When I was reading this piece in the Edinburgh Evening News today, I found I had to reread the following:

The transport minister and Green MSP Patrick Harvie left their cars at home and cycled to work yesterday…

If only the first part of that sentence really meant what it sounded like.

Tip: always remember that the whole chamber is covered by the cameras.

Watching the news coverage of the aftermath of the Iranian elections, it struck me that it might be mutually beneficial for our police forces to do an exchange programme: the British could invite Iranian police over here to teach them such useful things as kettling, while we could send the York Minster police over there to learn from the religious police. Anti-social behaviour in York would certainly go right down!

Seriously though, I don’t know what to think of Iran at the moment. Ahmadinejad is certainly just a tiny bit hideous in his views, but my impression until yesterday was that what limted democracy that is present in the Iranian system was functioning legitimately. Obviously I’m not so sure now. It has been interesting to follow the goings on via Twitter though, a few of the people I’m following have tweeted directions for protests and ways to bypass the blocks put on accessing certain web-sites. Unfortunately I guess the situation will calm down again soon into the same old oppressive and intolerant ways.

Talk about papering over the cracks: apparently we are to see a new ‘brand’ and a ‘policy plan’ to go with it from Labour this week. To be fair, it’s about time we started talking policy again, but when the Financial Times uses lines such as, “Lord Mandelson is characteristically confident of seeing off leftwing pressure” to refer to the drawing-up of the plans, I’m not sure how much confidence I have that the result will be recognisable as the new revitalisation of social democracy that Labour needs if it is to have anywhere near a remote chance of limping into a fourth term, or perhaps more realistically, if it is to be able to defeat the next Conservative government in a few years time. I’m not desperately keen on Labour, but they’re still much preferable to the wolf in sheep’s clothes that is the Conservative Party.

I love cycling. It’s my main form of transport, and I’ve put lots of effort into making my bikes as practical as possible for riding to work, the shops, or wherever. But despite this I get incredibly frustrated by the way that cycling is seen here in the UK. I’m not just talking about how ‘ordinary people’ see cycling, but also the image that cyclists have cultivated for it. Having had the privilege of riding in the Netherlands and Münster in Germany, I’ve seen what a proper cycling culture can be, and we are so far from it over here.

So first, what’s wrong with the image cyclists have created? Well, think cycling in the UK, and it’s either mountain bikes, lots of effort, arriving sweaty and with an unusually contoured hair-style from wearing a helmet, or road bikes and too much garishly coloured lycra. I was looking at the web-site of the cycle maker Giant earlier and it was quite interesting to compare the UK and Nederlands versions of the site. In the UK shop, the “Lifestyle” section had three hybrid, derailleur bikes and one folding one; switch to the same page on the Dutch site and you are presented with the folding bike plus a mix of eight town and hybrid cycles, almost all with useful features such as chain guards, and three of which exhibited that incredibly useful invention: the hub gear. To Giant, the British everyday cyclist is not interested in a truly practical bike; instead, they will make do with hybrids.

It is the planning approach to cyclists that is really shocking when making comparisons though. When I was riding in the Netherlands I rarely used main roads. Instead, I was able to glide along peacefully on off-road paths—there was even a cyclists-only roundabout in Leiden! Riding around, the entire way in which the roads were designed and built included cyclists as important road users, not an after-thought. This even extended to inter-city cycling. I was able to ride from Leiden to Den Haag mainly on high-quality off-road paths: a similar sort of journey in the UK, even on the National Cycle Network, would either involve large diversions for the benefit of leisure cyclists or sharing a country road with car drivers who don’t expect to see a cyclist there.

I don’t for one minute believe we could replicate Dutch road standards for cyclists in Britain. Rebuilding the entire road network might be a tad expensive. We should be giving far more emphasis to cycle facilities though. Numbers of people cycling are rising, but they won’t start rocketing (and they need to rocket for the benefit of all cyclists) until you can just hop on a bike, free from the hassle of getting tangled up in a pile of high-visibility clothes, safe in the knowledge that the road network won’t direct you along off-road paths which vanish into nothingness, and without the worry of what to do with the bike when you arrive at your destination. Perhaps something like Copenhagenize or Amsterdamize would be useful here to highlight and promote what practical cycling might already exist.

The European Greens have had an anti-Barroso campaign going for a little while, as can be seen if you go to 09:50 in the video below (though the whole thing is quite interesting). It seems though that there might actually now be some hope of getting someone other than Barroso into the Presidency of the Commission when the post is elected. If the European United Left/Nordic Green Left can be won ’round, then it seems support from other groups behind Guy Verhofstadt, the former Belgian PM, could be enough to win the secret ballot in the EP. One to watch, I think.

EurActiv is carrying a story today about plans from the IATA to achieve what it calls “carbon neutral growth” by 2020. Now I’m not one to draw the line at co-operating with industries in enacting measures to tackle climate change, and I also don’t think that we can do without the aviation industry (though its present form leaves much to be desired), but this ‘commitment’ from the IATA seems to be missing the point just a tiny bit. Even if all aircraft were to use 100% biofuels, it would not be possible to attain sustainable growth. Certainly the problem of burning up finite resources would be largely removed, but biofuels have to be produced from something, whether it be sugar beet or some other crop. It seems so blindingly obvious that the more biofuels you need, the more of these crops will need to be produced: the danger of vast monocultures of a small set of crops being established to feed the demand for aviation fuels—not to mention all the other things which biofuels are being hailed as the saviour of—is significant here.

Also, can anyone decipher the following quote from the IATA’s press release? I’m sure it means something, but what that might be is escaping me just now.

“Airlines should get carbon credits for every cent we pay, whether in taxes, charges or ETS payments. And we should pay only once, not several times” said Bisignani.

My last post was resolutely negative, but I said I was doing two posts, so here is the second, and it’s thankfully a lot more positive. In the UK, we held our two seats: there are still two loud Green voices from the UK in the EP. True, we didn’t manage to increase our seats as we had expected to do, but we held our base firmly, and the UK-wide increase in the Green vote was 50%. In other words, the electoral system is just a tad crap for us, but we did pretty well. Now we need to build on that and make sure that we get those extra seats next time. One of my favourite set of numbers for the night was Brighton & Hove, where we took the most votes, beating all other parties. Lets hope we can have a repeat performance when it comes to the general election.

Looking elsewhere in Europe, the state of the greens is rather good. In France, we saw a gain of 8 seats, taking us to a total of 14. In Belgium, Groen! (Dutch-speaking greens) suffered at the hands of Vlaams Belang (far-right), but Ecolo (French-speaking greens) won two seats in the EP (up one from last time), and are also the third largest party in the Brussels Capital Region Parliament. Not all results are in, but by my estimates, we’ve gained 13 seats across Europe, making the European Greens a stronger force in EU politics. I’ll try and keep that pan-European thought in mind, rather than the UK results.