Guilty Pleasures

Apologies for the lack of posts recently - I have had a virus all week. This has led to much sitting around and doing nothing, since when I tried to do something on Thursday I fainted. Well, actually, I felt dizzy and lay down on the kitchen floor for fifteen minutes. Sort of a controlled faint. After that, doing nothing some more seemed like a sterling plan.

This, of course, has allowed me to indulge in a few of my guilty pleasures. Everyone has them. I wonder what yours are? For me, they have been threefold this week.

1. War movies

For a Buddhist, perhaps I have a teensy too much of an attachment to war dramas and documentaries. This week I rewatched a little bit of Ken Burns' epic "American Civil War", a few episodes of Spielberg and Hanks' "Band of Brothers", remembered how good Eastwood's "Flags of Our Fathers" and "Letters from Iwo Jima" are, and - umm - watched "Gettysburg".

Yes, yes, yes, I know its a ridiculously bloated, overlong hamfisted Ted Turner egotrip. And yes, I know that Tom Berenger's beard looks like someone has planted a live badger on his chin. And, oh god, Martin Sheen as Robert E Lee is like someone casting me to play John MacClean in Die Hard V.

But I nonetheless find it touching. I don't think anyone with any knowledge of the American Civil War could watch the scene after Pickett's Charge and not feel a little bit teary...even if you hate, as I do, everything which the Confederacy stood for. It's those sheer emotions, the heightened feeling which is generated by the subject of war, which appeal to me when I'm couchbound. That, of course, and the salutory effect of "well, I might be ill, but at least I'm not at Gettysburg...."

2. Top Gear

Yeah, this is much more guilty. I quite like Top Gear.

There, I said it. I said it and I'm not taking it back! I know, of course, that Jeremy Clarkson is an overweening, climate denying, right wing, misogynist berk of the highest order. And that Richard Hammond is looking increasingly like an ageing member of a B-grade boy band. But...they can really be quite funny. Their trip across Alabama was funny. Clarkson trying to produce a drivetime radio show was funny. And "OLIVVVVERRR!" was funny. If you have no idea what I'm talking about, then you are a more virtuous eco-warrior than I.

Also, I like to watch their studio audience and wonder what on earth is going through their heads. "Hmmm, yes, lets go and stand in a freezing cold warehouse for a day and watch Clarkson tell the same joke in sixty-eight takes, while watching pre-filmed pieces which we could just wait a couple of months for and watch on TV anyway." Weird.

3. ICCCCEEEE CREEEAAAAMMMMMM!



Yummmmm. Nuff said.

Hackney Council and the Arms Trade

Originally posted at Matt Sellwood For Hackney

Did you know that the London Borough of Hackney has £9.5 million invested in arms companies at the moment, including £5.5 million in BAE Systems? Well, you do now - and if, like me, you think a company with this record of corporate crime shouldn't be allowed within a million miles of public funds, you can sign our online petition about the issue today.

Hackney Labour claim that, because of laws that commit them to thinking only about "the best financial return" when investing funds, they can't disinvest from the arms trade. Hackney Greens counter that it is perfectly possible to make a decent return without investing in death. The arms trade does not make up 3% of the UK economy - but it does now make up over 3% of Hackney Council's pension fund investments. We should disinvest now, and put that money into sectors that are guaranteed to grow and provide a return over the medium and long-term - for example, companies which provide green jobs.

Hackney Labour should take a courageous decision, and make a stand against the arms trade. They won't, of course - one of their most prominent councillors is a PR man for the arms trade - but that is just another reason why no one with a progressive point of view should be voting for them.

Freedom of Information request on Hackney's arms trade investments

The total amount (in £) of London Borough of Hackney's pension funds' shareholdings in the following companies for the years of 2007, 2008 and, if available, 2009

1. Lockheed Martin

250,792.31
253,308.85
243,887.64

2. Boeing

0.00
0.00
0.00

3. Northrop Grumman

0.00
0.00
0.00

4. BAE Systems

5,889,334.00
7,925,995.86
5,553,840.31

5. Raytheon

225,476.27
18,204.59
0.00

6. General Dynamics

51,807.18
0.00
241,992.85

7. EADS

0.00
0.00
22,963.50

8. L3 Communications

0.00
72,068.18
170,979.80

9. Thales

17,697.55
107,895.37
111,032.70

10. Halliburton

0.00
0.00
0.00

11. Finmeccanica

164,460.49
0.00
123,402.68

12. Rolls-Royce

682,645.51
594,989.37
433,345.88

13. QinetiQ

84,322.42
485,290.78
332,537.34

14. VT

370,787.60
68,590.80
75,817.36

15. Cobham

2,196,190.50
2,113,900.00
1,813,726.20

16. Meggitt

356,740.61
141,004.76
366,514.13

17. Ultra Electronics

50,073.90
52,004.46
43,839.80

TOTALS

10,340,328.34
11,833,253.02
9,533,880.19

Total Market Value of Pension Fund
481,178,080.01
458,971,805.98
315,341,441.84

Totals as a % of all LBH pension funds
2.15%
2.58%
3.02%

Carbon Trading - Bad, Bad Idea

Friends of the Earth have come up with a new paper, showing, once again, that carbon trading is a bad plan. I await the Government's U-turn with baited breath.

Here is a video of my former UNITE comrade and current FOE Climate Campaigner, Sarah-Jayne Clifton, explaining more about the issue.

A Weekend In The Life....

Originally posted at Matt Sellwood For Hackney

Every so often, people ask me what exactly being an electoral candidate consists of. The answer is, of course, that it changes pretty much every day, depending on what issue you are focusing on, what person you are talking to, and when in the electoral cycle you happen to be. I thought it might be interesting to give you a snapshot of my weekend though....as a small illustration of the kind of thing I've been getting up to.

Friday afternoon

Doorknocking on a council estate in Stoke Newington. Some really shocking conditions, including a bathroom floor that was absolutely full of damp and mould - but also some really good conversations with people who clearly want to improve their local environment. The usual rigmarole of spending ages trying to find someone willing to let me into the block, but then no one is hostile...it's very rare to find anyone who is actively rude to a Green Party canvasser, unlike those from the main parties. Passed the casework issues onto Mischa Borris, our existing Green Party councillor for Clissold, who starts working on getting people's issues dealt with.

Friday evening

Fireworks Night party at Hawksley Court Estate. I always feel a bit funny about turning up to things like this in my role as a candidate - you never like to impose. However, Hawksley Court is actually opposite my house, so this is my local fireworks display! It's good fun, particularly since we brought loads of sparklers, and we get to meet loads of people. Such an impressive event, complete with food and drink in the Community Hall, and loads of happy kids having a good time. Great to see the local community getting together.

Saturday afternoon

Behold, more doorknocking. This time on a residential street, complete with lots and lots of HMOs (Houses in Multiple Occupation), with dreaded entryphones. I never like them, because its so hard to tell who lives where, and to get an answer. Despite this, I have a number of good conversations, and pick up some more casework for the ever-hard-working Mischa.

Saturday evening

Attend a meeting at the Day-Mer Community Centre on Howard Road, which is dedicated to providing opportunity and community to the Turkish/Kurdish community in Stoke Newington and further afield. The meeting is hosted by Day-Mer Youth, catalysed by the recent tragic shootings on Howard Road, and discusses the problems of youth unemployment, community disintegration and crime. Hackney Solidarity Network are there too, and talk about the need for different communities in Hackney to forge links together and recognise that their common problems have common solutions. I totally agree!

Sunday morning

Leafletting - I never like to doorknock on a Sunday morning, it doesn't go down well for perfectly understandable reasons. So I go out and leaflet instead, with our latest newsletter, complete with story about our opposition to NHS privatisation. You never know how many people read them, but its a major way of getting the message out there....and we put thousands out in each ward, every few months. Not to mention personal letters, leaflets about specific events, and all sorts of other stuff.

Sunday afternoon

I went along to the excellent Butterfield Green Community Orchard, to take part in their monthly gardening event. Good to get a different kind of exercise than walking up and down towerblock stairs, and really good to help out with such an inspiring example of urban regeneration. Lots of weeds were pulled, cups of tea drunk, and conversations had. I'd strongly recommend going along next time, if you're local!

Sunday evening

I'm here at home...updating my blog, checking my email...and watching (I have to admit it) Die Hard 4.0 at the same time. Who can resist a film featuring the line "Dude, you just killed a helicopter with a car!".

Growing Communities

This was the article I mentioned a little while ago, published in Red Pepper - about the excellent 'Growing Communities' food scheme in Hackney.

Feeding the city

Matt Sellwood profiles a Hackney organisation that is trying to change the way the London borough gets and eats its food

Some 15 years ago, a small-scale box scheme started up in Hackney, feeding around 30 families. In 1997, that initiative started to develop into Growing Communities, an organisation that now feeds 1,000 people a week through its box scheme, hosts the only weekly organic farmers’ market in the UK, grows food on sites across Hackney and trains people in vital agricultural and food preparation skills.

Growing Communities is much more than the sum of those parts, however. Explicitly opposed to the current food production and distribution system, it sees itself as ‘growing the new society in the shell of the old’ and helping to model what a grass-roots, community-led, not-for-profit food production system might look like in the future. Through its 12-point ‘Manifesto for Feeding the City’ (see box, next page), the organisation lays out the principles that those involved believe are necessary for a fair and ecologically sound food system in the UK, and particularly for large urban areas such as London.

The organisation sources its food both through existing organic producers and through the development of its own patchwork of urban agriculture sites within the borough of Hackney. With around 25 producers hosting regular stalls at the farmers’ market, which has a customer base of an average 1,500 local residents each week, Growing Communities provides a much needed revenue stream for those small UK farms still competing with multinational supermarkets and agri-business. Meanwhile, its box scheme sources salad from Hackney-based ‘microsites’, as well as food from further afield. It generates nearly £10,000 from sales of Hackney-grown produce, from a total land area of only half an acre.

Constituted as a not-for-profit company, Growing Communities is run by a volunteer management committee elected from its membership. The membership is comprised of all subscribers to the box scheme, as well as those who donate to the organisation. In contrast to some other grass-roots food schemes across the country, it believes that members should have control of its operations through the management committee, as opposed to control by workers. As a result, while its structure is flatter than many commercial box schemes, it is not a workers’ cooperative but runs with a mainly traditional staff structure. It employs nearly 20 people, all of whom work on a part-time basis, as well as a number of volunteers.

Urban food strategy

Rather than simply attempt to grow as much food as locally as possible without analysis or strategy, Growing Communities has drawn on its years of experience in urban local food production to produce an achievable ideal of what food distribution might look like in the future. This ‘food zone strategy’ (see diagram, next page) informs the areas on which Growing Communities concentrates, and provides a way to measure the success of its efforts.

While the organisation currently enjoys success in sourcing food both from the urban and ‘rural hinterland’ zones, ‘peri-urban’ land remains a significant challenge. Despite the availability of urban fringe land within the M25, very little agricultural activity remains within this area of London. As a result, Growing Communities is currently looking into the possibility of kick-starting food production within the peri-urban belt, specifically for distribution within Hackney.

As well as expanding its own operations, Growing Communities is also looking into replication of the initiative across London. Having originally started as a small vegetable box scheme, the organisation is in a good position to advise other groups across the capital about the pitfalls and opportunities that await anyone attempting to repeat its success. Instead of leaving provision of local food to profit-orientated companies, Growing Communities hopes to catalyse more community-led, not-for-profit schemes in boroughs across the capital – having shown already that it can be done.

Part of the movement

Well aware of its wider connection to the environmental and social justice movements, Growing Communities attempts where possible to link its food production and distribution to a wider political agenda. Not only does its weekly box scheme newsletter often focus on critiques of the existing food system, but the organisation goes out of its way to make itself more accessible to lower-income residents of the borough. In June of this year, both the farmers’ market and the box scheme began accepting Healthy Start vouchers, the government scheme for low income families with young children.

In addition to this, the organisation seeks to create employment opportunities through its apprentice growers scheme, which teaches the skills necessary for urban agriculture and then allows hands-on experience on the Hackney based microsites. And the organisation is very activist-friendly – Climate Camp received a few boxes of Hackney-grown salad last year as a small token of Growing Communities’ awareness of its links to the wider movement.

Of course, there have been numerous challenges for Growing Communities, and many of these continue to exist. Any initiative that is seeking to challenge and subvert the power of institutions as large and as powerful as supermarkets will always encounter difficulties, particularly as it begins to grow large enough to make it onto their radar.

Even an organisation the size of Growing Communities, however, seems to have been largely overlooked by regional and national government, and has often been seen only as a concern of Hackney Council’s parks department, rather than as a wider exemplar of local economic health, environmental sustainability and social inclusion. Only many such organisations, networked and learning from each other, will be able to significantly challenge the status quo of food production in the UK.

As Kerry Rankine, who works at Growing Communities, says, ‘The most important lesson that the organisation can teach is that members of a community, working together, can achieve a real shift in people’s priorities and thinking. From a small start, the organisation now provides employment for scores of people, food for thousands, and hopefully inspiration for many more.’

Matt Sellwood is the Green Party candidate for Hackney North

Growing Communities’ 12-point manifesto

The food involved should:

Be farmed and produced ecologically
Be as local as practicable
Be seasonal
Be mainly plant-based
Be fresh or involve minimal processing
Be from small-scale operations
Support fair trade
Involve environmentally friendly and low-carbon resource use
Promote knowledge
Foster community
Strive to be economically viable and independent
Be produced honestly, transparently and promote trust throughout the food chain

Far From Mastery

There's no denying it - this blog has been pretty skewed towards the political (and the electoral) of late. I guess it was inevitable...the content of a blog is largely generated by the interests and everyday experiences of its author - and it's fair to say that politics is a big part of my life at the moment!

However, Dennis Healey's famous musing that "all politicians need a hinterland" is well-known for a reason - it is clearly true. In Gordon Brown, we can see what you get for becoming too obsessive, too monomaniacal. And it has been a source of some sadness for me recently that, currently, the only thing I really seem to have serious discipline for is politics and the pursuit of social change.

In my occasional fantasies, I fool myself into thinking that I would like to become really "expert" at something - at chess, or a martial art, or a musical instrument. The problem is, of course, that as numerous studies have shown, in order to become truly expert at something, you have to dedicate thousands of hours of concerted practice towards it. Very few people can simply pick something up immediately - for true virtuosity, years of discipline are required. Unfortunately, as my brief spates of practice with kung fu, aikido, chess, and other pursuits have shown, my focus is on politics at the moment...and it is difficult to dedicate the time to anything else in any great significance.

I suppose I wouldn't have it any other way, really. After all, there are few more important things in this kind of unjust and visibly maladjusted society than political engagement. And hey, I seem to be quite good at it, as these things go. And there's nothing wrong with being a generalist - indeed, despite the prevalence of the ideal of academic specialisation in our culture, having a wide range of knowledge is a valuable thing.

It's just that sometimes, I'd like to be able to do this:



Give me fifty years.....

Gun Crime - No Easy Answers

Originally posted at Matt Sellwood For Hackney

I've written and rewritten this piece several times now - hence the delay in posting anything for a few days, for which I apologise.

I've rewritten it so much because it's hard to comment on the violent death of a 15 year old with anything other than tired platitudes. It's particularly difficult to do so when that person died not five minutes walk away from where you live. It's even harder still when you are certain that his death won't be the last of its kind in the area.

I am, of course, referring to the shootings on Howard Road last Monday - shootings which seem to have involved one group of local teenage boys trying to kill another group of local boys - and in one case, succeeding.

There's one school of thought which argues that, in cases like these, politicians shouldn't say anything at all. I can understand that - after all, so many political proclamations are nothing but thinly veiled pleas for electoral support...insincere and counterproductive pledges to 'get tough', or equally vague references to 'Broken Britain'. Despite this, I think that it is a duty for politicians to try to understand situations like this...because they are, without a doubt, political.

Yes, there will always be murders, and yes - young boys will always act out their aggression in some form or another - but the form which that aggression is taking in our communities today is a result of the society we live in...the society that has been fashioned for us.

In some previous posts, I've talked about the impact that inequality has in the UK, and pointed to the shocking rates of poverty in Hackney. In the hope that a picture is worth a thousand words, perhaps this map of deprivation and gang activity in London (thank you to The Communard for pointing me to this) might make my point on this topic, too.



These young people, these children (because that is, usually, what they are), are not inherently evil. They are not born sociopaths. They are reacting to a society which tells them that they are worth nothing, which fails to support their development and growth, which destroys their communities and tramples on their dreams - and they are reacting by forming for themselves the only communities which they know - communities of violence, of tightly knit bonds between peers for whom status competition is everything, because they know nothing else will get them anywhere.

No politician can give an easy answer on the topic of gangs, violent crime and youth disaffection. There are no easy answers, and indeed politicians can only do a limited amount. This is a political problem, not an electoral one - and it will only really be solved in the way that inequality will really be solved - by ordinary people organising in their own communities, from the grassroots up, and by society as a whole providing a future for these young men that is worth living.

I'm going to try to support initiatives that recreate solidarity, cohesion and power in our communities - but support is all I can do. It's up to all of us to do this - and if we wait for MPs, or the Council to wave a magic wand, we're going to be waiting a long time. Lets take this Howard Road wake-up call, and resolve, today, to start modelling in our own lives and neighbourhoods the way things could be...the way they should be. And at the same time, lets keep fighting for an end to the economic system that is keeping so many people of all ages in the kind of despair that breeds this violence.