I joined the Green party over 30 years ago because I saw the unavoidable consequences of the way we run our economy. Destruction of nature and society for short term financial gain punish the vast majority of people everywhere. Climate disasters and war are the direct result of business as usual being continued beyond the point of sustainability. We in the west have gained greatly from industrialisation, but that can not go on. Resource wars have been fought for years already, Governments have known about this for decades and have invented reasons to go to war rather than negotiate for peace.  

Several of my pro peace, anti Netanyahu Tweets have been taken out of context by The Times, rehashed by other groups and then reported many times on the BBC. I have complained to the BBC - where I worked for over a decade, often on news programmes - and have not even had an automated reply. My party was pressurised by pragmatism to ask me to take them down. I couldn't even find them.

People say Greens are 'Left' leaning. I disagree and have said so since 1992 when I first stood for election. Greens stand for actions that protect the planet and every one and every thing on it. I love technology, I have been an engineer and lecturer for all my working life. I can see how appropriate use of technology can fix the mess it has created as it made us rich. We can have a high standard of living with new thinking, old ways simply don't work any more as everyone can see with rising prices, reduced social services, pandemics and 'one in  a hundred years' freak weather events happening everywhere all the time. Environmentalism is not left or right, it is essential. 

I am utterly shocked, upset and indeed frightened to see the twisting and outright negative inventions made by the 'right' - whatever party they claim to support, in aid of raising or protecting the market value of their particular interests. This is not left or right, it is greed, business as usual, ignorance of the limitations of planetary resources and the impact on people with no voice of using them indiscriminately. 

The Youtube, X and other coverage I have seen of Elon Musk's public meetings over the last few months have not shown me megalomania, greed, arrogance or any evidence of any of the charges made against him. I find it hard to watch Trump's speeches because he deliberately pushes my buttons, but, what I have seen tells me he is no angel, but, he has teamed up with Musk - a man who has done the most on the planet to protect it, so he can't be all that mad.

War makes money, peace is not news. Greens can change this.

Promoted by Melanie Collins on behalf of Simon Anthony (Green Party), both at PO Box 78066, London, SE16 9GQ.

 The Green Party's manifesto for the 2024 General Election outlines their positions on various issues, including Palestine and Islamophobia. Below are detailed summaries of their stances on these topics:

1. Stance on Palestine

The Green Party's manifesto takes a strong stance on the Israel-Palestine conflict, emphasizing the need for justice, human rights, and international law. Key points include:

• Immediate and Permanent Ceasefire: The Green Party calls for an immediate and permanent bilateral ceasefire between Israeli forces and Palestinian groups.
• Political Solution: They advocate for a durable political solution that ensures security and equal rights for both Israelis and Palestinians, viewing this as essential for long-term peace.
• Recognition of Palestine: The manifesto supports the recognition of the state of Palestine and calls for an urgent international effort to end the illegal occupation of Palestinian land.
• War Crimes Accountability: The Green Party pushes for the investigation and prosecution of war crimes committed in the conflict. They believe there is strong evidence to support claims that Israel's actions in Gaza amount to genocide.
• End to UK Arms Exports to Israel: They demand an end to all UK arms exports to and military cooperation with Israel, arguing that such actions make the British government complicit in war crimes.

2. Stance on Islamophobia

The Green Party is committed to combating Islamophobia and other forms of hate crime. Their manifesto outlines several measures to address these issues:

• Condemnation of Islamophobia: The Green Party condemns the rise of Islamophobia and antisemitism, recognizing the importance of tackling hate crimes and opposing societal divisions.
• Support for Religious Expression: They support the right to religious expression and pledge to work with religious communities to defend the safety of places of worship.
• Scrapping Prevent: The manifesto includes a commitment to scrap the Prevent strategy, which they view as counterproductive and discriminatory.
• Legal Protections: The Green Party aims to defend the Human Rights Act and ensure continued access to European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) protections in domestic courts. They also plan to restore legal aid for public law cases to help individuals uphold their rights in court.

These positions reflect the Green Party's broader commitment to human rights, social justice, and international solidarity.

 

Statement to voters

An elected representative should be a person who has the information required to come up with solutions that address issues raised by constituents - not well funded lobby groups or party whips. Greens are not only environmentalists but also independent individuals.

Simon Anthony was born in Hanwell in 1957. He grew up in Ealing and joined his parents in preventing a road scheme that would have ripped the Heart out of Ealing. In Nottingham he worked to prevent a fourth Trent crossing, both local campaigns took 20 years to win.

He left school at 17 and worked as a Post Office Apprentice before spending over a decade as a BBC Broadcast VT engineer, then thirty years part time as an Acorn computer journalist, Special Needs software writer, Web Developer, Cambridge QA Engineer, an IT college lecturer, teacher and parent.

He joined the Greens as a life member in 1991 and was general election candidate in 1992 and 2005 in Rushcliffe Nottingham, also standing for election to the European Parliament and in local authority elections in Nottingham and in London.

Simon loves all aspects of technology and science in general and has attended many hundreds of BBC Promenade concerts.

His second wife is Iranian. They met through a dating agency, surprisingly in Australia, where they lived for over four years returning five years ago to live in Barking. Between them they have four adult offspring and two grandchildren.

Personal statement:-

Individual voters have their own lives to lead, they may not have the time, interest or the information with which to see the best solution - an MP should to that job for them.,

My job as an elected Green representative would be to listen to the issues raised by all voters - not just for the Greens. I would see how they could be addressed in an environmentally sustainable and socially, multi culturally acceptable way. I may not have the answers myself but I will have the time and the support required to find the right people to ask.

I would check the validity of the requests by establishing the level of support for them. It is not possible to give everyone everything they may want - simply because the desires may well contradict each other. Also, it could be that I may be asked to do something that does not feel very ‘Green’. In that case I would dig deeper and see why the question was asked and find a better, greener way to address it - one that would not only be acceptable to everyone but also be possible to achieve.

I do not believe that anything should be rejected on a matter of cost. There are many ways to get things done and some of them do not need financial support. Communities would be encouraged and enabled to continue and expand their work - not as a charity, but as a social benefit for all - indeed a universal right.

Greens address the causes of problems, not just cover them up or clear away the mess as if nothing had happened.

Response written before publication of the Times article 7/5/2024

In the comments made in past Twitter threads I compared the situation of being invaded by one country to the situation regarding Israel and Palestine. I also compared it to the German Nazis invading France, and further the effect of what may have occurred if the Nazis invaded Great Britain. I believe that the people who have been invaded would fight back in some way shape or form. This is legal under international law. That is as far as my comparison was intended to go. 

I do not under any circumstances, support violence of any type by anybody.  I condemn all forms of violence.

I am pacifist and it is my considered opinion that the only way to deal with situations of this type is through negotiation and an attempt at reaching a common understanding.

I call for an immediate cessation of the Hamas and IDF violence, the return of hostages from both sides and the setting up of a truth and reconciliation system as a matter of urgency.

My Father lived in occupied Jersey during the second world war. His family managed to co-exist without violence with the Nazi occupiers. This did not make them collaborators but it did allow society and the mechanisms of civilisation to continue as far as that was possible.

I hope and believe that if cool heads can be kept on either side of any conflict, it should be possible to reach some degree of understanding. If however this is not possible, I do not consider myself capable or indeed willing to make any further suggestion. I myself however, would not use any sort of violence and I would make that clear.

In many other tweets I have intended to make the following points:

Pressure groups come in all types, one group is never representative of the entirety of the people they may claim to represent. This is clearly true of both the Israeli and Hamas leaderships.

Further, supporting a group does not and should never be used as an indication of support for every action taken by any member of that group.

It is not antisemitic to disapprove of the actions of the Israeli Government.  

It is not pro Hamas to wish Palestinian people to live in peace.

I stand by my comments and am happy to enter further debate.

Dear Barking

I am your green party candidate for Barking and I really don't expect to be elected, but don’t bet on it. Why, am I standing then? The reason is that I do not trust anybody else to do the job any better than me.

The issues are so very important that I can’t just stand by and let the same lot, or a different version of the same lot, make exactly the same mistakes they kept making over the last few decades. 

The ‘greys’  only think the electorate can cope with simple concepts, like more police would mean lower crime - which it could, or, better pay for teachers and medical staff would result in better educated kids and fewer ill adults - which again would be true, but, the big question of ‘why’ is considered too complex for the voters to grasp, so it is not even mentioned.

 

Oddly, most of the pressures we are all suffering from come down to the way we treat our environment, well, I would say that, but I have been saying so since I first stood as a Green in 1992. Finally now at last even the greys know there is a climate crisis but they don’t mention that either  - let alone the other effects of the way we have been ‘growing’ our economy, and they certainly don’t want to spend any money putting things right. All they do is offer big budget quick fixes rather than asking why do people get ill, why do schools not manage to educate children and why are there so many criminals and so few police on the beat. Greens ask these questions.The greys just want votes for hiding the evidence.  The ‘Change’ we offer is that we shall address the causes. 

Greens know it will cost a lot of money, more than the greys want to spend. If we had been heard in 1992 it would have been far less expensive and far less damage would have been done to our and everyone’s society, environment and life support systems. Greens have fully costed, far greater sums, and allocated the money for these headline issues

This is all detailed in our manifesto - available in three degrees of depth from https://greenparty.org.uk/about/our-manifesto/ But - you don’t have to read them. That’s our job. All we are asking you to do is to trust with your vote so that we can find the sustainable, environmental and socially equitable solutions that the greys keep blaming on other people.- that’s what a government is paid to do. 

All you need do is Vote Green. We do the hard bits.

       Simon Anthony 
    green@torty.org.uk

  Candidate for Barking

Promoted by Melanie Collins
on behalf of Simon Anthony
          GreenParty
London - PO Box 78066, 
       London SE16 9GQ

 

I have been a climate activist since before it was called climate activism. I first stood as a Green Party candidate in the UK General Election in 1992. It was not an easy thing to do. I lived in the constituency of the longest serving Conservative MP - Keneth Clarke. I stood no chance of election. I stood even less chance of being heard by press or public, but I tried and at the hustings, Mr Clarke personally thanked me for 'Supporting Democracy'. I replied that I wished he would consider the possibility that he was wrong about Conservative principles. In 2005, once I had recovered from that crushing defeat, I stood again, this time with more assurance in my ability to perform in public on the 'Hustings' - which is the one chance I have to address issues in public with all the candidates. I had not done very badly in 1992 but I hoped for a better showing in 2005. By then there had begun to be at least a small amount of public understanding - at least of the points we 'Greens' were trying to make. 

Simply put, Malthus was right. 

We live with a limited set of resources in the ground and limited space to throw away our waste. Once we use it all up, we will all die. I said I was putting it simply, but it is obviously true. Things run out. In 1992 we were up against the entire mass of the infrastructure of the western World, and indeed the rest of the world too as everyone hurtled along the same path - of growth. Here is another obvious fact, again one which you can test yourself - If you get more of something, then if resources are limited where you are, you must have taken them from somewhere else. For some reason 'we' all thought that the people who we were taking stuff from would be happy to let us do so for ever and not twig that maybe they were suffering.

Keeping things simple here, I shall call on your personal experience and that of any older person. 1962 was the last 'real' snow in the UK, it has snowed since, but that lasted on the streets for months. People wore hats, gloves, scarves as well as thick coats. These are hardly seen at all these days. There used to be ice on the inside of windows, breath was always visible inside a bedroom, bed clothes had to be thick and there had to be a lot of them. Making a bed was a task not just because the Duvet hadn't made it to the UK back then.

Think of the shape of a hockey stick, I know nothing of the game but I do recognise an exponential growth curve when I see one. Yes, there are parts in the graph of the rise in temperature of the planet that do not climb, or do indeed fall but these are only a small fraction of the larger graph. The 11 year cycles of the Sun can be seen, larger views show the volcanism of the Earth, the orbit of the solar system through the local group all do show up in sufficiently long range scientific observations. I do not claim otherwise. I do however point out that the rate of change in this internationally recognised 'Anthropic Epoch', which is visible to today's geologists, is vastly faster than at any time and in any scale view of the recoverable history of the planet. Even the asteroid strike which, together with increased volcanism, killed off the Dinosaurs took at least many thousands of years if not several millions to totally snuff them out. By the way, the small dinosaurs evolved in to Birds. 

Easily seen and totally reproducible records, Tree Rings, ice cores, written history itself, films made by Hollywood in which everyone worse hats - show that things are getting warmer very fast indeed. I myself was nearly killed by tiles falling off our roof in London when a Tornado, OK, a small one, hit our house.

Floods, Fires, rising sea levels, stronger winds, loss of species, any number of clearly evidenced facts show that the planet is warming. Records show that we are doing it.

Why then is there so much talk of a 'climate hoax'? I have not read or studied all of them as it is a challenge to read things that make me so angry, however, the arguments against environmental protection are I believe aimed at the protection of the status quo keeping business as usual as possible. Sadly I am certain that there are very many players in the Fossil Fuel economy who will do anything to keep their profits high at any price to anyone else. I have faced them for decades. I have been first ignored, then laughed at, now we are being attacked because the big bad guys out there know, and have known for decades that we are right.

Gaslighting is a term I have learned recently, it is the act of making people think they did not see what they actually experienced. I think this is an appropriate term to use in this situation.  Everyone knows the facts, but most are terrified - often rightly - of the consequences of trying to put matters right - and also blind to the speed at which it is essential to act.

I call on all readers to stop bothering with the carefully selected data touted by a decreasing number of people and look to the facts of their own lives, the shortages, the changed weather - which is driven by a changing climate - the increase in population and population movement - warned about for decades by Greens everywhere and now a topic our UK Government is trying to sweep under the carpet. Just how obvious do the signals have to be before people show their governments that we have to do things differently from now on ?

Now here comes the good bit:- We know how to fix things, indeed you know how to fix things in your own life and working environment. For example, look at how to increase efficiency in the production of local produce. Reduce exports of anything you need to eat or use yourselves. Leave Oil in the ground as much as you can. Use some of it to make sustainable power collectors - of Solar, Geothermal, Wind and Sea waves. There is no shortage of energy and never can be, its just that we are using it badly. All the answers are out there, no more need to be discovered and, even better than that, more are invented and recovered from history every moment - we just have to use them. The changes shall be radical - because we have left it so long before doing anything about our growing problems. Jobs will change, jobs will go. Retraining shall happen. This shall take time and so a safety net for people's income, a basic income, is essential. That is a governmental job.

There are many green foreseen changes that have already happened to our daily lives here in the UK. Covid was one such prediction, and more diseases like that are expected as a result of humans going too far. We pushed people in to eating, or at least in to close contact with animals that were normally left well alone. Trans-species diseases resulted - as we always said they would. The best way you can protect your selves and your future is by voting - or at least telling your representatives to go, Green. 

I say a Green vote is the most effective - because the history of leaving it to government as usual has had its day.

Simon Anthony 

    green@torty.org.uk

     Barking, Dagenham 

and Havering Green Party

Prospective Parliamentary 

  Candidate for Barking

I am a long time lover of space. I am old enough to have watched Apollo 8, I was born while Sputnik was in orbit. I was delighted by the moon landing and expected a very great deal more of these wonders in the very near future. The Space Shuttle was indeed amassing, but from the outset I worried about the solid rocket strap on motors and the incredibly fragile shuttle tiles. The ISS is incredible still to this day but none of what we have is more than a shadow of what was expected back then.

Back then the environmental damage caused by the western form of everyday life and business was just beginning to become noticed. It has taken fifty years to be taken seriously, but I knew how incredibly important it was from the early 1990s. I first stood as a British Green Party candidate in 1992. I stood no chance, I stood against the longest standing MP in British history - the then Health Minister, or was he the Secretary of Defence by then, anyway it was Kenneth Clarke who I shared the Hustings podium with. 

It took me many months to recover from the stress of that defeat, not that it was in anyway a shock that I lost, but the simple pressure of being, even for a moment, considered to be on a par with such a political icon drained me deeply. He thanked me for ‘supporting democracy’ I asked him if he could consider the chance that he may be wrong about his political convictions.

I saw him again in 2005 when I next stood. He remembered me, or at least claimed to - which was nice. It was surreal to have a pre hustings drink with him, but far less scary this time. Had I the chance to say words that were not answers to specific questions, I would have said that our only hope of continuing to live on this planet - what with the idea that Growth as the only answer to everything - would be to go in to space. There we could find all the resources we could ever need. There we could do what we liked and not mess anything up. But, I did not get the chance.

I am standing for a third time at the next general election, over thirty years later. This time I shall not let my natural voice just answer the questions. I shall push for all I am worth towards space. I can clearly see that it is impossible, even with the best will in the world, to get the people of the world to give up any aspect of what is seen to be ‘the good life’ no matter what happens. 

I don’t want people to have to face the disasters, the apocalyptic nature of the flooding of Libya, the devastation caused by wild fires, the tornado that took the tiles off the roof of our house in London which only just missed hitting me, to say nothing of the human caused but not human made Covid issues. It looks as if it would take even more than what has already happened to make people tell their governments that they see the problem. There should be no need to wait for the end of everything civilised on this planet to make people change the way we do things. 

Forget politics, forget parties, we must act together.

I have worked as hard as I can to bring about consensus between whatever argumentative groups I found, but I have not got very far in these three decades. However, my first great hope for the future is at long last looking as if it will be able to save us all.

Industry is coming to the rescue. The very mechanisms that have driven the planet to the very brink are now realising that ‘growth’ at least on Earth is counter productive, destructive, bottom line - expensive. Going Green, going in to space, is now seen as the least expansive and vastly more profitable route to take.

I applaud this new way of thinking, even though it is fifty years late  - after all, they knew first that this would happen. Lets hope they have their plans well laid. We need them all.