Today was another hectic day at conference. Aren’t they all?
Caroline Lucas gave a superb keynote speech this morning. Always brilliant when she talks about the Labour government’s disgraceful and immoral foreign policy, she demanded that the whole Labour Party be called to account for the war – not just Blair.
Conference was slightly depleted today because lots of Greens have travelled to Manchester to join the huge anti-war march. They are picketing the Labour party conference, which is starting as our’s winds down. Earlier on, in her speech, Caroline had rightly pointed out that Greens are not that interested in the Labour leadership fuss. It drives us mad that people think Brown might be any different to Blair – as believable as Cameron creating an entire new Tory Party with a flick of his fringe.
The rest of my day has really been all about energy. Not expecting an immediate switch to a Green government we are spending a lot of time this year campaigning to change the government’s cosy relationship with nuclear power – whether it’s being wielded through dangerous weapons or used as an excuse not to get serious about saving energy and developing green technologies. The likely renewal of Trident is a particularly urgent problem.
This afternoon we had our first proper rehearsal for Faslane365 (the Greens are joining the Scottish Greens for a 2-day blockade of the nuclear submarine base later this year). Weeks of work fiddling around with props, and detailed planning worthy of the kind of military operation we’re totally opposed to, came off smoothly as a big gang of Greens came down to the sea front and did rather a good job of looking like a nuclear submarine. Scottish Green MSP Patrick Harvie came along to join us. He has already been arrested in 2004 for taking part in a blockade at Faslane, but says the Scottish police were very nice – interesting because I’m used to dealing with the Met.
My final event of the day, and the last formal event I’ll be involved in this conference has just finished: a fringe event about how we can change energy policy from the ground up by working with local councils to bring in small-scale renewable and combined heat and power (CHP) generation plants.
CHP can use a range of fuels, including fossil fuels, but saves a huge amount of energy by using both the heat and electricity generated in the plant in local buildings. Tom Tibbits our energy spokesperson pointed out that this is actually an old idea that is well worth revisiting and that Battersea Power Station in South London was originally built to both generate electricity and provide cheap heat to thousands of local residents.
Nowadays, CHP can be done without seriously affecting air quality and on a much smaller scale and (for now) the government is also providing grants to help councils and developers put it in. The money committed is pathetic (just £80 million compared with potentially £25 billion to be spent renewing Trident) so a key feature of our energy campaign is for our activists to help get as many grants taken up by local projects as possible, so that the funds are used up and the government has to admit that its energy policy is out of touch with what ordinary people want. We’ll see. There are also householder grants for renewable energy so apply now.
Well, that’s it from the Green conference. I think the coherence of this blog has declined in direct proportion to the amount of sleep I’ve had and the number of events I’ve been organising each day, so congratulations if you have managed to read this far in less than total confusion. Next week back to ‘normal’ life as a 4×4 campaigner.
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