Yesterday, the Lords debated congestion and being the only green in the room, I said what the experts say – we need ‘pay as you go’ driving. I was pleased that I got a bit of support from some of the Labour and Lib Dem peers. The government don’t deny it will work, they just think it will be unpopular with motorists. Continue reading “Best way to reduce congestion is to reduce traffic”
Brexit will impact on every aspect of our lives, creating endless trauma but also the chance to improve things. We will need our own laws and our own enforcement agencies, and it’s an opportunity to create a body like the Environmental Protection Agency in the US, with its own staff, legal powers and a culture of independence from Government.
Continue reading “Brexit, a Clean Air Act and cycle lanes”
There are so many issues in the gracious Speech that I would like to tackle. I would like to talk about nuclear safeguards, agriculture and fisheries and the folly of HS2. However, I will try to contain my enthusiasm—or my fury—and talk about only two or possibly three issues. Continue reading “My response to Queen’s speech”
The Mayor of London issued a high pollution alert on Tuesday evening, but not the government, not the NHS, nor Public Health England, nor the Met Office and I didn’t notice anything on the BBC. Sadiq Khan has broken the silence which DEFRA managed to maintain for over a decade when Ken Livingstone and Boris Johnson were Mayors. He has quite rightly decided that the public’s health comes first and efforts should be made to warn them when we have a bad pollution episode. Unfortunately, the Met Office, the NHS and the BBC outside of London, all wait for DEFRA to act before telling the public and that is why the system of alerts has failed so badly.
The government have deliberately played down the health impacts of air pollution for twenty years, because they want to do the minimum they can get away with. If they regularly issued press releases telling people to avoid exercise, or busy roads, or even not to drive in pollution hotspots, then the public would want to know when the problem was going to be fixed. The solutions are well known and have been put in place in cities around the world: cleaner vehicles, used less.
The EU have taken the lead in the drive for cleaner vehicles and while they did a good job with regulating diesel lorries and larger vehicles, they had a light touch approach to the car manufacturers. That approach failed miserably. Many car makers put profit before people and cheated on the tests. The differences between performance in the test and the reality on the roads can be measured in human lives cut short.
Meanwhile, Labour, Conservative and coalition governments have all failed to reduce traffic. In fact, they have acted to encourage traffic growth with new roads and cuts to public transport. The cost of driving has declined while the cost of fares has risen. Measures like pay as you go driving have been promoted by the experts, but rejected by politicians running scared of the motoring lobby. A few years go the Greens on the London Assembly even commissioned a report on how it would work in London and we shared that with Transport for London.
I’m glad that Sadiq Khan is now putting this forward as part of a London strategy to reduce traffic by 3m journeys. Such policies need our support if we are to end the public health scandal of air pollution
Climate change is the biggest threat facing humanity and it has been largely being ignored or sidelined by the bigger political parties. Yet last year was the hottest on record and those records are being beaten at an increasing rate. Huge cracks are emerging in the polar ice at the same time as Trump has tried to sink the Paris climate change deal. Labour has refused to oppose Heathrow expansion, which is the single most damaging policy/project for climate change and air pollution. Continue reading “Four reasons to vote Green”
Just like Caroline Lucas, I welcome the fact that so many of the Green Party ideas from our 2015 manifesto have become Labour Party policy under Corbyn. I spent 16 years on the London Assembly encouraging Ken Livingstone and even Boris Johnson, to ‘steal’ the Green Party’s ideas and put them into practice. The Living Wage Unit, Same Sex Partnerships, hire bikes and a lengthy list of other green proposals were implemented as we changed the world via proxy. That only happened because of the large numbers of Londoners who regularly voted green.
A Corbyn led Labour government would start to address inequality, reduce the queues for food banks and stop the NHS from collapsing, but it would still be wasting billions of taxpayer pounds on Trident. Labour would also condemn the next generation to decades of paying huge energy bills for a new set of outdated and redundant nukes.
Climate change is given a mention towards the back of the manifesto and we would get a new Clean Air Act. However, there is no stated opposition to Heathrow expansion which is the single most environmentally damaging project in the country. I have no doubt that most of Labour’s current MPs (outside of London) would back Heathrow expansion in a free vote and that is what Corbyn has promised them.
Another good reason to vote Green is that I don’t want to reward Labour tribalism. We Greens have done our generous best in standing down in 30 constituencies where there is a close contest, but Labour doesn’t even support PR. Labour has even expelled activists who supported a progressive alliance attempt to unseat Jeremy Hunt by swinging behind a doctor standing as an NHS candidate. I admire the local Green parties who have made the sacrifice, but Corbyn’s Labour Party have failed to respond and engage.
If the polls are right and we end up with a Conservative landslide, then it will be even more essential that we have clear Green Party voices in Parliament to help protect existing environment regulations from Theresa May’s Great Repeal Bill. We need more Green Party MPs like Caroline Lucas to push a positive agenda on renewable energy, civil liberties and reducing pollution. There’s no substitute for real Greens.
RoadPeace Lawless Roads Report 2017
Today’s report by RoadPeace shows the urgent need to reverse the cuts to traffic police, enforce the rules of the road and provide genuine justice for the victims of dangerous and careless driving. Continue reading “Cuts in traffic police cost lives”
I was involved in taking evidence and drawing up the recommendations in the new report from the Parliamentary cycling group. Many of the stories I heard were of injustice, as the rules of the road are either unenforced by overstretched police or sidestepped through the use of legal loopholes.
For example, does anyone seriously think that the number of driving bans has fallen by 62% over the last 10 years because the quality of our driving has improved? The rules on claiming ‘hardship’ to avoid a driving ban haven’t changed, but the inclination of Magistrates to let people off has. When the ‘exception’ becomes the norm, then the law has to be changed to close the loophole and ensure that dangerous drivers are taken off the road and restricted to using buses/taxis.
The Guardian has a good summary of the report here
