I received an email from the MapRA Network advising me of some local Open Gardens in the National Garden Scheme. In this scheme, private gardens of national interest are opened to the public, in aid of charity. Here is a map of the local open gardens.

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For more information on the NGS visit www.ngs.org.uk The main charities supported are: Macmillan Cancer Support; Marie Curie Cancer Care; Help the Hospices.

What factors are increasing the price of oil, recently over $135 a barrel? Is it the speculative ‘unregulated’ oil trading that William Pfaff, writing in the IHT, criticises? Certainly the black magic of contract trading is a factor, a parasite on the ‘real’ market for the commodity. According to the BBC, OPEC has so far blamed price rises on speculators and says there is no shortage of oil. Likewise, Pfaff considers the present situation with rising prices dissimilar to the 1973 oil crisis, when OPEC announced that they would no longer supply oil to nations that supported Israel in its conflict with Syria and Egypt.

Paul Krugman, also in the IHT, is somewhat naive if he thinks that we are entering merely an era of scarce, expensive oil. This is more than an era. The buried sunlight that we like to burn is running out. Scarcity is the true reality. It’s more than Half Gone. Not only is the raw material that we are critically addicted to becoming more expensive as it becomes increasingly scarce, feeding our addiction in consuming oil is one of the major causes of global warming.

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You may have read a letter in the Kilburn Times from a residents in Queen’s Park questioning the sanity of planning regulations that prevent people from moving towards renewable energy. I bumped into Rupet Degas from the Brent and Harrow Green Party in Queen’s Park yesterday and he nearly split our sides laughing at the lack of joined up thinking. This morning he forwarded me a reply he wrote that has, as yet, not been published by the paper.

“It saddens me to hear yet another story of Brent Council’s ludicrous policy regarding solar panels (’Council policy has gone mad’, letter, Times, 12th April). For the Labour led council to declaim support for renewable energy and then deny planning permission to those who want solar panels on their houses is at best hypocritical, at worst utterly irresponsible and environmentally destructive. Solar panels don’t look much different from your average dormer window, so my guess as to why the council doesn’t want them up probably has something to do with bottom-line profit or some such nonsense. The fact remains that the sooner more people go to the initial expense of installing solar panels, the sooner prices will come down and everyone will have them. I’d buy shares now if I were you before the Labour boys finally wake up and want a piece of the action. Joking apart, self sufficiency should be strongly encouraged and advocated by the council, but without any Greens at the table to get things moving, what hope is there? Look on the bright side though - at least you can watch Rupert Murdoch’s propaganda channels without the fear of Brent Council asking you to remove your satellite dish! Funny that.”

Rupert Degas
Green Candidate for Queens Park
Brent and Harrow Green Party
PO Box 42434
London NW10 3XT
rupert@qsound.uk.com

The Labour Action Team have some hot Election Information for the citizens of Brent - they are ernestly distributing glossy colour A4 ‘Election Information’,erm, leaflets? newsletters? I don’t know what you’d call it. The glossy reminded us it was important for us to vote and we were not to be talked out of it by anyone. What was intersting was the lack of a logo. These materials where not branded Labour - the logos and the slogunogos were missing too.

The glossy is part of a series of an infoglossation campaign that Labour hope will get picked up and read by the voters in Brent. The leafet shows in ernest several of the acheivements of the Labour Council in Brent over the last electoral terms. It devotes a full page to making a contrast with Liberal Democrat and Conservative councils accross London.

Some times it is better not to make a contrast however. In attempting to show that the Liberal Democrats are soft on crime a comparison is made between the shamefully low 26 AntiSocialBehaviourOrders issued in Lib Dem controlled Islington and the not much tougher 33 issued by our Labour Council here in Brent over the same time period.
Team Red highlight the following acheivement areas in this leaflet: recycling, but not green issues in any wider sense; quality of environment as street care along with education results and access to learning resources.

The Labour public information machine knows no bounds and more leaflets are promised over the coming weeks. I’m already looking forward to the next one - it looks like it will be called ‘Your voting guide to the next four years’

also in early march I received the Liberal Democrat Focus On…Mapesbury newsletter. This newsletter was the first opportunity to meet the Lib Dem candidates for the Mapesbury wards. The candidates are Chris Leaman, Sami Hashmi and Hayley Matthews.

The BELDs expect that a Labour council would again increase council taxes significantly after the local elections. The LDs (as we know) propose a ‘fairer system’ of local income taxation.

Local education and student finance also make an appearence in the newsletter. Sarah Teather has been consistantly raising the issue of numbers of school places in the House of Commons. And the Lib Dems have been against tuition fees, as highlighted by Hayley Matthews.

The newsletter also draws our attention to a number of quality of environment / quality of life issues that the BELD have been responding to in the Mapesbury area.