Sushila Dhall

This morning on High Street when you shook your head at me and my bicycle in disapproval, from high up in your cab, I wanted to talk to you. I wanted to tell you that when you indicated suddenly as you came towards me that you were about to turn to your right (into my path), I did not slow down because I was on my way to work, and had right of way as a vehicle moving along the pubic highway in a straight line. Undaunted you shifted your heavy vehicle, that could kill me, fast towards the cycleway next to the pavement where I would be mashed under your wheels. I still did not slow down. You were surprised; why was your superior height and might not making me give way? You thought I was stupid. After all, if someone is waving a loaded gun in your face, surely you do as that person wants? But I didn’t slow down. So you had to. You slowed down, blocking two lanes of traffic for a moment, because you couldn’t get two slab-cracking wheels onto the pavement on my other side straight away. And shook your head at me, irritated, pitying, almost furious. It took me two seconds to pass you and then you heaved your roaring lorry across the road. And I could tell by your demeanour that you thought I was one of those law-breaking anarchic cyclists you’ve read about in the papers, who don’t recognise that we live in a motorised vehicle-dominated society, and who insist on acting as if they have rights to safety on our public highways.

Well Mr Lorry-Driver, if the Green Party was making the policies, the road-users’ hierarchy would be turned on its head. Wheelchair users and pedestrians would have first priority on our public highways, followed by cyclists. You would not be able to assume priority because you have the biggest heaviest vehicle. You should not be able to do so now. But it wasn’t your dangerous method of assuming priority or your pavement parking, or your stinking engine-fumes that irked me most. It was the attitude conveyed in your fed-up head-shaking and accompanying facial expression. You told me without words that I deserved to die under your wheels for being so stupid as to not give you right of way, and that only your generous long-suffering pity saved me. And I could not reply, being much smaller, quieter, less polluting, and more easily injured by you than you could be by me.

Thanks to all those of you who voted Green in Oxford East’s general election; I am aware that every one of those votes was a strong vote of confidence in Green policies, in putting social equality and environmental awareness at the heart of all policies, rather than as an add-on extra. And every single one of your Green votes counts and is appreciated.

But so very many people said to me before the election that although they are Greens at heart they had decided to vote Lib Dem ‘this time’ in the general election for two reasons; to keep Labour out, and to ensure electoral reform. Thousands of people did this. Well, the 17,000 plus Lib Dem votes didn’t keep Labour from winning Oxford East, and will only lead to electoral reform if the Lib Dems manage to hold onto any scrap of integrity in whatever coalition they form. The most humane coalition would be with Labour, who have offered elecoral reform on a plate, but the Lib Dems, as they have done on Oxfordshire County Council in the past, look as if they are choosing to side with the Tories; alas. The Tories blatantly want the Lib Dems to get them into power, and the Tories also do not believe in electoral reform (or tax-funded public services, or public transport, or a publicly-funded NHS, or cycling, or taxing the rich, or a lot of other valuable people-centred forward-looking policies).

Nevertheless, I enjoyed the campaign, and might even be foolhardy enough to do it again, but next time I would urge all of you very strongly not to vote for anything you don’t believe in but to support what you really believe in, and let’s make Oxford East the next Brighton!

Well, it’s after 11pm, and I have finally nearly finished answering the
200 or so emails a day I have been sent over the past 3 weeks. Luckily
some were duplicates and luckily I know how to cut and paste! But hundreds
I wrote from scratch – I do not want anyone to be able to say they didn’t
vote Green because I didn’t reply to them. If I missed anybody and you are
reading these blogs, you know what I stand for anyway so you know if you
are a Green or not, but I apologise.

The campaign has been fun and interesting. I always enjoy meeting people
and listening to them, and arguing the Green corner with intelligent
people. Several times I have realised how much I would love to be your
Green MP. Partly because I enjoy representing people and campaigning for
Green policies, and partly because having been in local politics I know
first-hand how desperately needed a Green voice or two is in a parliament
obsessed with business and profiteering and debt as usual.

But the main thing on May 6th is to get out there and vote. Vote with your
heart, for what you believe in. And if you have the courage, dare to vote
Green.

They have called nationally for renewable energy while locally
opposing windfarms (eg in Cornwall, Cumbria, Devon and Worcestershire). They
have promised fiscal measures to cut traffic while voting against such
measures in local authorities (in Edinburgh, Manchester, York). They say
they want to cut aviation emissions, but they’ve supported airport
expansions all round the country (Birmingham, Carlisle, Exeter, Liverpool,
Manchester and Norwich). They say they want no more roads, but in fact
they’ve been saying this for twenty years while locally supporting even the
most controversial road schemes from the Newbury and Batheaston bypasses to
the M74 and currently the Lancaster Northern bypass.

Judge a party on their record, not their pre-election face.

At my work as a public/charitable sector counsellor we are told we have a pay freeze, which of course is a pay cut in real terms. We feel we are lucky not to be made redundant, and there is a terrible sense of a squeeze, we have to somehow do more with what we have to tackle waiting lists. Colleagues leave and are not replaced placing further strain on the service.

We are proud of our excellent quality service and want to provide it well. We are behaving calmly and as usual making cups of tea for one another and chatting in the office. But there is a sense of deprivation in our clients which is worse than it has been before, as other frontline services contract and retract. There is fear that things could get worse.

And at the same time the banks whom our taxes are propping up are still paying out bonuses! And none of the three biggest parties can say that they will not cut frontline services, that we pay our taxes for. They all talk about ‘protecting’ those services ‘as far as possible’, and I think, from whom? From themselves, the policy-makers who tacitly or overtly support the notion that ‘economic growth’ and private sector investment’ are the only valid ways forward. In other words, more of what got us into this dead-end where debts at all levels are overwhelming, and everything needs to be geared to servicing the so-called public debt, not the people or the planet.

How I long to hear a clear fresh Green voice in parliament, a valid alternative voice calling for an equal sharing of our finite resources and an eye to what true wealth we have, our earth and all that is living.

People keep asking me if they should vote tactically to keep someone out, or if voting LD will benefit the Greens because they might bring in a fairer voting system.

My answer is; if you believe in Green policies, vote Green, otherwise the result is going to be unrepresentative of what people actually want. If enough people voted Green we’d have a Green MP.

The LDs are not planning a vastly fairer voting system, only a form of porportional representation which favours a third party, not smaller parties. They hope it will benefit the LDs, not the Greens. For all they can sound Green in a Green-lefty area, the Libs can also sound right wing-ish in a Tory area.

I have no doubt that we Greens will get into parliament eventually even in the present out-moded first-past-the-post system, which is just as well, because Greens are uncompromisingly in favour of social equality, sharing what finite resources we have equally and sustainably, and protecting the environment. We do not put economic (and debt) growth ahead of every other policy as the three largest parties do.

But if people vote negatively to keep others out, when there is so little difference between the policies of the three bigger parties, we risk forfeiting our chance to have a fresh, out-spoken, uncompromising Green voice in parliament, which is what is desperately needed to ensure that other MPs keep to their pre-elecion promises to protect the environment and create social equality.

Where there are Greens, everyone goes Greener. Where there are no Greens, everybody reverts to business as usual.

Today I received a second call from a disgruntled Labour voter telling me I can’t call Oxford School ‘excellent’ in my first blog, because ‘excellent’ is a term that can only be applied to schools scoring a ‘5′ in the league tables, and that only Cherwell School in Oxford is ‘excellent ‘ under this scoring method. My response is that ‘excellent’ is not a word confined to official use. It can refer to the progress a school has made in response to an earlier grading, or an impressive improvement, or to a place where work is done that is so jolly good one may as well call it ‘excellent’ even if it doesn’t fit in the official definition. However the two calls I got from the disgruntled Labour voters made me read over my blogs again, and I ended up thinking that if that is the only complaint a Labour voter has against what I write in these blogs, well we Greens must be expressing ourselves very well. Dare I suggest excellently?

I have done 14 hustings, 9 of them in the last week, at the recent Climate Change hustings I felt frustrated afterwards that I did not do myself or the Green Party justice.

I did not mention that my house has been assessed in terms of what is good
and what could be improved. It is a small place, terraced, extremely well-insulated with cavity wall insulation and double glazing. I have a combi-boiler, although a smaller one would be better; ironically I have no money to get rid of the tank we have (which came with the house) and buy a smaller boiler. Likewise we could use a smaller fridge than the one built-in here, but I have no money to have this one taken out, nor to buy a smaller one. In this I am in the situation of many who would like to be greener than they are and have no money.

I compost all our waste, and recycle the rest. I use Ecover cleaning products, pouring the water onto the apple trees and raspberry canes I put in the tiny garden, and empty Henry into the compost (these hoovers don’t need bags). The only thing in our wheelie bin is plastic, and as I largely shop where everything is not wrapped in plastic, the bin is always nearly empty. We have no car, tv, or video player, and the few electrical appliances we have get switched off at the mains if they ’sleep’ rather than being properly turned off (the music centre). All this said, we can all improve, and my big thing this year is to buy local produce and boycott air mile produce. The taste of knowing produce is local is an excellent flavouring!