Harringay, Haringey - So Good they Spelt it Twice!
The Stroud Green Hustings | Hornsey & Wood Green Electorate | Parliament 2015 Election | Monday 20th
Tags for Forum Posts: 2015, :, Election, Hornsey & Wood Green, Hustings, Stroud Green
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Clive Carter on
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THE venue is currently packed out with some 200 people, with many turned away. Far more turned up than expected. Tottenham's MP managed to get in after the lock-out to ordinary residents; there actually was a genuine 'elfin safety issue, such was the pressure.
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Permalink Reply by Michele on
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Wow. Just wondering what Tottenham's MP was doing at Hustings for Hornsey/Wood Green Constituency ???
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Probably because Mr Lammy lives close to the venue. The many folk locked out, including me, held an informal fringe meeting outside the shut gate. Some of us waved through the bars to people we knew beyond.
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Permalink Reply by Chris Setz on
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I too was locked out but waited patiently and eventually those remaining in the lobby were ushered into the overspill back garden and eventually into the rear of the hall itself where we could hear more clearly. There was a nasty moment when one of the (presumably senior) staff shouted across the candidates to order a man and a woman to step down from the sofa they were standing on 'for their own safety'. When the woman claimed to be able to preserve her own safety the crowd effectively defeated helped the 'sofa 2' to defeat the powers that be and no action was taken.
Presumably nobody gave any thought in advance to what to do if too many attended. The shouted 'lets move outside' wasn't taken up. I heard many people denied entrance say they couldn't go to Thursday's one in Muswell Hill 'because it was during the day' (which is wrong, it's at 7pm). List of hustings here.
Given that the hinterland for these hustings was, say, 30,000 people, it was actually a tiny, tiny band of around 200 residents who decided to turn up - further proof, were it needed, of the disengagement that is legion.
These types of meetings must be among the most difficult to conduct and I thought the Chair (Kevin Duffy, Friends of Finsbury Park) did admirably well given the fluid nature of the forces operating. Three of the candidates (Hoi Polloi, Christian People's Alliance and Workers Revolutionary Party ) who might have expected to be given a place were excluded for reasons of manageability, so that left the usual suspects - Green, Labour, Lib-Dems, Tories and UKIP.
The order of appearance was pre decided by ballot and everyone who spoke was heard, although there was a lot of cat-calling of the Tory, UKIP and Lib-Dem candidates, roughly in that order. One of the spurned was present (Christian People's Alliance) and allowed to make a one-minute statement at the very end, which was largely greeted with derision, focussing as it did on an endorsement of marriage as being at the heart of society, which didn't seem to sit well with the audience, who didn't look particularly married to me.
I was glad of the chance to hear the candidates speak - there was only the mildest of pokes by the main candidates at each other - all very well-behaved. Few shouted accusations. One Councillor, waiting patiently to the very end to ask a question, was denied the chance by consensus when someone shouted out that it was wrong for Councillors to speak and the Chair overruled his previous decision and announced that 'no Councillor be allowed to speak'. This was a good decision by the Chair in that it was a fair reflection of the feeling of the meeting but how ironic that arguably the most representative appear to be held in the least respect by the majority.
Enough heckling at the right-wing (the so-called 'BlueKip') to have made it feel like a hustings - the feeling of the meeting was definitely positive towards the 'progressive' candidates in my (biased) opinion.
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It's a 'weasel' word I'm afraid, that sucks meaning from those around it, sorry. It comes out of various threads that look to progress as cumulative - we build on the previous good stuff and seek to extend it, rather than conserving the status quo.
It links it to the uniquely left-wing idea that the burdens government pass on to us (i.e. taxes) should be applied according to ability to shoulder them. So, for instance, the left wing will often call for means testing because giving rich people, say, the £200 winter fuel alliance when they don't need it is not 'progressive'. Presumably the left would want £200 to the poorest, £150 to the next rung, £100 higher up etc, dwindling to zero for those with incomes about, say, £100k? That is referred to as a 'progressive' approach and sort of sums it up so it's applied more generally to the Greens, Lab and Lib I think. At least I hope it is :)
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I have not noticed many Green policies that are in any way harmful to us, nor that are not reasonable. The only big difference I can see is that they have the vestiges of the 'no growth' policy that, arguably, is the reason they do not win. That and the slight suspicion that they are a one-issue party, so simply don't have credible policies in areas not considered important to 'Green' supporters and are likely to be too religious over their beliefs.
Greens want to prevent a new third runway at Heathrow for example, whereas all the others don't. Their plan to renationalise the Railways is admirable, as is their plan to write off all existing student debt - who wouldn't want that?
I think the Greens have advocated superb, literally planet-saving policies time and time again, so much so that all the mainstream parties have been heavily influenced by them - Greens are great people with great ideas. When/if they have power (as they do in Brighton) they might out-Tory the Tories (they raised Council Tax, implemented deep cuts etc) but who is to say that every party won't abuse the power we give them?
I don't really understand why the Greens aren't more powerful than they are - they got up to 16% of the vote at one point in Europe. What may have happened is the treacherous cherry-picking that seems to go on in politics. Parties claim they get their policies from "the people" but whenever any party gets popular on any single issue, the others simply grab it and try to make it their own. Remember the Tories claim to be the Greenest government ever? Both Coalition partners are claiming it now.
I'm not a Green voter because I want more - the wider Labour values. Do want to deploy many good Green ideas and approaches and value and cherish them as people. Don't think Coalition works because we in the UK are still too immature (we'll get it eventually) but do want a smorgasbord of all the good policies out there and don't want dogmatism and the ideological despotism of the right wing.
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One thing we know for sure is that the right wing are the party of Capitalism, of the rich. The crash of 2008 was a crisis of Capitalism and it's right-wing 'neo-liberal' big-business-friendly greed-based policies that causes the deep inequality that is the basis of almost everything wrong with our society. That eventually lead to riots as we know to our cost.
Guess it's entirely natural that a more sophisticated electorate will be more diverse because that's how people are - it takes all sorts (including old fools like me).
Agree that many on the left are disenchanted and yet draw hope from the fact that the world is more 'left' than it's ever been.
There seems to be a wide consciousness that we are all the same people on the same planet and that we can work together best because of, rather than in spite of, our differences.
38 Degrees, Change.org etc mean to me that there is significant, untapped poitical engagement amongst ordinary people. The pundits have it wrong about disengagement - we're not turning away from politics, we're turning away from the political class. We want to click and change the world and, who knew, yes we can.
The plurality of left opinion is a natural thing - people are individual. The Labour party will just have to get used to the fact that a one-party state is, hopefully, never going to be possible again and use their vast experience coping with consensus where there is disagreement to progress. The Green approach (none are whipped or lobbied) is right and we should adopt it.
To me the evolution of politics is reflected a bit in the travel industry - people used to be scared to go out of their village so were offered 'package holidays' (return transport to airport, flight, hotel all one price, with conducted tours once there). Now people have grown up they decide themselves.
So what we need to get used to is that other people have great ideas and the means to absorb them has, for the first time in history, become freely available. In Spain Podemos (Spanish for 'we can'), is a mass movement only formed in 2014 that won real electoral power quickly. 0 to 8% of the national vote in four months, third largest political party 20 days after they allowed membership.
They use the internet heavily and the part that interests me most was the use of open source (i.e. free) software to let people express their opinions and build agreement. This means you don't need money to win elections.
That's the internet future that the political dinosaurs of all parties in Westminster are running scared from by trying to pull up drawbridges. It's the left wing that is most likely to take up what I see as mainstream but they see as radical - vote early, vote often :)
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Permalink Reply by Robert Pike on
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Thanks Chris and Billy. Really interested to read this exchange as it kind of sums up my own indecision/ plurality in the context of my own Tottenham constituency -limited choice I know - and in national level context. In my view the Greens have finely been given a national televised platform in which they could really present something very different and take a totally different approach in which people can buy into. In my mind they have not done so.
I quite agree with the second part of your last post. We need this adhocracy approach, we need an ideas driven manifesto of the people and for the internet and open source to draw more of the disaffected together.
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Thanks Robert - I think one joy of this election is that you can vote one party and get policies you wished they'd have but don't.
Example? 3 year tenancies as standard - arguably, of everything promised, that will make the biggest difference in this borough. Given that the majority of us here are renters and that will only increase, the feeling of extended security I think will make people feel a bit more comfortable and more likely to invest in their surroundings than in the current 'renew every 6 months if your Landlord can't get more money'.
Only Labour are promising 3 year tenancies as standard but I guess that all parties except the Lib Dems and Tories would support it in coalition. What's not to like?
Effectively you are voting for the largest party to cherry-pick from all their partners' policies in order to retain a majority. So if you think that the Tories are going to get the largest number of seats, you could vote for a minority party confident that the reason you vote for them (a cherished major policy) is the one you'll get if the Tories can stomach it.
Assuming that Labour are the largest party but need others to govern, I don't think, for instance, that the Green policy to forgive all student debt will get adopted (shame!) because the other parties are too scared - same goes for the re-nationalisation of the railways. There is still a huge feeling among the electorate that the govt can't run things properly and until the tide turns on that, nationalisation maybe be too ideological. I hate the fact that the Tories privatised the hugely profitable nationalised East Coast Line (£9bn profit returned to the treasury!) for ideological reasons. We need the Govt to make a profit by employing people in strategic industries - the rich will just strip it bare.
The Greens have great policies that are 'left' in outlook like the Citizen's income. Remembering that the Lib Dems promise to introduce Proportional Representation (a coalition bargaining tool that Haringey voted in favour of) never happened so the Greens may not be able to force their larger partner to implement major Green policies. A danger would be, if, say, Labour agreed to implement all the major Green policies, what purpose a Green party?
In the end I suppose it's pretty certain that a Green Policy or two will get implemented it's just not certain which. I don't think it even matters much how many votes they get - the SNP (who I see as more Labour than Labour) will hold the balance of power but we've already seen the Greens deservedly punch above their weight. Partly I guess that's because they're good at policy and good at consensus and I'm really happy with that. The only real and present danger I see is if Labour don't get enough votes - then it all collapses and whoever is the last to leave, please switch off the light...
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