At one o’clock Monday morning, I counted the votes to select a parliamentary candidate for the Green Party in the Oxford East constituency, to replace Peter Tatchell who had to stand down due to health reasons. Announcement to follow in due course, soon.
From one o’clock to three in the afternoon, I attended the Green group of councillors to discuss budget proposals for Oxford City Council and Oxfordshire County Council, and election strategies.
From seven to about nine o’clock in the evening, I was glad to be at the launch of the inaugural issue of the Oxford Left Review. There I talked with three journalists (among other radical right-on comrades), from Aamulehti of Tampere, Corriere della Sera of Italy, and Samoa’s Environment Weekly. Very nice people they were.
Here is the table of contents for the inaugural issue of the Oxford Left Review (Issue 1, February 2010):
- Samual Burt: Equality and Republican Ideals
- Peter Tatchell: Voter Reform and the Left
- Stuart White: An End to Labourism
- Cailean Gallagher: Call to Scottish Labour
- Matthew Kennedy: The Putney Debates
- Jeremy Cliffe: A Fourth Way for Labour?
- Brian Melican: Germany’s Fragmented Left
- Christopher Jackson: The Return of Keynes
- George Irvin: Time for a Tobin Tax
- Kaihsu Tai: The Science of Copenhagen
- Sophie Lewis: COP15 – Activist’s Perspective
- Matthew Kennedy: Žižek review
- Roberta Klimt: Bennett review
- Noel Hatch: Today’s Lost Generation
Pace Radford, it was typeset in Palatino, to good effect dare I so say. All references to non-L——r party affiliation were cautiously scrubbed, for which I am (to be frank) a bit miffed. Despite that, it was an excellent effort by the editorial team in setting off this worthy initiative.
Near midnight, I refined my letter to the Oxford Times about public ownership of assets, after email-shots to follow up all the interesting discussions I had for the last 24 hours of politicking.
It is amazing that I am not getting paid to do any of this, but certainly it has been more fun than staring at molecules on the computer. Citizenship is a full-time job, and the work of a citizen is never done….
Books
Political events since mid-2009, especially the parliamentary expenses scandal, accentuated long-standing symptoms in the British body politic, eliciting predictions of doom (in the form of further voter disengagement, among others) and calls for reform. Among these, many an opinion poll suggested the possibility of a hung Parliament, and many a campaign group called for a referendum on reforming the electoral system of first-past-the-post (FPTP). Peter Tatchell outlined the case for electoral reform in the inaugural issue of this Review. Beyond this, the wide Left ought also to think a few more steps ahead. Read the rest of this entry »
