Brighton Green
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It was a car crash, but would an SPGB candidate really do any better under that kind of questioning? After all, you're proposing, not 500,000 new homes, but social housing for the whole planet. How much would that cost?
stuartw2112 wrote:It was a car crash, but would an SPGB candidate really do any better under that kind of questioning? After all, you're proposing, not 500,000 new homes, but social housing for the whole planet. How much would that cost?It wouldn't cost anything in monetary terms. Just the materials, energy and people's time, of which plenty will be available once the artificial scarcity and organised waste of capitalism has been ended. Are you saying, Paxman, that this couldn't be done and that millions of people must continue to live in shanty towns? Next question.There's also this of course: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-rjv71HyAPg
Also, Stuart, if asked the question of pounds and pence costing, it would not be the interviewer telling the SPGB interviewee to go back and do his or her homework on basic policy but the candidate accusing the interviewer of not do their preparation work in understanding the party position, putting the interviewer on the back-foot.Therefore, the candidate would have the advantage with the explanation ALB outlined and not failing the simple arithmetic of 500,000 X 60,000…but she did have the excuse…she had a cold…and i am sure there will be times that one SPGB candate or two won't always be up to top form and might have the mind go blank…but we don't have leaders where the whole credibility of the party rests on the shoulders of one person…It is far easier for us to issue the apology of a poor performance…As delegates of the party carrying out the instructions of the party, there is less necessity for independent thought or individual intelligence…we rely upon a collective knowledge …our MPs can be dunderheads and get away with it…
stuartw2112 wrote:It was a car crash, but would an SPGB candidate really do any better under that kind of questioning? After all, you're proposing, not 500,000 new homes, but social housing for the whole planet. How much would that cost?Stuart, in the UK there are an estimated 1 million empty homes. Here in Spain there are reckoned to be 3-4 million empty housing units . And in China there are supposed to be about 64 million empty apartments. Yes, thats right 64 million (http://www.grist.org/cities/2011-03-31-chinas-ghost-cities-and-the-biggest-property-bubble-of-all). This is to say nothing of empty retail establishments, empty offices , empty factories etc etc.. Never mind the cost of building more houses – what about the human costs of not using those that have already been built? Just the other day in Granada (my nearest city) we had a case of a woman who flung herself from her apartment several floors up. The reason? The banks were going to repossess her property. There is a glossy magazine in my local branch of the Spanish bank I bank with featuring properties for sale that have all been repossessedMany of these i guess will continue to remain empty for quite a while yet….
Our SOYMB blog reported the ghost cities of China report on Grist.http://socialismoryourmoneyback.blogspot.com/2011/04/chinas-ghost-cities.htmlWe also posted on the European positionhttp://socialismoryourmoneyback.blogspot.com/2014/02/homes-without-people-people-without.htmlAnd our housing policy in general from 1984 articlehttp://socialismoryourmoneyback.blogspot.com/2010/01/post-practicability-of-socialism-this.html
stuartw2112 wrote:It was a car crash, but would an SPGB candidate really do any better under that kind of questioning? After all, you're proposing, not 500,000 new homes, but social housing for the whole planet. How much would that cost?It was indeed, and not the first time it has happened. Reminded me why the Green Party should have stuck with principal speakers and no leaders! Still, she's human, she's admitted she fucked up, apologised to GP members and I won't lose sleep over those who claim that they'll no longer vote Green because of the interview.If the SPGB ever gets to the stage where it has the media presence of the Greens (#socialistsurge?) I'm sure there will be plenty of similar cock-ups. Unless they are going to spend millions on media strategists and spin doctors?
Robin, FWIW the Greens recognise this and advocate using empty property use orders to halve this figure. See http://greenparty.org.uk/values/housing-2010/housing-detail.html
As Adam twigged but others seemed to miss, I wasn't making the point, or saying it was unanswerable, just pointing out that any socialist argument would struggle under Paxman style questioning. That because he has all the assumptions (of bourgeois ideology, of "common sense") on his side. To give anything like a convincing answer, you'd have to challenge the assumptions. But as soon as you do that, it's "Answer the question! Answer the question!"As Jools says, a failure at that Punch and Judy game is no failure in anyway that counts.Still, if Danny and Adam and others are able to do it, fair play to them!
stuartw2112 wrote:As Adam twigged but others seemed to miss, I wasn't making the point, or saying it was unanswerable, just pointing out that any socialist argument would struggle under Paxman style questioning. That because he has all the assumptions (of bourgeois ideology, of "common sense") on his side. To give anything like a convincing answer, you'd have to challenge the assumptions. But as soon as you do that, it's "Answer the question! Answer the question!"As Jools says, a failure at that Punch and Judy game is no failure in anyway that counts.Still, if Danny and Adam and others are able to do it, fair play to them!I think this is a fair point. I listened to the interviews with Natalie Bennett and she was basically saying the costing would be in their manifesto which was still in the process of being written by conference. Not the disaster as reported. She also said that the manifesto was being written by conference as the Green party is a democratic organisation. It didn't placate the media storm and the question remains how the SPGB would answer this without being castigated (as questioning costs seems to become an accepted lazy politico-journalist test of credibility), or even whether conference would write the manifesto in as democratic a way as the Green party.
In fact, if you look at the way she answered the question about the threat of Russia, she answered without hesitation or equivocation but was similarly castigated which makes you wonder if it isn't just because it is a non-mainstream acceptable political position regarded as 'cowardly' to refuse to engage in war-mongering rhetoric.
I've not listened in, but it is clear that thisis getting Labour types out in force to pulverise the Greens, so it's instructive to see how social media is being used by the big guns.
i think you are being very charitable about Bennet…fact is, when put on the spot she couldn't do a simple sum….she couldn't multi-task…We all must know our own limits….i don't think she does….i saw Lucas next day and to be truthful…the communication difference was night and day…Lucas steered the discourse much more and possessed a disarming personality…something i notice a few of the SPGBers possess I think i have made mention that we should not be so rigidly attached to being "nice"…or we will risk coming across on occasions as Harry Enfield's "nice but dim" Tim and perhaps be a little more in your face in our public persona is a more appropriate tactic…But i am not excluding a series of different images for the party…the academic Marxist theorists…the idealistic romantic utopians…the leaderless anarchist archetype …We will be all things to all people and i say that not as a negative…It will be a matter or performing various roles…different strokes for different folks …Russel Brand showed that there was more than one approach to interviews, using humour mixed with seriousness…i was not a fan of it …some on the list have been…but i do acknowledge television appearances and interviews is a bit of theatre…from dress sense on…i recall Labour Alasdair Darling on advice of the spin-doctors shaved off his beard…Thatcher took elocution lessons …Whether we are up to it, who knows…But we aren't going to find out until we are in the position to be tested…particularly by an aggressive interviewers when they do realise we may be a potential threat…Just look at how the Guardian writers now turn on the Green Party when their precious Labour Party seems threatened by them…On the long term I think we should be more prepared for venomous vitriolic attacks from our left flank rather than from the right-wing …but that's just the paranoid in me, speaking
i just saw your remark on Russia…her reply was wishy-washy pap…i recall similar during the 2003 pre-invasion…lets involve the UN like the nice social democrats we are…lets get a mandate….well they had one for Kosovo…they had one for Libya …well we would still be anti war if the UN had authorised the Iraq invasion …and what's more we would still have been anti-war if Hans Blix had found Iraq overflowing with WMDs…and that is where i would suggest that a more pointed, more vehement response was deserving to the question….a no war but class war answer …and all she did was waffle…
The Greens decision to abandon their twin-spokesperson policy a few years ago has come home to bite them when they sought to share the TV debate appearances between Bennett and Lucas…http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/feb/28/natalie-bennett-green-party-limit-leader-screen-broadcasters I know it is a hypothetical position, one which we overcame on our BBC interview debut, but the television companies might choose to insist that we stick to such rules if we ever got to the point of television debates. I for one do not think the media should determine our democratic procedures.
http://www.theargus.co.uk/news/12941298.Labour_sweep_to_power_in_Brighton_and_Hove_as_the_Greens_are_ousted/That's the end of that experiment then.Meanwhile another experiment starts:http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/ukip-running-first-council-after-5667766Local builders must be rubbing their hands with glee in view of UKIP's propensity to attract dodgy candidates.
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