Caroline Lucas & Question Time
When QT resumes, I hope they invite Caroline on a bit more. She's barely featured since winning a seat in Parliament for the Greens
Nigel Farage can be good value, but he's not an MP, yet he seems to appear quite regularly.
Priorities please Beeb!
Nigel Farage can be good value, but he's not an MP, yet he seems to appear quite regularly.
Priorities please Beeb!
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Comments
I would agree. Her policies are met favourably and she always makes entertaining viewing.
That's beside the point.
Caroline is an elected MP and that should be recognised more by QT.
QT's format is 3 well known faces and 3 representatives from different political parties, they've never said that person had to be an member of parliament and isn't their format.
Even if it was, there were 650 MPs elected in the last election so why should Caroline be on and not some Lib Dem back bencher, they are both MPs. It would take 217 episodes to get through all of them...
She can afford to have a social conscience as she knows she'll never be in a position where she has to put it into practice
Who cares about her policies - she's a babe - we need to see more of her..:D
How can one's opinion be inaccurate?
Ccritical assessment by respected economists?
I think that her social conscience is genuine and in any case that is something that Cameron, Miliband and Clegg clearly do not have imo.
I wasn't talking about her economic policy though, I was talking about the Green Philosophy as a whole which (IN MY OPINION) should be taken no more seriously than the BNP's or the MRLP.
Making the speed limit 20mph for example (and just 55mph on motorways), they want to bring back the fuel duty escalator. Banning the average earner from taking foreign holidays etc etc
As you said it's all about opinions and I agree with a lot of her policies.
Making the speed limit 20 mph (in built up areas) is an excellent idea, not only would it save lives and decrease carbon emissions but it wouldn't increase the average journey time very much. You often see idiots accelerating away from a roundabout and then slam on the brakes at the next one - the same idiots that then complain about the price of fuel.
It was a disgrace when New Labour removed the fuel escalator, motoring despite all the winging is far to cheap for the damage it does.
Where in their manifesto does it say this?
And what about 55mph on a motorway then? And ironically I think that driving at 20mph causes more pollution because cars are generally built to be most economic around 30.
What about banning planes flying at night?
What about banning short haul flights?
What about making the London Congestion Charge national which they want to do?
The Green party are an extremist party in my view, just because their policies look well intended doesn't make them any less wacky.
The Green Party want to build a new class system in the UK, not one built on wealth but on lifestyle choice. If you are a walker you are in the aristocracy whereas people with the temerity to drive a car will become the Green's "lower class".
Well, they want to
Air. Ban night flying.
Thereby drastically reducing the amount of flights, thus making them more exclusive and thus more expensive and less affordable
Taxes. We would reduce air travel by introducing a tax on aviation that reflects its full environmental costs. Failure to tax aviation fuel, and choosing not to levy VAT on tickets and aircraft, amounts to a subsidy worth around £10bn every year in Britain alone.
So they expect us to pay £10bn a year more to fly.
Taxes. Carbon quota for all. Everyone given their own quota and can buy or sell to others.
They wanna give people 'personal' carbon quotas which can the be bought and sold! So if you drive to work everyday your quota would have run out by the time you book your holiday meaning you then have to 'buy' some more from all those angels living the good life.
Do you not don't think the above policies would make flying unaffordable for the average earner? OK so maybe I should have said they want to ban the average man from flying (as you can still go 'abroad' by train but your choice is limited to nearby mainland Europe).
If the Green's policies ever came to fruition we'd be going back to a time where only the rich are afforded the use of cars and taking foreign holidays, the rich wouldn't stop flying/driving even if they had to pay the higher charges through gritted teeth but the average Joe would be priced out of anything deemed 'unevironmental' which just happens to be everything that's a bit of fun or makes our lives easier.
If you want to go an experience what life under the Greens would be like, just go and stay with an Amish family because that's essentially the perfect lifestyle they wanna promote.
Aviation is extremely fuel-intensive and relies on imported oil. Moreover a very high proportion of the air transport fleet is made up of imported aircraft. On both counts the UK suffers a further drain on its balance of payments. Efforts to manufacture a higher proportion of aircraft in the UK involve huge subsidies from the public to the aviation industry - for example the £500 million donated by the UK government to BAe to help it build its Airbus.
(Financial Times 13.3.2000)
If Science tells us that aviation damages the environment, then sadly something has to be done, despite how objectionable many of us may be.
Money does need to be directed for research into cleaner alternatives, and there are many new new alternatives being researched as we speak (Many have already been produced).
http://greenaviation.org/
http://www.nasa.gov/centers/ames/greenspace/nasas-role.html#green aviation
http://www.thirtythousandfeet.com/green.htm
But all that is irrelevant in this context as the Green Party are big fans of foreign Aid (i.e British Money Going Abroad)
..from Manifesto.
Increase aid. We will exceed the UN’s 0.7% target and allocate at least 1% of UK Gross National Product for aid by 2011, adding an extra £4.5bn pa. Aid should be targeted for the poorest, not involve economic policy conditions, respect gender equality and not be diverted to equipping security forces.
If we withdrew Tourism (a lot of which does go to poorer countries) we would only have to replace it with Foreign Aid anyway.
If we were talking about the BNP it would be different.
But there are more questions to be asked first....
By exactly how much does Science say planes damage the environment and what are the knock on effects of that damage. You also then need to ask how reliable that information is and how reliable any predictions will be.
Lest we forgot that the parts of England were brought to a standstill this month due to "unexpected heavy snowfall". If we can't predict how heavy snow will be a few days beforehand then why are people so ready to believe predictions based 25-100 years away?
If the computer modeling is that accurate why don't the BBC Weather guys use it?
I'm not a climate change denier, I put those people in the same idiotic categories as those that think Climate Change Theory is complete and moreover an accurate predictor of the future. They are both naive positions and the Greens fall into the latter...
You can't justify taxing the hell out of people just because it's environmental, you have to argue it by stating the proven and undeniable outcome of not doing it. The only thing in their manifesto that comes close to a more descriptive reason is when they say it'll raise them £10bn a year. Well so would raising income tax to 70%....
This money should come mainly, if not wholly from the businesses that will benefit from the technology, it's called R&D and most large organizations should spend a lot of money on it. Oil is a finite resource and is supposed to run out in around 40 years time (at the current rate) so they would only be killing their own business by not looking for an alternative.
I honestly do not believe the Science is there to suggest that if we continued as is for 40 years we would cause drastic global changes to the weather/environment and therefore these types of proposals cannot be justified.
There's no way around the fact that flights are bad news for the environment. It's not just that planes are worse than most other forms of transport in terms of the impact of greenhouse gases per passenger mile. Just as important is the simple fact that flying allows us to travel a far greater number of miles than we otherwise could. Thanks to these two factors, individual trips by air can have a remarkably large carbon footprint – which helps explain why aviation has become such a heated issue in the climate change debate.
As the aviation industry is usually keen to point out, planes account for only around 1.5%–2% of global CO2 emissions. However, this figure is somewhat misleading. For one thing, most flights are taken by the wealthy, so in developed countries the slice of CO2 emissions caused by flying is higher – around 6.3% in the UK, according to Department for Transport figures for 2005. Even this figure underplays aviation's environmental footprint, however, and not just because the number of flights has risen since 2005. There are at least three other reasons why 6.3% is likely to be a strong underestimate.
First, the total global warming impact of each flight is thought to be around twice as high as the CO2 emissions alone. Second, the figures are skewed in favour of British travellers. The standard way to account for the emissions for an international flight is to allocate half to the country of departure and half to the country of arrival. But UK residents take up two-thirds of the seats on the average plane landing at or taking off from a British airport. This means the official statistics are effectively offloading the emissions of British holidaymakers and businesspeople on to the countries they're visiting. Third, the aviation industry causes emissions over and above those of the planes themselves. The processing and transportation of the aviation fuel, and the manufacture and maintenance of planes, airports and support vehicles all create extra carbon dioxide.
There's not enough data to say for sure, but it seems likely that aviation's true impact in the UK is around 13%–15% of total greenhouse gas emissions. If that still sounds fairly low, compared with the massive amounts of attention heaped on aviation by climate change campaigners, bear in mind that most people in the UK don't regularly fly. The average British resident takes a short-haul leisure flight only every two years, and a long-haul leisure flight only every five years. In other words, the air travel of a minority of regular flyers causes a substantial slice of UK emissions.
http://www.icao.int/icao/en/env/aee.htm
http://www.enviro.aero/Impactofflying.aspx
http://www.grida.no/climate/ipcc/aviation/index.htm
I'm not making the case that every single MP should be invited onto QT, but that every party that has a seat in Parliament should be given a voice.
A similar argument was used by the Beeb to justify giving the BNP a platform (because they have a couple of MEPs).
I don't think it's unreasonable to expect Caroline Lucas to appear more frequently now that her party has secured a seat in the House of Commons. She's earned her place on the program more so than someone like the UKIP leader whose party has zero MPs but whose frequent appearance on QT would lead us to believe they had several.
Their views on controlling population are scary.
http://women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/women/families/article5627634.ece
What is said in public is not necessarily what they would implement if given the chance.
People who have an over riding concern for one issue, whatever that issue is, have a habit of finding ways to justify all sorts of nastiness on other people.
Jonathon Porritt is not a member of the Green Party and the Green Party does not share his views.
PP106 The Green Party holds that the number of children people have should be a matter of free choice.
http://policy.greenparty.org.uk/mfss/mfsspp.html