Yes, I know I promised to file a blog on eco-towns a fortnight ago. However, I have to confess I was tempted into moonlighting it away to the Telegraph, who are running a series of stories on what they are calling ‘Gordon’s poll tax’. So, for an update on the impressive number of campaigns that have emerged to oppose the fifteen shortlisted eco-town sites, you’ll have to read my article here.

In other news, therefore, the Greens have scored a second decent result in a by-election with our best ever mid-term Westminster score of 7.4 per cent and second place in Haltemprice and Howden.

Congratulations to Shan Oakes, who blogged her determined campaign for this site, and who worked incredibly hard to win many new voters in a seat we haven’t contested for many years.

This comes just two weeks after an excellent third place for our candidate Mark Stephenson in Henley, on an election stage that carried a full slate of parties, and where we beat a Labour candidate for the first time in a parliamentary election.

Interesting developments also in the Census Alert campaign to prevent arms company Lockheed Martin running the 2011 Census. No, not the response from the government to our petition, which we received this week. Their three paragraph missive said nothing much, other than they were getting everyone to sign agreements to look after our personal data properly, which is not particularly reassuring.

However, the Treasury Select Committee have been taking up the cause, rightly supporting our concerns about how the US Patriot Act (which forces US companies and their subsidiaries to hand over any data they hold that is deemed of interest to their country’s intelligence agencies) would apply to any work done by Lockheed on our Census.

In a recent report, the committee put in a strongly worded request for more work to be done, saying: “We remain concerned that the personal information gathered through the 2011 Census could be subject to the United States Patriot Act and therefore we ask the government to take clear legal advice and advice from the US State Department and to publish it in response to this Report.”

We’re now looking forward to reading this advice. If the legal position continues to be a grey area then, faced with the choice between breaking UK privacy laws and the Patriot Act, which government would Lockheed choose to ignore? The point of our campaign remains that it would be better to ensure the Census data is not allowed anywhere near Lockheed Martin by removing them from the procurement process altogether.

And finally, goodbye, as this will be my last blog for this site. From this week I will be going, if not undercover, then at least behind the scenes to work full-time in the Green Party press office. We have an extraordinarily important two years ahead of us, with European elections in 2009 followed (or possibly preceded) by a general election in which we have our best chance ever of making a breakthrough into Parliament.

With no elections I can personally fight until 2010 at the earliest, I have decided the best way I can serve my party is to help promote the excellent work of Greens around the country, and to help Caroline Lucas MEP make history by winning in Brighton Pavilion, where we already have a majority in local election votes.

Westminster elections are, of course, a world away from local polls, so winning there will be a tough and exciting challenge, but also a huge opportunity to make a real difference to UK politics which I am looking forward to with great relish.

I will miss the opportunity to blog here though. Not the angry and libelous comments I get in response, naturally, but it has been a privilege to be able to highlight the work of a wide range of campaigns and causes on this site. Over the past 22 months, lots of green issues have obviously had an airing, from the campaign to stop Heathrow expansion to the exploitation of Mongolia’s natural resources and the failings of the Tory Quality of Life review.

But I’ve also been able to bring up much wider issues, including local high streets, fair pay campaigns and free and open source software. I hope the New Statesman will continue to give all these issues prominence and trust it will find someone to replace me who has even more to talk about.

www.newstatesman.com - Berry last blog

My favourite word today is ‘emblazoned’. That’s what adverts for cars will have to be from now on - emblazoned with details of fuel consumption and CO2 emissions, thanks to a sudden change in advertising rules by the government.

The 4x4 campaign has been working on this for about a year now, but the endgame was surprisingly easy, with the Department for Transport changing its guidelines for advertising within three months of asking. They haven’t come over all green, or even responded to the high cost of petrol, but were correcting a legal error they made more than seven years ago in exempting the majority of ads from an EU law.

One of the aims of the 4x4 campaign has always been to get advertising rules changed, since we were fed up seeing our efforts to change the image of 4x4s counteracted by shiny ads on billboards and in magazines that contained nothing to show their climate impact – or the colossal amounts they cost to run. Complaining to the Advertising Standards Agency about specific ads got us nowhere - we always got the answer that the ads followed the government’s guidelines to manufacturers, and therefore were ‘compliant with the law’.

Inspecting these guidelines in more detail, we spotted the problem. A 1999 EU Directive says fuel economy and CO2 emissions information must be provided in all promotional literature for cars, and that this should be displayed as prominently as the main selling information. However, the Department for Transport’s guidelines for car advertisers (published by the Vehicle Certification Agency in 2001), wrongly stated that 'primarily graphical' adverts do not need to include CO2 information and specifically excluded billboards from their rules. Manufacturers, of course, then gleefully exploited this loophole to leave fuel economy and CO2 out of as many adverts as they could, including billboards and most ads in glossy magazines as well.

Working with the Friends of the Earth legal team, we concluded that the DfT’s guidelines represented a significant breach of European law and wrote to them in March this year to point this out. We also threatened to take it to the High Court if they didn’t bring the guidelines up to scratch, which probably helped.

After a quick review by the Department, we got confirmation yesterday that they are revising their guidance notes from today to make prominent CO2 information compulsory on all billboards and posters advertising cars in the UK.

The letter said: "We have concluded that our guidance is incorrect in respect of primarily graphical material. For this reason we will be amending this section of the Guidance Note on the VCA website by close on 20th June to read as follows;

“The Regulations define 'promotional literature' as 'all printed matter used in the marketing, advertising and promotion of a new passenger car...'. We are of the view that this definition does include material which is largely graphical, with limited textual content (perhaps containing only the model name and an advertising slogan). We therefore consider that street advertisements are subject to the requirements of the regulations.”

So that’s it. Job done with remarkably little fuss, showing what a small group can achieve when the law is on our side. Thanks to a simple letter, from now on, people choosing a car will be able to get vital information on CO2 emissions and fuel economy much more easily, and will be able to make greener and cheaper choices of car.

This, in turn, will help encourage car-makers to build more efficient vehicles, something they have been very slow to do. Despite having a Europe-wide target of reaching average emissions of 120 grams per kilometer of CO2 by 2012, most companies are way off achieving this. With information on fuel costs at their fingertips, people power and simple consumer choice should now be able to drive manufacturers in the right direction at last.

www.newstatesman.com - Oops we broke EU rules

After all the election excitement, I’ve been enjoying some glorious (if skint) ‘resting’ time over the past few weeks, getting some fresh air in the Lake District and having long lunches with everyone I’ve not seen in months.

Last week, I went to a preview screening of a new film about climate change called ‘The Age of Stupid’. Part sci-fi, part impressive documentary, this is a much more interesting piece of work than Al Gore’s ‘An Inconvenient Truth’. My colleague Jim Killock has reviewed the film properly, and I’d encourage everyone, from teachers to trekkies, to see it.

And of course I couldn’t stay away from campaigning for long. This week, I have helped launch a new cross-party, cross-NGO initiative to ask Boris Johnson what the dickens he’s going to do about greener transport in London.

There was so little information on this subject provided during his election campaign that campaign group London Living Streets was forced to leave a blank space next to Johnson’s name under two of their policy areas when they compared the candidates for Mayor in April. With admirable understatement they concluded, “Living Streets is disappointed at the lack of policies on this issue”.

The key problem with all this vagueness is that it’s very unclear how he’s going to balance the transport budget, when most of his published plans actually involve taking vital money out of Transport for London’s revenue stream.

Add up the cost of cancelling the CO2 Charge scheme (£50m a year), ditching the Western Extension (£65m), cancelling the deal with Venezuela that gave people on income support half-price fares (£16m) and swapping bendy buses for a newly designed and built routemaster (think of a large number, then double it), and you get a very big fiscal hole indeed. In the absence of a magic wand, this can only be filled with cuts to other programmes or by higher fares.

Green transport activists are now understandably worried that our favourite schemes, among them the £50 million a year cycling budget, walking initiatives, school and workplace travel plans, the Paris-style bike scheme and the hybrid bus programme, are going to see red lines drawn through them in the near future. Along with the loss of the CO2 Charge, all this could spell real problems for air quality and road safety, and put a stop to people in London switching from cars to public transport, walking and cycling.

Given the excellent progress we’ve seen since 2000 in all these areas except the stubborn problem of air quality, this is all very worrying. So, please join us in writing to Boris and asking him how he’s going to sort this mess out – you can download a stylish letter from the 4x4 campaign’s website.

www.newstatesman.com - Boris's large fiscal hole

So, the election in London is over, we’ve lost a great Mayor, gained an uncertain future and kept our two Green Assembly Members in the face of an almighty squeeze. After a week of catching up on sleep, meeting the babies my friends produced during the campaign and – importantly – reacquainting myself with the local pub, it’s time to reflect.

Although as predicted I am not Mayor, the Greens did remarkably well, all things considered. The thousands of new voters turning out to vote for either Boris or Ken rightly made all the other parties nervous about their vote shares. When we arrived at City Hall on Friday afternoon last week, we had to rely on staring at the relative sizes of the Labour and Tory Assembly votes that were being displayed on plasma screens (via the patented London Elects scale-free bar chart system, which seems to be specifically designed to make candidates nervous). As we tried to work out what each extra chunk on our electronic columns meant in the real world, it did at first look like we would be facing the same level of squeeze that the Scottish Greens saw last year, and which resulted in them losing five of their seven MSPs.

However, as the evening wore tensely on, it became clear that our vote had stood up to the challenge, and that we’d added as many voters as the turnout demanded to keep a virtually identical vote share on the Assembly list as in 2004. In the final count we ended up with exactly the same number of AMs as before, and my vote share in the Mayoral race went up slightly, with around 25,000 extra first preference bringing me in at fourth place (up three on last time). Full results from London Elects here.

Other parties did not fare so well. UKIP and One London were wiped off the Assembly completely, and the LibDems lost two of their five AMs when their Assembly vote went down nearly 7%. Mayor candidate Brian Paddick lost them nearly 5%, too, with an overall reduction in voter numbers for the LibDems of more than 50,000. Our campaign, while it felt a lot like running very hard to stand still, at least saved us from being squeezed like this and, if our extra votes turn out to be from people switching from other parties, rather than new voters coming in to bash Ken or stop Boris, it may mean we are set for a hefty percentage increase in the Euro elections next year.

What’s concerning me in the short term, however, is what our new Tory Mayor will do now. I can guarantee some things we won’t see. Catchy ‘headline’ policies like a new routemaster bus, a no-strike deal with the RMT, and rephasing traffic lights to solve congestion, are all likely to fold quicker than you can say ‘ethical foreign policy’, and I predict we will see them shelved as quietly as possible by the new team in City Hall over the next few months.

On the other hand, Johnson’s pledge to cancel the new £25 congestion charge for gas-guzzlers can be achieved all too easily. After a few days off, I’ll be getting together with my colleagues on the 4x4 campaign and with cycling groups (the money raised by the new C-Charge was earmarked to support new cycling facilities for the next decade, so it’s their concern too) to work out our next move. Watch this space…

www.newstatesman.com - Farewell Ken

Okay, I’m going to be painfully honest and admit I have a very slim chance of becoming Mayor of London after the ballots are counted on 2 May. I’m being asked why I’m standing a lot at the moment, and the truth is it’s not because I think I’m actually going to be Mayor.

But, I do believe in giving voters a full choice of candidates in every election, and I know that many voters will want to send a strong message about wanting more progress on green and social justice issues, and that’s what a Green first vote is all about. Then, as I have blogged before, I am recommending people cast their final round votes for Ken Livingstone to save London from the horror of becoming Boris Johnson’s playpen for the next four years.

This is what I’m calling their ‘insurance’ vote, and I also have an insurance policy of my own in this election. I am fourth on our London Assembly londonwide list, and so I do have a realistic chance of becoming an Assembly Member after election day.

Provided we run a decent campaign (which of course I’m largely responsible for making sure of, working in the high-profile mayoral candidate role), I think we should be able to win the confidence of the same proportion of London voters as in the last council elections in 2006. This was 13.5%, and would just about be enough to put me in via the fiendishly complicated D’Hondt counting system used to assign the list seats.

The only problem – and it’s not a small one - is the pitifully tiny amount of attention actually given to the Assembly elections by the ‘Boris and Ken show’ obsessed press. Hardly anyone is aware we have a progressive, almost-fair, PR-based system for the Assembly election, or that they can vote for who they like and be sure their vote will count towards winning AMs for their chosen party. Hopefully this will improve though, as the campaign goes on, and of course I’m doing my little bit by posting this here.

It’s a double shame for us in the Greens that the Assembly is so invisible in this election, because our current two AMs, Darren Johnson and Jenny Jones, have made far and away the best job of being on the Assembly over the past four years. I have honestly never known two more hardworking, morally upright and astute politicians.

Unlike the part-timers from the other parties, they have worked tirelessly to make London better; and not just on green issues either. Some people are aware that Livingstone’s increased investment in cycling and home energy-efficiency is down to their casting vote over his budget each year. But how many know that they were also responsible for the creation of the Living Wage Unit, which calculates what a Londoner really needs to earn to pay for the basic essentials and enables campaigners such as London Citizens to go out and shame big employers like Citigroup into paying their cleaners decently?

The scale of their achievements came home to me the other day, when I was putting together this webpage, listing what they have got done. Yes, as they (probably) say, ‘you can take the woman out of the web manager job, but you can’t completely take the web manager out of the woman’, so fiddling with the London Green Party website is still my spare time hobby. The amount of material was so large I ended up putting it over four pages in the end, and it still needed a list of id-tagged contents at the top of each page.

So, while a Tory monopoly will still leave us with lots to do, my two hopes for this election are that, first, we retain a Mayor over which the Greens have an influence and, second, that I can be working alongside them in City Hall making it all happen.

To find out who you should be voting for on May 1st visit our Fantasy Mayor site.

www.newstatesman.com - I may not actually win...

The Guardian scored a bit of a coup this week, with three candidates for Mayor – including me - getting out their laptops over the weekend to take part in what can only be described as a stonking row on the Comment is Free website.

It all started when Ken Livingstone published a piece pointing out the uncanny similarities between Boris Johnson and Brian Paddick in the area of transport policy, and denouncing Paddick for announcing a policy to privatise the tube, something he called a “sharp change in Liberal Democrat policy in London”.

Brian is not one to take criticism lightly, and is also often to be found commenting on blogs in the small hours. (I’m almost positive the BrianPaddickDelivers who commented on my blog here is the candidate himself). So, it was no surprise to find one ‘BrianforMayor’ posting a long comment in response,standing up for himself and his transport plans.

Unfortunately, as I have written about here before (Porsche, Bozza and Paddick, 22/02/08, Ken’s accusations are spot on. However much he denies it, the fact is Brian IS in favour of privatising the tube. To be precise, taking it out of Transport for London’s control and running it on a ‘concession model’, the same way as the privatised buses, Docklands Light Railway and - until Livingstone bought it out recently - the Croydon Tram. Brian is proposing putting more of London’s transport systems out to tender, while Ken Livingstone is bringing more of them in-house, and this is a clear difference of policy, as well as a difference from LibDem views expressed in the past, and so is well worth pointing out in the course of an election.

Brian also stood up for his policy of opposing the new emissions-related congestion charge, in very similar vein toBrianPaddickDelivers on this site before. On Comment is Free, however, he was even less convincing, asking "why not graduate the charge like road tax?" despite this being precisely the plan: a zero rate at the bottom, with a large hike at the band G threshold of carbon emissions at 225 g/km. After many paragraphs of blog comments and several hustings, I still can honestly say I have no idea why he thinks the CO2 Charge is a bad idea.

But the most damaging accusation is that he is not pursuing the policies one might expect of a LibDem candidate leading an election campaign in London. It’s also the one where BrianforMayor has the flimsiest defence. His argument that "unlike the other two main candidates neither I or my partner have a car" is no kind of evidence of being a true LibDem on this issue.

Although I rarely dish out praise for people from other parties, the truth is that, on the £25 congestion charge, LibDem politicians were some of my 4x4 campaign’s earliest supporters, and LibDems along with Greens in local councils have been pioneering the same approach to parking charges around the country as well. With BrianforMayor calling these kinds of measures ‘playing politics with the planet’, there must be very many LibDem supporters out there - not to mention councillors and Assembly Members - wondering what happened to their candidate.

The to-and-fro of comments between Paddick and Livingstone continued for several very entertaining posts and that’s why I now owe newstatesman.com an apology. Because, I confess, I did succumb to temptation and get involved in the debate as well. In the end, I simply had to point out my own disappointment in Brian Paddick’s distinctly un-LibDem performance, and eventually took to my keyboard on Easter Sunday; what would otherwise have been a welcome day off (or at least a day spent reading the papers and generally catching up). I’m quite far down the page at 14.26 on March 23 if you’d like to have a read.
I do have a new development to report here as well. Today, while I was at a breakfast hustings with the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors, Darren Johnson and Jenny Jones (our two Green London Assembly Members) delivered an open letter to LibDem leader Nick Clegg, lamenting Brian Paddick’s desertion of LibDem positions on the environment. Without a move from Brian to change his mind on the Low Emission Zone, tubeprivatisation or the CO2 charge, environmentally concernedLibDem supporters may find themselves with no option but to vote for me, they argue.

I’m very far from being a LibDem candidate (although I was described by the Daily Mail as a ‘chain-smoking libertarian who supports licensed brothels’, so my liberal credentials are pretty strong) but, with Brian Paddick moving increasingly far from his party in a different direction, I do think they have a point.

www.newstatesman.com - The truth about Brian Paddick

Today I announced my recommendation for a "Sian 1, Ken 2" vote for Mayor of London this year, and here I want to explain why.

I’ll start by making it clear that Ken Livingstone is not my first choice for Mayor of London. I am my first choice for Mayor of London - more than anything London needs a real Green Mayor. But voters in this election do have two votes on the Mayoral ballot paper, and the way in which my supporters use their second votes could well be decisive on 1 May.

London faces a double threat in the next 43 days. First, we have the threat of Boris Johnson. As Mayor, he would prove to be a disaster for London, even on his own. But second, we also have the threat of a Tory monopoly over London.

For the past four years, Ken Livingstone has had to negotiate and compromise, because he has had to win votes from another party to pass his budget. Each year, the Greens on the London Assembly have driven a hard bargain and we have made significant progress in a number of social and environmental areas.

Boris Johnson, in contrast, would come with a built-in Tory majority, enabling him to do anything he likes over the heads of a powerless opposition in the Assembly.

And the truth is that what Boris Johnson likes is not what you or I like. He doesn’t share Londoners’ values; in fact in many ways he seems to hate them.

He hates that we celebrate each other’s heritage; he hates that we are trying to pass on a healthy environment to our children; he hates that we look after our most vulnerable neighbours; and most of all he hates that we all expect to share in our city’s financial success. And if he is elected he will do his best to dismantle and destroy all of that.

He stands for scrapping affordable housing requirements and abandoning higher charges for gas guzzlers. He opposed the minimum wage and the Kyoto treaty. He has tried to hoodwink London over airport expansion and he was a cheerleader for the war in Iraq. Johnson is no joke, and I cannot bear the thought of London under his cruel and careless control.

I’ll be the first to admit that Ken Livingstone isn’t perfect. I am, after all, standing against him and am deadly serious about wanting to replace him. I have spoken out on a number of occasions about my reservations. The Thames Gateway motorway bridge remains a dreadful plan that he won’t give up, and at hustings I’ve repeatedly expressed my concerns about his plans for jobs and economic development.

But he has shown again his willingness to negotiate over this last point and, under tough questioning from Green Assembly Member Darren Johnson at Mayor’s Question Time last week, he made new commitments to look again at how we can develop new industries in London to meet the challenges we face in the future, rather than rely solely on the financial services industry for our prosperity.

And despite all Ken Livingstone’s faults, the fact remains that putting Boris Johnson in charge would be so much worse.

London Greens share my view. So, as a party, we have decided to recommend that our supporters give their second vote for Mayor to Ken Livingstone not Boris Johnson. And of course we also welcome Ken Livingstone’s recommendation to his voters to give their second votes to the Greens.

So, if you care about having a fair London – socially and environmentally – and you want a Mayor who is accountable, not uncontrollable, you should vote for more Greens on the Assembly, then vote for me first for Mayor and use your insurance vote for Ken Livingstone.

www.newstatesman.com - Vote Berry... and Livingstone!

Last Monday I helped to launch the Fair Pay Network, a new coalition of anti-poverty and workers’ rights campaigners, of which I am now a proud patron.

At the launch in Westminster were fellow patron John Cruddas MP and the chair of the Fair Pay Network, Karen Buck MP, as well as representatives from network members NUS, Unite, UNISON, the Fawcett Society, and Oxfam. Not forgetting campaigners from probably my favourite organisation in the capital (after the Green Party): London Citizens, whose work on the living wage I’ve http://www.newstatesman.com/200712170001">championed here before.

During the event, I spoke about fair pay for women. I've become a patron of the Fair Pay Network to demand decent wages for all workers, but it’s a simple fact that women workers are furthest from this modest goal. Low pay is worst among part-time and temporary workers - the workforces that are majority female.

As a result, women in Britain are 14% more likely to be in poverty than men. Close this gender gap, and we're well on the way to a fair deal for all workers.

I’m also very proud of the Green record on this issue. Green London Assembly members were instrumental in setting up the London Living Wage Unit, which carries out the annual assessment of the pay level needed to provide the basics of life in the capital, and Green AM Darren Johnson last year helped persuade the London Fire Authority to vote for all the cleaners in its fire stations to be paid a living wage.

There are no environmental reasons at all for my involvement in campaigning for fair pay. It’s all purely for reasons of social justice and equality – but these other facets of the Greens’ philosophy seem to be too much for some to take in.

Extremely curiously, Channel 4 insisted on removing a section covering the fire station cleaners’ story from our ‘Political Slot’ – an annual three-minute broadcast, which was aired by C4 on the Thursday before the Fair Pay Network launch.

This year, we decided to focus our film on the achievements of our two London Assembly Members, with me topping and tailing the piece with a short plug explaining how, ‘when voters put the Greens in positions of influence, we really get things done.’

After clearing the script with the producers and recording the piece without incident, the final cut was deemed ‘too election focused’ by Channel 4’s lawyers. Fair enough, we thought, and awaited a version without my plugs for electing Greens. However, in the final cut, all that stuff remained in and, instead, the entire section on low pay had been taken out.

Very, very odd indeed. We still have no idea why, but it has made us wonder about rates of pay at Channel 4. Whistleblowers and conspiracy theorists, please get in touch (about this, not about free energy, 9/11 or Diana).

Oh and of course you can watch the original cut, including the section on living wages on our http://youtube.com/watch?v=sSSjGnj6g7k">Green Party YouTube channel.

www.newstatesman.com - Fighting for fair pay

It was always going to cause a stir. The new emissions-based Congestion Charge (the 'CO2 Charge') was confirmed by Ken Livingstone at a press conference at City Hall last week. I was there to witness him signing the order to bring in the new scheme, which means that, from 27 October, the most polluting band G cars (emitting more than 225 grams of carbon dioxide per kilometre) will pay £25 per day to come into the central London C-Charge zone. Meanwhile, the cleanest cars in bands A and B (less than 120 g/km) will get a 100% discount, at least for a while.

Acknowledging the part my campaign group the Alliance Against Urban 4x4s played in delivering public support for this measure, Ken Livingstone tried to hand me the pen used to sign the order as a souvenir. Unfortunately, the pen in question turned out to be a birthday present belonging to a member of GLA staff, so I wasn't after all able to place it in our campaign museum (along with our first spoof parking ticket and our collage of sweary emails from petrolheads) but it was a nice gesture.

Despite the long-overdue need for real financial incentives for cleaner cars, it is election time, so the announcement immediately prompted knee-jerk attacks from the other Mayoral candidates. Not only that, but gas-guzzler manufacturer Porsche has since threatened a legal challenge and both candidates have used this as an excuse to criticise the scheme again. Boris Johnson said he “understood where Porsche was coming from", while Brian Paddick added, "Porsche have a point."

I'm not worried by the legal threat at all. I don't see how a classic case of applying the 'polluter pays' principle could be classed as discrimination, especially since Porsche could easily make vehicles under 225 g/km but simply choose not to. And people will still be free to carry on driving big, polluting cars in central London; all the new charge means is that they will have to pay more for the extra cost of the pollution that they create. It all seems perfectly fair to me.

Legal experts agree that Porsche's threat is unlikely to come to much in the end. Barrister Nick Armstrong told the Guardian that 'unfairness' to Porsche owners was unlikely to wash with the High Court, saying, "On the face of it is difficult to see how Livingstone's decision falls outside the range of reasonable responses."

Reading through the newspapers on this, it's sometimes hard to tell the complainers from the proponents of the scheme. While the head of Porsche UK (against) is actually complaining when he says that the new charge is, "a green tax for those who own certain cars in London,” Ken Livingstone (in favour) is all for it when he says it would, “ensure that those who choose to carry on driving the most polluting vehicles help pay for the environmental damage they cause.”

Similarly, while Tony Juniper of Friends of the Earth (in favour) says, “It would be more appropriate for Porsche to put its effort into making a new generation of much less polluting vehicles,” Brian Paddick (against) says much the same with, “Manufacturers are already modifying their cars to come in just under the CO2 threshold.” Yes Brian, that's the very idea and, if they do, it will represent a real advance. The difference between the 348 g/km of CO2 chucked into the atmosphere by the Porsche Cayenne and the 225 g/km that would bring it under the threshold is significant, even if 225g/km is still too high for a truly sensible car.

I find Paddick's strident opposition to this measure the most bizarre development here. After all, while on the London Assembly, one of the earliest proponents of this measure was Lib Dem MP Lynne Featherstone. In fact, a lot of his policy-making is starting to develop a back-of-an-envelope feel, especially on green issues. His campaign has come up with a long, rambling list of alternative ways of cleaning up London's cars including (weirdly) off-setting schemes and a self-defeatingly large £10 congestion charge zone extending right up to the M25.

What's not in doubt is that this is definitely an election issue so, if some people don't like the idea, they can of course vote for one of its opponents in May, rather than for me or Ken Livingstone.

Having argued for these changes for four years with the Alliance Against Urban 4x4s, and having looked into almost every detail of the Congestion Charge for our report to TfL in 2006, I am very happy with the resulting scheme. My one quibble is that, at the bottom end, there is no confirmed date for when the zero-charge band will be tightened. That's why, in my response to the recent consultation, I proposed making it clear now how the emission bands at both the top and bottom ends would be strengthened over time.

However, while I am being constructive, both Johnson and Paddick aren't helping themselves or their campaigns with their attacks. When you find yourself arguing on the side of a petulant car company against the interests of ordinary Londoners, you should realise you've taken opposition for opposition's sake too far.

www.newstatesman.com - Porsche, Bozza and Paddick

Conference in Reading is remarkably quiet compared with recent Green Party get-togethers, or perhaps it just seems that way after leaving behind the excitement of the London election. The campaign is snowballing now, and the first full hustings took place on Thursday, hosted by the Green Alliance. You can watch the videos and judge for yourself how we all did on Friction.tv.

Away in Reading, we've been enjoying the international flavour of the conference. The 'Global Voices' panel on Friday afternoon saw the Venezuelan Ambassador to the UK, Samuel Moncada discuss global human and environmental rights with Dr Abdullah Abu Hilal from the Palestinian West Bank town of Abu Dis, a Jerusalem suburb on its way to being officially twinned with my home town of Camden. Also on the panel, talking about the ongoing problems with Shell in the Ogoni region of Nigeria, was human rights lawyer Patrick Okonmah.

Meanwhile, back in London, two new reports have been published that finally demolished the government's paper-thin economic case for expansion at Heathrow. Friends of the Earth have released their paper, “Heathrow expansion – its true costs”. This shows the massive faults in how the consultation documents value the impacts of expansion. The report shows that, even if you accept the government’s ethically dubious framework that reduces all the impacts of a new runway to amounts of money, the numbers still don’t add up.

The figure used to calculate the cost of climate change damage isn't the Stern Report’s 'business as usual' figure of £53 per tonne of carbon dioxide, but just £19 - a figure that assumes climate change itself will be minimised thanks to strong policies from the government. FoE calls this 'circular reasoning of the worst kind'. Assuming that expanding an airport does count as 'business as usual', correcting this error almost triples the climate costs from £4.8 billion to more than £14 billion, and wipes out the government's 'net benefit' at a stroke.

The FoE report also finds flaws in calculations of the future cost of flights. In particular, the most ridiculous assumption in the whole consultation – that the price of oil “falls from $64 per barrel in 2006 to $53 per barrel in 2030”. I read this and (after I picked myself up off the floor) went to check the oil price today - it was $95.

The second report, published by consultants CE Delft who were commissioned by campaigners HACAN to look more closely at the figures, is also damning of the government’s economic analysis. They found that gains to business and employment were being similarly inflated by not taking into account the fact that money, if not spent on via the expanded airport, would be spent elsewhere in the local economy.

These studies, exposing the economic con-trick BAA and the government are trying to pull, are important since these supposed benefits are their last positive argument, set against a vast pile of negative consequences of expansion. The population of London are virtually up in arms about the extra noise and air pollution that would result from more flights, and the climate change argument is completely clear – we can’t fight climate change and build more airports, full-stop.

We now have just a few more days until the close of the consultation. Like most such consultations, the questions have been put together in such a way that it’s very difficult to answer them and actually get your opinions across. The campaigners suggest answering all the questions with a simple ‘No’ and I'm urging everyone to do the same before 27th February. See the Stop Heathrow Expansion website for more on what you can do before then, including coming to the big rally in Westminster on 25th February.

www.newstatesman.com - A spot of Reading then Heathrow