Nomination Time.

It is that time when I must obtain my 30 nominees for the Mayoral candidature. No problem there this is as it should be. What I do not think should be is the £500 deposit a candidate has to pay before they can stand in this local election. This is a barrier to local people standing as Mayor unless they are rich or supported by a political party. There could be someone out there in North Tyneside who would be a brilliant leader of the Borough but could never put themselves forward because they do not have the cash. It would be good if everyone wrote to the Electoral Commission whose web page is at http://www.electoralcommission.org.uk/ and demand that all future local elections should be deposit free and so open to anyone who can muster the number of names of the People of the Borough.

Local politics are important but if they are only the province of political parties and not accessible to all then there is no point in them so we may as well abolish them and stop wasting money on them. The only way they can remain relevant is if local people participate in them, in the very least voting in them. Even if it is only to write "abstain" on the ballot paper it will have an effect (epically when a deposit can only be returned if a candidate gets over 5% of the vote cast - including "spoilt" papers.

So, on the 4th June go and vote - preferably for the Green Candidate - in North Tyneside that's me and Shirley Ford, Iris Ryder & Nic Best as the Euro candidates.

It is important!

Your X is important.

Come the Green Revolution

I have just heard something really funny on the radio. David Cameron, out dear leader in waiting, said that we need a completely new concept of government - which is true and not the funny bit. The funny bit was that he thinks that he and his Tory cronies are the ones to achieve this monumental - I could say revolutionary - change. The only thing that would be different if Dave and his Tories took over from Gordon and his Tories would be the accent of the Prim Minister. Even the LDs would not provide the revolutionary change we need, not only in this country but across the world. There is only one political faction (with lots of parties working together) and that is the Green Parties of the world. Let's look at the facts, Communism failed, Capitalism is in the process of failing, Nazism is making a comeback but who in their right minds would want fascism as their mode of government. So that just leaves Political Ecology to provide the way forward. Have no doubt this will be a revolution on a global scale and not everyone will survive.
One aspect of political ecology that is not discussed very much because most of us find it scary is death. We talk about things such as population control but we must remember that we will all die eventually, death being an essential part of the life cycle. Without death there would be no food. Every living thing on this planet is dependent of dead stuff for its nourishment. Even plants which can photosynthesis and so fix carbon into glucose are dependent of the decay of other living things to provide the components for life. Most of the things we humans eat are dead or dieing. Even the most rigorous Vegan will be eating plants that are alive. Most salads are alive when we eat then. So with this intimate chain of life and death we must start to come to terms with death and the fact that the world as it stands is heading for a great extinction which is very likely to include us Homo sapiean sapiean. But we are a supremely adaptable species. Evolution is our game, we are up there with the Rats, cockroaches and gulls as the supreme survivors, but not if we refuse to accept that a big change is going to happen whether we like it or not so we must change now. and the change we must make is laid out via Political Philosophy.

Educated, nuclear roundabouts.

This is going to be a three headline blog so please read on, the clue is in the title.

Education.
During the week the usual flow of stuff has come out of the teaching unions conference some of which is sensible some daft but all of interest. The idea that teachers should get a 10% pay rise may at first seem like one of the daft ideas but when you think about it it really isn't. Considering what we ask of them there is nothing that they do not deserve (though getting it is a different matter entirely). But if you agree that they deserve such consideration then they should also agree that getting rid of those teachers who are not up to the job is of equal priority. Yes I realise that this may well cause problems finding enough teachers to fill the gaps, especially as I would like to limit the number of pupils in a school to 500, but it need to be done. We should also look at how to get people to fill the gaps left by this purge of rubbish teachers. And then there is the question of defining what constitutes being a rotten teacher. Well one thing is sure, I am not going to solve this in this brief paragraph.

Nuclear Power Stations.
So the proposal to have a whole range of "new" nuclear power stations has been published by our dear government and Hartlepool and Cumbria are on the list. Now I have a problem with nuclear power stations and especially with this term "new." Yes, okay, they will be new in a bricks and mortar kind of way, but from a technical point of view they are the same old dirty technology we have always used so that we can make bombs. So please object to these monsters that will not help with global warming only produce a range of different problems our children will have to solve.

Roundabouts.
North Tynesides Dear Mayor John has proposed that the roundabouts close the Tyne Tunnel are going to need to be upgraded or the new tunnel will simply allow you to travel faster between traffic jams. He does not seem to have understood that is is the number of cars on the road that is the problem not the road. It would be better to spend the money on car-pooling schemes and improving public transport than on flyovers over roundabouts.

Brick walls break whilst willows bend.

So an advisor to Gordon Brown has had to go because he has sent naughty e-mail to a political blogger. A ministers husband was caught out watching porn on government expenses. People throughout the Westminster and Whitehall communities are "adapting" the rules to they own financial advantage. Bending the rules seems to be a popular pursuit, but only, it would seem, to achieve self aggrandisement. When the rules need to be bent a bit in order to help people then our employees in Westminster & Whitehall do not seem to be interested.
An example of this are the daft fishing quoter's that are imposed upon out fishermen. Now I do believe that some form of control is required in respect to the health and well being of our oceans, but they need to be sensible ones. We have got to get rid of stupid rules that mean that dead fish that, if landed, would put a boat "over quota" are dumped. Everything that is trawled from the sea and killed should be landed, recorded against that boat and used. Trying to keep things alive should be the prime objective but the methods used to take fish in general doesn't allow for such. We are not allowed to do this because of the rules - so bend them. Bend them in the same way that the Spanish do. In Spain virtually everything that comes out of the sea is eaten, and superb it is too.
There are many things in our society that with a little bit of flexibility applied in a sensible way could improve our lives while still maintaining the rule of law on which our society is based.

Dropping the Mask

Last night at the Jazz Cafe in Newcastle I stood in front of a crowd of people and presented some of my poetry. Now I have been before an audience numerous times before and apart from the nerves that any performer should feel before going on stage I have never had a problem. But last night I was really nervous. I put this down to the fact that it was my own work that I was performing so in a way I was putting myself up there for people to see. I could not hide behind a character or another writer, it was all me and that is what I found most frightening. I do not as a rule put me out there. I am shy, people frighten me, so it is good to have a character to hide behind. As a character I can, and have, done all sorts of thing that as a real person I could never do, or be. I have been a King and I have murders kings. I have been a peasant, a squire, a lord, even a God. I have made love with women and men that I would never have a chance with in real life. But last night it wasn't a character it was me.

It was a good feeling last night and I think that it will a good rehearsal for the Mayoral contest that is coming up. Between now and 4th. June I am going to have to present me to the voters of North Tyneside. If I don't, if I try to present a character, they will see through it and I will not get the vote I require to start the process of Greening North Tyneside. We will be stuck with the same old cosmetic greenery that people are fobbed off with because it is trendy.

Next week the nomination papers are out and I will be looking for 30 people to put their names to it and trying to find £500 for the deposit. Yes, there is a deposit. So if you are on the dole like I am, and you do not have a party machine to back you up, which I do have, then the chances of you being able to stand are remote. So much for democracy eh!

On the 5th. May at 1 o'clock at the Monkseaton Arms pub we will be launching my Mayoral Manifesto, if you fancy coming along you will be most welcome.

1984 - 2009? ! ?

Last night I went to see the People's Theatre production of 1984. It was tremendous. The production captured the essence of the book to a degree that is rare in stage adaptions of book. It showed the Delmer of Winston Smith perfectly. But what was most striking was how a story written in 1947/8 could be so relevant to what is happening today. We are increasingly living in a "Big Brother" world with CCTV cameras watching us all the time, the state monitoring our movements in and out of the country and even monitoring our on-line activity (hallo special branch ;-} ). It was all in 1984. and when O'Brian, the party boss in the play who Winston and his lover Julia turn to for help, explains what they can expect now that they had declared against "The Party" could have been the basis of the al-Qaida recruiting speech - or any other terrorist recruiting gambit for that matter. It was a chilling experience made even more so by the realization that all of this has been out there for the last 55 years and instead of rejecting it in the real world we seem to congratulate ourselves for accepting it. We have turned "Big Brother" and "Room 101" into TV shows. We have watched spy cameras proliferate in our streets, shops and places of work and accepted their presence with very little in the way of questioning who is at the other end of the camera cable. We use call phones all the time without thinking how easy it is to pick up the radio waves that carry the messages and listen in. Also how easy it is to pin-point where an active cell phone (or sat-nav) is. Biometric identification is a requirement if we wish to travel beyond these Island and our DNA is increasingly finding its way onto databases - legally or otherwise.

1984 gave us a warning all those years ago which we seem on the whole to ignore. Now is the time to stand up and be counted and say

"Down With Big Brother."

"Down With Big Brother."

"Down With Big Brother."

"Down With Big Brother."

"Down With Big Brother."