DEM not gonna CON dis NATION: Rolling UK politics in the short-lived post-Murdoch era

Is homeopathy and other alternative therapies making up a sizeable chunk of the NHS still Green policy on Health, or did they quietly drop it after the last election after seeing Jeremy Hunt accused of the same?

But, I haven't been able to find much on it since with some very cursory searching and I don't think it was mentioned in the bumf I got through the letterbox.

Oh, the Guardian, day by day you make it that much more difficult for me to want to spend money on you. I think you'll have to treat this as a final warning.

― Here he is with the classic "Poème Électronique." Good track (Marcello Carlin), Friday, 23 May 2014 11:28 (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

luckily you can get them free with a mywaitrose card now

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BoYxG9zIgAAGId3.jpg

the political commentariat has largely outdone itself in uselessness this week but this matthew parris column is an exception

making it a place thats always on panarama

Think the producers of Panorama also have some input here

pananoramaman bezings

oh hey the guy funnelling all the council money into obscure somali organisations

loony left lezzer black marxist theatre groups onna rates, eh?

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2014/may/23/ed-miliband-labour-ukip-change

Ed Miliband has been put on notice that Labour faces a major battle if it is to secure an overall parliamentary majority next year after the local elections showed that the party is struggling to achieve the sort of breakthrough that would signal a Westminster victory. Labour took heart after it topped the local polls in England with 31% of the vote – up two points on last year – as the Tories came second and Ukip failed to translate an expected victory in the European elections into a breakthrough in council seats. But Miliband faced murmurings of discontent at all levels of the party, up to the shadow cabinet, amid signs that Labour is struggling to look like an opposition party on the eve of a general election victory. Its share of the vote was seven points below its score a year before Neil Kinnock lost the 1992 election, though that was in the era of three-party politics before the rise of Ukip.
...
The Labour inquest was taking place as the final results showed a mixed picture for all the parties. Ukip, long regarded as on the march, actually saw its projected share of the vote fall by six points compared with last year, from 23% to 17%, according to BBC calculations. Experts identified Ukip polling 20% in most of the country but just 7% in London. The Liberal Democrat vote fell by one point to 13% while David Cameron's leadership was stabilised as the Tory vote increased by four points to 29%. It was estimated that this would translate into 322 seats for Labour at a general election, 255 for the Conservatives, 45 for the Lib Dems and other parties, including Ukip, 28 seats.
Labour achieved nearly 300 council seat gains – well above its forecast of 200 – as it secured important victories by winning control of Hammersmith and Fulham, Croydon, Harrow and Amber Valley from the Tories. But the gain in seats was well behind the 490 identified by the psephologists Michael Thrasher and Colin Rallings as the number required to show that it is a potentially winning force.

^ seems a bit contradictory. On the projections based on Thursday's poll, Labour would be by far the biggest party (but a handful of seats short of an overall majority) yet have fallen well short of the level required to show they are 'a potentially winning force'. That only makes sense if we take it for granted there will be a significant swing from Labour to the Tories over the next year. I don't know how much sense it makes to go back to the 1991 local elections for comparisons as the situation was obviously very different then. Fwiw, in the 2004 local elections the projected national share of the vote based on the local elections had Labour in 3rd place (Con 37, LD 27, Lab 26) but they won the general election the following year.

There is currently no promotion of, or even mention of homeopathy in the Green Party policies. The only mention of "alternative medicine" is that alternative medicines should be held to the same level of regulation and accountability as other medicine.

You can read the whole Green Party policy on health for yourself here:

http://policy.greenparty.org.uk/he.html

"Appropriate methods of assessment will be developed for both synthetic pharmaceuticals and natural medicines, involving practitioners expert in their respective uses."

So snake oil salesmen get to decide that their snake oil works.

"The Green Party would ensure that an independent healthcare treatment agency provides assurance on the effectiveness of treatments and recommendations for new treatments to the NHS. The effectiveness of treatments will be assessed by the agency using the best clinical evidence available. The agency will use independent panels of experts to assess treatments. The agency will assess the effectiveness of treatments across the entire health care spectrum, from synthetic pharmaceuticals and surgical procedures to public health interventions and complementary therapies."

So it is still in, or rather they'll let homeopathists decide whether it should be.

Lots of mentions of expansion of NHS Direct too:

"Community Health Centres will be the focal points for self-help and community-based initiatives"
"District staffing structures will be reviewed, with the aim of integrating hospital-based specialists into primary care and community health workers into hospital practice.
"care for minor illnesses and injuries provided for by community health centres"
"National campaigns will encourage people not to automatically seek healthcare with self-limiting conditions like common cold, cough, sore throat, diarrhoea and vomiting, and flu-like illness. Information will be available to help people self-manage these conditions"

That is not how I interpret those passages. I'm not sure how you get from "Best clinical evidence available" to "snake oil salesmen will decide everything" but you seem to have already made up your mind, so I'm not going to argue with you about it.

Mainly because complimentary therapies have failed every clinical test they've been subjected to, so if you were serious about only using the "best clinical evidence" then you'd be absolutely clear that they have no place in your healthcare policy. Instead they say that assessment of efficacy will be conducted by the people who are already believers in the 'treatment'.

The Green Party have lots of worthwhile policies, but also some that they get a free pass over because they're not Labour/Tories/UKIP. They should be subjected to the same level of scrutiny as everyone else. Jeremy Hunt was roundly ridiculed for being appointed Health Secretary while believing in non-clinical practices. Why shouldn't the Greens?

whilst i agree in principle i think there's a genuine difference between the policy statements of a party as far away from government as the Greens are - yeah i know a whole MP woohoo - and the policies of parties with a non-negligible chance of influencing legislation

think of this sort of shit as similar to the Lib Dem's concessions to their own beardo cadre during the wilderness years - not a central plank of the offer and liable to be dropped toot sweet if shit gets serious

Oh no, I agree completely with that. You can promise whatever you like as long as you know you'll never have to do any of it (which makes them a bit like UKIP I suppose).

Greens also want to 'scrap HS2'

hard to take them seriously as more than a protest vote yet obv but at least i didn't feel compelled to spoil my ballot for once

they're absolutely nothing like UKIP

compare their manifesto to UKIP's - in length alone before reading any of it - and then tell me the two parties are in any way similar

http://greenparty.org.uk/assets/files/European Manifesto 2014.pdf

http://d3n8a8pro7vhmx.cloudfront.net/themes/5308a93901925b5b09000002/attachments/original/1398869254/EuroManifestoLaunch.pdf?1398869254

yeah uh join up that green party url

& aldo, do you not agree that large pharmaceutical manufacturers invested in their clientele developing a dependency to their product should receive the same scrutiny as alternative medicine providers?

*upon their product, w/e

They're like UKIP in the context I said they were - policies to appeal to your fan base, and single issue policies to draw in floating or protest voters, safe if the knowledge you'll never have to implement the unimplementable.

And I get what you're saying there about Big Pharma (an interesting folk demon in that they're A Bad Thing on both the left and the right- in the US I think they're considered more suspect by the right than the left) but their products by time they reach point of sale have already passed the scrutiny that alternative medicine has failed.

i would not describe that 36-page election manifesto as 'single issue'. the problem with the green party is a lack of imagination, not a lack of thoroughness

"policieS" is what I typed. Changing the law to encourage breast feeding in public places is a single issue. Heavily subsidising wind farms is a single issue.

Lack of imagination is not something you could level at the Greens. Abolishing VAT because barter has become the primary source of purchase (EC660 and EC 770) is pretty fuckin' imaginative. Suggesting wars will stop if we all become pen friends (PD301) shows nothing if not supreme imaginative skills.

what pages of that manifesto are those claims on?

greens' lack of imagination is in their positioning within the brit political spectrum. they need to deprioritise some of the environment stuff (while keeping it) and focus hard on the social/financial/community aspects imo

I've just given you the policy references, do keep up. EC660, EC770 and PD301. EC policies are the Economy paper and PD policies are in the Peace & Defence paper.

lol at tacit defence of snake-oil salesmen ITT

I'm fairly sure a UK government can't simply abolish VAT under EU rules. Are the Greens proposing leaving the EU?

No, but the organisation as it stands needs to be replaced with a completely different one whose main focus is setting environmental law, ruling on human and animal rights and promoting cultural exchange (EU211-215).

Mind you, it also doesn't think countries should exist within Europe any more and that they should be replaced with independent areas which might not even be geographically contingent (EU110). They would form a kind of feudal structure (EU390) which precludes joining the single currency (EU422), but cross-border trade between EU countries should be discouraged in any case by punitive taxes (EU546).

Mind you, they also think the UN, WTO and IMF should be reformed and/or removed (IP131).

I should really thank Branwell, because until I started reading their policy documents I didn't realise exactly how utterly barking they were.

To be honest, if your reading of the rest of the manifesto is as ~creative~ as your interpretation of the health bit as "they didn't ACTIVELY SAY they were against witch doctors, ERGO THEY MUST BE PRO WITCH DOCTORS" then I'm sure you can find whatever you like in there.

That's a 'creative' interpretation of what I said.

To use your analogy, they used to be pro witch doctor. They have changed that to be generally in favour of shamans, however, shamans will need to be Catholics to be supported. Luckily, they'll get asked whether they are Catholics and if they say yes then they are.

Actually, in the 2010 Guardian article linked to above Brian Cox comes to the same conclusion, so it's not just me.

But thanks for greensplaining what I think. I'd think I'd be interested to see what you think I've made up about the other policy references I quote.

@DAaronovitch 10h

There’s a school of “I don’t agree with Ukip voters but I understand them, unlike u silly met liberals” self-conceit that I call Harrisism.

We really need to poll the "leftie" broadsheet hacks whose entire career is based on trashing an imagined metropolitan liberal consensus - Cohen, Hodges, Harris, they're all the same kind of cretin.

Stick Liddle in there as well.

For real, I've not met a single person opposed to UKIP this election season who didn't make a point of mentioning legitimate concerns and social-cultural backgrounds etc

we shd meet up for a beer sometime

I don't know, I don't think blanket condemnation helps. With the hijacking of the #whyivoteukip twitter handle, people were offering responses like 'because I like to blame minorites for my own lack of achievement' or 'because I'm so dumb and useless that I'm actually in danger of losing my job to people who don't even speak english'. I don't think that helps anything, and is very blind to the unequal access to education, etc.

No, but the organisation as it stands needs to be replaced with a completely different one whose main focus is setting environmental law, ruling on human and animal rights and promoting cultural exchange (EU211-215).

Mind you, it also doesn't think countries should exist within Europe any more and that they should be replaced with independent areas which might not even be geographically contingent (EU110). They would form a kind of feudal structure (EU390) which precludes joining the single currency (EU422), but cross-border trade between EU countries should be discouraged in any case by punitive taxes (EU546).

Mind you, they also think the UN, WTO and IMF should be reformed and/or removed (IP131).

I should really thank Branwell, because until I started reading their policy documents I didn't realise exactly how utterly barking they were.

Non-sequitur? Leaving aside the whole alt-medicine car crash, what's particularly barking about calling for fundamental reform of supra-national organisations? Seems like it'd be more eccentric to think everything's cool with the EU, UN, WTO and IMF. Also, we've been conditioned in our own era to view any restrictions on free trade as a kind of blaspehemous obscenity, but taking a slightly longer historical view- and bearing in mind the basic green position that the drive towards ever increasing economic growth is harmful and needs to be reined in- policies to discourage international trade aren't so eccentric.

Frederik, if you're saying there's a lot of poisonous snobbery and bigotry aimed at working class people then yeah that's true. but pandering to racism and claiming it as the common passion of everybody who isn't a member of the bourgeoisie is insulting tbh

"metropolitan bourgeoisie" rather

These fucking people. To say that it is elitist to be anti-racist... sorry, WTF?

I actually agree with Frederik that blanket condemnation of UKIP voters isn't particularly helpful. The poisonous fantasy world many appear to inhabit isn't entirely of their own creation. If you have every mainstream political party and almost every news outlet presenting immigration, 'multiculturalism', etc as a negative, and positioning the UK's role with the EU as a combative one, you can't really be surprised when a portion of the electorate votes for the party with the strongest views on all. You would need to be fairly credulous to believe that Romanian Muslims are Halal-butchering our swans so they an serve them to unsuspecting white children in their Marxist-lesbian-run madrassas, stealing British jobs, purses and council houses as they go, but it would only require you to believe 30% of what you've red in the Daily Express / Mail.

There are two approaches you can take to that - engaging critically in the understanding that you are essentially dealing with people who have been lied to or accepting their concerns as a legitimate expression of white working class angst. Harris does the latter almost without exception. The idea of writing them off as irredeemable fascist scum doesn't appeal though.

I'm not gonna be horrible to the voters, because it's fairly easy to unthinkingly blame an Other group for everyone's conditions, but I feel VERY comfortable with pointing vitriol at the arseholes (right-wingers on the British version of 'wingnut welfare') manipulating them through rhetoric.

Absolutely. They're the enemy.

Please be patient with me; I find discussing politics, in IRL but especially on the internet quite stressful and even upsetting. I don't believe that Aldo is arguing with me in good faith; I believe that he wants to find "A Green" to shout at, and because I was foolish enough to post information he could easily google, I fulfilled that role.

Disclosure: I am a Green party member. Not very active, my main exposure to them came through local issues. They were people I got to know through the local festivals, library, community garden, etc. Because I know them socially, I'm aware of ~what kind of people~ they are, what their interests and concerns are. They tend to be compassionate hippies, yes, but they also tend to be very "evidence-based" compassionate hippies. e.g. What can we do to decrease emissions and road traffic? Oh, here's a study on bicycling from the Netherlands. What can we do about this awful intersection where pedestrians keep getting killed? Oh, here's a study on the effectiveness of traffic calming measures from Nottingham. What can we do about reoffenders from Brixton prison? Oh, there's a guy from the Quakers who's been running a study on that for 20 years, let's get him in to present his evidence. When people like *this*, the people actually running the campaigns on the ground, say things like "best clinical evidence" I believe that they actually *mean* policy should be dictated by clinical trials, in which complementary medicine performs badly, not "let woo-monkeys regulate the woo".

With regards to Brian Cox and his opinions, opinions do not exist in a vacuum. Cox was, at that point, a member of, and actively campaigning for the Lib Dems. Since the Lib Dems have always seen the Greens as a competitor for the "left wing protest vote" it is not surprising that he had a compelling motivation to see the evidence he wanted to see, and paint the Greens as ~loony-left woo-monkeys~. Green votes are indeed a threat to Lib Dems. I live in Lambeth; there used to be a significant LD presence on the local council. The Lib Dems ran a "smear the Greens" campaign locally, full of (deliberate?) misinformation, the Greens ran a "here are some figures" campaign. The LDs have been wiped from the map in Lambeth, the Greens have made gains.

I have not read the entire manifesto; instead I read the book that all members are issued with when considering joining, and some of the other suggested reading. So, no, I cannot argue chapter and verse about the manifesto, however, the book concentrated more on *why* and how Green party policy is formed. (e.g. finding an alternative to VAT goes along with their whole philosophy on eradicating Income Inequality; VAT disproportionately affects lower income households.) ITT, we have talked about "are there left wing objections to the EU that aren't based on racism and destroying labour laws/human rights?" and Green ideas on that seem more aligned with the ideas discussed there, on the "replace the capitalism-driven EU with a socialist paradise" front. Maybe it is more "utopian pipe dream" workable solution. But the lack of ideas coming from centre-Left parties headed increasingly rightward on issues I do know and care about, makes me have admiration for utopian pipe dreams and the people prepared to explore them. Maybe "renationalise the railroads and utilities" is also a pipedream, but they're the only ones I see advancing those arguments.

Objections to "Big Pharma" happening on both sides of the political spectrum. Again, this is an issue where there are two distinct strands which need to be untangled. The right wing thread of "I object to Science and Progress because it frightens me and undermines authority" is clearly bullshit. But "I am frightened by the increasing influence of capital and profit-driven decision making in medicine; medical decisions should be made by doctors, not shareholders" is less easy to handwave away as "woo", especially when it's coming not from idiots like Jenny McCarthy, but from scientists and doctors like Ben Goldacre and David Nutt. If you have already painted Greens as ~loony-left woo-monkeys~ you will see their opposition to Big Pharma as the former. If you see Greens as disillusioned former Labour voters attracted by "single-issue" buzzwords like "addressing income inequality" and "sustainability" then you may start to see it as the latter.

I am not an expert. I do not wish to become anyone's punching bag for "The Greens". These are just my opinions, and my experiences. Your opinions and experiences may differ substantially. I'm sorry this is so long. I probably should not have addressed any of these issues at all, but it's hard to stand silent when you see things you believe in, or things your associates are working for being twisted and misrepresented. I'm not really prepared to discuss much of this any further, mostly because I'm off to the Community Garden to weed organic bean-patches with my ~loony left~ mates for the rest of the afternoon. Discussing politics is difficult for me. When making local poltical decisions, I tend to trust the people with their knees in the dirt (literally and metaphorically) on a local level, more than I trust random people shouting at me on the internet.

Thanks, that's interesting.

I guess what I want to know was whether the u-turn from homeopathy was genuine, that's pretty much it. I would imagine they'd find it increasingly difficult to hang on to anti-science medicine stuff while, as you say, trying to promote evidence-based solutions for other issues.
I didn't come to the same conclusions as Aldo but I would find it heartening if they made a clear-cut statement on it. However, I imagine that could be a bit of a nightmare with trying to keep the traditional 'hippy dippy' voters so I don't really blame them if they don't.

I really, really, really despise all campaign material from all parties. It makes me despair. Greens have been relatively OK on that front so far ime.

xp what possible reason could you have for thinking Aldo is posting in "bad faith"? Is it because he disagrees with Green party policy, or with you? Because that's all I've seen him do ITT, and he's certainly not "shouting" at anyone.

I am perfectly able to draw my own conclusions about conversations I'm involved in, and do not need to be patronised by having them explained to me, thank you very much.

Aldo otm.

Starting with the proviso that the Greens seem like good people and less craven than the other parties, I read the actual Europe section of the manifesto, as opposed to what Aldo said it said, and its main problem is its setting of extremely ambitious targets coupled with a frustrating lack of detail about how they intend to get to that point*. The climate change policy has the same issue, there's a lot of 'set restrictions and let the market deal with how to achieve them' which strikes me as unworkable. The science and technology policy that would be absolutely central to bringing even a fraction of this about is remarkably flimsy and doesn't appear to have been revised since the beginning of 2011.

*Even established parties do this, but when the Tories do so they aren't going against the grain of how our international institutions are structured, so if anything it's easier to put bits of them into practice even when the whole aim is batshit and unworkable.

I love this faith in manifestos..