well-being is based on a continuation of our oil-saturated world. We are going to need a radical and root-and-branch rethink of how we are to live in the future, if we are to live at all. We can put our faith in the invisible hand of an unfettered market ... although it is largely thanks to that faith that we are in the mess we are in, and that route does not hold much hope to bring about anything different because it is premised on maintaining power differentials that favour the well-off and already privileged. As the noose tightens around our collective necks, we can be sure that civil liberties will continue to be eroded (all in the name of keeping us safe, of course!), GMOs will be forced upon us (despite medical evidence of harm and centralised profiteering by Monsanto and company), and our human life will become ever more truncated by the pressures of the market place convincing us that we are living a better life than ever before.
Meanwhile, our existential plinth - the biosphere - will continue to be ravaged and plundered and damaged beyond its capacity to regenerate and support life. What then? Colonise Mars? Live in Eden Project-like biodomes because the atmosphere is too toxic?
Whether people want to live in denial, or engage in a form of bargaining ala Kubler-Ross' model of dealing with the bereavement of losing all that we are so familiar with and take for granted, these do not change the facts. Our way of life is killing the planet, and therefore will kill us too. The political parties of today don't have a clue about how to deal with these issues. For the last 30 or so years however the Greens have been thinking through these issues, trying to work out solutions to problems that impact a far wider zone of importance than whether or not the ruddy congestion charge will increase! There will come a time when people won't even be able to afford to buy the petrol to drive vans, etc. So get over it already.
We need radical vision for living into the future: I really cannot see that anyone at this point in time, aside from the Greens and Ken's bullish street sense, offer us much of an option. I'd strongly advocate that we who get to vote endorse Ken and the Greens and become involved in shaping that vision.
Posted by: Happy Harry | Thursday, 20 March 2008 at 09:40 AM
This grubby little deal speaks volumes.
What's the expression, 'I'll scratch your back if you scratch mine'.
The motivation is quite clear. Desperation for Ken - who as his track record shows, would strike a deal with just about anyone to stay in power.
As for Ms Berry - it makes you wonder what she is expecting in return if she helps him back into office. Maybe she's heard from Lee Jasper how generous 'uncle ken' can be (with London taxpayers' money)
Posted by: Mike Wallace | Thursday, 20 March 2008 at 09:37 PM