[The Weeping Angel]

It seems some of their councillors have all the qualities of Reform councillors.

https://www.birminghamdispatch.co.uk/gr ... -officers/

Former mayoral candidate arrested for assaulting three police officers

Siobhan Harper-Nunes, a Green party councillor for Ladywood and former mayoral candidate, has been charged with assaulting five people including three police officers. Police were called to reports of disorder in Edgbaston at around 5pm on Thursday, near the junction of Monument Road and Hagley Road, after which the 66-year-old was arrested. In the days since, she has been posting her version of events on social media — we can’t share this for legal reasons, but Harper-Nunes seems to have no such qualms. She’ll be up in Birmingham Magistrate’s Court on 10 September for a plea hearing and has been suspended from the Greens, pending an investigation. Harper-Nunes is big on the local business and political scene. Not only did she run for the West Midlands mayoralty in 2024, she’s the founder of Shakti Women, a ‘women’s empowerment agency’ for businesswomen and also the vice chair of the Birmingham Race Impact Group. (ITV)

[Tubby Isaacs]

Someone ought to bring in a big windfall tax or something.

[Boiler]

You could certainly see and smell the smoke from Holme Fen this morning, several miles north of it.

[Tubby Isaacs]

Interesting to hear about Burnham's "silence on the climate crisis" from the Greens. Polanski's whole schtick has been to sideline the hard climate change stuff and concentrate instead on Corbynite stuff.

[Oboogie]

Interesting to hear about Burnham's "silence on the climate crisis" from the Greens. Polanski's whole schtick has been to sideline the hard climate change stuff and concentrate instead on Corbynite stuff.

Yes, if your chief concern is climate change Starmer's Labour were the best party to support, now the LibDems are probably the most vocally Green, whatever, it's certainly not The Greens.

[The Weeping Angel]

These people are psychopaths.

[davidjay]

I normally wouldn't bother about an extremist party principling itself into irrelevance, but while they're still getting media attention, these clowns cause everyone on the Left to be lumped together as anti-Semetic fanatics.

[Oboogie]

I normally wouldn't bother about an extremist party principling itself into irrelevance, but while they're still getting media attention, these clowns cause everyone on the Left to be lumped together as anti-Semetic fanatics.

Which was a major factor (not the only one!) for making Labour so repellent to the electorate in 2019.

[Abernathy]

[quote=Oboogie post_id=115862 time=1787009911 user_id=65]

[quote=davidjay post_id=115861 time=1787001381 user_id=68]
I normally wouldn't bother about an extremist party principling itself into irrelevance, but while they're still getting media attention, these clowns cause everyone on the Left to be lumped together as anti-Semetic fanatics.
[/quote]

Which was a major factor (not the only one!) for making Labour so repellent to the electorate in 2019.
[/quote]

This is true. In fact, I think what we can see happening to the Green Party under Polanski is more or less identical to what happened to the Labour Party during the Corbyn years. .Corbynites used to brag about the increase in membership numbers, but what was behind those numbers was a considerable influx of Trots, Tankies, SWP types, and other cranks, many of whose attitudes to the boundary between anti-Zionism and outright, racist anti-semitism was, shall we say, somewhat carelessly porous. These cranks found a welcoming home in the Labour Party, and it would now appear, in the wake of the work that Starmer did to expunge the stain of anti-semitism from the party, that they are finding an alternative welcoming home in Polanski's Green Party.

[Tubby Isaacs]

The Greens situation is much worse. Labour would never have courted the likes of 5 Pillars in a by-election, and Jez had much stronger sense of the boundary than Polanski does. Plus lots of the worst people wouldn't have joined Labour in any situation.

[mattomac]

Polanski’s approach a bit like Farage is to say that the establishment is attacking them and it’s supporters repeat it.

[Oboogie]

Polanski’s approach a bit like Farage is to say that the establishment is attacking them and it’s supporters repeat it.

For a while now, I've been anticipating a quiz (perhaps on Have I Got News For You) where the contestants are presented with some quotations and asked to identify if they're from Polanski or Farage - I think it'd be quite challenging.

[Youngian]

I'll start: 'Hooray for car parks, down with houses and green spaces,' Reform or Greens?

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cj9dxgne4d7o

I'm of course missing a lot of nuance of the situation but it does show how populist protesters very soon leave big chair. Implementing choices some voter won't like is what the establishment do, man.

[Yug]

I'm sort of with them on this. For smaller towns, building on car parks is economic suicide. Not everyone needs to use a supermarket* every time they go shopping for stuff. Will people drive somewhere like Selby or Howden with pay-and-display car parks, or Goole with its free car parks? Cos the one place they ain't gonna drive to is the place that turned its car park into a housing estate.


*and in a lot of places the supermarkets with car parks aren't conveniently situated for the town centre.

[Tubby Isaacs]

I think out of town shopping centers can make sense when there are fairly small towns. I remember being struck by the amount of those in South Wales. Easy to say that it should have all been in the centre of Aberdare, Merthyr or wherever, but towns like that wouldn't necessarily be able to support an M&S, Next or whatever. If you site them outside town in a reasonably convenient place, then the towns together can support those shops.

But smaller towns can support a number of supermarkets. Aren't there others in St Ives and Huntingdon?

[davidjay]

I really do hate the number of small towns with a new housing estate at one edge and a supermarket/retail park/leisure development at the other. But I am getting old and crotchety.

[Youngian]

Being able to walk to a supermarket next door to your house sounds just the ticket when you're old and crotchety.
If introducing park and ride in a small town to reduce air pollution and congestion is all too much hassle to make a better world for our grandchildren, its no surprising the global birth rate is plummeting. What's the point?

[Oboogie]

If you're concerned about the death of the High Street as so many politicians profess to be, your starting point is to ensure that the public have easy, affordable access to your town centre. It's not complicated, if you make it difficult for them to park, more of the public will spend their money elsewhere.