“We need better. The country needs better, and they deserve politicians they can trust. No-one else is providing the principled opposition to the three-party consensus. This is our job. Our time.”
Caroline Lucas, Green Party Leader, Spring Conference 25th February 2011
Introduction
We are living in turbulent times. The collapse of the world’s banking system has opened up a crisis that shows no signs of abating.
While governments are under pressure to cut public expenditure, people are challenging the old ways and questioning why we should pay for the banks.
Over the past 30 years we have seen how national governments have been forced to open up markets, and compete on a global stage. This has led to greatest transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich since the 1920’s.
Across the world we have seen record numbers of youth unemployment, spiralling food prices, and chronic levels of national debt and dependence upon the world market.
The contradictions of such a world are nowhere more evident than in the Arab world, where the people have taken things into their own hands and shown a way for others to follow. In Egypt the richest 10% of the population owned 90% of the wealth, and the same could be said for most countries around the globe.
In the UK the Coalition government have declared war on the public:
- Young people face a life of debt without end;
- Women are being targeted by the cuts as they are more likely to work in the public sector and use services;
- Migrants are increasingly under attack from racist government immigration policy;
- Pensioners and public sector workers are seeing their pensions squeezed;
- People on benefits are being criminalised, and many see the complete loss of their benefits.
With the rate of inflation outstripping wage increases, the threat of a rise in interest rates and a tightening of credit, there is a perfect storm being brewed that will hit everyone except the very richest.
It will be places like Carlisle that will be hit the hardest, and we feel it is time that a party stood up to defend people’s right to economic security. It is no good tackling climate change, if we do not also address the fact that it is people on low incomes who will be most effected by the challenges of the 21st Century. To bring this vision of true opposition home to Carlisle, we have developed a 10 point plan that is organised around three main themes:
- Affordable living
- Solidarity and co-operation
- Open City
Affordable Living
- Pledge 1 - Finance: We will promote the credit union as an alternative to the banking system – encouraging the Council to invest its grant income into the Credit Union instead of the Stock Market. We will also go on the offensive against organisations that offer easy access to credit at high rates of interest.
- Pledge 2 - Housing: We will push for a return to social housing, and encourage the Credit Union and Tenants’ groups to buy up houses for sale and shrink the private housing market. Our aim is to reverse the housing policies of successive Tory and Labour governments and explore policies of giving people the right to sell their houses back to the Council or Housing Associations in return for cheap mortgage payments and the option of becoming life long tenants.
- Pledge 3 - Food and Commodities: We will promote schemes to increase the amount of land space given over to growing food, as well as developing clothing banks, and free exchange pools so people can access goods that are locally produced and reused rather than thrown away. We will also explore policies that develop repair schemes, where goods from TV’s to computers can be repaired and re-used until the natural end of their life cycle.
- Pledge 4 - Public Transport: We will aim to drive out the private monopolies in public transport by pushing for the Council to cease all dealings with Stagecoach, and to fund community transport schemes. We will also work with neighbouring Councils to explore the feasibility of taking the ownership of the local train network and will explore the possibility of setting up trams in the city centre as a greener alternative to buses.
Solidarity and co-operation
- Pledge 5 - Industrial Relations: We will work with Trade Unions to resist the cuts, and redress the balance of power so that employees have a greater say in what happens to them. We will seek to build a vibrant Chamber of Labour that can rival the Chamber of Commerce and give the employees of the city the same civic voice as the employers.
- Pledge 6 - Community Relations: We will encourage the development of community co-operatives based on electoral wards. This will allow people in neighbourhoods to form action groups to take on projects that take goods and services out of the market and provide them as shared communal resources. This could range from food growing, to a pooled car scheme or setting up a trades co-op.
- Pledge 7 - Equality and Diversity: We will promote relations of solidarity between people from different backgrounds, encouraging awareness of the destructive impacts of racism, sexism and homophobia; challenging attitudes to disability that limit people from achieving their potential and making sure that the Far Right will never be able to exploit peoples' discontent.
Open City
- Pledge 8 - Citizen engagement: We will promote a far greater role for citizen engagement in the business of the Council. This will range from randomly selected citizen’s juries to advise on major policy developments, to a greater development of youth councils and pensioners’ groups to make sure that the issues affecting young and old people are central to decisions.
- Pledge 9 - Public space: We see will seek to challenge the idea that town centres are for shops and banks, and will campaign for a community centre fit for a city like Carlisle. We will encourage groups to form spontaneous gatherings in the main square and occupy vacant properties.
- Pledge 10 - Open access: We would support the development of accessible routes through the city, recognising that the needs of cyclists, pedestrians, wheelchair users and people with pushchairs are one and the same. The most affordable way to get around is without a vehicle and we need to remove as many of the barriers to open access as we can. This will mean renovating bridges and viaducts to connect the city, and creating access routes so that a person can travel from Harraby to Kingmoor without encountering motor traffic.
Can we do this?
- One Green Councillor could make the difference in a hung council.
- Two or three Green Councillors could seriously promote the Credit Union and see the early development of ideas sketched out in these pledges.
- Five or six Green Councillors could develop a Chamber of Labour and build community co-operatives in their wards, linking them up into a Green Network, where pilot projects could be developed in line with the principles laid out in the pledges above.
- Nine or ten Green Councillors could become an effective formal opposition and start to challenge the whole running of public services. They would have the capacity to create an alternative budget and detailed policy platform that holds the executive to account and mobilises public opinion against abuses.
- A Green controlled council would have refused the cuts doled out from Central Government. A Green Council would demand a fair settlement and use their constitutional power and elected authority to refuse to deliver all public services until they received a fair central government settlement. No Council in the country has taken this step, and it demonstrates the collective failure of Labour Councils across the land to resist the attacks launched by the Conservatives and their Liberal Democrat allies.