…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.

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.

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.

… and quite fun really. The artists have gone to town:

If you’d prefer an academic take on the election, there’s an excellent (independent) London analysis here.

There’s something slightly inevitable about the fact that as this canvasser was cycling down Dartmouth Park Hill this afternoon, the cyclist who passed her was the Green Party candidate in the Highgate byelection.

(My excuse for going so slowly was that I had a full backpack of leaflets for the morrow, and I don’t know the road… and he is a local. Although it was slightly embarrassing that when we met up again at the lights at the bottom of the hill, he was complaining about a slow puncture and saying he was going slowly…)

Canvassing for four separate elections involving three voting systems is, you might say, challenging – but entertaining. (For the record, the London mayoral vote is by the supplementary vote system; the London Assembly constituency seats by first past the post, and the London Assembly London-wide members by the d’Hondt method (a form of proportional representation). And the Highgate byelection for Camden council is also first past the post.)

Note to my neighbours: if you hear me reciting this in my sleep, don’t be surprised.

Q. What’s the largest crop in America?

A. Grass.

No, no … not that kind. The suburban mow-it-on-Sunday kind – occupying 30 million acres.

Just imagine how much you could grow on all of that land – things that there was actually some point in growing, like food for example ….

Yes, you might say I’ve an allergy to grass, not the biological kind, but the sociological kind of allergy that comes from growing up in the suburbs.

And even with the millions of acres of land covered over with even worse stuff, you could do a lot with what has been dubbed “asphalt gardening”. I look out on the internal courtyard of my flats and think what a nice lot of mini-allotments the parking spaces would make – and this would probably be the way to do it…