First of all, 50% increase in bus fares people are being punished for using greener methods of transport. In Nottingham twice as many people use the bus for work than the national average, so this is really going to hit working people hard.  We should have seen massive investment in public transport.

Secondly we’re seeing significant tax rises, and most of that is falling on work, not on wealth. Bringing in a wealth tax, rather than taxing employment would mean that the knock on from the money raised wouldn’t end up on the cost of your cup of coffee. 

Finally on public services. There was hardly anything for local government. Nottingham, Nottinghamshire, and other councils across the east midlands have got huge holes in their budgets after 14 years of tory cuts.

Labour’s slogan was change, but we’re being given more of the same.

Councils desperately need more funding and aren’t getting it, so we’re going to see Labour closing more libraries and other public facilities in the near future. If people are being asked to pay more taxes they should be able to see it being spent on their local services.

If the government was serious about tackling climate change then we should have seen strong signals in the budget, but it was just more tinkering around the edges.

For more local views on the budget check out our latest interview on BBC iplayer.

The post Response to the 2024 Autumn budget appeared first on Nottingham Green Party.

Whichever of these factors motivated his comment, it is one that women should stand together to challenge. Ms Rayner has withstood an ill-founded allegation about her former property. Now she is to be accused of insubordination to a leader she has staunchly supported. Her rather more left wing sympathies than his have been accepted, no doubt, within the “tight ship” he is proud to run Ms Rayner is an outspoken politician who sets a bar for women in politics which we need to applaud.

I am proud to represent a party that stands for equality of opportunity for persons of diverse backgrounds and genders which is able to support and nurture its candidates and offer an election option to voters across the UK. If the major parties find decades of misogyny difficult to slough off, the Green Party offers a rational and well-managed solution.

Rosey Palmer 1st June 2024

The post Letters From the Frontline – Angela Rayner appeared first on Nottingham Green Party.

The objective of its message is to ensure that voters acknowledge gender as a priority when marking their ballot paper.

The Green Party is unique in its leadership’s gender balance. Carla Denyer is a co-leader. Caroline Lucas is widely know as a brave lone voice in Parliament safeguarding rights and values held by many. She is followed by Sian Berry in this election for Brighton and Hove. In Nottingham two women stand alongside two men, all offering their services to the city for the first time.

One of these candidates, Rosemary Palmer, has a history of residence in Jamaica, where Portia Simpson became Prime Minister and female heads of families have traditionally provided for and guided their youngsters in the absence of male counterparts.

Rosemary, with Diane, asserts the importance of acknowledging women’s potential in government. She underlines the need for gender equality, challenging the disproportionate impact of extreme economic need. 

• Rosey Palmer 30th May 2024

The post Letters from the Frontline – Diane Abbott appeared first on Nottingham Green Party.

Rushcliffe – Richard Mallender
Email Richard at rushcliffe@votegreen.uk

Nottingham South – Cath Sutherland
Email Cath at nottingham.south@votegreen.uk

Nottingham North & Kimberley – Sam Harvey
Email Sam at nottingham.north.kimberley@votegreen.uk

Nottingham East – Rosemary Palmer
Email Rosemary at contact@nottingham.greenparty.org.uk

Gedling – Dominic Berry
Email Dominic at gedling@votegreen.uk

Find out more about our candidates here.

If you’d like to help our campaign, you can:

• Make a donation
• Sign up as a volunteer
• Join the Green Party

If you would like more information please use the contact link at the bottom of the page or email contact@nottingham.greenparty.org.uk.

The post Nottingham Green Party Welcomes General Election with Full Slate of Candidates appeared first on Nottingham Green Party.

My contribution was published in part, with the rest of my statement as follows:

“What I see as a huge problem with s106 money is the length of time between when the sums are calculated, and when they are eventually spent. This is especially problematic as we’ve just gone through a period of high inflation. 

For example £500,000 pounds for a community hub in 2014 that is delivered in 2024 would only now be worth the equivalent of £375,000 in today’s money. Which would be bad enough, but you also need to factor in the uplift in property values. The same £500,000 community hub from 2014 would now cost you £766,000 to construct. Because of a ten year delay the community will now have to make do with something that is half as good as they were promised. Ten years isn’t unusual, or even particularly long in planning terms. After twenty years what has grandly been called a community centre might well be delivered as barely more than a scout hut.

In the same period these same factors work the other way in favour for the developers who are building and selling houses that are worth more and more for each year they delay.

It seems in law that planners can link sums payable to inflation, but this isn’t something that we see regularly, and it’s communities who are missing out.”

If you have any comments or want to discuss subjects such as s106 you can contact me on chair@nottingham.greenparty.org.uk

The post Councils yet to spend £93 million in S106 housing developer contributions appeared first on Nottingham Green Party.

Nottingham Green Party Chair Ben Gray says:

“The Green Party have detailed plans to tackle the realities of climate change, including simple things such as properly funding emergency responses and stopping new building on flood plains.”

“Even more importantly, the Greens are the only party committed to tackling the causes of flooding. We need to end the system that keeps hurting our environment and build a better alternative.”

So, what next? Record-breaking summer heatwave?

If you have any comments or questions on this story please email or telephone John Burgess on 07990013534.

The post Flooding in Nottinghamshire requires robust response appeared first on Nottingham Green Party.

A section 114 notice means that the council will be restricted in its spending and cuts are inevitable. The rich won’t suffer much, but others will.

Council Leader, David Mellen, blames the Tory government, and up to a point he is right. Over the last 13 years the Conservatives have cut £100 million from Nottingham’s annual budget, at a time when the cost of meeting responsibilities is rising. The council is legally responsible for the social care of adults and children. The number of people needing such care has risen significantly. So has the cost of providing it, and yet the Tory government continues to pile on cuts to local councils. 

The government cuts are so deep and so widespread that one in five councils in England think they will be in a similar situation to Nottingham within the next year.

Times are tough and are going to get tougher. We are short of money. When you are strapped for cash, you need to be careful. You need to be careful what you spend your money on, and you need to be careful to keep good accounts.

Our Labour council has not been careful as to what it has spent its money on, (even David Mellen acknowledges there have been mistakes) and they have not kept good accounts.

Robin Hood energy failed, costing the City millions. The Broadmarsh is partially demolished, with no funding to replace it, and the closure of the Castle happened on the Labour Watch.

When it was discovered that over £40 million had been transferred illegally within the council, Ernst and Young were commissioned to review the Council’s books. Despite calls from all sides for transparency, the council said that it would only provide a summary as “it might impact on further activity”. Such as what? You might ask.

Even the summary is damning. The financial management of the Council was found to be “not fit for purpose”. Ernst and Young uncovered a “work culture that was not properly following accounting rules”. They were also concerned about the council’s inability to find documents.

We still do not know what is in the full report, and we join others in calling for its publication.

The council has spent carelessly and been careless in its keeping of accounts.

The Government is principally to blame for the “bankruptcy” of our Council, but the Labour controlled council has made matters worse. 

Remember that this is a council of 55 seats, 51 of which are held by Labour. Before that they held 50. Democracy works best when there is a strong opposition to hold the governing party to account. The Labour Council have not been held to account. They should be. 

The Tory Government should be held to account at the next election.

As a Nottingham Green Party we will be fighting to make sure there is an effective opposition in the Nottingham City Council chamber, this city deserves better

The post Green Party Reaction to the Nottingham City Council Section 114 Notice appeared first on Nottingham Green Party.

The residents of Lady Bay voted in the Mallenders with a very healthy two thirds of the vote, with Labour coming in a distant second. Labour chose to stand candidates in Lady Bay despite not being able to find enough candidates for areas where they have more recently had more success, leaving the Tories unopposed by Labour in several wards.

The re-election comes after a tough time for us all as COVID provided a challenge for our communities. Whist being at the forefront of the community efforts in Lady Bay, Sue Mallender was also Mayor of Rushcliffe for a record two terms. Sue was the first (of many we hope) Green Party Mayors of Rushcliffe.

Richard and Sue are once again our only Green councillors across Rushcliffe, Gedling, and the city of Nottingham. Former Borough Councillor Ben Gray, who crossed the floor earlier this year (and is currently writing in the third person), was unsuccessful in his attempt to be re-elected as a Green councillor. He was able to increase the Green vote from 5% to 30% in an intensive short campaign, and is hoping to gain the 100 votes needed to win next time.

As a party we also saw strong results across Rushcliffe, Gedling, and the City of Nottingham, putting us in a strong position for future campaigns. This is with huge thanks to all of our candidates, volunteers, supporters, and voters!

The post Richard & Sue Mallender Re-elected in Lady Bay appeared first on Nottingham Green Party.

With bankruptcy staring it in the face, Nottingham City Council has had to accept the government dominating its every decision and dictating to it, as it approved its ‘Recovery and Improvement Plan’ on 25th January.

Our city council is no longer really in control of the running of its services, following government intervention to make it implement wide spread cuts, totalling £15.6m and efficiency-savings, including the loss of 272 full-time jobs, and sell £100m of council assets.

This intervention was needed because, following the failure of the council’s Robin Hood Energy company, at a loss of at least £38m to the council, Nottingham City Council could not set a budget for 2021/2022 that balanced. The council leader, David Mellen, has accepted responsibility.

This is a mess and financial disaster for our city. The council has been incompetent. The council nearly went bankrupt, which would have meant services being stripped to the bone, and thousands of job losses.

How did this happen? One reason is that the Labour Party has had the overwhelming majority of the seats on Nottingham City Council, 50 out of a total of 55, and therefore hasn’t had a good opposition to hold it to account. Maybe it became over-confident? More councillors from other political parties such as the Green Party would probably have forced the Labour council to make its decisions more carefully.

Following the extensive intervention of the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, which is now “in partnership” with the council, an external ‘Improvement and Assurance Board’ has been set up to oversee the council’s reforms, with external members appointed by the Secretary of State, Robert Jenrick. All this was introduced following a damning external auditor’s report in August 2020 after the failure of Robin Hood Energy. The external investigations found many inefficiencies in the way our Nottingham services are run.

The council had to submit a 3-year recovery plan to plug the £53-64m hole in its budget by 2023/24.

All these cuts and efficiency savings are going to mean a reduction in the services that the council can offer its citizens, for several years. And this follows 10 years in which the Tory government has cut funding of the council by £271m, forcing the council to make cuts. The council has also spent £28.4m on dealing with the Covid19 crisis, which has not yet been reimbursed.

This is a sad state of affairs for Nottingham. Not only is it humiliating, but we will all get less services from the council, and we will lose lots of buildings which were owned by all the citizens of Nottingham because the council owned them. Many of these buildings are used by community groups, small enterprises, organisations helping the community. They were also there to be used in the future if needed for the public good. Now they will probably become privately owned flats or offices.

The decision to set up Robin Hood Energy was done with the best of intentions, in order to be able to offer lower energy prices to its citizens. But going into the energy market, especially the ‘energy delivery’ section of the market, was risky, and the question has to be asked “How good was the advice that they took?”. Nottingham City Council invested £43m into Robin Hood Energy, with a further £16m of guarantees, and had to write off £24m of Robin Hood Energy debts. The other energy company set up by a council, in Bristol, has also collapsed.

Now the most important thing is that the cuts and policies imposed by the government on Nottingham do not damage our vital services to the people who depend on them, such as older people, families in need of housing or other support, children’s services, people who need social care at home, and people who rely on public transport.

The Green Party believes in strong well-funded local government. We believe that more power should be devolved to local councils, and councils should be able to raise more of their budget from local taxes, rather than it coming via the government.

Even before the government set up an external ‘Improvement and Assurance Board’ to control our city council, the government has been taking control of services away from local councils, taking the power back to London, and cutting the finance available.

Council incompetence and government austerity cuts – the losers are the people of Nottingham.

If you have any thoughts on the above piece, or you’d like to write for our website, send us an email: contact@nottingham.greenparty.org.uk.

Sign up to our mailing list for future updates from the Nottingham Green Party.

The post Nottingham City Council needs a strong opposition appeared first on Nottingham Green Party.

How has Nottingham or the East Midlands benefited by leaving the European Union? What new good things are going to happen in Nottingham, or the region, as a result of not being in the EU? More jobs, more houses, more income, more skill training? There is no reason to think that any of those things will come along.

The UK is a trading nation. We need to trade to survive. We only produce 60% of our own food, and the vast majority of our cars, mobile phones, white goods etc. are made abroad. People say that it would be better to bring manufacturing back to the UK, and the Green Party believes that we should produce as much as possible locally. But it wouldn’t be an easy transition. Would you be prepared to work for one tenth of your current level of pay? That is what workers who produce loads of the stuff we buy from abroad are paid. That’s why we import those things, and that’s why they are cheaper to import than to produce in the UK. Producing more things locally would need a radical transformation of our economy.

For our economy to thrive we need to trade, and to survive in overseas markets we need to be able to compete. That means that we need trade deals with big markets, to make it easy for UK exporters to compete in those markets. That is why we joined the EU 40 years ago. Around the world almost all countries form trade zones or agreements with the countries close to them. It is logical.

Technology operates on a huge scale now, as does science. Countries don’t become self-sufficient in Internet services, for example: they are international, and the scale needed is too big for one country. Another reason why we need trade deals.

So what are the alternative big markets we can form trade deals with? China, India, Brazil or USA? To agree quality regulations and a ‘level playing field’ the most likely partner will be the USA. If we open our markets to another country and they have free access to our market, but they pay their workers one tenth of our pay levels, and have no health-and-safety or environmental regulations, then their products will be much cheaper, so we will have to lower our pay and standards to compete in their market. The USA is closest to the UK in its standards and regulations. However, USA standards are lower than ours in many ways, so it would put pressure on us to lower our standards. The USA is much bigger and more powerful than us, so they will be able to dictate the terms of a trade deal. It will be in their interest, not ours. US big business will insist on terms that give them huge opportunities in our UK market. Unlike the EU in which we were an equal partner, we will have no vote and little power to shape the deal the way we want. The USA has already made that clear.

“But we have our sovereignty”, you might comment. What extra sovereignty do we have in the East Midlands or Nottingham as a result of Brexit? What extra sovereignty do you or I have? How is that ‘sovereignty’ going to make your life better? Most decisions about the East Midlands are made in London. We currently have a government that centralises power as much as it can, preferring to cut out even the Houses of Parliament from as many decisions as possible, let alone local Nottingham politicians. The Tory government has taken key powers away from local government, like control of education. It wants to take planning control away from local decision makers too. The Green Party believes in strong powers of local decision-making and decentralisation, but our country is moving in the opposite direction right now.

When we make a trade deal with the USA, or whoever, as we need to do, we will have to sign away huge parts of our sovereignty as part of that deal. We will have to guarantee that country or trading block access to our markets. We have to agree to maintain certain market conditions. For example if the UK decided that we want to bring a particular service into public ownership, to be run by councils or the government, because delivering it through the market wasn’t working (like the probation service) then a trade deal with the USA would probably prevent us from doing so. Once they had the right to compete in a market then the terms of the trade deal would forbid us from taking that right away from them. This would probably hugely affect the NHS. The government gets as many NHS services delivered by private companies as it can (like ‘Track and Trace’) and once the USA had a right to compete for that service it would have to stay in the commercial market. If the USA produced good using lower environmental or labour standards than the UK, then the UK might have no option but to lower our standards to be able to compete. Trade disputes in such deals are normally resolved in secret arbitration arrangements and the public have no right to know how those decisions are reached.

What about the EU? There is a lot wrong with the EU. The Green Party believed that we should have stayed in EU, but we recognise that it is run too much for the benefit of big business and banks, and it urgently needs reform. However, the perfect large trading block with high social welfare standards and strong environmental protections in line with Green Party policy does not exist. The EU is by far the nearest to our standards that exists. The UK belief in a welfare state, universally available healthcare, strong standards for employment to stop workers going back to Victorian working conditions, and good environmental protection policies, exist in the EU. The EU is a close fit with our values and culture and working practices.

So it is a mistake to believe that now we have left the EU that any new trade deal struck by our government is going to make life better for people who live in Nottingham. It is more likely to make workers’ rights worse. No one is claiming that it is going to bring new jobs or prosperity. Any ‘sovereignty’ that the government claim we have gained, that you may feel they can now use on your behalf, is likely to be signed away in a new trade deal in which the UK is the ‘rule taker’, a trade deal on other countries’ terms. The Tories always have been the party of big business. That is the stable that Tory politicians come from, and those are the interests that they look after.

So when the government starts negotiating with other countries be alert, listen carefully to what the terms of that trade deal are. Be ready to oppose trade deals which really only benefit big business, but not us residents of the East Midlands.

If you have any thoughts on the above piece, or you’d like to write for our website, send us an email: contact@nottingham.greenparty.org.uk.

Sign up to our mailing list for future updates from the Nottingham Green Party.

The post How has Nottingham or the East Midlands benefited by leaving the EU? appeared first on Nottingham Green Party.