Have not blogged over the weekend as I was busy on Saturday meeting our first ever Green Party of England and Wales member elected to the committee of the European Green Party, Steve Emmot, who I am sure will do an excellent job.
Afterwards, together with Steve, I attended the International Committee meeting where we heard a number of very interesting reports back from the recent EGP Council meeting in Malmo, Sweden, of which more anon. With the Copenhagen Climate Talks looming quickly into view, the European Green Party is also organising a number of events around this in Copenhagen. I have just discovered that the train for activists from London to Copenhagen is now fully booked. I know that a number of Green Party activists from Manchester and other places are going, together with a sizable delegation from Climate Camp and the Campaign Against Climate Change. I wish them luck, but with the announcement from the Singapore summit and Obama's latest statements on the US position, it seems that Copenhagen is going to be a complete anti-climax. This is to be deplored and no amounts of statements promising agreement next year are going to make up for the feeling that a historic opportunity has been lost. The world's leaders are truly fiddling while the planet literally burns.
On Friday, having co-authored a report on the Social Care Green Paper, I submitted the Green Party's proposals to the Dept of Health. The Green Paper is a major consultation on what should happen regarding the payment of social care for those aged over 65 in the future and also about the future of Attendance Allowance and Disability Living Allowance for those over 65. There was a suggestion of examining DLA for those under 65, but there was such a huge outcry from disability activists and others that the government dropped this proposal - for the moment. My local Age Concern branch in Lambeth has issued a good response to the consultation, as have many other disabled and older people's organisations across the country. The Green Party's response is below.
There is a huge looming question about the future of care in this country, with a decreasing number of carers, many of whom subsidise the state to the tune of millions, by providing care for their partners and relatives for a paltry carers allowance. The numbers of carers is shrinking rapidly, while the number of older and particularly disabled older people continues to rise. One suggestion is that many of the jobs in the future in the UK will be centred around health and social care. This will probably be the case but training and funding for this has got to be provided as a priority.
A basic suggestion from me would be that less 'vanity projects' should as Trident should be scrapped, along with neo-imperialist wars in the Middle East and elsewhere and this money ploughed into areas of expenditure which are desperately needed and which will provide employment for many young people - health and social care. Seems logical does it not? But not for the arms industry and those other non-productive lobbying groups who used to support New Labour but are now turning their amorous attentions towards the Tories.
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