Alan's Green Thoughts

  The Montenegrin parliamentary election that took place yesterday produced a sensational change: for the first time since Montenegrin independence, the Democratic Party of Socialists of Montenegro (DPS) failed to win enough seats to assure itself of being the governing party. The DPS only lost 6 seats, bringing it down to 30, but in a parliament with only 81 seats each seat loss counts for much more than in the House of Commons of the United Kingdom, which has 650 members by comparison. Corruption scandals-a common theme in the politics of  former Warsaw Pact countries-against the DPS, which resulted in nationwide protests last year, were the primary reason why the DPS lost out in this election, along with allegations of electoral fraud to the point where opposition parties boycotted the Montenegrin parliament. Religious discrimination against the Serbian Orthodox Church, in favour of the Montenegrin Orthodox Church, made matters worse for the DPS. The main beneficiary of the...

Amidst the coronavirus pandemic, elections continue to take place in much of the world, except the United Kingdom even though other countries have shown that both local and national elections can be conducted safely with full postal ballots. The Sri Lankan election of 5th August (delayed twice due to said coronavirus pandemic) saw former Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa, whose Sri Lankan People's Freedom Alliance surged to 59.1% of the vote, giving them 145 seats and a majority of 65 (very substantial in a parliament with only 225 seats) rise again. By contrast, the United National Party, which had governed Sri Lanka for the last 5 years before splitting in a spectacular fashion, lost all but one of its 106 seats and fell to an ignoble seventh place. The largest party to emerge from the fracturing of the UNP was the Samagi Jana Balawegaya (meaning "Peace and People's Power" in Tamil), a liberal-conservative party which is now the main opposition in the Sri Lankan Parl...

The current Conservative-led government is proposing, this autumn, to bring in new legislation that would make trespass a criminal offence, as opposed to a civil one in most cases (exceptions include the railway, for example). This follows on from when squatting in residential buildings was made a criminal offence in 2012, when it was previously a civil offence. This would not only breach the human rights of travelling communities (including Roma and Irish Travellers) but would also jeopardise the right to demonstrate, the right to enjoy the countryside , and severely hamper our access to nature given that only 8.5% of UK land is publicly owned; conversely nearly half of UK land is owned by aristocrats or corporations, amounting to just 25,000 landowners. Even most homeowners own very little land at all. People need to be able to have access to nature, especially since one in eight UK households have no garden or access to one; these households are concentrated in major cities. Scotlan...

Last week in the Spectator, Nick Tyrone hinted that a merger between the Liberal Democrats and the Green Party could happen within this decade , and in the Independent, John Rentoul suggested the exact same thing. Despite their claims, a merger between the Liberal Democrats and the Green Party would in fact be a very bad idea politically, especially for the Green Party. Here is why: 1. The Green Party can reach out to many areas the Liberal Democrats cannot.  This was particularly noticeable in the 2019 local elections, where the Greens managed a net gain (notionally due to extensive ward boundary changes in many areas, in addition to council mergers) of 148 seats from the Conservatives, and mainly in rural areas and small towns where the Liberal Democrats are not competitive. Most of the Green gains from Labour that year were in areas with high qualification levels but not high affluence (such as Norwich and the southern parts of Royal Leamington Spa) that are only competitive be...

  Earlier this week, Robert Jenrick (Conservative MP for Newark since 2014), the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, announced a major shake-up of planning laws to allow for housing to be built rapidly and quickly on brownfield sites and designated "growth sites", in response to Boris Johnson's wish to "build, build, build". It cannot be denied that there is a housing shortage in Britain. However, the real reasons why it has occurred are the effects of Right to Buy from the late 1980s onwards, which has decimated Britain's social housing stock and stigmatised council housing, a lack of affordable homes, speculation on house prices, and one million empty homes which have been left unoccupied not being compulsorily purchased so they can be used for housing. The planning reforms proposed by Mr Jenrick and co will make Britain's housing problem worse, not better. Here is why. 1. They will create, in effect, a new generation of slums. Bro...

John Hume, a founder of the peace process that ended The Troubles period of Northern Ireland and culminated in the Good Friday Agreement of 1998, passed away earlier today. John Hume's political life started when he helped found the Northern Irish civil rights movement, to counter the repression Catholics like him faced at the hands of the Protestant powers that be in Northern Ireland. He served as a member of the Northern Ireland Parliament for 3 years for Foyle (covering the western part of the city of Derry) until the Northern Ireland Parliament was abolished in 1972. He was subsequently elected as the SDLP MP for Foyle in 1983 and served as MP for Foyle until he retired in 2005, and he was also an MLA for Foyle for 10 years. He led the SDLP (which he co-founded with Gerry Fitt) from 1979 to 2001, taking it through a period of significant growth and ensuring that Catholics obtained much better representation in Northern Ireland's Westminster constituencies than before, with ...