A discovery for medical science: I’ve identified a new syndrome – leafletter’s knuckle. After delivering about 2,700 Green Party leaflets over a couple of days, most of the skin has gone off the knuckles on my right hand (the result of paper cuts and encounters with letter-boxes that seem to have been adapted from a design for mousetraps).

I’ve also had lots of encounters with deadly basement flat stairs, and some horribly bodgy lifts. At the fourth rattle and the fifth squeak, I think: “I’m glad mobile phones were invented; at least it will be easy to call the fire brigade.” That is often followed by the thought: “What was this building called again?”

The BBC goes very straight:

The Green Party hopes to have more than 100 councillors after the local elections in England on 4 May.
The party is calling for good local services within walking distance and protection for local businesses.
The Greens already have 70 council seats including six in Oxford, where they hold the balance of power.
The party’s Caroline Lucas told the BBC they did not expect to win overall control in any council but were hopeful of boosting numbers of councillors….

The politics wonks’ site, ePolitix.com, is into the numbers:

Launching its poll push on Tuesday, the party said it was fielding a total of 1,294 candidates.
There will be a particular focus on London, where 567 of the candidates are standing.
Camden, Hackney, Islington, Lambeth, Lewisham and Merton are among the London boroughs where the party is hoping to make gains…

The Guardian, meanwhile, takes the anti-Conservative, national politics line:

The Greens are grateful to David Cameron for pushing environmental issues up the political agenda, the MEP Caroline Lucas said yesterday as the party began its local election campaign.
But Ms Lucas, who represents south-east England in the European parliament, added that the Tories had no policies to back up their claims to care for the environment. She believed their leader’s promise to lead a green revolution was a case of “the emperor’s new clothes”, which was bound to backfire.
At the Greens’ press conference in London, Ms Lucas said every time Mr Cameron was asked “to deliver on a specific policy proposal, you see him ducking and diving, slipping and sliding”.
She added: “When people see the lack of substance behind his rhetoric, that can only do us good.”…

I went out for a short canvassing session on the council estate on which I live last night (when the rain stopped). And I was surprised anew at the highly positive response I got. The Labour Party really is in the stink with its traditional supporters.
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I was also pleased to see this morning that Jean Lambert, the other English Green MEP, has taken up the case of the murdered Thai human rights lawyer Somchai Neelaphaijit.

MEPs Jean Lambert, from Britain, and Frithjof Schmidt, from Germany, also asked the Council if it had communicated to the Thai government its concern over security threats to Somchai’s wife, Angkhana.
Angkhana has been threatened on several occasions and warned not to pursue her husband’s disappearance, most recently last month.
The issue of allegations of torture by members of the Thai security forces and its effect on Thai-EU relations was also raised by the MEPs.

The observant will have noticed that you haven’t had a Friday Femmes Fatales yet this week. I’ve got some excellent recommendations, but after nearly three hours of representing the Green Party at a hustings this afternoon run by the Camden Federation of Private Tenants, and various other duties this evening, the energy just isn’t there.

So you might want to chat among yourselves, or alternatively fill in the alternative energy survey (from The Greens of course), that is our answer to Tony Blair’s crazy rush to nuclear power. It won’t take long. Go on. Please.

Today’s Guardian diary:

It comes to something, we think you’ll agree, when elections are decided by plastic bags. But such seems to be the case in Camden, where the council’s ruling Labour group is so scared of losing overall control in May’s poll that it has sent redoubtable ex-leader Dame Jane Roberts (who isn’t even standing this time) out to do battle with the Greens in the Ham & High over this important policy issue. Oddly, our old friend Cllr John Thane, who will be hard-pressed to hang on to his Highgate ward, was passed over for the key task of defending the council’s outstanding record on reusables, even though he chairs its environment subcommittee. From such seemingly slight and inconsequential scraps of evidence, reader, do we conclude that Labour is bricking it.