It has been buried in the news in the Conservatives surge in the British local elections, but there has been a change in Norwich, where the Green Party, for the first time has become the official opposition by taking three seats from the Lib Dems. (They missed out on this status last year by one vote.)
The city council tally is now Labour 15, Greens 13, Lib Dems 6, Conservatives 5.
…from the Independent:
Sian Berry, for the Greens, on the other hand, has been an articulate, imaginative and effective advocate for her cause. With her programme for a greener London, with more cycle-lanes, cheaper public transport, more small shops and eco-friendly housing, she has come across as a forward-looking politician, committed to a better quality of London life. We hope she can continue to find a voice in the national debate.
So consonant are her priorities with those of this paper that, if we could vote for mayor today, we would place our first-preference cross against her name. This would underscore the importance of the environment to both London and to the rest of the nation. Then, and with rather heavy heart, it would be illogical to do anything other than make Ken Livingstone our second choice.
And do vote Green on the peach ballot paper, the London-wide Assembly list – that could put Sian into the Assembly.
Labour throws out a hint that it plans to change the law of royal succession, to end the extraordinary sexism that puts any male in one family above any female, but then within a week, despite some public support wimps out on the plan.
I am of course a republican, but that the monarchy should be quite so sexist is a further disgrace.
An historic first: This is, I believe, the first time that a national newspaper has advocated voting Green:
The traditional beneficiaries of protest voting – the Liberal Democrats – have failed to make an impact in the campaign. Their candidate, Brian Paddick, is undoubtedly a decent man, but he has been out of his depth as a politician. There is a stronger case to be made for casting ‘first preference’ votes for Siân Berry, the Green candidate. The party has already used its toehold on the London Assembly to wring green concessions worth millions of pounds out of the mayoral budget. A respectable score for Ms Berry, an intelligent and articulate advocate of her cause, would send a clear signal to whoever wins the mayoralty that London cares about environmental policy. It would also deprive the British National Party of fourth place, a small but notable step towards the mainstream.
A great tale in the Telegraph about three “young housewives”, who 50 years ago decided on a jaunt right across Europe, and up the Himalayas.
Five months later the women returned to England and resumed their lives as diligent wives. They packed their adventure away, along with the maps, and these intrepid explorers were largely forgotten. There is no mention of them in the 1979 book Zanskar, the Hidden Kingdom, by the French explorer Michel Peissel, nor in many later books on the area.
(Zanskar is now in Jammu and Kashmir.)
And their adventure was forgotten, and probablyten would have remained so, had not a diligent film maker uncovered their film record “the only visual record of Zanskar before 1975… When Salter tracked down the women he found the film in a box on top of Davies’s wardrobe”.
You can’t but feel that had they been men, they would have made a great fuss and today been something like travel David Attenboroughs….
That GM is not the answer to the world’s cropping problems has been evident for a long time, but in the past few days there’s been a flurry of new evidence. First, a panel of 400 experts working for the world food programme concluded:
“Assessment of the technology lags behind its development, information is anecdotal and contradictory, and uncertainty about possible benefits and damage is unavoidable.”
And a study of soybeans, one of the two great “successes” of GM, has found thatyields of GM crops are lower than their naturally bred relatives.
He grew a Monsanto GM soybean and an almost identical conventional variety in the same field. The modified crop produced only 70 bushels of grain per acre, compared with 77 bushels from the non-GM one.
The GM crop – engineered to resist Monsanto’s own weedkiller, Roundup – recovered only when he added extra manganese, leading to suggestions that the modification hindered the crop’s take-up of the essential element from the soil. Even with the addition it brought the GM soya’s yield to equal that of the conventional one, rather than surpassing it.
Another earlier study suggested two factors at work: 1. while you are GMming a variety, standard selection for desirable traits such as yield is continuing, while you’ve stood still, and 2. the modification reduces productivity.
The Ecologist (admittedly not exactly an unbiased source) sets out the full case against GM. (Hat-tip to Ruscombe Green for that one.
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