Alan's Green Thoughts

We are almost at the end of the first year in what I term the "Cyberspace Age" and it has been one of the most chaotic years in recent memory. We are also seeing a further "digitisation of humanity" in this world of ours. Norway announced that it would turn off all FM stations, leaving only digital radio active, and Switzerland has stated it will follow suit. Britain is also considering this move once digital radio listeners reach 51% of total radio listeners. Social media is becoming more and more critical in politics and everyday life, and it has also helped fake news, notorious during the 2016 US Presidential election, spread more quickly before being debunked and thus able to influence far more people than last year. Social media is also leading to increased social isolation and could fragment society even further if obsessions with it are not curbed sufficiently; it is very useful and will continue to be but we must not become so attached to it as if it were ...

The Catalan general election of 2017, called on the orders of hardline unionist conservative Spanish PM Mariano Rajoy who is determined to stop Catalonian independence by nearly any means, produced a rather interesting and divided result. It is worth noting that the decisive vote for Catalonian independence was enhanced by anger at the heavy-handed means used by the Spanish Government to suppress it, especially by the police. At this election, however, nothing approaching such action was taken and it ran without major incident. The most striking thing is the realignment that took place on both the unionist and separatist sides of the divide in Catalonia's electorate. It was the pro-union Citizens' Party that topped the poll, winning as many as 37 seats and 25.4% of the vote, more than any of the individual pro-independence parties in Catalonia. A considerable proportion of their vote came from the increasingly unpopular People's Party (to whom Mariano belongs to), who los...

If you missed me on Employable Me last night, you can catch up on BBC iPlayer here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b09k7wlj/employable-me-series-2-episode-4 The experience was a life-changing and eye-opening one, and I thank everyone who has seen it so far. I was inspired by an autistic acquaintance of mine who had appeared on the first series of Employable Me, and when the second series was making a casting call I applied, wishing to showcase my talents for political analysis that I have been developing since I started this blog four years ago. I was so pleased when I was accepted for the series, given that a few months prior I had failed to complete a graduate diploma in applied psychology and wanted to find a new path that was more suited to me in the long-term and more achievable for me than becoming a chartered psychologist. Even in undergraduate psychology I was very passionate about politics (and how psychology could be applied to it), but had never had the option t...

The results for the last set of local by-elections in Britain for this year are as follows: 07/12/17: Enfield LBC, Enfield Highway:  Labour 1619 (69.8%, +22.9%), Conservative 620 (26.7%, +9.2%), Green 79 (3.4%, -6.5%). [BNP and UKIP from 2014 did not stand] North Devon DC, Newport: Liberal Democrats 390 (38.8%, +9.0%), Conservative 373 (37.1%, -6.0%), Green 159 (15.8%, -11.3%), Labour 83 (8.3%). Liberal Democrat gain from Conservative. 13/12/17: Exeter BC, Newtown & St Leonards: Labour 1044 (54.6%, +5.3%), Conservative 512 (26.8%, +3.5%), Liberal Democrats 179 (9.4%, +1.7%), Green 137 (7.2%, -3.9%), UKIP 40 (2.1%, -3.3%). [Independence From Europe from 2016 did not stand] Waverley BC, Godalming Central & Ockford: Liberal Democrats 266 (37.8%), Conservative 246 (35.0%, -4.8%), Labour 151 (21.5%, -5.4%), Green 40 (5.7%).  Liberal Democrat gain from Conservative. [Something New and the Independent from 2015 did not stand]   14/12/17: City of London Cor...

China, Britain's biggest export market for scrap and other recyclable materials, has announced a blanket ban on plastic waste, a tightening of standards for industrial scrap, and intends to impose stricter standards on recyclable material in general after finding that much of the scrap sent to China's plants was "contaminated with dirty wastes or even hazardous wastes": https://www.greenpeace.org.uk/chinas-plastic-waste-ban/ Britain has sent 2,700,000 tonnes of scrap plastic to China and Hong Kong in the past five years-that is on average 540,000 tonnes per year. This reliance on exporting plastic abroad has meant a lack of British capacity to tackle processing of plastic waste, scrap metal and glass and has meant little has been done to tackle the problem of excessive plastic production, especially when our water is being damaged by microplastics and macroplastics (plastics visible to the naked eye, as opposed to microplastics which are not). "We've reli...

Counting has not quite finished officially for the Queensland state election of 2017, but the results are clear by now in what has been one of Australia's most nail-biting state elections ever. Despite the fact that Australia's closest answer to UKIP, Pauline Hanson's One Nation, was winning over many Liberal National and Labor voters, it was Labor under Annastacia Palaszczuk who emerged victorious managing to secure an overall majority with 47 seats, although with a one seat majority she will have to rely on crossbench support in practice. Their 1st preference vote also dropped to 35.5% although the Liberal Nationals were hit the hardest by One Nation. As many as 6 "crossbench" MLAs have been elected to the Queensland state parliament-3 Katter's Australian Party members, 1 One Nation member (Steve Andrew, the first person of South Sea Islander ancestry elected to a state parliament), Independent Sandy Bolton, and the Queensland state parliament's first ...

Readers, the results of local by-elections from 30/11/17 were as follows: Gosport BC, Bridgemary North: Liberal Democrats 644 (57.9%), Labour 255 (23.0%, -49.0%), Conservative 212 (19.1%, -8.9%). Liberal Democrat gain from Labour; all changes are since 2016. Maidstone BC, Maidstone North: Liberal Democrats 719 (51.4%, +20.0%), Conservative 364 (26.0%, -6.0%), Labour 270 (19.3%, +8.0%), Green 47 (3.4%, -2.1%). Liberal Democrat gain from Conservative; all changes are since 2015. Tandridge DC, Westway: Liberal Democrats 483 (53.5%, +17.6%), Conservative 239 (26.5%, -2.5%), Labour 118 (13.1%, -2.8%), UKIP 62 (6.9%, -12.2%). Torridge DC, Torrington: Liberal Democrats 701 (60.2%), Independent 180 (15.5%), Conservative 159 (13.6%, -6.2%), Green 76 (6.5%, -16.2%), UKIP 49 (4.2%, -17.0%). Liberal Democrat gain from UKIP. No-one can doubt that this week has been one of the best for the Liberal Democrats in terms of by-elections, since all of them were won by the Liberal Democrats with ...