87 Films From The 2021/22 Awards Season – Ranked.

“Why do you watch so many films?” the film buff is sometimes asked. “They’re good therapy”, is my considered reply. Roger Ebert said that cinema is “a machine that generates empathy”. Like most humans, I don’t take time to empathise enough, but through watching films I feel connected to a wider sense of belonging in the whole world, not just our small part of it. Like last year’s list, this one was assembled from nominees (in most categories except the stylistic and sound ones) for four major awards ceremonies on either side of the Atlantic: the Oscars, the BAFTAs, the Independent Spirit Awards, and the British Independent Film Awards.

I watched all of the 87 films below, but at the time of writing, there were still 6 films not available for streaming in the UK (7 Days, Attica, Bank Job, Holler, Lunana: A Yak In The Classroom, Test Pattern). It strikes me that you watch this many films in a year, much of the measurable impact (and therefore the score given) is defined by your ability to remember the key plot points. But films are not just memories, they are objective artefacts and so I have gone back to remind myself of those that have faded somewhat from memory. This list is more than a year of enjoyment, and I’m looking forward to doing the same this coming year. It’s organised by rating, but I’ve only bothered to carefully rank the ones rated 8 or 9. Now: to the list!

87. House Of Gucci (2021) – 2
As I put it on Twitter on 14th September 2022, “this is possibly the worst mainstream Hollywood film nominated for awards I have ever seen. From start to finish I was utterly uninterested in anything that happened. That’s some feat!” I literally fell asleep watching this, and I wasn’t even tired.

86. The Harder They Fall (2021) – 4
I feel bad for negging on Jeymes Samuel, a successful Black British director, but unfortunately this sub-Tarantino (ouch – I dislike post-millennium Tarantino) western is all style and absolutely zero substance, with all of that style being showy and annoying.

85. The Power (2021) – 4
A silly, undercooked British ghost film. Forgettable.

84. Raya And The Last Dragon (2021) – 4
I have heard good people call this a “feminist masterpiece” (or something like that), but sadly you have to have the masterpiece aspect to fit that bill and this has that kind of terrible juddery unclear animation style that makes it really hard to bother to watch. The medium is part of the message!

83. Everybody’s Talking About Jamie (2021) – 5
I liked some of the songs in this, but sadly the sorry is so trite and predictable that I just couldn’t get with it. I’m not the biggest musical fan – I believe you need to have at least 4 or 5 bangers for it to be classed as even worth making. This has 1 or 2.

82. Don’t Look Up (2021) – 5
Ah, now you’re paying attention! I get it. You love a metaphor and you care about climate change. Same here. But, objectively, this is a really poorly put together film that leaps all over the place tonally. The director Adam McKay has previous form on creating comedy satires that – because of an unflinching desire to nod and wink at the audience and mollycoddle white western liberals with what they want to hear – loses vast amounts of potential persuasive power. I also, crucially, didn’t care about the earth that Leo and Jen were trying to save – because it wasn’t REAL. Ironic, really, given the theme of fake news. I’d like to see someone make an ACTUAL climate change film, but that involves criticising colonial/extractivist capitalism and private jets, and Hollywood just ain’t up to it.

81. She Will (2021) – 5
More odd Brit horror that I’m not really interested in – lots of being in the woods, witches and supernatural gubbins. You have to really live within the psychology of horror films to love them and mostly I find it difficult to give myself to that. The performances were good though.

80. In The Same Breath (2021) – 5
There are a few Covid documentaries out there and the problem with this one is that it spends too long on China and not long enough on the US, which (if you get me) ends up being not long enough on either. There is some great footage and narrative about the initial cover-up of the virus in China, but it really needed to be two separate films, not this cursory comparison between the two nations.

79. Encounter (2021) – 6
[SPOILER REVIEW] I love Riz Ahmed, who doesn’t? And he’s great in this, as are the two child actors. However, despite some really emotive and well-produced scenes, this was sadly an anti-climax because I wanted more than a familial resolution to the central genre question of the film – have extra-terrestrial bugs invaded the earth, or is it all in his head? (If you’ve seen it and are going “that was resolved”…was it? How?)

78. Nightmare Alley         (2021) – 6
Such an impressively shot and confected picture, and some interesting thematic elements with a horrifying denouement. A couple of stars are knocked off though for just how poor the editing decisions were. It didn’t need to be 2.5 hours and is a much worse film because of it.

77. The Eyes Of Tammy Faye (2021) – 6
Despite a very uneven screenplay and no small number of horrendous characters to have to watch for 2 hours, I thought this was good on the psychology of fundamentalist belief in showing how – ironically – it requires someone to hold more than one idea in their head at the same time to maintain mental stability. It also emphasises (in a good way) an under-noticed fact about American evangelicalism – there are many social liberals who are subscribers to it.

76. Wild Indian (2021) – 6
Michael Greyeyes is terrifying in this, a very solemn attempt to make a mainstream film about the experience of Native American people, but I felt by focusing on an extreme but also obvious example (troubled abused child becomes a rich unlikeable careerist) a lot of the potential emotional power was lost.

75. In The Earth (2021) – 6
I’ve just re-read the plot of this and I just wish Ben Wheatley had focused on this aspect a bit more rather than the general “ooh it’s some creepy pagan mystical thing” aspect. I would have enjoyed it more and thought all the wibbly stuff was worth the effort. One star added solely for the presence of the legendary Reece Shearsmith.

74. Benediction (2021) – 6
The life of Siegfried Sassoon. I liked the scenes where he was being principled and the anti-war tenor of it but I found the rest a bit of a chore and pretty unmemorable.

73. Spencer (2021) – 6
For me, this was one of those films I couldn’t help judging before seeing it, but (even as an ardent republican) I entered with an open mind and I was strangely won over by this one’s emphasis on Diana’s inner turmoil that largely ignores the wider familial context of her pains. The scenes with Harry and William are heartfelt and – of the five Best Actress Oscar nominees – I would have given it to Kristen Stewart.

72. Cow (2021) – 6
It does exactly what it says on the tin. Life, love, boredom, sex and murder as experienced by the average dairy cow on a British farm. It didn’t make me vegan, but it did make me think.

71. The Humans (2021) – 6
Last year we had The Father, an impressively put together adaptation of a theatrical production that I found way too stylised to get alongside. This year, we have The Humans, which is a better film, but still doesn’t escape the feeling that the lights will come up any second for the interval. The performances are note-perfect, in particular (I thought) Stephen Yeun’s as the outsider at the family dinner. I’d really like to see the play.

70. Titane (2021) – 6
Now this is how to plot a film! Surprise after surprise, but also the more it goes on, the more you (well, I) go “yeah…but no”. So maybe it isn’t how to plot a film after all. But I love the way it pulls no punches and it certainly says something true about the link between sexuality, power and autophilia.

69. Wildfire (2020) – 6
Estranged Irish sisters as metaphor for the border. I was really looking forward to this (from watching the trailer) and it bristles with a distinctive energy but sadly it just doesn’t quite cut it in terms of the expository information it presents and the way it manages its material into a (in)coherent whole. Yes yes, “show don’t tell”, but we do need a bit more telling than this.

68. The Bike Thief (2020) – 6
Taking more than a flavour of the Italian neo-realist classic Bicycle Thieves (1948), for most of its runtime this expertly explores the London gig economy and its reliance on non-British born workers to sustain it. The story is too slight for this to attain the same status as the aforementioned film and the end doesn’t work, but it should be seen by more people.

67. Being The Ricardos (2021) – 6
I got halfway through watching this and thought “this seems very Sorkin-esque” and then realised that’s because it was written and directed by Aaron Sorkin. My review from Sorkin’s The Trial Of The Chicago 7 can be repeated here: “he just needs to stick to the writing, not-so-much the direction – and learn how to underplay to create more compelling drama”. Also: writers, stop sidelining writers in your writing in favour of performers. Some of us prefer writers.

66. CODA (2021) – 6
This won Best Picture at the Oscars (for the record, The Lost Daughter, The Power Of The Dog and After Love won the equivalent awards at the other three ceremonies) and you can see why, but you could also see why they really should have given it to Dune, Belfast or The Power Of The Dog (or something better than all of these). It tugs at the heartstrings, there are one or two hilarious moments and I liked it, but in the cold light of day it’s not doing much different to any other Hollywood heart-warmer getting 6.5 out of 10 on IMDB.

65. The Mitchells vs. The Machines (2021) – 6
Over-hyped but good fun for the most part. I found the animation style takes a bit of getting used to and some of the characters were grating at times. Meh?

64. No Time To Die (2021) – 6
[SPOILER REVIEW] It’s a Bond film, but he dies in this one. Otherwise, it’s the same as any other Bond film. Next.

63. I Am Belmaya (2021) – 6
Film-making as a route out of abuse and poverty for a Nepalese woman. Good but not great.

62. True Things (2021) – 6
To be watched through your fingers while quietly asking the main characters “why are you doing this?”, Ruth Wilson is great as a woman bored of all the mundanity who ends up in an obsessive relationship with a mysterious stranger.

61. Catch The Fair One (2021) – 6
A woman willingly puts herself into a sex-trafficking ring to try and find her kidnapped sister. Tense and horrifying.

60. Swan Song (2021) – 6
There are two 2021 films called Swan Song. This is the Udo Kier one. Set in Sandusky, Ohio, it’s a love letter to that town and it is sweet and mournful.

59. Encanto (2021) – 6
Is it me or are the songs completely forgettable? I didn’t really like the premise and didn’t think the overall message was worth the trouble, but I liked that Bruno character, he was fun to watch.

58. Ascension (2021) – 6
It was kind of interesting seeing some things that take place in China these days, but beneath all that it felt like a more insightful and profound documentary was waiting to get out.

57. Flee (2021) – 6
I have liked previous rotoscope animated films, but really couldn’t stand the juddery stuff in this one. While the subject matter is of profound importance (LGBT rights, migration), sadly I didn’t feel there was enough here to distinguish this story from other better told tales of refugees and asylum seekers. That more people will understand the horror of international migration is a very good reason for it to exist, though.

56. Cyrano (2021) – 6
There is nothing wrong at all with the three main performances, but the staging and production is not that special and unfortunately I didn’t feel invested in the central romance, nor really believe it.

55. Last Night In Soho (2021) – 6
I had no idea this was a horror film before watching it. The jump scares were oddly cliched but the whole spectacle and narrative was pretty well done. Thomasin McKenzie’s accent was dead annoying and her love interest very shallowly written. It got a bit more interesting towards the end but not enough to make me recommend it.

54. Dune (2021) – 7
Superb wide canvas film-making from Denis Villleneuve (certainly far more interesting than the dull as ditch water Blade Runner 2049) but as many others have said it felt more like a set-up for the next film than a standalone film.

53. King Richard (2021) – 7
So, 12 months on from “that slap”, how do we all feel? Personally, I thought this was a really good biopic and a great performance from Will Smith (not to mention the actors playing young Serena and Venus – Saniyya Sidney and Demi Singleton), but I still would have given the big prize to Andrew Garfield (more on this later!) and avoided all of that stuff.

52. Belfast (2021) – 7
I watched this a long time all the Oscar hype and really enjoyed it – witty and faithful to a time and place in history. But it’s not in the instant classic category as some would have you believe.

51. Becoming Cousteau (2021) – 7
Only the film Don’t Look Up wishes it was! Cousteau did so much to mainstream ecological thinking and this film is stuffed full of wonderful archive footage of his life, loves and losses.

50. Sweet Thing (2020) – 7
Simply for the style in which this is filmed – a sort of wistful fly-on-the-wall black and white thing – I have added a star. The young actors are great and although the plot is no great shakes, it still explores its themes effectively and in a heartfelt way.

49. Pirates (2021) – 7
This is a great buddy film and very funny, particularly if you were a teenager in the late 90s. The period detail is well done and the dialects of that era are brilliantly reconstructed. Ironically, a great night in!

48. The Power Of The Dog (2021) – 7
Yes, Cumberbatch is great in this, but he’s great in most things. This is really Kodi Smit-McPhee’s gig, I think. I find Campion’s style a bit languorous to give myself completely to and the screenplay is unrelentingly shy of disclosure, but I suppose that all works in its favour by creating an ambiguous puzzle for the viewer to solve for themself.

47. Sweetheart (2021) – 7
A lovely story about teen awkwardness, family arguments and queer love set on an English seaside holiday camp. You’ll like it.

46. Ali & Ava (2021) – 7
I love the characters more than I love the film, but it’s still really good. Bradford looks glorious in all its hilly splendour.

45. After Love (2020)  – 7
Joanna Scanlan can never be disassociated completely from Terri Coverley (The Thick Of It) in my mind, but no matter. She is excellent in this sombre story of a bereaved wife who discovers her late husband has not been entirely truthful in life.

44. Licorice Pizza (2021) – 7
So much of this is enjoyably funny, but there are some annoying parts (Sean Penn on a motorbike? Nah…) and the central romance is a bit dodgy to say the least. It is worth seeing just for the downhill truck reverse segment alone. I’d put it down as a mid-tier Paul Thomas Anderson film. Everyone – listen to Haim!

43. West Side Story (2021) – 7
It’s a tremendous production. I liked it, I didn’t love it. Ariana DeBose was the correct choice of the five nominees for the Best Supporting Actress Oscar.

42. Swan Song (2021) – 7
Of the two 2021 films called Swan Song, this is Mahershala Ali one and it’s a well done sci-fi drama about whether if you’re dying you should allow an exact clone of yourself to take over without telling your family. The wonderful Akwafina is in it and that makes it a lot less maudlin than it could have been.

41. Passing (2021) – 7
A very good period film about class and race with great performances from Ruth Negga and Tessa Thompson. That’s it – watch it if that sounds good to you!

40. Together Together (2021) – 7
I really liked this, it wasn’t trying to be anything more than it was and what it was is a lovely relationship comedy about surrogacy.

39. Prayers For The Stolen (2021) – 7
The constant looking over your shoulder of living in a Mexican village being gradually taken over by a violent drug cartel that disappears people in the night, or even the day. This situation is seen through the eyes of three girls whose friendship is shown at different ages as they deal with the ruptures and uncertainty caused. The lack of explanation of what is really going on is what creates such a powerful sense of unease and puts us right in the girls’ mindset.

38. Pleasure (2021) – 7
What if someone unapologetically sets out to become an adult film star? This is an uncomfortable watch at times, but it seems to me it shows the reality of the industry and the performances are strong and well-delivered.

37. Happening (2021) – 7
4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days is widely acknowledged as the go-to film about the horror of living in a society that won’t sanction legal abortion, but I found this to be just as if not more effective due to its lighter (initial) tone and setting in France in (as late as) 1963.

36. Censor (2021) – 7
This is an excellent Bristol horror period drama about film censorship in the 80s with such a good central performance by Niamh Algar. The allegory of parents ”censoring” the possibility of their daughter still being alive is such an interesting juxtaposition with the video nasty era this is evoking. The ending is very cleverly done, but this film probably isn’t for everyone.

35. Luca (2021) – 7
I think this received too many negative and mixed reviews, it’s really great and the denouement is really moving. It doesn’t matter whether the boys are gay or straight, they’re boys – stop writing articles about it!

34. The Souvenir Part II (2021)- 7
This is far better than the original which I found indulgent and stolid simultaneously. This as least has a far bigger funny part for Richard Ayoade and some central animating force.

33. The Worst Person In The World (2021) – 7
It’s hard to love a film about a narcissist but you can admire it. The “let’s be intimate without cheating” scenes are so well played and a bit thrilling. There are some really good moments but I’m not convinced this is the instant classic some quarters have screamed it is.

32. Pebbles (2021) – 7
This is a Tamil-language Indian film about an abusive father and his son as the father tries to find his wife in a neighbouring village. The action takes place in the searing desert heat and there is one moment where the father stares at the camera as if it were an apparition. One to seek out.

31. A Chiara (2021) – 7
A teenage girl discovers her family are part of the Calabrian mafia. A well told, interesting film.

30. Zola (2020) – 7
A film inspired by an incredibly long tweet thread by a stripper and her open-ended road trip to Tampa, Florida, this keeps you guessing at every stage (if you haven’t read the thread in question, of course). A sort of companion piece to Pleasure in this list, with a much more sly and winking attitude.

29. Jockey (2021) – 7
Some films perfectly showcase a journeyman actor’s previously hidden wellspring of talent and this is the one for Clifton Collins Jr. It tremendously captures the world of a professional jockey and the risks that many take with their bodies and minds.

28. Queen Of Glory (2021) – 7
A female Ghanaian scientist living in New York inherits her mother’s Christian bookshop on her death. This is funny and touching and well-played and worth your time.

27. Dying To Divorce (2021) – 7
Perhaps the most harrowing and rage-inducing film on this list as it deals directly with Turkish women who have been shot or beaten by their male partners (who are still not in prison) and how they are fighting back against a patriarchal and unjust judicial system.

26. The Hand Of God (2021) – 7
Odd, funny and beautiful coming-of-age drama about a Naples family set at the moment Diego Maradona made his move to play for the local team.

25. The Novice (2021) – 7
A brilliant frenetic performance from Isabelle Fuhrman is at the heart of this tale of an extremely obsessive student who wants to be the best rower on the college team.

24. Blue Bayou (2021) – 7
A man born in Korea but raised by adoption in the United States wrestles with the authorities and the local community as he tries to remain in the country rather than abandon his wife, soon-to-be-born child and step-daughter. The kind of subject matter than could be really cheesily done, this mostly stays on the right side of the line, even if the characterisation of the “baddie” is a bit too unsubtle.

23. Compartment No. 6 (2021) – 7
A woman travels to the far north of Russia on a train and interacts with other passengers in her compartment. This has received critical acclaim, and I can understand why – an understated character piece with gorgeous landscapes as backdrops and a humorous note to its largely dramatic sense. I didn’t get as much from it as others have, but there were some great moments and observations.

22. Rebel Dykes (2021) – 7
Brit doc about lesbians in London in the 70s and 80s and a club night that was transgressive, even by today’s standards. The look is of a fanzine or scrapbook pieced together from the talking heads’ memories and there was enough material for this to work well. This has some important things to say about inclusion in the LGBTIQA+ community too. Loads of good indie punk on the soundtrack.

21. The Tragedy Of Macbeth (2021) – 7
This was a lot more accessible than I was expecting (even if like me you struggle to grasp every jot and tittle of Shakespearean speech). The cinematography should win every award going (Dune won the Oscar and the Bafta in this category). Denzel Washington and Frances McDormand are tremendous, and the three witches are great too.

20. Cicada (2020) – 7
New York gay romance, with therapy included. Many funny or witty moments. Cobie Smulders’ therapist is the one false note of this, for me, and knocked it down a point. But some proper contemporary issues being dealt with in an honest and realistic way.

19. Red Rocket (2021) – 7
The director Sean Baker also did Tangerine (2015) and The Florida Project (2017). They are both probably more interesting films, but I would say they are not as watchable and they don’t have as compelling a central character as Simon Rex’s retired porn star Mikey Saber. Watch as a portrayal of total narcissism plays out, and feel guilty you might be enjoying some of the ride.

18. Parallel Mothers (2021) – 7
The plot is interestingly put together, with a beginning and an end focused on exhuming bodies of relatives, and a seemingly unconnected (or is it?) story about two mothers taking up the middle. I liked the twists and turns, and I liked all the performances.

17. Drive My Car (2021) – 8
Japanese drama. Impeccably shot, wondrous ending and many lovely moments but it didn’t need to be as long as it was.

16. The Killing Of Kenneth Chamberlain (2020) – 8
This is one of those films you don’t really want to watch for most of the time you are watching it as it unfolds with such a grim inevitability. Post-watch, you go “this must be embellished in some way”, but no, this is pretty much what happened. Incredible performance from Frankie Faison which deserves more recognition.

15. The Lost Daughter (2021) – 8
This was really good, particularly Jessie Buckley as a relatable young parent with hard-to-manage children. The mystery/enigma at the film’s heart is what really intrigues though. To whom does “the lost daughter” refer?

14. Petite Maman (2021) – 8
Sweet, tender and short parent and child musings. Time travel without the bells and whistles and all the more poignant and moving as a result.

13. Keyboard Fantasies (2019) – 8
An inspiring film about Black transgender musician Beverley Glenn-Copeland, his 1980s electronic record Keyboard Fantasies, and audiences embracing him as a lost genius in the last few years. This is just tickle your tummy lovely, and Glenn-Copeland is such wonderful company. I love how queer stories like this can connect young and old in liberation struggles across time and space.

12. Boiling Point (2021) – 8
It was all the rage for a time for films to be just one continuous shot (Russian Ark, Victoria, Birdman). This arrives a bit later, but is no less impressive as the aforementioned three. Stephen Graham is at his best, but the real star is the screenplay’s pacing – there is not any period where you think “this is dragging a bit”.

11. Mass (2021) – 8
Sadly the hype for this one was a bit too much for me to be completely satisfied with its emotionally powerful themes. Gun violence seen (partly) through the lens of the perpetrator’s parents is underexplored and this certainly explores it. In some ways, the awkward location of this meeting is the leveller needed to really drill down deep into the characters’ loss. The title of the film is clever – it could be placed in front of “shooting”, or refer to the church the meeting takes place, or signify the heavy weight anyone affected by gun violence carries with them.

10. Procession (2021) – 8
Dealing with childhood sexual abuse by Catholic priests is a pretty weighty subject, so survivors are asked to re-enact or re-interpret their experiences as film scenes, which create parts of the film. It’s an interesting premise and, on the whole, works. What knocks this film up a star is the palpable sense of pain as survivors explore the places and things that still remind them of their experiences. “This machine generates empathy”, indeed.

9. Pig (2021) – 8
If you’re a big John Wick fan, you might exclaim “hey, you stole the premise but it’s a pig not a dog!”, but come on, this is Nicholas Cage as an ex-chef who now lives in a cabin in the woods with his truffle-hunting pig and it’s about the madness and power of food as a lifestyle choice, rather than as fuel for our bodies. I very much enjoyed it.

8. Summer Of Soul (2021) – 8
A truly incredible concert film containing seemingly everyone who was anyone in 1960s African-American popular music performing at the Harlem Cultural Festival in 1969, this is lifted further still by the context and politics of the era being fully explored and reflected on by the participants. It’s really uplifting!

7. Writing With Fire (2021) – 8
Women journalists in India take on the patriarchy and vested interests in big and small ways. Hope-inducing – perhaps there is a way out of this mess!

6. The Rescue (2021) – 8
I didn’t know the precise details of the Thai soccer team who were rescued from a cave system ahead of watching this documentary, and I think this probably hit a lot harder as a result. It’s really well edited and put together and the pacing is more like a thriller – as perhaps all great documentaries should be? It tells of the mystery of one group of people being at the wrong place at the wrong time, and another group being at the right place at the right time.

5. First Cow (2019) – 8
An allegory for the rapacious ideology of capitalism as imagined by white men on the American continent (as if you can “steal” an animal’s secretions!), its alternative is unembarrassedly loving outsider male friendships which, if you’re a bloke and live in the modern world, you’ve got to admit is quite a radical idea that might need to be taken up a bit more. The film’s visual aesthetic is wonderful.

4. tick, tick…BOOM! (2021) – 8
I am not a person who is really into musicals, nor am I into stories of the creation of musicals. But this is also a story about writing and obsession and I love stories about those things. Andrew Garfield is so so good in this, but there’s lots to love – the songs, the science fiction element of the musical’s narrative, and the parties!

3. The Nest (2020) – 8
This was really quite superb, somewhat surprisingly. Jude Law and Carrie Coon are tremendous as a couple drifting apart and Law absolutely nails the persona of a bullshit merchant who starts to realise that real life is catching up to him. Seriously, you will read the plot synopsis and go “meh” but you totally should bother with it.

2. Nowhere Special (2020) – 8
This is the film that Coda wishes it was. It’s a really beautiful piece of cinema about a terminally ill man and how he arranges for his young son to continue to have a good life when he’s gone. The casting is perfect and the performances are great too.

1. C’mon C’mon (2021) – 9
A film about parenthood for people who aren’t parents? Joaquin Phoenix is an uncle who is making a podcast series by going from place to place but ends up having to look after his sister’s son. I can’t even remember much about the details, but it was my film of the year for its authenticity and the sublime performances. It was directed by Mike Mills who also made 20th Century Women and which I also rate very highly indeed. You should watch both of them!

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79 Films From The 2020/21 Awards Season – Ranked.

The 2020 awards season was a strange one because of Covid-19, but for many of us who can’t get out to the cinema as much as we’d like to, it was a more accessible year to watch new films as they often went to streaming services a lot quicker than The Before Times. Around about the middle of 2021, I committed to watching the nominees at the Oscars, Baftas, Independent Spirit and British Independent Film Awards, which I thought would give me a good cross-section of choices. It did, but of course I probably saw fewer non-English language films than I would have liked to. As ever though, distribution in the UK was poor and there still remain two films that have not been made available in the UK to streaming (The Man Who Sold His Skin and Herself). Nevertheless, it’s impressive how low-cost this hobby is and (to me) quite cheeky (to say the least) that people still expect to access films online – independent or otherwise – for free given how we know that a film’s crew is an artistic workforce threatened by global shutdown as much as any other.

Some notes on the following list:
> Only the top 40 have been properly ranked, the rest are just randomly ordered. Life’s too short.
> There was only one film I switched off before finishing or fast-forwarded through, and that’s the bottom film.
> You may note I’ve put some very well-liked films low down. I’ve explained why and I am happy to hear your views about why I am right 😉
> There are films near the top you haven’t seen. See them. That’s the point of the list. I go to the effort so you can see interesting, emotionally resonant and powerful films (plus, I also get to watch lots of films).
> Thanks for reading even this far. Enjoy the list!

79 Over The Moon
Disney’s attempt to make a film that crosses over to China or something. Just so absolutely cheesy and dreadful. 4

78 Da 5 Bloods
BlackKklansman this ain’t. It’s sloppy, all-over-the-place, has a tremendous performance from Delroy Lindo but it’s not an enjoyable experience and it’s supposed profundity is much over-egged. 5

77 Host
This Shudder low-budget horror flick is not scary in the slightest. Like the majority of horror films, it just made me laugh. 5

76 She Dies Tomorrow
I really really wanted to like this, and although there are some odd/creepy moments, it’s a complete waste of a brilliant premise on a thoroughly undercooked script. There’s just so much more they could have done with this concept. 5

75 Notturno
I can’t even quite remember what this was about, but I remember it was really dull. 5

74 Hillbilly Elegy
In which serious actors try to win Oscars for playing rednecks really badly. They failed! 5

73 The United States vs. Billie Holiday
The central performance from Andra Day should arguably have won her Best Actress at the Oscars, but the reason it didn’t is obvious – the film it exists within is just badly put together and sadly uncompelling. 5

72 Mank
The most over-hyped and overrated Oscar contender of recent memory? I can barely remember what happens except Gary Oldman getting drunk in almost every scene. 6

71 The Trial Of The Chicago 7
Sorkin gonna Sorkin. I liked Sacha Baron Cohen and some of the dilemmas around revolution v reform were well-rehearsed but he just needs to stick to the writing, not-so-much the direction – and learn how to underplay to create more compelling drama. 6

70 Onward
Meh. Name a single scene from memory. They try and get across some ravine with some mind trick or something? Lucky old Pixar to put their dud out just as the virus hit. 6

69 Time
I’m probably being too harsh on this stylish black and white documentary about a woman advocating for her husband’s release from prison. It just didn’t seem to connect with me in quite the way it seemed to want to. 6

68 Borat Subsequent Moviefilm
It’s funny in parts, and just annoying/unfunny/obvious in others. We do have it to thank for THAT Rudy Giuliani bedroom scene, though. 6

67 David Attenborough: A Life On Our Planet
How dare you! But then how dare David Attenborough make a documentary about the climate emergency without once mentioning capitalism. Pretty straightforward hagiography, I thought. 6

66 Saint Maud
I know, I know. I can see why people rate this. I just don’t get why the interplay between religion and poor mental health are such a profound thing to muse on. The shocks aren’t that shocking. The final short is memorable but what for? 6

65 Moffie
This could have been lower. It’s about a boy who goes into the South African military during Apartheid and the lack of acceptance of gay people. It’s not bad if you’re interested in those themes. 6

64 Being A Human Person
Roy Andersson is a great Swedish melancholic/darkly comic filmmaker, but I think I would prefer to watch one of his films rather than a documentary about him. (I only found that out afterwards, of course.) 6

63 The Assistant
This was good as far as it went (#metoo in a directors’ New York casting office) but didn’t have any massive spark. 6

62 The Half Of It
Sweet little film about learning to accept yourself and others but pretty slight. 6

61 Bull
Well-observed and acted but just not that into the storytelling style. Watch if you like rodeos. 6

60 Perfect 10
Young woman gets better at gymnastics despite messed up family. 6

59 Rising Phoenix
Netflix documentary about Paralympians. Struggling to remember much specific now. 6

58 Miss Juneteenth
You can read what the ending of this is going to be from the very start but it’s not bad. I’d like to visit the bar in it! 6

57 White Riot
A short history of Rock Against Racism. It’s an OK doc. 6

56 One Man And His Shoes
This is about Air Jordans. You can make compelling documentaries about lots of things but this is done quite averagely. 6

55 Mogul Mowgli
I really like the rich tapestry of mental images drawn out of a character whose body and future are disintegrating. The hyper-real however drew attention away from more empathetic considerations. 6

54 His House
It all goes a bit magical realist for my tastes, but the audio-visual rendering of the refugee experience should be seen by more people. 6

53 The Mole Agent
Old guy pretends to be nursing home resident to check the staff aren’t abusing someone. Doesn’t really get to the bottom of it, but a load of older women fancy him instead. This is about the sum of it, but you might find it mildly amusing. 6

52 One Night In Miami…
Famous American black men from the 20th century all go to one place and chat about religion, politics and their lives. Sounds great, but I didn’t think there was much to write home about. 6

51 The White Tiger
Just very hmmm. Some good bits. Some longueurs. Some bad bits. Just very hmmm. 6

50 News Of The World
I wish the whole film had just been Tom Hanks reading the news to slightly aggressive people and them being won over. Those were the best scenes. 6

49 Justine
I watched another film called Justine thinking it was this one. I can remember more about that one than I can this one, which I think was about an addict who falls in love with another woman and it all ends in tears? Clearly left an impression. It’s set in Brighton. 6

48 The Mauritanian
This should probably be lower. It was the very definition of post-9/11 political drama by numbers, with few redeeming features. 6

47 The Father
It’s based on a play, but why did they have to film it like one? I found the final scene quite moving but otherwise I was pretty underwhelmed even with all the clever timey-wimey stuff. 6

46 Better Days
Bullied student in Hong Kong finds solace in a bad boy. Better than it sounds, weirdly. 6

45 My Octopus Teacher
I still don’t know what the hell to make of this. The guy is creepy, I find creepy-crawly creatures icky, and yet it’s well-made and engagingly told. It robbed Collective (see later) of the Best Documentary Oscar. 6

44 Straight Up
Very talky LGBTIQA+ film. Funny in parts. Mostly a bit too quick and smart for its own good. 6

43 The Disciple
Very interesting for getting a sense of a specific style of traditional music. In a film-watching sense, I found it tepid at best. 6

42 Night Of The Kings
Much to appreciate – not least the adlib dance/play choreography from the prisoners. Some really ropey CGI and it’s all a bit mythological and unexplained. 6

41 The Reason I Jump
Decent doc about autism but I don’t really feel just taking short excerpts from the book worked very well in making clear the nature of autism, not least because it isn’t one uniform thing. 6

40 Clemency
This is the archetypal 6/7 marginal rating call. Great performance from Alfre Woodard as the death row prison warden but it did feel like quite well-worn material. 6

39 Rose: A Love Story
Surprisingly good indie horror film. A couple lives a secretive life in a cabin in the woods. It becomes clearer and clearer why, but the journey there is interesting, I think. 7

38 Kindred
The screenwriter really must hate the main character, as what they face in this is pretty unrelenting. It’s a well-studied portrait of psychological torment and abuse with a wicked (in the old sense of the word) ending. 7

37 Dear Comrades!
A loyal party members’ daughter gets involved in the first strike they’ve had for a very long time. And you can sort of imagine what has to happen next. 7

36 Pieces Of A Woman
Very hard to watch at times, this is about infant loss and the effect it has on a couple. It felt like a true story. 7

35 Dick Johnson Is Dead
This is an odd film about a film director who realises her father won’t be around for much longer, so ropes him into performing various deaths for her to film. I think the concept is better than the film itself. 7

34 The Social Dilemma
Mark Zuckerberg told me to write this. 7

33 The Courier
Good old-fashioned spy thriller with Benedict Cumberbatch. Perfectly entertaining and surprisingly moving, I found. 7

32 A Shaun The Sheep Movie: Farmageddon
Aardman can do no wrong in my eyes! This cribbed from all the best sci-fi reference points. 7

31 Preparations To Be Together For An Unknown Period Of Time
You meet someone at a conference, come home, see them in the street and they deny having met you. It’s hard to string this premise out for an entire film (and personally I found the conclusions unsatisfying) but it’s definitely well told. 7

30 Soul
I didn’t like the “becoming a cat” part at all but I very much did like the emotional coda. 7

29 Minari
The power of this film is its denouement about, er, celery. 7

28 The Dig
I liked this, it has some starry-eyed wonder moments and some lemon drizzle cake. I loved Ralph Fiennes’ Suffolk accent too. 7

27 Looted
This is a British film worth seeing, not least as it has Thomas Turgoose (from This Is England) who is always worth watching. It’s about looting cars and dying relatives. 7

26 Bad Education
This was surprisingly good, although Allison Janney is unsurprisingly excellent of course. The half-way twist is well-telegraphed and does shift the emphasis of the story in an interesting way. 7

25 I Carry You With Me
Gay Mexican restaurateurs! They are incredible. I love how this plays for the vast majority of its runtime as a narrative drama and then breaks into a documentary at the end. More films should tell their story this way. 7

24 Babyteeth
This is probably number one this year for “quirky indie” but is no worse for that. It’s set in Australia and the feel of it is summery, even though the background theme is terminal illness. 7

23 Calm With Horses
Heartfelt but also brutal Irish gangster film. The supporting performance from Niamh Algar is particularly good, as the world-weary mother of a special needs child. 7

22 Limbo
Asylum seekers are sent to a Scottish island while their claims are assessed. Lots of space for heavy metaphors and social commentary but it all hits home, frankly – and the final scene is beautiful after all the build-up to it. 7

21 County Lines
Young lad gets sucked into drug-dealing. Convincing drama ensues. The supporting performance from Ashley Madekwe is phenomenal. 7

20 The Australian Dream
Follows the most famous indigenous Aussie rules footballer, Adam Goodes, as he becomes the star of the sport at the same time as facing down institutional racism. 7

19 The Dissident
The murder of Jamal Khashoggi is forensically examined in this powerful documentary. 7

18 Nomadland
Overhyped, but it would be difficult not to hype this purely for the cinematography, which is breathtaking throughout. The scene where Frances McDormand goes on a walk through the rocks to play hard to get is worth the price of admission on its own. 7

17 Crip Camp
I felt the film was let down slightly by a dawdling ending, but the central section of direct action for disability rights is an inspiring and teachable moment for anyone who has lost hope that change is possible and the early scenes of the camp are just wonderful too. 7

16 Promising Young Woman
Would you like to be hit over the head repeatedly by a totally on-the-nose #MeToo parable? Here you go, then. There are some tremendously played scenes by Carey Mulligan and the message really does hit home by the final scenes. 7

15 Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom
There are films where a performance elevates a so-so screenplay to a higher plane and Chadwick Boseman’s does this. It’s still mind-boggling that the Academy could be so tone-deaf as to miss the chance to honour his legacy with a post-humous award. 7

14 Palm Springs
Good fun, laughed a lot, enjoyed the timey-wimey twists, would watch again. 7

13 Bacurau
This is a mind-lingerer. The real-life Hunger Games it portrays is so matter-of-factly introduced, as if the participants are just going paintballing. The town itself is a near-utopia before its prelapsarian bubble is burst. 8

12 Lapsis
Brilliant satirical commentary on zero hours contracts and the invisibility of the people who keep the cogs turning on worker servitude. It explores its themes and then ends abruptly on an image to mull over. More films should do this. 8

11 Rocks
It’s so refreshing to watch a young, female-led cast in a story about finding your feet in the world even amidst hardship. 8

10 Les Miserables
Another film where the final shot is a graceful interrogation, this is a French social realist crime thriller where the cops are no good and the squabbles in the tower blocks are petty, but have great consequence. 8

9 Collective
Documentary about Romanian journalists’ struggle to get the truth about the medical treatment of victims of a nightclub fire, this goes far deeper into how politics attempts to reform itself when found completely corrupt, and the incredibly murky waters idealistic politicians have to wade through to get anywhere to this end. This might sound boring to you, but watch it anyway and (hopefully) be surprised. 8

8 Wolfwalkers
Cromwell’s in Ireland but there’s no giving up centuries of mythology and folklore. Sublime animation and storytelling. 8

7 Another Round
Trainspotting showed the euphoria and the horror of drug-taking in intimate detail. This sort of does the same, but for drinking alcohol. The final shot asks us to question ourselves about what WE believe the overall effect of the substance is. On the way, this is a riot and a sombre meditation in equal measure (pun intended). 8

6 Sound Of Metal
The title refers to three different things: the protagonist’s musical style, the ability for deaf people to ‘hear’ metal by vibration, and the metallic sound of artificially rendered sound through a hearing aid. It’s a profound meditation on dreams, expectations and human (in)ability to adapt to dramatically changed circumstances. 8

5 First Cow
The first ever cow arrives in the Pacific Northwest and two acquaintances team up to (ahem) milk it for all its worth. A lovely buddy film, it is simply and charmingly told and impeccably shot. 8

4 Quo Vadis, Aida?
Anger-inducing, harrowing but essential account of the Srebrenica massacre in 1995. 8

3 The 40-Year-Old Version
This was so so enjoyable and funny. The message: it’s not too late to reinvent yourself. 8

2 Judas and the Black Messiah
It’s got a good amount of competition, but this will surely be seen as the key film to represent the Black Lives Matter movement era and the call for racial justice. It should have won Best Picture at the Oscars. The screenplay grips like a vice and all of the performances are fantastic, but I particularly rated LaKeith Stanfield as William O’Neal. 8

1 Never Rarely Sometimes Always
A near-documentary account of what it’s like to access an abortion when your state requires a parent’s permission to get one. Yes, this really was the best film I watched. It is stunning from start to finish. 9

#MayWriteABit 2020

Friday 1st May
I’ve been thinking about what to put in this first bit of writing for a long time. Our mind writes for us! I think writing is worth pondering in itself. Why do I feel compelled to write? Mostly, I do this in shortform every day at regular intervals on Twitter, Facebook and in my day job (which is writing comments based on policy on planning applications). It’s pretty performative stuff, all told, although of course I do only put stuff up I actually believe in. It does seem like writing comes from an egotistical and fairly self-centred space. I do tend to take the Cartesian approach. I did Philosophy A Level and I remember we watched this (in hindsight) quite funny video of Descartes sitting in his aristocratic bed and questioning all things, it just made him look like a privileged white European bloke, getting up at midday for his daily think. Because thinking is surely central to writing? I went to one of those Guardian Masterclasses in London a while back, it was on writing a novel and was hosted by Tim Lott, who wrote a small column for the Family section of the Graun for a while, but he was going through a divorce at the time and it was all a bit morose, but the thing I remember most was him saying that basically most of writing is thinking abstractly as the key aspect of your work day. I mean, there are literally billions of people who – with work, childcare and other essential responsibilities – simply do not have the time to do this thinking, let alone the writing. Then again, there have been loads of really great writers who have just snuck it into their daily schedule and produced, well, literature. (The obvious example is JK Rowling, although I have never read her books as I am more of a sci-fi than a fantasy person, and I have a dislike for anything hyped.) As I’ve already said, I tend to write non-fiction, but when I think about formalised non-social non-work writing, I tend to think in more fictional terms because of my primary motivations in life. I am a fairly unreconstructed idealist when it comes to social and political things. That means I think in a utopian framework. You can construct an entire world in your head that grapples with the vision and realities of living in a community, but it begins to get to you that you aren’t actually writing any of this shit down, it’s just a daydream. Is this ego? Or is it just wanting to share your perspective on the world with the hope that someone else agrees and wants to do something about that? I mean, that’s why I got into politics, to get together with others and push for our common visions, dreams, utopias, alternatives to the way things are. So I guess what I am saying here is that, for me, all writing is utopian. It is an attempt to get your utopian vision of the world across to someone else. There is also the question of legacy, and I do think that is a primary motivation too. I find this is wrapped up with mortality. “When I’m gone, what will be left?” is the line of thought. With a bit of perspective, you can look at this as a very selfish impulse, but also, we all want a meaningful life, that our actions were loving, kind, helped people, gave people a perspective, made an impact. That must be a large part of what drives writers, that they are thinking that – overall, perhaps discounting the indulgence of sitting still thinking all day! – they are providing something unique and socially useful. And people who read books, love them and learn from them will agree to that I’m sure. But I’m not sure that this is “legacy”, it’s just “useful at the time”. Maybe that is a more humble way of looking at it, but part of me really desires to “outlive my death” through my work as some writers have. As I type this, Anna is singing “we’re going on a bear hunt” to our daughter Erin. I am getting distracted by this! So:

1) It is hard to find time to write.
2) Most writing is done in your head
3) My writing is always from a utopian impulse.
4) A lot of writers want to change people’s way of thinking, teach them and provoke an emotional reaction in the here and now.
5) Some writers want to have a “legacy” so that they can somehow “survive eternally in print”. This is a heavy burden to carry for most and I think I probably need to get rid of this idea myself to take the pressure off myself.

8 minutes left of my half an hour! One of the things I was thinking before I started this is how easy it is to do the first thing, but much harder to do the second thing. It makes me think, weirdly, of the band Stereophonics. Anyone who has been following indie/rock music since the mid-1990s that the first Stereophonics album, Word Gets Around, was lyrically brilliant. There’s a theory that gets trotted out that you have 18 years to create your first album, and only 1 or 2 to create your second album. Stereophonics’ second album was OK, but by their third album they were already just creating bland MOR songs that said nothing about them and who they were as people as their first album did in capturing what it was like to grow up in Wales, the local personalities, the ways that people talk, etc. I am also doing Couch to 5K at the moment and I just did my third run. I felt great on the first run, OK on the second one (slightly worse) and then I could barely make it through the 60 second jogs on the third run. I think I have had a fear of stamina for a long time. The idea that I could write a novel, or do anything in a sustained and controlled way like this, is kind of scary, because it requires your whole person, which isn’t something I or anyone is comfortable giving out most of the time. So I guess this project is an opportunity to provide structure and maintenance for me in my writing. I am worried the open free expression I have committed to may just be 31 blogs that read boringly and don’t provide insight, so I think what might make me more comfortable – and motivated to continue! – is just firstly putting down what I think about the world, to describe my worldview in terms of philosophy, religion, politics, etc. This might also create a number of things I can spin off from and write about. I do have to leave the door open to the idea that I will have something desperate to write about that doesn’t follow on sequentially from what I have said before, but mostly I will be doing this as a continuous piece of writing. 53 seconds to go! Aarrghhh. What do I put here? I think I peaked a little too early there. Anyway, this was a first stab, let me know what you think on social media and I will see you tomorrow for the next installment of my #MayWriteABit!

Saturday 2nd May
Start at the top and work your way down is a maxim I tend to go with, not least because I think the utopian impulse is built on this. And it does seem to me that the absolute top is God, or heaven, or nirvana, or any spiritual or religious idea of perfection, holiness, goodness, sanctity. This might immediately put people off, but please bear with me. This very plausibly could be a two-parter, as there is much to say!

My religious background is a lot to do with my left-liberal parents. My parents met in Sierra Leone when my Dad was working for Student Christian Movement (SCM) and my Mum was taking what we would now call a gap year from her studies at a small college in Nebraska, USA. My dad ended up moving away from Christianity to atheism, but my mum was a believer and churchgoer up until her death through complications of Multiple Systems Atrophy (MSA) – what we thought was Parkinson’s disease until a post-mortem was conducted on her brain – in 2010. So, Sundays growing up we had a choice – either go to church with mum, or stay home with dad. For most of my early teens, I chose the latter while my two older sisters went to church. It was only when my sister invited me to go to a Bible study (when I was about 15, I think?) that I started to become interested in religion, but more accurately more interested in philosophy and theology. I went to a church camp and did the whole “giving my life to Jesus” thing, but I was always a bit of a sceptic, even when surrounded by evangelicals and wanting desperately to believe it all. I think it was only towards the end of my time at university (circa 2006) that I realised that I needed something spiritually wholly different than orthodox Christianity. When I moved to Bristol in 2008 (after time spent on a liberal Presbyterian summer camp in Minnesota, USA), I found a contemplative “post-evangelical” emerging church community called Foundation. This is where I met a lot of people who felt pretty similar to me – burned by dogmatic belief but wanting something nourishing and communal still. I was then, in the words of the great Richard Holloway, probably “dancing on the edge” of Christianity. The services were non-hierarchically organised and sometimes very unorthodox with loads of use of film, music and involving a lot more questioning and doubt, but perhaps a lot more simplicity in their spiritual direction of travel too. Sadly, Foundation kind of fizzled out, arguably because people ran out of ideas and energy. It has since been reborn in a different form but life circumstances make me less inclined to make appearances, and I do feel it is a bit more orthodox and churchy now, which turns me off a bit.

Anyway, I suppose all of this is just a long-winded way of explaining that for me, religion and spirituality have always been a choice. It’s probably not good to compare myself to my two sisters, but I think it is interesting that one of us is probably still sort of “in the fold”, another is an atheist (I think? I haven’t asked her) and now I am a sort of woolly agnostic deist. Let me unpack that!

There is a lot of religion out there to choose from, but frankly I have always been more interested in the questions than the answers. I look at the world and see profound beauty and immense power, but I think God Themself seems very like my parents in Their approach – unpreachy, letting us make our own decisions, not uncaring about our plight, but certainly not really someone who intervenes. I have in the past struggled with the problem of evil, but mostly I just put it down to the fact that it’s not much of a world if we don’t get to make conscious decisions about what to do with it. That can result in the Holocaust, but it can also result in the invention of the printing press or

Jesus seems to be a good bloke, but there are lots of things I disagree with that he said…and that’s OK? I mean, he said a lot of Premier League history-making shit too, but I think his followers probably just misunderstood who he was and embellished a few things. It was clearly a great idea that was born, an idea that will forever be the centre of any spiritual insight – love everyone, act justly, create community together to support one another, etc. – and I am reminded of a quote from a Jeannette Winterson book called “Written On The Body” where she talks about the first disciples. I apologies for taking time out to find it, but it was such a marvellous thing to find it again as I first read this when I was doing Cultural Criticism in my first year at Cardiff (2002):

” The earliest pilgrims shared a cathedral for a heart. They were the temple not made with hands. The Eklasia of God. The song that carried them over the waves was the hymn that rung the rafters. Their throats were bare for God. Look at them now, heads thrown back, mouths open, alone but for the gulls that dip the prow. Against the too salt sea and the inhospitable sky, their voices made a screen of praise. Love it was that drove them forth. Love that brought them home again. Love hardened their hands against the oar and heated their sinews against the rain. The journeys they made were beyond common sense; who leaves the hearth for the open sea? especially without a compass, especially in winter, especially alone. What you risk reveals what you value. In the presence of love, hearth and quest become one.”

Isn’t that brilliant? It speaks to me of giving your absolute all for a cause. I don’t think I could ever do that with Christianity, not because the core truths aren’t great, but that by subscribing to it I am saying something about myself politically that I don’t want to say – that I believe that there is always a reason for everything and that it’s all part of some wider plan. Beyond the laws of the universe, I just don’t believe it is. So, my spirituality really got enveloped into a different institution, if you like – the Green Party. Foundation was my transitional stage. And, in many ways, political parties are exactly like churches or religions. My old voting reform friend David Gould said they are cults and he isn’t completely wrong. The Green Party is perhaps more like this than most – we have a philosophical basis, a central dogma/truth (“you can’t have infinite economic growth on a finite planet”) and it definitely allows me the ability to be like Winterson’s pilgrims. Its core demographic is an interesting spiritual mishmash of Quakers, liberal Christians, out-and-out atheists, and open humanists – the sort of mixture I can get along with. We have a minute’s attunement before we make policy. It’s probably not healthy that my religion is politics (or maybe “political change/activism”) but that genuinely is where my heart lies now. So, in conclusion, I am an agnostic when it comes to whether there is a God (I lean in a sort of Pascal’s Wager way towards yes, mostly because of my background) and if there is a God, I think it’s definitely a deistic, non-interventionist God, where the beauty and the truth is wrapped in the creation and revelation is simply our subjective readings of that creation and the engagement with our consciousness that we have been given. However, I am regularly spiritually and emotionally moved in ways that aren’t to do with the creation, but to do with human charity, poignancy and struggle. That’s my 30 minutes up!

Sunday 3rd May
I feel like I left yesterday’s writing quite abruptly on the subject of what I am moved by. So maybe I should just make a list of things that I am/have been moved by? Here goes:

> The music video to Hurt by Johnny Cash
> Andrea Bocelli singing Nessum Dorma at the King Power Stadium after my team Leicester City had won the Premier League
> A particular scene in A Quiet Place towards the end (if you’ve seen it, you’ll know what I mean) – I saw this before and after I became a father, and I got it more the second time
> There are lots of film scenes, in particular moments in these films: Super 8, E.T., Toy Story 3, In America, I’ve dried up, but a lot of my learning comes from how I feel in these moments
> My daughter smiling at me for the first time really got me! (Pretty much everything she does gets me, to be fair.)
> A blog my friend Steve wrote the other day about collecting his father’s possessions from a care home after he’d died.

I feel like a lot of these are quite “blokey” moments. So I guess this blog can be about sex and gender? Why not, we have to go there sometime.

I am probably more on the sensitive side, but I still have a lot of frustration/anger that spills out at fairly regular intervals that could be said to be unchecked masculine stuff. I believe gender and sex are really hard to define and for that reason I think it is utterly wrong to try to pigeonhole people into binaries that don’t fit our lived realities. I am incensed by the way in recent years the gender “debate” (it’s not a debate, just as debating another minority group’s shared characteristics is not up for debate) there has been this extreme fundamentalist vision created by men like Graham Linehan and the like, who don’t really give a shit about people’s feelings or finding common ground, but just want to tear apart people’s sense of their own identity. It’s not difficult to find empathy for people who feel deep down they are not living in the world in the way they want to. No one transitions between genders lightly. The scaremongering around “men” (i.e. trans women) entering “women’s spaces” (i.e. cis women’s spaces who don’t recognise trans women as women) is horrific and should be condemned. I’m not sure where I’m going with this, I’m just saying what I think and what I think society should accept. Those people who are saying that we shouldn’t recognise trans and non-binary identities and that they are not valid will I think find that they are on the wrong side of history.

I cry a lot. It’s not usually because I am sad, it’s nearly always because I am moved. As time has gone on, I have become more and more comfortable with this and I actually wear it as a badge of honour. Mark Kermode talks about this a lot and quotes Roger Ebert who said that cinema is a “machine that breeds empathy”. I do find it quite hard to empathise with other people sometimes (i.e. people who I consider to be just being stupid and ignorant), but I think cinema does help me to fine-tune that impulse and understand it. One absolute masterpiece I watched recently was the film A Separation which is set in Iran and follows a couple going through a divorce. It is so finely written, every aspect of the film promotes that Ebert maxim – you can understand each character’s difficulties, there is no black and white, everyone is just struggling to survive and do what they think is best. I think that is immensely powerful as a message. However, I think this genuine desire to see things from other people’s points of view is ruthlessly exploited in society by the Government and by large employers. We had to go to Tesco earlier (I hate Tesco, but the local chemist where we buy nappies is shut on Sundays and we had run out) and the cashier we had was wearing a t-shirt saying “We’re all in this together”. Little things like that just HUGELY wind me up – because we’re not, the person wearing the t-shirt is not experiencing all this in the same way I am, and neither are care and NHS workers. The rich can retire to their country estates, the poor are forced to live in one room. Anna says I am becoming a middle-aged complainer, and she’s right. I hate that I can’t push our daughter in a buggy on our daily walks because there’s not enough pavement and not enough dropped kerbs to access that pavement. This comes back to me to the values that society holds. Western (neo)liberal capitalism is what we base everything on, which is kind of “as long as someone is not hurting anyone else by doing something, it’s fine” (never mind that the fact capitalism silently kills people everyday as a result of its unrestricted amoralism). I think utilitarianism has a lot to answer for as it suggests that the pragmatic delivery of multiple pleasures is the goal of society, and not the common good of all. (I’ll wait for a liberal to rush in and tell me this is an incorrect interpretation!) If we truly valued the common good, we would publicly state that getting parked cars out of residential communities would be a fundamentally good thing for everyone in terms of livability, air quality, ability for pedestrians and cyclists to navigate the streets safely and easily, climate change aims, etc. So I am pretty fixated on the massively overcrowded streets near me, but I haven’t seen anyone else who is particularly, or at least no active group that wants to change this situation (even if lots of people don’t like it). So I think this blog has meandered (3 minutes to go) and again I haven’t felt like I have said that much that makes it very coherent, but I think you can see that for me the emotive side comes out in two ways in particular: 1) when I am watching films and 2) when I can see the things that frustrate me on the hyper-local level. Perhaps in my next entry I will discuss how I think this second aspect can be approached on a community or societal level. I recently wrote a 14,000-word master’s dissertation on the socio-political viewpoints of urban pedestrians, but for me the most interesting part of (which I didn’t have space to say much about) is the theory of agonism. (No, it’s not as painful as it sounds!) This theory is fascinating because it suggests that we actually NEED conflict. With 30 seconds to go, I guess I’ll tell you all about it tomorrow! So long.

Monday 4th May
Anna bought me an SD card for my phone because I keep filling up on photos of Erin, so I was hunting around for the little metal pointy thing you use to get your phone to open and I stumbled across the headphones that came with my phone. “Great, I can use these for my Couch to 5K” I naively thought. If you were out in Eastville Park at around 7.45am today you would have seen a guy yelling “STUPID FUCKING HEADPHONES KEEP FALLING OUT!”. I will be returning to the over-ear headphones for Wednesday’s run. This serves as an intro to our topic today: the political theory of agonism. On first glance, people probably think this sounds quite painful and negative, like a belief that we should all be in agony! Far from it. I first came across this term when reading for my very first essay on my MSc Urban Planning course, in relation to the structures that may be used to create neighbourhood planning. In essence, there have been two prevalent planning theories of community/political engagement in the last 20 to 25 years: Patsy Healey’s “collaborative planning” based on Habermas’ ideas around communicative practice and the ideal speech situation. This theory argues (or perhaps, in line with its precepts, suggests!) that bringing diverse people into communication (i.e. talking in a room) can create a consensus on issues where initially participants diverge. This may not happen in one meeting, but it can happen. This relates quite well to the sort of democratic principles that the Green Party has espoused for its entire history, that consensus is preferable to than majority voting and definitely preferable to dissensus or conflict (these are subtly different terms). If you go to a Green Party meeting, there are many signals that this is how we want to work, there will be instances where no vote is taken and the discussion that has occurred takes as read the conclusions that members have come to. It can work really really well, and when it doesn’t work, you fall back onto majority decision-making (i.e. raising hands). On a micro-level (e.g. Bristol Green Party) this is much more likely to be effective than on a macro-level (e.g. the whole of Bristol, or even the whole of one ward or district). I have some positive experience of this. When I was a councillor, we brought together people (about 30?) who were concerned about one community member’s desire to build a house behind theirs on some open land. Introducing deliberation as a key value of the meeting was key, with everyone being asked to slightly rein in their strongly held views (there were equal numbers on each side of the debate, as I recall) and what occurred was a sort of gentle recognition that the idea to build there would just not be a good thing. This was helped by the potential house-builder being a member of the community, a reasonable person and a listener. And this is the key problem with collaborative planning – it doesn’t allow for the differences in wealth, status and class that already exist (and persist) in society. It suggests – and New Labour were quite key to pushing this as a model in communities – that everyone is an equal stakeholder. Well, that’s bollocks isn’t it? Because a black working class disabled lesbian female minimum wage retail worker does not have the same power and privilege as a white upper middle class abled-bodied heterosexual male chief executive of a business lobbying group. And there’s the rub. Because as long as these inequalities are not addressed at the macro-economic (i.e. state) level, any collaborative framework will naturally cohere to dominant economic and social orthodoxies. The idea that we can just work out these stratospheric differences with a bit of a chat is not only naive but also insulting to people who don’t have the power and privilege to perhaps even be present at the meeting. So, what is the alternative? How do we get a peaceful and respectful decision-making process without disallowing and denuding those who have been sidelined by society? How do we allow for rancour, shouting, anger and deeply held views to be heard and taken into account without the whole thing descending into a fight? The key here is in acknowledging that agonism is not antagonism. An antagonistic discourse would be what I kind of just described. It would be an unstructured rant which, although maybe 100% accurate, true and relevant, does not allow for the possibility of a sustained critique between different groups. Agonism, on the other hand, suggests that groups (or even just individuals) in society can agree a sort of “constructive adversarialism” whereby differences and hegemonies (i.e. dominant power structures) are acknowledged, and different strategies for change are thrashed out. This theory wasn’t born out of planning, by the way. It arose through the work of Chantal Mouffe, a Belgian political theorist who works at a university in London (I forget which) and wrote a book in the 1980s called Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. I haven’t read it, but I have read her later work where she expands on the agonist idea at length in books such as Agonistics and For A Left Populism. 4 minutes to go. This theory is applied to the EU and in many other contexts to suggest the way forward is to work out ways to challenge the dominant economic paradigm of neoliberal capitalism. Reminding myself of that book title makes me think that “left populism” could be a good thing to talk about in my next blog. But, in conclusion, I think we need to move away from the idea that consensus is always possible and that agonistic discourse is the way forward, and it also is a way for constructing alternatives to the hegemonic forces at work in society. Here’s the Wikipedia article if you are interested and want to learn more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agonism

Tuesday 5th May
I am drinking a beer at 4pm on a Tuesday (started work early today!), so what better subject to talk about than left populism? Populism is a word that has been ubiquitous over the last few years, so much so that the Guardian did one of those multi-nation case studies about its effect. Most people associate it with people like Trump, Farage, Johnson, Putin, Orban, etc. but this is of course only one element of populism. You could call it rightwing populism, but even that is too simplistic as in some countries, it expresses itself in things like the 5-Star Movement (Italy) which has an interest in environmentalism and e-democracy. I recently watched Tiger King on Netflix (who, apparently, hasn’t?) and it reminded me that there are a whole set of people that have socially liberal views on some things and still want a small-state and less government interference. Libertarianism actually exists. Libertarianism isn’t always populism though, which Wikipedia defines as ‘a range of political stances that emphasise the idea of “the people” and often juxtapose this group against “the elite”‘. At the risk of being too simplistic, this does generally fall into right populism and left populism, although arguably the rhetoric employed by a mainstream party like the UK Liberal Democrats around the 2005-2010 period had elements of a ‘centrist populism’ or, as some Lib Dems like to label themselves, ‘radical centrism’. (Personally, I think this is nonsensical, but let’s not get too sidetracked into my issues with the Lib Dems!)

So what are right populism and left populism? Right populism is more authoritarian in its belief in institutions and markets but still holds a belief that these have been corrupted in some way by an elite (e.g. Farage vs the EU) and need to be taken back by the people. Johnson has been successful in claiming this ground from Farage in the UK context simply because Brexit was a massive single issue that could contain the rhetorical contradiction of a strong UK economy and a horrific EU bureaucracy (they are interdependent). Left populism, on the other hand, takes aim at different elites – the people who manage the economy, such as billionaires and lax tax regimes. It is not intrinsically eurosceptic or protectionist, but instead targets the elite in whatever ways are suitable within the context it is working. It is not anti-statist as I understand it – in the case of successful examples like Podemos and Syriza, it is far from being anarchistic or critical of using state apparatus, even if it sees social and political change coming ‘from below’ not above. It sees the building of movements – separated by issue, but united in common desire – as the central focus and as its theory of change. The two successes already mentioned came about as a result of the combination of the financial mismanagement and austerity measures in the period since 2007. Podemos were helped by the main centre-left’s blandness in Spain (and they capitalised on some of the regionalist autonomous struggles). Syriza were helped by the EU effectively trying to bankrupt Greece unless they implemented austerity measures (the EU sadly won this argument with Tsipras giving in and Varoufakis, er, starting his book tour!). So should we be in favour of left populism? Is it a sustainable form of politics and does it have wide enough appeal to continue to carry votes at the ballot box beyond its contextual birth in the post-crash world?

Personally, I think it is a vital tool. The progressive side of politics (it’s hard to deny there are two ‘sides’ of politics, really – even if some people try to) do need to use the rhetoric of the people against elites to energise their voter bases. It is surprising that this railing against the system and elites wasn’t more central to the message of Corbynism in the 2019 General Election, as my friend Adam Ramsay  has written here. The problem with the UK context is the first past the post system forcing people to fit into a big tent party like Labour that is a bit centre-left and a bit radical left. I would argue that only a proportional voting system allows the right dynamic for left populism to gain a sustainable foothold in electoral politics. In Germany, there are three left parties: the SPD (centre-left), the Greens (centre-left to left) and the Left (the left!). They go up and down with each election, but because the right can’t always get a majority, their politics is able to find voice. And each of these groups – at least on paper – represents key aspects of progressive politics: SPD (organised labour), Greens (environmental capital) and the Left (radical movements). The key task for each of these parties then is to develop broad platforms while, to some extent, stealing each other’s rhetoric and messaging to try and broaden their appeal without losing their core vote. Doesn’t that sound FASCINATING, UK people, compared to what we have? In this system, left populism will be more likely to be found in the Greens or in the Left, but it is interesting that parties in the UK like Plaid Cymru and the SNP have been able to capture a bit of that nationalist mood because of their context of faraway English dictat. The SNP are currently calling for a citizen’s income, which in itself is an interesting ‘straddler’ of the left-right divide: rightwingers want it because it cuts benefits bureaucracy, leftwingers want it because it offers everyone dignity to pursue their interests without being in poverty. The SNP (and the Lib Dems!) calling for this now is clearly in response to the economic effects of the pandemic, but this does show that populist measures like this can also be incredibly practical. It is the movement of left populism (which I’d argue the Green Party represents most closely in the UK context) towards the practical implementation of those policies, that is the key movement in most societies in the Global North and is the cause that many of us will continue to champion. Perhaps then, my next blog should be about the avenues for Green/left influence and why there is always a need for a small, radical leftwing party within the UK system. I guess this is me saying I am returning to my comfort zone, but they can’t all be challenging pieces to write! 🙂

Wednesday 6th May
After Jeremy Corbyn was elected leader of the Labour Party in September 2015, a bunch of people left the Green Party (and a number of other smaller leftwing parties) to get behind him. The context of the rise of Corbynism was a pro-austerity Ed Miliband-led Labour having their urban seat majorities affected by the anti-austerity Natalie Bennett-led Green Party. 1.1 million Green votes didn’t achieve any additional seats due to the ridiculous first past the post electoral system the UK uses, but it did force Labour to engage with the leftwing arguments the Greens had been making and adopt some (but not all) of their sensible policies: bringing the railways back into public ownership, opposition to austerity and – belatedly in 2019 – the Green New Deal (which had been drawn up by Caroline Lucas and other key green economic thinkers around the time of the financial crash).

This paragraph in itself demonstrates the need for smaller, radical parties in parliamentary systems. (I would argue – as a dual US-UK national – that this doesn’t apply to the US pres system, where there is one big head-to-head, not 650 individual head-to-heads, although I would vote for a less wacky Green for positions at the city level in America.) Simply by voting for a smaller party, you do a few things, some of which are not generally understood by most people:

1) You increase their national vote share which allows them to gain more “short money” (for more on this, start here). In the Green Party’s case, that means Caroline Lucas has more people supporting her in her vital work. This is a Good Thing and can only produce better scrutiny of the government on key progressive issues, something that Labour often fails to do on a range of issues (e.g. Brexit).

2) You build support in a constituency for future elections so the Greens can make the case that they can actually win there in 1 to 2 elections’ time. My own constituency of Bristol West is a case in point. In 2010, the Greens got about 2,000 votes. But due to the unpopularity of the Lib Dem Coalition government, the incumbent Lib Dem leaked thousands of votes to the Greens in 2015. If the Greens hadn’t even stood or got NO VOTES AT ALL in 2010, there would not have been any credibility to the idea of winning in 2015. Of course, the Greens didn’t win in 2015, but they are now unquestionably in second place in that constituency, so there is a possibility in 1 or 2 elections time of getting a Green MP. None of this could have happened without people voting Green in 2010 (and 2005 too!). If you don’t ever vote for the change you want to see, you will never see it. It also isn’t a wasted vote – as this paragraph has evidenced.

3) As described above, you may force the other parties to think twice about their approach to electoral politics. In 2019, Molly Scott Cato MEP stood in the Stroud constituency and spent the entire campaign fending off calls for Labour to not stand because the Greens would “split the left vote”. Never mind the fact that this is a patronising and undemocratic position to take, the fact that Labour lost that election may make them think twice about some of the larger strategic questions of how to convincingly beat the Tories and elect a progressive, green government sometime before we disappear into the sea. (Admittedly, this one is a long shot given Labour’s past record, but one can hope.)

4) As also mentioned above in the Corbyn example, you may shift the policies of the other parties. The Labour and Lib Dem 2019 election manifestos were massively influenced by the green agenda which, admittedly, was because of the school strikes and Extinction Rebellion rather than the Green Party’s voters being a direct influence. However, in 2015, the Labour Party went as far as to set up an “anti-green unit” to try to shift their rhetoric towards green issues. Consider the alternative – another election goes by without substantial debate on the most important issue facing humanity – and you begin to see why political pluralism and radical smaller parties are necessary.

5) You can elect local Green councillors. Under first past the post, this is the only level (other than the sadly now defunct European elections) that Greens can quickly get people into positions of influence. The council I work for elected 3 Greens in 2019 because people were tired of the status quo. Voting Green may not influence your local area this time, but the margins of victory in council elections (due to poor turnout) are often very small. (I think I was elected by under 100 votes, and was expecting a different party to come second than actually did!) As we increased in influence in Bristol, a number of our members who weren’t standing in “target wards” began to get a little bit worried they might actually win the seats they were standing in! And this makes a massive difference. Cities like Manchester or Birmingham are basically one-party states with no opposition. Constructively critical opposition is a vital part of the democratic system. Greens deliver great opposition and in some places, are now ready to govern.

Finally, a couple of points on tactical voting (read more about Duverger’s Law here):
1) You only get an average of about 12 general elections to vote in in your life. Why waste those 12 opportunities? Use your vote to vote for what you actually want, or you’ll never get it.
2) If Labour and Tories continually get votes from people who just want to keep the other party out, they will never value you and will continue to use you and abuse you (frankly!). Your vote is precious. Make them earn it by withholding it if you think there is someone or some party who would be better.

Voting for parties tactically has sometimes got a place. For instance, in the last Metro Mayor election in the West of England region, I gave my second preference vote to the Labour Party because they were most likely to be in the “play-off” with the Tories and obviously I would prefer Labour to them. I could have just left the second preference column blank. This is the only electoral system under which I would place a tactical vote, because all other systems are covered by what I said above, or are proper preferential or proportional systems where your true preferences will be carried into the results…and influence them! Out of time. Phew!

Thursday 7th May
I realise my last post was a very biased but of course deeply felt piece of propaganda. Perhaps I should row back a bit and think about genuine routes to change. This is I think (as I said in my first post) a utopian impulse. Let me try and trace some ways that we can actually improve societal structures and political systems.

1) One way is through a more anarchistic appreciation. I really like the ideals of anarchism. The biggest anarchist influence on me is the Ursula Le Guin novel The Dispossessed, I thoroughly recommend it, whatever your political values. Anarchism doesn’t, in my view, succeed as a worldview for tackling systemic problems at the macro stage (you have to get inside it to do that – more on which later). However, I think it is the strongest motivation for localised action to directly improve community and people’s lives. In distinction to socialism, its ambivalence/hostility to the state means that it isn’t an “asking” philosophy, it’s a “doing” philosophy. The mutual aid groups that have been set up because of the pandemic are loosely an anarchist idea: if you don’t believe the state will help you (and it may be undesirable that it does), you have to set up your own mutual aid arrangements. This can only really work at the local level, although of course good practice can be shared. So this is one route to change: just start organising to care for people in your community and provide an arena for strategic action.

2) Another way of making change is through religion. Many faith communities have incredibly strong social bonds amongst people from a wider area than an anarchist collective (as described in 1)) might be able to draw and this results in greater social action (e.g. organising food banks, social action projects like The Noise, community iftars, etc.). I remember talking with my friend Mark once about how only a macro-level religious motivation would provide sufficient motivation to globally upturn the economic system quickly enough to supersede capitalism. It seems unrealistic that a post-Englightenment world could return on a mass scale to religion, but successive new age communities have sprung up. If there was one with credibility and simplicity, it would be interesting to see how this fared. Surely we are in a moment where “slow living” and “community bonds” are absolutely being taken up, but this is happening generally not just through churches, mosques, synagogues, etc. From my own experience, church communities do seem to be best-placed to take action, they just need increased mobilisation – and politicisation.

3) Another route to change is of course the well-worn reformist party political route that, generally speaking, I favour. I spoke about this more in my last blog post. There are good reasons to be demoralised by this route, but also many avenues for change, particularly on the local level. Which leads onto…

4) We need a proper recognition of the role of “civics” in terms of our engagement with local governance structures. Without people standing up at the local level to fight things, it is hard to see how anything will change. This “civic organising” is relatively strong in Bristol where I live. People turn up at council meetings to make their case to the Mayor and council. If you follow your “local political Twitter”, the anger and frustration are evident in the populace at the slow pace of change. Traditional campaigning through petitions and direct action at council meetings is absolutely essential, but too few people take this up as a positive pursuit rather than just as a reaction to something they don’t like. A big part of this would be helped by…

5) Proper civic and political education in schools! Students should be taught between 11 and 16 about the political system, why parties take particular positions rather than others, the concept of media bias and what the motivating factors are for prevalent media sources/journalists, and different theories of change. Too much is taught about all of this, without any critical engagement WITH it. I’m fortunate that I did media studies at school, otherwise I wouldn’t have had any foundation for critiquing what I was reading. And of course it helps if we have…

6) Much more ability for journalists to be investigative, questioning and constructively critical of powerful figures and organisations. The current media landscape severely restricts the range of questions that journalists are able to countenance as part of their reporting. Recently, there has been a breath of fresh air at the local level with the advent of Local Democracy Reporting. This means that there will be at least one person in every locality questioning why politicians and councils are doing things. They turn up to meetings and report (on Twitter and through BBC and other local media channels) what is actually going on in area. This is absolutely invaluable and has caused some annoyance in the Labour administration in Bristol as the scrutiny they are now being placed under requires them to have an answer for their positions!

7) The final theory of change I will talk about is a bit more wishy washy, but perhaps the most important. Whether you’re religious or not, the entire mindset we bring to the world is the most important factor. If even 5% extra of the UK population, for instance, decided that they were going to spend ten minutes each day in quiet meditation (I don’t do this myself, I’m giving it as an example!), it would have demonstrable benefits in terms of the way we all are able to cope with the world and engage positively with these other 6 methods of getting change. I’m not sure how this gets rolled out, though. Any ideas welcome!

So those are my seven routes to potential change. They are:
1) Anarchist-inspired community/collective organisation and mutual aid
2) Faith-based social action
3) Reforming the system from within by getting involved in party politics
4) Civic organising to challenge and critique local governance decision-making
5) Civic and political education in schools
6) Creating more space for investigative, questioning and critical journalism
7) Some kind of mindset change within each of us as individuals

Now, I’m not saying that we are all going to do all of these. I’m saying that most of us are probably involved in one of these, and we should be encouraged by that fact. It also requires flexibility. If you live in a village, the church might be the best way of contributing to change. If you are put off by anarchism, why not campaign for media reform or better political education? If you cannot manage any of these due to time constraints, perhaps doing number 7) for you involves simply being open to other people in a way you haven’t been previously?

I realise that I have been pretty solidly focused on number 3) for the last ten years, largely to the detriment of all of the others. I am currently questioning that. With a new baby comes less time to spend on multiple pursuits and a necessary narrowing down of efforts. This kind of self-reflection is something we probably do quite irregularly. It was some old Greek who said “an unexamined life is not worth living”. I think it’s time to examine mine.

Friday 8th May
Or, alternatively, don’t change a thing. Here’s a thought experiment. Say that you found a job on your 18th birthday that pays about average wage that you like and you have inherited a house or a flat that is perfectly comfortable and close to your work. (This is a thought experiment, obviously this isn’t what the vast majority of people do.) Now imagine that you don’t change a thing. You read the news but it doesn’t really move you to do anything differently. You’re friendly with your colleagues at the office and might go out for the odd drink with them, but you otherwise keep yourself to yourself. You enjoy your job but you aren’t really bothered about career progression as you just see it as a hassle. You go and see your parents or your siblings at the weekend. You don’t really want a relationship as you are quite happy watching Netflix or TV and think it would get in the way of that. Effectively, you are perfectly content and do not desire anything new or fresh to occur, you are perfectly happy with the day-to-day existence that you inhabit.

To most of us, this sounds horrific as a way of life because there is no variety and nothing interesting going on. There are probably a fair few people living this life. Conversely, Immanuel Kant was keen on an idea: universalizable action. Ethically, you should act as you would expect everyone else to act in the same situation – a sort of extension of that old saying “treat others as you’d like to be treated”.  What would be the consequence if everybody lived their life as “universalisable action” or as “change nothing”?

The risk here is to say that the world would clearly be much better off if everyone treated everyone else as they would like to be treated. However, this saying is too vague and too hard to practically pin down. Say you pass a homeless person on the street – does this universal law of ethics means you are duty bound to help that homeless person right there and then, just because you can imagine how you would like to be treated if you were in their position? The world is a big and complex place. If every time you were made aware of some sort of human suffering (as surely this is where Kant is going with his ethical maxims) you contributed time or money, you would soon be exhausted. This, in many ways, is what happens in progressive activist circles. People have too much care or at least too much moral/ethical conviction. “What a disgusting thing to say!” I hear you cry. But if you think about it, it’s not disgusting, it’s self-preservation. There’s no use in us all being exhausted and unable to function – then we’re no use to anyone. It is possible to intellectually know something is wrong or needs to be addressed without personally committing yourself to address it. Just today I saw a horrific video of a man being tasered by police in front of his child. It’s probably the most outraged I have been for a while, but how am I going to act on that? This video was filmed in Manchester – it is impractical for me to get involved with the specific case. The broader issue? Sure, I could campaign solidly for police to not routinely carry tasers in the UK, but am I about to drop all the other issues that I care about for this issue. I see people like Peter Tatchell who pretty much dedicate all their waking hours to campaigning, and it just seems impractical for where I am in life right now. So why do I hold in my mind that this is the kind of thing I should be doing at all times? Damn you, Kant!

Equally, I am not sure I could live in the “change nothing”. Obviously there are people who are just getting on with living their lives and trying to be happy and enjoy things, but I think most people do have at least a charitable side to their personality and will support an organisation (Cancer Research is an obvious example) where they have been affected by that issue. The central question here is: is just going about your daily business enough for any of us, or do we ethically have a responsibility to be an activist or a campaigner – if there is nothing stopping us from being one? The direct result if we became the “change nothing” person would be an OK atmosphere, but also a load of systemic issues that weren’t being dealt with and mounting inequality and climate change. That is just as undesirable a situation as activist burnout.

So what is the balance to be struck between these two extremes and how do you choose what you should do in life? At the moment, I am finding it really hard and there is a strong temptation for me to just drop out of political commitment and just focus on caring for Erin and spending time with Anna with any extra hours that the day brings. It is hard for me to accept that this is an acceptable course of action, but I don’t think many people reading this who have had kids (and many who haven’t) would say it is an ethically questionable choice. But it is the “easy path”. And I don’t think life is about taking the easy path. Because if you just stick to that “change nothing” easy path, you don’t experience things that you could. I can imagine myself on that path from about the age of 22 when I moved to Manchester. I could have become that person – go to work, come home, see some friends maybe, but not really contribute to anything. It is easy to wonder what might have been. (I would certainly be getting more sleep now! WHAT a WHINY thing to say!) So I guess I can’t do it. I can’t take a step back and do nothing. Kant has got under my skin. My motivations must engage with some structure or process or cause or thing that is ABOVE MYSELF. It wouldn’t be selfish not to at this stage, but I just don’t think I would be – in the terms of social media memes – living my best life. And, at the end of the day, that’s what it’s all about!

Saturday 9th May
I don’t know what I want to write about today, nothing is popping out at me. The two things I am thinking about most in terms of “non-work work” (if you get me?) are how many emails I have got (I haven’t properly been through them since the end of March, really!) and how a councillor candidate campaigns for election during a lockdown (with great difficulty!). These aren’t really enough as subjects to write about, because the first one is just something that needs doing, and the second is something that I shouldn’t really put out on a public forum as, you know, elections are competitive things and any REALLY good ideas risk being stolen by other local wannabes! I know politics shouldn’t be like that, but it unfortunately is and there are so many examples from my 10 years of involvement of people telling others things that need to be kept in confidence and are then leaked.

Perhaps instead I should tell you about some things that have helped me to start to refocus on what I want to be doing during the next period.

Firstly, I made a word map from the titles of all of the interesting words from book titles on my shelves. I know I know, this is an odd thing to do. The loose idea is to go through all of the words and pick out those I am most interested in and want to push into in terms of my politics and writing. But frankly, it’s just sat there gathering dust at the side of my desk. I also have a bunch of academic papers I have come across through my degree that I want to do the same with. The idea is “use mass information to focus on pick out specific interest”. I’m not sure why this appeals to me as a process, but it does. I like looking at a totality and figuring out where to start, I guess. I am still interested in academic study, but it’s Anna’s turn now (if she wants to) and so a PhD isn’t on the cards, but I am always fascinated by these “independent scholars” you see around the place. I wonder whether I could just start writing journal articles and see how far I get with getting published without the need to be a professional academic. It can take months putting together an article and the process is one I enjoy, even when stretched out. So that’s one option!

Secondly, I did have the idea to do more podcasting. I currently have a podcast with my friend Robbie which is focused on new programmes and films on Netflix UK. We have fun recording it but don’t really promote it, although I don’t think it’s bad. I think if we both had more time, money and motivation, we could probably get it to be reasonably successful on the podcasts charts and stuff but we’d need to do it more regularly and slightly more professionally and set up websites, social media, etc. I am probably less into TV than Robbie and Robbie is less into films than me, but that makes it just about work. It’s also a good way for me to keep up with what is new on Netflix and I have seen things that I otherwise wouldn’t have that were really good. Overall, though, I want to try my hand at setting up my own podcast. At the beginning of the year I was thinking about a film podcast based around home viewing. I’ll see far fewer films in the cinema due to childcare responsibilities so I had the idea to do a sort of “6 months late” film review when things come out on digital/DVD. Then the coronavirus happened and no one is seeing anything in cinemas, so that makes it more tricky right now. I would also want to engage the Bristol film scene to get contributors, and it would just require loads of work to make it happen, particularly now when you can’t meet anyone. I would also be interested in starting a generic green politics podcast, but I think there are already some good ones out there. Mine might just be interviews with Bristol Greens, which wouldn’t be too hard to set up at all and might get more of a following in the circles I’ve been building up for a long time (10 years). It would actually be minimal effort too. Or it could just be a podcast looking at each of the Policies for a Sustainable Society policy chapters and talking through the implications Green policy would have if implemented. So this might be something to float with others.

Thirdly, I am thinking about how to blog and what to blog about. This project will come to an end and then I would probably like to continue, having built up my blogging stamina. One idea I had was a utopian cities blog. Bill Bryson talks in The Lost Continent about a fictional town of Amalgam, USA, where all the best parts of all the small towns he passed through would be present. There is a case to be made for a blog that takes different aspects of good cities/communities and focuses on each one. For instance, one week would focus on the city with the best trams, the next would look at the city with the most green spaces, etc. and conclusions would be drawn about how the city got to the top position, what civil/political factors influenced those decisions, and how cities elsewhere can get there. This would be a very fun experience for me and is something I am interested in definitely setting up and seems to be the most easy to pick up and stop depending on other factors.

Finally, I am also thinking about my own ability to think creatively and write fiction. This isn’t something I probably have the headspace nor time to really do properly, as it doesn’t come naturally to me in the way this form of writing does. I do struggle to draw characters, for instance, as I am more based around ideas. I have never tried screenwriting though, which involves a perhaps less pronounced level of detail and more ability to editorialise rather than allude. I have an idea for this, but I’m not going to share it here as I need to keep it in confidence for now.

Realistically, I think my best ideas are the ones that I can do with minimal need to maintain the pace and stamina of the work: the podcast about Bristol Greens and the blog about “creating Amalgam”. One is an outwardly facing communicative format, and one is a bit of analysis and fun. I think that’s what I am realising – that I need something outward, even if my instinct is to go inwards and just talk about things I am interested in. I need to hear other people’s perspectives. So, I guess, I should just act in getting on with these!

Sunday 10th May
Today’s topic is INBOX ZERO. If you don’t know what it is already, you can probably guess. It’s where you deal with all of your emails and there’s nothing there.

As I reported so “interestingly” yesterday, I hadn’t checked my emails properly for yonks, due to dissertation, parenting, work and frankly not getting many that are that important and so not being bothered to check! I kind of feel in the last few years that WhatsApp has replaced email as the best way of having a conversation with people you know through an organisation or social group – it’s quicker, more convenient. However, for certain information, it probably is worth keeping email. One of the things I use email for is to send myself things I want to look at later, or that I see at work but might be relevant to the non-work world. In effect, I use it as a to-do list and so ironically that is why I don’t look at it – who wants to actually get down to doing things?!

So, anyway, last night I did my emails (great Saturday night, eh? Anna was watching some fake Eurovision thing on YouTube, I made the right choice!). There were perhaps one or two emails that I needed to action something, and a large number that were things like planning applications for the ward I am standing to be a councillor in (for some reason, I am just filing these as if I am going to go through them at some point in the future? Strange behaviour!) and articles I had sent to myself while I was researching my dissertation to file (I have in mind that I am not going to have access to the university’s resources soon, so I need to save a lot of journal articles on things that I am interested in and may want to write about!). But, largely, my inbox was full of annoying little things that I didn’t sign up to and I am not interested in. The annoying thing is, that even if you go through and unsubscribe and deal with all the emails, you still have little outstanding bits and bobs which mean you can’t get to inbox zero. Added to that, on Gmail (which I use), you have five different inboxes, so I current have 23 in Primary, 0 in Social, 1 in Promotions, 10 in Updates and 0 in Forums.

Here’s a further categorisation:
Primary (23)
> 1 sharing a #MayWriteABit post!
> 1 person in touch to argue with me
> 5 about union stuff
> 1 about accessing work on home computer
> 4 about Green Party campaigning/work
> 1 about RTPI membership
> 1 email chain (5 of them) about a DJ set I did on Twitter for #BristolDJsUnite
> 7 about a potential camping expedition with some friends (may not happen of course)
> 1 is some thoughts about theology I sent to myself
> 1 is a community newsletter
> 2 about the film podcast (sent to myself) I talked about yesterday that I wanted to set up
> 1 is from an ex-colleague at TravelWest explaining how I can get a loan bike (I don’t need it, so I’ve actually just deleted this one)
> 1 is a list of festivals I would go to (not this year obviously, boo hoo) that I sent to myself
> 1 is a link my dad sent me of some of our wedding photos

I don’t really know why I shared all that. Is it interesting? Probably not to you, but it is to me, because all of these little contacts are thoughts for creating a better life. The last item on my list has actually been sitting in my inbox since the 7th January 2018 (sorry Dad!). It was a great day of course, but part of me must feel that I’m not ready to look at it. I must have just ignored it and thought “I can look at these later” but then because of the amount of activity in my inbox, I never got round to looking at it. I’ve just this second clicked on the link, and I notice I have actually already bookmarked this link in my browser, so I don’t need to email. It had been sitting there since 2018!!

Why do we do this? Why do we keep things that are obviously important to us but don’t prioritise acting on them? Is INBOX ZERO actually desirable, or are we better off having a bit of untidiness, a number of loose ends, a feeling of incompleteness within our psyches? Personally, I love the idea of INBOX ZERO because it suggests a few things to me about myself if I manage it. Mostly, it’s that I am competent – I am able to action things when I am made aware of them. This might involve a long-winded discussion over what to put in a leaflet, or it might be something as trivial as a Google Alert for something I am interested in being read, absorbed and filed in my memory banks. Either way, I have dealt with it, it is gone, it is not my responsibility any more. There is a sort of despair behind this though, isn’t there? It’s almost like an addiction or at least addictive behaviour: “if I just do this one thing, I’ll have accomplished everything, I’ll have completed life” – as if we’re playing Sonic The Hedgehog on the Mega Drive in 1995. I remember when we played Lemmings as kids and my oldest sister getting annoyed when I was going through all the levels and asking her how to complete them, she was going “I’m the one who stayed up late at night figuring all this stuff out!” Now, this is probably partly the resentment that comes with being the oldest child and having to be responsible for everything, but I think it rubs off on the youngest child potentially even moreso. Because you’re never the first to be given responsibility, you crave it…

If I read my Enneagram, I figure that I am a Reformer or a ‘One’. This means my Holy Idea is Perfection. My basic desire is goodness, integrity and balance. It’s almost like my email inbox is one way of showing my integrity and balance – that all the bits of voluntary work, scribbled thoughts and ways of building a utopia – are acted on through this arena, even if not immediately (or not, in the case of the wedding photos, a couple of years). It is my way of keeping order. And INBOX ZERO is indeed my Holy Idea of Perfection – if I ever manage it, I will probably not believe it is a perfect moment because I wouldn’t then be able to feel like I was acting with integrity and balance in all things.

Monday 11th May
Health. I have managed to make it 11 days without talking directly about “our current circumstances”. Simon Mayo uses a nice euphemism, he says “what with one thing and another”. Health to me is feeling very good in yourself. Oneness, wholeness, contentment, these kinds of things. In the Jewish and Christian traditions, it is the idea of “shalom”, peace and wholeness. I am fortunate in that I have never really had any serious health concerns. At the moment, my main health concern is underlying tinnitus. I blame the band Mogwai for this (!), I saw them in the Cardiff Students Union in about 2004 and they were extremely loud, but actually it is probably cumulative. Weirdly, I only got persistent tinnitus when I got a horrendous cold when I was in Lyon on our planning course field trip. I remember feeling so shit, and the blocking of the airways has seemingly just persisted since then. I don’t really notice it any more, it’s just a faint background noise.

It’s interesting that I have immediately talked about unwellness and ill-health. The emphasis in public policy has notably shifted in the last several years to an emphasis on preventative, proactive public health initiatives. I did some work when I was working at Swindon Council (1-day a week paid internship) looking at how health & wellbeing policies can be applied to the planning system and it was surprising just how many interventions are possible with a little thought, right down to the design of buildings mitigating the potential for domestic abuse. Because of course the health of society isn’t just based on biological wellness, but also the structures necessary to restrain the effect of violence or abuse of individuals, which massively adds up as a public health cost.

The current crisis has shown us that preventative action in public health is always much much more effective (I am so happy New Zealand exists) and that the way that a government approaches public health in the “good times” clearly has an impact on the ability of a society to adapt. Even regularised occurrences (e.g. the winter flu bug) have shown that the government does not understand the first thing about investment and how the outcomes and preparedness we need are simply not possible with a stripped back state. I would argue that the two real arbiters of improved public health are economic and spatial interventions:

1) If people do not feel they can survive without working, they will either continue to work until their mental health deeply suffers, creating greater burden on health services, or simply remain unemployed and spiral into a more vulnerable position. The Citizen’s Income or Basic Income is a massively important policy. It suggests that everyone deserves a safety net. It’s controversy is that it is paid to everyone, but purely based on economic cost, it would be cheaper to administer than the benefits it would replace. It would also not replace all benefits, as not all benefits are to do with social security but to do with the additional costs of living for certain people (those with children, disabilities, etc.). I believe this would be the number 1 intervention that would change the health of society for the better.

2) Reducing the amount of traffic on urban roads and streets would do wonders for improving air quality through cutting pollution. It is probably a cliche, but air pollution is an invisible killer, with thousands of people in the UK dying each year as a result of the effects of air pollution. But the real reason for this are the proactive benefits. The leading reason people don’t take up cycling is due to the danger on the roads. Providing more space for cyclists and pedestrians enables people to feel confident and comfortable in choosing a different option and further legitimises the closure of specific routes to motor vehicles. This is something I will be an advocate for for as long as the necessary infrastructure is not there and I have breath in my body because it opens up cities to being so much more good to live in for all of our mental health.

Like most people, I drink beer, and I eat pizza and crisps. Diet and lack of exercise is a massive factor in not having good health. At the moment, I am doing the Couch to 5K programme and it really is working for me. Frankly, I am not cutting back on the dietary stuff (I have really been enjoying it!), but I am finding that my cognitive abilities are vastly improved by 20-30 minutes of exercise. The reason I didn’t do it before now is that I can excuse it because I have to cycle the first bit of my commute and that will do (and that my commute is 2 hours a day and there isn’t time for more exercise in my day). I am thankful that I have been able to see how exercise makes me feel well and hopefully, if/when we come out of this pandemic, we will all be able to keep good habits and expand our physical wellness to improve our mental wellness. I think that’s all I have to say on health, at least for now!

P.S. I still like Mogwai.

Tuesday 12th May
So long, Frank Lloyd Wright. Today I wrote comments on a building designed by FLW! I’m pleased that there are great and visionary architectural thinkers, and it does make me think a bit about the kind of home I’d like to have. I haven’t ever religiously watched Grand Designs, but there is definitely appeal to me of observing what can be produced aesthetically and environmentally if money is, seemingly, no object.

I have always enjoyed living in terraced houses because they are compact and cosy. On the other hand, they tend to be poorly insulated and there are not many places to put anything. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing if it means downsizing possessions in a Marie Kondo style (I am big into Kondo!) but one of my great annoyances in life is trying to find anything in our cupboard under the stairs or as we call it “the cupboard of doom”. There is something about the closure of every object having its place in a household. (It makes me think of Everything In Its Right Place by Radiohead.)

I remember reading about the footballer Michael Owen (I think it was him) buying up an entire row of terraced houses in Chester for his family. I have had a few experiences of community houses and of course sharing private rental housing over the years, and I think what I like best is the feeling that you live on a street with like-minded people, but not a formalised communal living space beyond the street. For me, the decisions of the post-war era around using streets predominantly for storage of private motorised transport was the biggest mistake we ever made for the wellbeing of our communities. It stopped our streets being a commons, a place for our children to play, a place to hang out and chat to neighbours. We are really fortunate that we live on a cul-de-sac of 6 houses, but there are still 2 cars regularly parked in the street. The reason for this is that the streets are so crowded with cars near us that there probably isn’t anywhere else to reliably park.

What is it that makes people so irate about parking problems in their street? I guess it is simply that we have been taught to think that if we return from a long day’s work at 5pm (or thereabouts), we should have the luxury of an easy end to the commute without fuss or delay. I am constantly wondering about the best way to break this ideal of car ownership. I have never owned a car and, if we continue to live in a city, I never want to. I just don’t see why it is necessary when there are so many other ways to get around. When Erin is old enough to be taken to places other than school and left there, most people would assume we would need a car. But I simply do not think that is the case. If I want her to have a full appreciation of the need for better, more prolific sustainable transport options, I should keep her from instituting her own familial taxi service, right? I know this is probably easier said than done, but it comes back to how much we value the planning of journeys and how much we enjoy journeys themselves, not just the destinations they propel us to. Making time for slow travel seems to me a brilliant idea. Yes yes, I get annoyed by having to travel an hour to my work in Clevedon and an hour back, but the alternative of having to concentrate hard for all of that time (by driving) strikes me as so much worse.

Sorry, tangent there – I want to talk about how to break car ownership. I think the key aspect is to come up with simple community-orientated scheme. One idea I had was for something called “2+2”. The idea is that 2 people who don’t own a car (but want regular access to one) are partnered with 2 people who do currently own a car (but don’t use their car on a daily or even weekly basis and want to stop paying so much for insurance and upkeep). In this model, everyone gets access for a week at a time, or a pre-agreed system (i.e. alternating weekend access, and a booking free for all in the week, or weekly access). The flexibility desired can be pre-worked out. The vehicle used would be one that is already owned by someone in the group, and all four users would need to sign a contract saying they had no other access to a car. The drawbacks are that you don’t necessarily know the people you are going in with, which means any arguments that occur are difficult to resolve easily. But for each group, you would be taking one car off the road. Of course, that car would probably be bought and go back into circulation somewhere else, but this isn’t necessarily a problem if that person lives in a rural area with a private driveway (for instance).

Car clubs already exist of course, but their models are based around casual, hourly use at the moment – it is not economically viable for me to drive one out of Bristol to take a weekend away somewhere. The only way this would change is with a vast injection of cash into the number of available vehicles and a massive cash incentive given to people who promise to sell their car and use the car club instead. You are always fighting a tide of apathy when many people have the money to have a piece of metal sit outside their house, and it’s probably already been paid for (i.e. a sunken cost).

I constantly go back to the approach of places like Amsterdam where they progressively removed parking spaces over a number of years. I wonder where all the cars previously parked in central areas of the city then went? Presumably they were just parked in suburban or rural streets or driveways instead? But it happened. It actually happened. So it is possible and we can do it.

How predictable was it that I got distracted from housing into transport?! I just think the connections between places are the key and have such major impacts on quality of life, health and wellbeing and feelings of safety, security and community. We all need a bit more of that in urban areas.

Wednesday 13th May
Oops. Too busy to write on this day!

Thursday 14th May
I missed yesterday’s writing – shock! horror! – because I did a LOT of exercise. This was partly due to us deciding to take an electric car club to Brean Down and have a picnic, a walk with a friend, and also because we wanted to watch a film in the evening (Jupiter Ascending, Eddie Redmayne is hilarious in it, I’m not sure intentionally!). We actually didn’t finish the film (no spoilers!) and this bugs me. I am a big film fan, but weirdly since the lockdown have felt unmotivated to watch so many films. It’s almost like my cinephile habits evaporated when the conventional multiplex world of film came to a spluttering holt. I suppose I could write today about why I love film – hooray!

As you might have gathered, I like structure and order and stats and geekery and lists, but I also like opinions. There is no medium greater for these things than cinema. The structure and order are provided by the release schedule (which I monitor religiously here – even if it’s very sparse at the moment and now includes on-demand releases, which feels wrong!) For stats, there are all kinds of things you can find out on IMDB, not least the YEAR in which a film was made. This might seem obvious, particularly if you are looking up a current film. However, it isn’t when you consider that the majority of “touted” films (i.e. chin-stroking ones with hidden depths) tend to get an outing on the film festival circuit before they are shown on general release in your local multiplex or (more realistically) arthouse cinema. This means you can anticipate films of ALL kinds (not just biggies like Star Wars, etc.) for a long time before they are released based on a few things: director, screenwriter, poster, trailer (if you don’t mind spoilers), stars, hype from those critics who have seen it. This anticipation is simultaneously one of my favourite feelings in the world, but also the most terrible thing as well if the film ends up being less than an 8 out of 10 when you finally see it.

Take a recent example, and probably a lot of people’s last “pre-lockdown cinema trip”. Parasite was just massively, massively hyped if you follow the film release schedule in any way. It was an Oscar contender (and obviously won a lot, including the big prize of Best Picture), so it was being mentioned for months while awards season played out. It was released in UK cinemas in the week of the Oscars, so many people didn’t see it (myself included) before the big night itself. This strikes me as a really bad deal and I do not see why it should be so. It was also a film that was not immediately placed on the multiplex circuit, which meant I actually COULDN’T see it in its week of release – I was busy and all of the nights I COULD make it to the Watershed were sold out. Thankfully, it then got a wider release because of its success, but think of all of these stages of anticipation I went through, not least of which was my wife going to see it at Babycinema before I did! The horror!

Anyway, this is all a roundabout way of saying that films aren’t always released in the year that they are actually given, so Parasite is a 2019 film and there are still films being released into UK cinemas (or streaming services, currently) that are 2018 films. There’s a really great film critic on YouTube who goes under the name YourMovieSucks. When you look at their site, it looks like one of those crappy American movie review sites that is just really annoying, but it’s truly brilliant even if the guy’s voice is annoying. I don’t always agree with him, but you can guarantee he will have watched a really good film you have just seen at some film festival 10 months ago and will give a thoughtful, if irritated analysis. What I particularly like is that he does his best of the year review videos when he has watched all of the films he thinks COULD be good in that year, so for instance his top 10 films of 2007 came out 6 months ago. These are longer videos but they are really worth watching if you want to get some interesting and unknown films under your belt and widen your horizons and perspective from multiplex fodder.

So, what do I like? My home territory is science fiction – it’s difficult for it not to be when I watched the Back to the Future trilogy a million times as a kid and The Matrix came out when I was 15 years old. Of the IMDB-listed genres, I also particularly like documentaries and dramas. I am less keen on horror. It’s not because I haven’t seen a few great horror films (The Blair Witch Project, REC and The Cabin In The Woods are favourites), but because I often find myself laughing at it rather than being scared by it. I also don’t really love conventional comedies because usually the humour is out of step with my own, either through being too-over-the-top or not-over-the-top-enough. I like to watch foreign language films but find myself lost in a sea of content and find it hard to sort the wheat from the chaff in this world. This is never the case with sci-fi – it’s REALLY easy to tell what will be a bad sci-fi movie, not least because the critics will absolutely pan it unlike other genres where if something isn’t very good, it’s still get a 2 out of 5. I think sci-fi, fantasy and horror (the speculative fiction genres) get a bum deal from the film critic world. Because they require a greater suspension of disbelief, it is more difficult for critics not to lambast them. I really like sci-fi dramas, or films like K-PAX or Sound Of My Voice that set themselves up as mysterious and leave the viewer to decide on the claims of their protagonists. Films can leave us all with a sense of wonder and empathy. That’s really why I love them.

Friday 15th May
It’s Friday and so it’s time to crack open a beer and relax a bit. I am really struggling to maintain my motivation to write at the moment when there are other things to do in non-work time, but the discipline of it is good for me. So I thought this one could just be a list of my favourite beers that I take the whole half-hour to write. I have deliberately chosen not to include ales, bitters and stouts (and obviously not ciders or any other alcoholic beverage). This is purely a list of lagers and pilsners, which is generally what I drink because I like the taste more – shoot me! I have only chosen beers that appear on YouGov’s most popular 100 beers list here.  So without further ado, here’s the list in ascending order…

MY TOP 25
25. Carling – piss
24. Stella Artois – almost piss
23. Foster’s – Australian piss
22. Coors Light – American piss, but I have some loyalty as it’s
21. Budweiser – “king of beers” my arse, maybe those that taste like water
20. Bud Light – drank it in the Isles of Scilly so I have a weird soft spot for it
19. Oranjeboom – we used to get this from the cornershop when I was a student because it was cheap as chips, there’s a reason for that
18. Carlsberg – defines “beer mediocrity”
17. Grolsch – ditto
16. Sol – meh, drink it in the sun, it’s alright
15. Tuborg – main memory is serving it to thousands of punters when we did Workers Beer at Glastonbury, pretty anonymous though
14. Corona – I feel sorry for it, probably higher placing because they are flogging it for cheap now so I am happy with drinking it for that reason
13. Peroni – my mother-in-law loves it and it does make me feel suave and sophisticated
12. Amstel – jumped numerous places in this list because of THAT Jeff Bridges ad, so I’m superficial, sue me!
11. Beck’s – marketed well on the German Purity Law thing, can’t shake the nagging sensation that it’s overrated (even in this list)
10. Red Stripe – BRISTOL! ST PAUL’S CARNIVAL! Otherwise, nothing special
9. Heineken – Dutch and likable
8. Kronenbourg 1664 – Eric Cantona and just a slight edge over many competitors
7. San Miguel – this is the SECOND most popular beer in the UK after Guinness, but can anyone explain why? For me, it’s just vague associations with Spain and nice can design…or something
6. Tiger Beer – associated with curries out, which jumps it numerous places up the list I’m sure
5. Asahi – a rare treat, very dry, very nice
4. Duvel – this is a Belgian beer that we drank a bit in Belgium (Antwerp and Brussels) so it has fond associations for me, quite surprised it makes the top 100
3. Birra Moretti – they do this on draft in the Greenbank and it makes me feel Meditteranean
2. Estrella Damm – they do this on draft in the Greenbank and it makes me feel Catalonian
1. Pilsner Urquell – they do this on draft in the Watershed and they pour it in one of those wonderful thin tankard sleeves and it tastes wonderful while watching a pretentious film, this is the beer experience I miss the most

Honorable mentions
Timothy Taylor and Samuel Smith’s – both dirt cheap lagers when you buy them in pubs, fond associations with Sinclair’s Oyster Bar in Manchester and of course the Llandoger Trow/Old Naval Volunteer in King Street, Bristol

Not on the list, but personal favourites

Offshore – this is a Sharp’s brewery pilsner/lager that they have on draught in the Turk’s Head, my favourite pub in the UK (and also the most southerly pub!)
Kirin Ichiban – they serve this on draft in the Greenbank and it is lovely and dry and drinkable and I miss it!

Not sure they’re lagers?
Leffe – drinking this right now! But it says it is a blonde beer, I’ve never learned what counts and what doesn’t
Staropramen – more of a wheat beer? Unsure

Never tried/can’t remember trying
Desperados
Miller
Tennent’s
Singha
Skol
Bavaria
Efes
Tsingtao
Brahma
Harp
Chang

Saturday 16th May
I am officially bored with writing every day. Let me put my finger on why. I have covered a number of topics but none in any great detail so I can’t point at any one of my pieces and be particularly proud of them. They are not journal articles that are referenced, well-considered and watertight, so they lack a bit of pride in that regard. It’s also because the pieces are not going towards one strand of thinking, on one subject, so there’s no target audience, so I am less inclined to keep wanting to write them as they are largely just to myself. I need things to feel like they have a point, and I’m unclear as to what mine is now, beyond the writing itself. It is also just a bit unnatural to write every day, you should write more on one day out of every 4, say, than write a tiny bit on every day. People say that a tiny bit a day is good practice, but I think that’s rubbish. I have always been a sprinter not a marathon runner. I remember when I hit puberty and got much worse at sport because I lost any semblance of stamina and just wanted to sprint everywhere but couldn’t more than about twice without getting knackered. So I think I am generally a “purple patch” writer – I will have phases of intense activity and then not do anything for ages.

So, yeah, I really just want to give up this project. I am really good at starting things, but terrible at finishing them. The determination just drains away from me when I realise that I am only doing something for myself, and no one really cares either way if I complete it. It must be so good to be a novelist who has written one or two best-sellers because you know you have a captive audience that you are writing for and who expect you produce something. I think I would thrive on this kind of pressure, but I can’t see a circumstance where it would be possible to build that kind of anticipation for my writing in a wider audience, it’s really hard to attract an online following and particularly if you don’t have the backing of a media outlet or academic body.

The one recent example where I persevered with something beyond the point where I internally wanted to was in learning to drive. I needed to fail on my first driving test to get better. Fortunately, on the second test it was so obviously one thing that I was (quite harshly) ajudged to have done wrong that I left it feeling confident that I would be able to pass the third time. After a false start on the third test (I thought I’d booked it for a specific date but evidently hadn’t!), I felt more comfortable and didn’t get any major faults. There was no question that I needed to persevere for family reasons, and that was the main force influencing me. With writing, it’s an additional extra that I don’t need to survive or take on as a responsibility because I have a steady job and career path. The phrase “starving artist” is supposedly apt because if you force yourself to live vulnerably, it makes you work at the thing you really want to do, at least in theory. I actually found that when I tried to do that (this was when I first moved to Bristol and didn’t have a job) it didn’t work at all because I hadn’t had enough life experience to write about anything meaningful to any level of depth, nor the first understanding of how disciplined you have to be if you want to produce results on a regular basis. It’s so easy to say to yourself “if it wasn’t for this and that and this, I’d be able to write so much more” when the reality is that without it being a paid profession, you would probably still struggle for motivation. There’s a quote about this from a song called An Episode Of Sparrows by The Paperbacks

“Thoughts scrawled on discarded receipts on the backs of cash-handling procedure sheets on unpaid breaks in highlighter pen but then the senses overload, a fog rolls in…and then arriving home so tired tonight that I don’t think that I’ll bother to write, but the crest of ideas neglected like this will find expression in dreams, dense dreams…”

I feel like when you’re working dead-end retail jobs is when you have the best shot at getting your writing act together (those “scrawled thoughts” mentioned above), but this quote is a warning that you will be too tired to functionally do it. This is what I worry about with my own writing exploits, that work, parenthood, relationships and other commitments will always be the thing that stops me from plunging into a major writing project. The problem is, you don’t know how good you might be until you make a major commitment to it, and you also don’t know if you’ve “left it too late”. I could carve out a chunk of time (2-3 hours?) each weekend – if Anna is OK with that, of course! – and do that for 6 months but will it produce anything tangible or worthwhile? It’s hard to say.

So this has become a much more personal reflection than I perhaps intended, but does seem to begin to articulate my frustration at wanting more hours in the day to do all of the things that I want to do. I am going down to 3 days a week soon at work, but this is to take on more caring responsibilities (I am really pleased to be able to do this!) not to make space for other/new projects. Erin will obviously get more and more articulate and so I am greatly looking forward to it, but it also makes it less realistic that I will be able to use much more time to do some of my ideas for blogs/projects. I guess it is just important to keep my ideas at the surface and in some semblance of order so I can dip into them whenever I get a sliver of time of an evening or weekend. I still have 3 minutes left of today’s writing, and so I will use it to think again about what I really want to do with these slivers of time. Writing is thinking, remember.

Sunday 17th May
On this day, I decided to change to a writing project (utopian cities thing) rather than put up my entries up here. So, half an hour of writing to sort that out!

Deprivation, employment and the effect of Arena siting on Lawrence Hill residents

Statement to Extraordinary Full Council meeting, Monday 3rd September 2018
Deprivation, employment and the effect of Arena siting on Lawrence Hill residents

Multiple deprivations in Lawrence Hill and lack of employment opportunity

As a resident of Lawrence Hill ward, I am particularly concerned by the missed opportunity building the Arena in the centre of Bristol will have on communities here.

Lawrence Hill has, according to Bristol City Council’s own Deprivation in Bristol 2015 report, five Lower Super Output Areas in the top 20 most deprived in Bristol (Easton Road, Stapleton Road, St Philips, Cabot Circus and Barton Hill). All LSOAs in Lawrence Hill ward are within the most deprived 10% nationally. Overall, the ward is the fourth most deprived and has the second highest percentage of people who are employment-deprived in Bristol, with 3,240 (25% of the population). More than a third of people in Lawrence Hill are income deprived (7,060, or 36%). Almost half of all children live in income deprived households (2,235, or 46%)

I do not believe that the siting of an Arena is a panacea for this deprivation and the wider income inequalities in Bristol and the UK. However, if we think for just a few seconds about the kind of work that will be made available by this development – regular work in the service and hospitality industry – this is exactly the kind of role suitable for people who are long-term unemployed and with skills and education deprivation.

Journey times for Lawrence Hill residents to Temple Meads quicker and cheaper than to Brabazon Hangar

The siting of the Arena is a factor on people within Lawrence Hill accessing the Arena’s jobs. The route connections from our area of the city to the Filton area are poor. Even from the most northerly point of Lawrence Hill (where the M32 intersects with the railway line), the minimum journey times to the Brabazon Hangar are currently:

Walking: 1 hour 30 minutes
Cycling: 30 minutes
Bus: 50 minutes (with at least one change of bus)
Train: 54 minutes (requires a change to bus)

For comparison, here are the journey times to Bristol Temple Meads, adjacent to Arena Island:

Walking: 34 minutes
Cycling: 11 minutes
Bus: 22 minutes (includes 12 minutes’ walk)
Train: 13 minutes (direct train)

This shows that the siting of the Arena will have a substantial and direct impact on the cost and desirability for Lawrence Hill residents taking jobs at the Arena. Additionally, the anti-social hours that employees of an Arena may need to hold are not necessarily conducive to the use of public transport.

Conclusion

The Arena Island site represents a substantial opportunity for residents in deprived areas like Lawrence Hill (as well as other areas of inner city Bristol, both north and south of the river) to access good-quality jobs within walking, cycling and public transport distance. I hope that the Labour Mayor of Bristol, Marvin Rees, considers the people who need jobs most before he decides to move the Arena project away from these employment-deprived areas.

Rob Bryher
Lawrence Hill resident

My views on the EU, Brexit, democracy, neoliberal economics, Corbynism and Labour

In the 2014 European elections (they seem an age ago now), I subscribed to the policy platform of the Green Party – “three Yeses”.

1. Yes to reform of Europe
2. Yes to a referendum on whether the UK should stay in the EU
3. Yes to staying in Europe

I will use these statements as starting points for explaining my views.

1. Yes to reform of Europe

Out of the three, I was and still am most interested in the first yes. The European Union – in line with the global economic system – is a neoliberal institution that too closely aligns national governments within and into this orthodoxy. The reforms necessary to shift the EU and its institutions towards a radical progressive platform with redistributive tackling of inequality at its heart are sizeable, and I understand the scepticism of some about the ability of nation states, political blocs within the European Parliament and individual MEPs, never mind national polities (e.g. the UK public), to enact radical reform easily.

Nevertheless, it seems to me that the alternative to this priority – giving up on the European project in its institutional/democratic spheres as a lost cause – is so much worse, particularly for a country with the colonial history and isolationist tendencies of the UK that has still sat in a prominent place within European politics.

It is not just the economic settlement where I would like to see reform. I think the democratic understanding of most people in the United Kingdom of the procedures and processes of the European Parliament is poor to non-existent. I see the need for legislation in the UK Parliament (perhaps in reform of the BBC charter and the way the media works generally) to ensure that EP sessions are included regularly on national media and on channels such as BBC Parliament for people to understand how democracy works in the European system. The European Parliament – on paper at least, if not in its perceived distance from the UK public – is a MORE democratic institution than the UK Parliament in pretty much every single way. This diagram explains this better than I can.

EU democracy

So, yes to reform of Europe, with UK MEPs and the people playing a strong, organised role in pushing for reform. This is what, I hope, would have happened if the referendum had gone a different way. It’s to the referendum that I now turn.

2. Yes to a referendum on whether the UK should stay in the EU

Ironically, given the current positions of both parties, the Labour Party was not offering a referendum on our membership of the EU heading into the 2014 European elections and the 2015 General Election and the Green Party was. At the time, the Labour policy struck me as being quite anti-democratic. My view then was that: a) people who had never had a say on our membership (i.e. who weren’t alive or old enough to vote in the 1975 membership referendum) should be able to have a say on it now and b) that if the vote – as I think most people expected – returned a Remain vote, that that would put the issue to bed for another generation, which in my eyes would mean we could focus more closely on more important things – like campaigning for EU reform, introducing proportional representation, taking bold steps to fight against climate change, and tackling income inequality and the housing crisis.

I can already hear people screaming “hypocrisy!” at me. How can I be in favour of the result putting the issue to bed if it went the way I wanted it, but not be willing to accept the result if it went the other way?

It’s a fair criticism, I suppose. At the same time, if people in UKIP (and eurosceptics in Labour and the Tories) had continued to campaign against our membership of the European Union after a Remain vote, I would not have thought that was anti-democratic or poor form, just a bit eccentric. That is completely up to them and it is a vital aspect of our democracy that people believe strongly in something (however much I think it is unimportant or settled) to continue to campaign for what they believe in. I would of course have supported the UK government (ugh!) in (presumably?) ignoring their pleas.

And so now that we have had a Leave vote, there is nothing to stop Remainers from continuing to call for what they want: to Remain in the European Union and for a referendum on the terms of the negotiated deal.

There are also numerous more reasons to question the referendum itself:

a)  The referendum question was a simple yes/no question, which does not lead to a firm conclusion as to the method of the UK leaving the EU.
b) The referendum was not legally binding in the same way as the Scottish Independence referendum was. This means that although different sides would need to accept the stated democratic will of the vote, the final settlement of the exact kind of exit from the EU was not clear. This calls into question whether the vote can be meaningfully called a democratic expression of the will of the people, as there was not a detailed picture of what leaving the EU would mean in practical outcome for the UK.
c) The Electoral Commission has ruled that the Leave campaign broke electoral law. This casts doubt over the whole referendum as a democratic procedure.
d) As there was a previous referendum on the UK’s membership of the EU in 1975, there was now a precedent set constitutionally that the UK does not see membership of the EU as a “once and for all” vote, allowing subsequent votes.
e) The circumstances and specific content of the terms of UK exit are yet to be decided and, democratically speaking, if the public has had a say over WHETHER the UK should leave, it should also get a say over HOW the UK leaves, given the numerous options (no deal, hard, soft and remain after all) that will present themselves when the Government finally reveals the deal it has got with the EU.

3. Yes to staying in Europe

My priority in politics reads thus: what position and politics will lead us – at the local, regional, national, continental and global stages – to tackle climate change and social inequality effectively?

I do not believe that the UK can tackle climate change without cooperation, dialogue and international working as part of the EU. I also trust the European Parliament and EU to bring in strong legislation on climate change more than I trust the current UK government to do similar. Other European democracies have a better record than the UK does on this. We need a seat at the table and to be able to use our voice for change in that institution. As a cooperative, democratic institution, the UK is a vital peace project. Some of its economic and social policies are downright terrible – on Greece, or on the refugee crisis, for instance – but I believe the sum total of our collective wisdom needs to be supported in its institutional form, even while we criticise and attempt to reform its flaws.

The politics at play right now

It is clear that the Conservative Party is split on the EU still, and continues to procrastinate, argue and muddle through. MPs who campaigned to Remain are now adamantly for the hardest of Brexits because they are scared of the 10% or so they gained from UKIP in 2017 going back to them and stopping them from being the largest party at a subsequent general election. Irrespective of this, the Tories are in a bind anyway as, if the economy collapses if we leave the EU (whether no deal, hard or soft), it will be them who will be clearly shown to be terrible at handling the economy.

The Labour Party is also split on the EU, but their muddle-through is slightly easier because they are in opposition, they improved their position in the 2017 general election, and their party leader is seen as at best a “soft remainer” and at worst an “ardent Eurosceptic Brexiteer”. The difficulty they have is there are a majority of Labour Party members – on the left, centre, right, and wherever else – who are intelligent, see the EU as an important institution for the aims of international social democracy and solidarity, and have noticed that the polls show regret over the Leave vote (see image below), with the majority of Labour-held constituencies now being in favour of Remain.

Brexit mind change

This means that Jeremy Corbyn, who – if you remember – immediately called for the triggering of Article 50 on the day after the referendum in June 2016, finds himself on the wrong side of his party membership, the voters he needs to convince to continue voting Labour at the next general election, and the public at large. Refusing to support a People’s Vote on the final Brexit deal may not ultimately prove to be his undoing, due to the weak, divided leadership of the Tories, the economy cratering and – to be honest – a bunch of people who will vote Labour whatever, whether out of fear of the Tories, support of a local candidate, or as “the only progressive option”. This is what Corbyn supporters perceive as “playing the long game” in terms of strategy.

The difficulty with this strategy is clear. Firstly, Corbyn will continue to be attacked on three fronts: by the Conservatives and other parties, by non-Corbynist MPs and members in his party, and by influential media sources who support the continuation of Conservative government. On the first, he may develop some good lines and play the same timid game Labour always plays in opposition of slowly winning trust in the country (this is for people who don’t realise or understand what a calamity Brexit would be). On the second, he will struggle – as we have seen with the anti-Semitism row. And on the third, he will without the tabloid press (and, let’s be frank, a positive media profile and perception that he is a moderate) find it hard to win over that extra 3-5% in the so-called centre ground of British politics that saw Tony Blair deliver two landslide election victories. Even as a leftist, I do not believe that the Labour Party just serves people who have leftwing politics. It reaches parts of the country my own party cannot yet hope to reach and we need it to continue to do so, at least for the timebeing.

As a Green, I find it more and more perturbing how easily some of Corbyn’s supporters gloss over the gap between Corbyn’s “straight-talking, honest politics” and the fact he doesn’t have straightforward answers on whether the UK will be better off economically outside the EU. We won’t be. Even the Government’s own forecasts show we won’t be under three different exit scenarios.
UK Brexit economy forecasts

If Corbyn is such a change from the norm, why can’t he just say “the forecasts show that we might not be better off, but if we are elected after Brexit has occurred, we will have to do our best with the situation we have inherited from the Tories”? Why is such an idealistic movement as Momentum prepared to put up with such a lack of idealism and leadership? And how will this help Labour’s electoral chances if they enable the Tories in pushing through whatever Brexit they negotiate without a chance for the public to say “nope, this will make things worse in every way”?

So, in summary (and quite obviously), I support a People’s Vote, I think the Labour Party needs to support it, I think Labour should have a strong Remainer who is on the left or soft left of the party as their leader, and I think only these outcomes will potentially stop economic catastrophe, further years of even worse Tory austerity and even more time wasted in tackling climate change and the unequal economic settlement that Corbyn and his supporters say they want to radically reform.

Rob Bryher
Wednesday 22nd August 2018

The design and application of neighbourhood planning in England acts effectively to constrain local autonomy and inhibit public participation in planning. Discuss.

Introduction

The introduction of neighbourhood planning (NP) has been met with critical discussion both inside and outside of planning literature. I will argue that NP processes have produced some positive participative practice but within a framework that does not allow for local autonomy or inclusive participative practice at the sub-local authority area. I will go on to recommend strategies for reforming the structures that have been put in place.

What is neighbourhood planning?

The Conservative-Liberal Democrat Coalition Government (2010-15) introduced neighbourhood planning as part of the 2011 Localism Act (DCLG, 2011b). The preamble to the government’s neighbourhood planning guidance claims that NP “gives communities direct power”, allows them to “choose where they want new homes, shops and offices to be built” and provides “a powerful set of tools for local people to ensure that they get the right types of development for their community” (DCLG, 2014). Both academic and non-academic critique often includes the contention that the government has seen NP as a tool to encourage neighbourhoods to accept further development, particularly housing (Parker and Salter, 2017).

In direct practical terms, this new statutory power allows, in coordination with their local authority, any set of 21 citizens to become a “qualifying body”, designate a neighbourhood development plan area, write a neighbourhood development plan (NDP), put this plan out to consultation, have it assessed by an independent examiner, and then ask for the NDP to be approved by the local community through a referendum. NDP policies must conform with the Local Plan and the Government’s newly introduced National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF, 2012). The NDP then becomes a statutory part of the development plan, alongside the Local Plan for the area designated.

Parker et al (2015) suggest that NP is a significant statutory shift that local authorities cannot ignore and is unlikely to be abandoned. The 2011 Act was the culmination of a building political rhetoric around the terms localism and decentralisation for both government parties whilst in opposition, with Copus et al (2017) suggesting the localist political shift may relate to the effect of Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish devolution on English provincial thinking. NP represents the first time a statutory right of this kind has been granted to communities at the sub-local authority area, but as we will now discuss is not the first instance of attempts to sub-localise the planning system.

The pre-2010 context of neighbourhood planning

NP was thus a departure from the previous Labour government’s (1997-2010) policies if not its language of ‘new localism’. The unformalised ‘local strategic partnerships’ were the New Labour precursor of sorts to NP. However, specific sub-local authority governance structures such as parish councils and urban-based neighbourhood forums had hitherto not had any planning powers, leading to an unsatisfactory situation where local authorities could choose to adopt or ignore non-statutory sub-local plans (Gallent 2013). Parish Plans, produced since 2000, were an example of community-led planning used regularly prior to 2010, almost exclusively in rural areas. Parker and Murray (2012) state that pre-2010 consultations on these plans would “rarely carry quality criteria which are applied or enforced”. However, in April 2009, the Labour government did introduce a wide-ranging ‘duty to involve’ powers on local authorities (DCLG, 2008) and a Central-Local Concordat in conjunction with the LGA (HM Government and LGA, 2007, cited in Bailey and Elliott, 2009). The Coalition reforms can be said to, at least rhetorically, respond to New Labour’s ‘managerial’ localism (Sturzaker and Gordon, 2017), although Brookfield (2017) argues that the Coalition were echoing the New Labour rhetoric, and adopting a neo-liberal justification for localism.

Local autonomy’s non-existence

Planning literature in the aftermath of the 2011 Act refers largely to decentralisation and localism, rather than autonomy, perhaps for the reason that the former are concepts perceived as less political and more operational in orientation. There is no agreed definition of local autonomy within democratic theory, with Clark (1984) stating that its meaning “remains opaque”. However within the NP context we are clearly discussing any ‘autonomy’ that exists at the sub-local authority (i.e. neighbourhood) level. Internationally, the term ‘local autonomy’ is used synonymously with ‘local self-government’ (i.e. local government) with one 2014 assessment (see Ladner et al, 2016, 344) measuring the UK as 31st out of 39 European countries. Pratchett (2004) makes a strong claim that local autonomy and local democracy are conceptually not the same, with Clark (1984) defining two aspects of autonomy in governance terms. Immunity is “the power of localities to function free from the oversight authority of higher tiers of the state”. Initiative is “the power of localities to legislate and regulate the behaviour of residents”. These aspects are closely mirrored by Pratchett (2004) as “freedom from central interference” and “freedom to effect particular outcomes”, stating a further aspect, “reflection of local identity”, an addition that brings participatory governance into our analysis of autonomy’s definition. It’s clear that a qualifying body could affect particular outcomes in a positive way by delineating land use more specifically than its attendant Local Plan currently does. However, this does not in itself represent an autonomous state of affairs, merely an ability to change some aspects of the local authority’s development planning documentation in line with what already exists or will exist.

I contend (under the auspices of traditional anarchist thought and the definitions of the aforementioned thinkers) that autonomy only exists independently of prescribed democratic and institutional structures, in arenas where local citizens make their own rules and practices, what Parker and Murray (2012) describe (from a non-anarchist perspective) as a “direct challenge to established decision-making models”. Indeed, Gallent (2013) differentiates democracy as a top-down, “provider-led” approach, and governance as a bottom-up approach (with the crucial caveat that it is liable to myopia and a lack of detail and coordination). The introduction, therefore, of NP can be said to have had a negligible effect on local autonomy, as NDPs are required to be submitted both to the local authority and the planning inspectorate (an executive agency of HM Government) for approval, as well as conforming closely and working within the Local Plan policies and the NPPF (Parker et al, 2015), with no variation on this pattern legally condoned. As local autonomous governance structures are thus only theoretically possible and currently non-existent, it is difficult to say whether “they” are constrained or not. Regardless, this conclusion does not preclude the possibility of improved public participation under NP, a subject to which we now turn.


Public participation in neighbourhood planning

Public participation has been part of planning law since the 1968 Town & Country Planning Act (HM Government, 1968), although it was almost immediately followed by the Skeffington Report (DoE, 1969) which critiqued the Act’s top-down solutions and recommended a far more neighbourhood-orientated approach (recommendations 1 and 2, appendix 1). Today, there are still charges that public participation can be tokenistic, with Parker and Murray (2012) describing participation opportunities as “little more than rhetorical bulwarks used by politicians seeking public support and legitimation for particular policies”. Certainly the Localism Act’s emphasis on delivering growth by a neo-liberal economic model could be characterised this way, but are there opportunities afforded by NP for authentic communicative practice?

Vigar et al (2017) posit two dominant schools of thought within communicative practice – a participative-deliberative tradition and a radical-agonistic one – suggesting that the latter is the dominant contemporary planning paradigm. Forester (1999) recognises the role of emotion in planning but takes the deliberative position, describing planners as crucial to facilitating any “joint gains” that can be made between “conflicting claimants” (p. 12-13).

I agree with Parker et al (2015) that NP presents as a dialogic space (see Wegerif, 2016) of rational actors (see Rydin and Pennington’s (2000) five rational choice questions) but that in reality its public participation remit is limited and the design of its structures preclude agonist practice. Brookfield (2017) notes that planners are not ‘levelled down’ to the status of another stakeholder as is typically an interest of collaborative planning. Also, as Parker and Murray (2012, p.8) note, individuals don’t always act rationally or in some narrow self-interested sense, implying that some people engage if others (and particularly others ‘like them’) engage. Overall, for NP, “the benefits and problems of participation are likely to be mixed and fluid; reflecting the so-called fuzziness of neo-liberal institutions” (Parker et al, 2017). The design of NP, to which we now turn, is also one of the main factors in assessing NP’s public participation credentials.

The design of neighbourhood planning

Neighbourhood planning has been communicated and legislated maximally but resourced minimally. The government’s 200 or so pilot areas each received £20,000 up front (Bailey and Pill, 2015). Up to £9,000 is available to qualifying bodies from DCLG through Locality’s website (2018), a sum which hypothetically allows payment of a living wage to a dedicated planning employee for a little over 27 weeks of full-time employment. The median time for an NDP to progress to referendum is 29 months (Parker and Salter, 2017), which makes it logistically unfeasible to offer anything other than part-time, freelance work to a planning consultant, who may or may not be able to work in the way that conveniences the designated neighbourhood forum (DNF). In one study (Parker et al, 2015), it was found that 69% of NDPs relied on consultant support. Staff resource from local authorities is not specified quantifiably in the legislation, so the DNF must negotiate support resources (DCLG, 2014). The local authority has responsibility for setting timetables and time limits, but the emphasis as regards advice and assistance is on what planning officers “consider appropriate” (which of course could be minimised to solely the aforementioned time factors) (DCLG, 2011b).

The concern expressed by some (e.g. Lord et al, 2017) about the risk of the de-professionalisation of planning comes to the fore in light of this design, with the overall neo-liberal framework not being hidden by the government (Parker et al, 2015) when they state that local authorities will have “more freedom to work with others in new ways to drive down costs” (DCLG, 2011a, p.7). Parker et al (2017) suggest that New Public Management theories lead to a “wider traducement of public sector planning” for a performative end. However, Brookfield (2017) notes two specific benefits for communities after an NDP has been adopted: the retention of 25% (as opposed to the regular 15%) of any Community Infrastructure Levy (CIL) raised on local development and (for plans that promote housing development) the New Homes Bonus, an unringfenced grant where government matches the Council Tax raised on each new home for six years. (Both positives are contingent, of course, on the NDP promoting rather than restraining development.) Parker (2017) also notes that local authorities receive a £30,000 ‘burdens’ payment on plan completion.

As regards inter-relational aspects of NP design, Davoudi and Cowie (2013) state that the self-selecting character of NP groups may result in the favouring of better educated, well-off and more vocal social groups who may have the time, capacity and inclination to engage. Although the NDP must go to referendum to be judged by the public, there are questions about the legitimacy of unelected bodies acting on behalf of the wider community before this occurs, particularly as the DNF proposes the extent of the area covered.

Overall, there are some basic problems with NP design and with the necessity to conform to the Local Plan and NPPF, what Bailey and Pill (2015) call ‘framing and constraining’ activity. These tight controls on NDP content ensure that ideas, policies and priorities will be “rescripted” to ensure conformity, with their obligatory passage acting as a means of control on participants (Parker et al, 2015).

The application and practice of neighbourhood planning

The non-compulsory nature of NP will always mean patchwork rather than blanket coverage, with 2,228 projects applied for as of October 2017 and only 349 having been formally adopted into local development plans (Planning Resource, 2017), with only 10% of neighbourhoods who could have initiated NDPs doing so (Parker and Salter, 2017). Reasons for lack of uptake have been variously cited, but government assumptions about willingness and capacity, homogeneity and ability to put aside self-interest may also be a factor. The government’s professed light touch approach may have acted to create a degree of confusion rather than enable or expedite processes.

The government forecasts for overall take-up of NP, but not for regions or wider demographic factors (Parker and Salter, 2017). It is observable that the south (comprising just two of England’s nine regions) accounts for 41% of NP take-up (Parker and Salter, 2017). Only six of the neighbourhood areas to have passed referendum by October 2016 were in the 20% most deprived areas of England with 60.8% of plans being produced by those in the 40% least deprived areas (Parker and Salter, 2017). NP has undoubtedly been taken to more in rural, parished areas, although there are examples of large cities, such as Leeds (see Brookfield, 2017), taking a proactive approach, with council officers recommending to the executive board an overall approach to give equality of opportunity, although even in this instance there were participation challenges.

On the issue of whether NDPs have representational legitimacy, although 21 named local individuals are necessary to become a qualifying body, it has been noted (Parker et al, 2015) that a small group of people usually steer things, not the whole of the qualifying body or larger community. Davoudi and Cowie (2013) suggest that the key assessment criterion of this “symbolic representation” is the extent to which DNFs are accepted among local communities and trusted by them to draw up NDPs, highlighting the poor turnout at referenda as a sign of lack of acceptance, despite the figure (32.4%) being commensurate with local election turnout figures (Carpenter, 2016).

There are also clear examples of inequality of implementation. North Shields Fish Quay in North Tyneside was in 2011 part of the government’s ‘Frontrunner’ programme, but even after spending substantial time and effort on developing an NDP, opted instead to formulate a supplementary planning document as result of delayed guidance from government and the group’s “fatigue” (Parker and Salter, 2017).

More positively, some NDPs have taken the opportunity to advance socially and environmentally sustainable solutions, protect heritage assets, and ensure local housing needs, with slightly more control over the type, mix and location of new development than previously (Parker and Salter, 2017). The example of West Berkshire by Parker and Murray (2012) provides some clues for ensuring success. National funding was granted by the Countryside Agency and action was taken and resources allocated by the local authority chief executive, with the LA enjoying a good pre-existing reputation. This enabled trust to be built between the local authority and participants with a neutral agency (the Rural Community Council) providing a valuable brokering role. There is also evidence that – in contradistinction to my earlier analysis of funding – influence on LAs and a resulting access to resources and networks has emerged, an example of the ‘foot in the door’ thesis and allowing for “some limited orientation” (Parker et al, 2017). A counter-example in Exeter involved the DNF negotiation design changes of a development after their NDP adoption, but this could have been managed without the work going into the NDP, with the DNF opining that NP powers are “not as strong as promoted” (Lord et al, 2017) and that “the council did not have to consult us or check whether we were satisfied with their interpretation of neighbourhood plan policies…and they didn’t” (Sturzaker and Gordon, 2017). Blackpool and Manchester are also given as examples where NP has been said to have had negligible impact (Lord et al, 2017).

Parker et al (2015) report that more than two-thirds of people get involved with NP because they want more influence, greater say and to shape a local vision. By any reading, NP can be seen as a positive development in this regard, even if the process overall may struggle to meet these expectations. Parker et al (2017) show that “known co-production” (i.e. diverse actors working together on NDPs) is actually occurring. More critically, the government’s aim could be seen to be reducing local conflict through this consensus-building in order to increase housing supply (Gallent, 2013), although conversely a report from Turley (2014) found that the key theme of 55% of NDPs was the preservation and protection of what already exists (Lord et al, 2017). This suggests that NP may not currently be meeting government’s expectations.

On one analysis (Parker and Salter, 2015), it was recognised that planning skills were crucial but that for most groups the lack of this expertise delayed but didn’t prove fatal to their NDPs (Parker et al, 2015). The implication is that local authorities were then required to intervene or, for wealthier areas, private resources were utilised to fund a consultant tasked to plan-write. At this stage, community aspirations are likely to be rescripted into ‘planning language’, with some suggesting that this, combined with interactions with the local authority, led to a feeling of lost ownership. This “instruction from authority” and tendency for the instrumental pragmatism of “getting things done” can limit the “imagineering of alternatives” and has an effect on the rational choice realities mentioned earlier leading to a ‘why bother?’ result amongst some groups. Conservatism, self-regulation and self-censorship were observed in particular in the latter stages of the process (Parker et al, 2017).

There are instances where a Neighbourhood Development Plan (NDP) has informed a Local Plan (rather than vice versa), with over 1,138 areas being designated in areas with no up-to-date (post-NPPF) Local Plan (Parker and Salter, 2017). This represents an ability of DNFs to use NDPs to shape policy, and potentially re-opens our whole debate around local autonomy. The government guidance itself states that NDPs “can be developed before or at the same time as the local planning authority is producing its Local Plan”, yet simultaneously a draft NDP “must be in general conformity with the strategic policies of the development plan in force”, with additional guidance that qualifying bodies and local authorities should discuss and aim to agree the relationship between policies (DCLG, 2014). Anecdotally (Parker and Salter, 2017), some forums and parishes have slowed their processes to wait for a Local Plan to be adopted in order to know what policies they should follow. This ambiguity in precedence has been tested at examination, with one examiner comically citing Jean-Paul Sartre’s existentialism in defence of allowing an NDP to not conform to a non-existent Local Plan (Sturzaker and Gordon, 2017). In general, though, the LA-DNF relationship is characterised by Parker et al (2017) as a “critical dependency” rather than a “truly co-creative relationship”. Mutual exchange only delivers desired outcomes when there is trust, transparency and accountability and Gallent (2013) suggests that there is a structural hole that needs bridging by incidental mediators, giving the example of Ashford where housing (rather than planning) officers were effective at connecting group members to the local authority.

Superficially, it might be observed that a DNF’s powers can be described thus: “Although it cannot choose what to do, once given a specific task it can implement it in any way thought consistent with its tasks.” (Clark 1984, p. 201). Neighbourhood planning groups do choose what emphasis to take (if not exactly choosing what to do). Nevertheless, this gives the impression that their deliberations have a weight that the Localism Act ill affords them in terms of setting planning policy.

Parker et al’s (2015) assessment of their user experience study with Locality of 120 neighbourhoods uncovered a feeling that a local authority ‘duty to support’ needs to be operationalised through memoranda of understanding, which could set out clearer guidance for how to plan rather than just what to plan. The study also found that managing expectations and investing in the early stages to raise awareness in the community paid dividends. Parker et al (2017) believe the relations, knowledge and understanding built by NP may influence new forms of community engagement. More critically, Davoudi and Cowie (2013) argue that for inclusivity to improve we should consider not just how to incorporate marginal groups, but also how to limit the influence of privileged groups. Parker et al (2015) similarly query how we “proof” neighbourhood planning against dominant actors and a ‘managerialist’ consensus. Agonistic practice may have some of the answers in allowing dissensus to reveal power differences within the process (Vigar et al, 2017), but must be used sensitively by well-trained, ‘bridging’ mediators. The user experience study also noted the challenge of designating NP areas in urban settings, recommending a simplification of the process and more targeted, clear guidance for groups. The study also found that clarity around the referendum rules, consistency around resourcing, and clearer messages around the continuation of DNFs (with the view of reviewing or amending the NDPs) as further ways to practically improve the NP process (Parker et al, 2014).

Conclusion

I have argued that neighbourhood planning does not act to constrict local autonomy, because local autonomy does not exist in the English democratic system at the sub-local authority level. Using Clark’s description of the concept of local autonomy, I have suggested that only a wholesale, near-revolutionary change in the British democratic system would allow for this conception to make sense on its own terms of “local self-rule”. NP is fundamentally a state-led and state-run activity, regardless of how specifically the initial bottom-up inception of processes occurs, as it is limited by both central and local state’s policy framework on what local communities can prescribe in their NDPs. However, this does not in itself preclude the possibility of public participation in NP.

There has been limited research thus far into the comparative uptake of local planning participation before and after the 2011 Act. Nevertheless, I have found substantive examples of neighbourhood planning producing forms of public participation which were hitherto unrealised. Even a mechanism so tightly scripted by state actors has the potential for delivering non-state actors’ priorities into local development schemes. My concerns with these processes are almost wholly to do with who is participating and how NP can be reformed and developed to ensure a greater breadth of uptake amongst diverse communities, urban areas and English “non-southern” regions. The cited example of Leeds gave me some hope that urban areas can respond to the current set-up through strong leadership to encourage a joined-up process at the local authority level.

Thus, I would contend that there is a need to directly link neighbourhood planning to strategic planning timetables, so that Local Plans and NDPs are concurrently produced. This could be linked to a statutory responsibility on all local authorities to review and consult on their Local Plan (a consolidated document covering all local and neighbourhood plans) every five years. This would dispel fears of a lack of consistency in a two-tier system (Lord et al, 2017), potentially widen the breadth of topics found in NDPs, and allow all councils to plan for ‘big bang’ engagement at regular intervals. Needless to say, this would require substantial financial investment and new revenue-raising powers for local authorities. It would be perceived as a retreat from ‘localism’ and a centralisation of power. However, to release greater participation and community dialogue (particularly in deprived areas), it is imperative that neighbourhood planning is well-resourced. This seems to be the only effective way to ensure a coherent planning system that allows local innovation, increased diverse and inclusive participation and outcomes that effectively and fairly balance local and national planning priorities.

Bibliography

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Bailey, S. and Elliott, M. (2009) Taking Local Government Seriously: democracy, autonomy and the constitution, Cambridge Law Journal, 68(2), pp. 436–472.

Brookfield, K. (2017) Getting involved in plan-making: Participation in neighbourhood planning in England, Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space 2017, 35(3), pp. 397–416.

Carpenter, B. (2016) Analysis finds average neighbourhood plan turnout of 32.4%. Available at: http://www.planningresource.co.uk/article/1406239/analysis-finds-average-neighbourhood-plan-turnout-324 [Accessed 8 January 2018]

Clark, G.L. (1984), A theory of local autonomy, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 74(2), pp.195–208.

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Forester, J. (1999) The Deliberative Practitioner: Encouraging Participatory Planning Processes, The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, London, England

Gallent, N. (2013), ‘Re-connecting “people and planning”: parish plans and the English localism agenda’, Town Planning Review, 84, pp. 371–96.

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Lord, A., Mair, M., Sturzaker, J.,  and Jones, P. (2017) ‘The planners’ dream goes wrong?’ Questioning citizen-centred planning, Local Government Studies, 43:3, pp. 344-363.

Parker G. (2017), The uneven geographies of neighbourhood planning in England. In: Brownill, S. and Bradley Q., eds., Localism and neighbourhood planning: Power to the people?, pp. 75-91.

Parker, G., Lynn, T. and Wargent, M. (2015) Sticking to the script? The co-production of neighbourhood planning in England, Town Planning Review, 86:5, pp. 519-535.

Parker, G.,  Lynn, T. & Wargent, M. (2017) Contestation and conservatism in neighbourhood planning in England: reconciling agonism and collaboration?, Planning Theory & Practice, 18:3, pp. 446-465.

Parker, G., Lynn, T., Wargent, M. and Locality (2014), User Experience of Neighbourhood Planning, published report, October 2014, London, Locality.

Parker, G. & Murray, C. (2012) Beyond tokenism? Community-led planning and rational choices: Findings from participants in local agenda-setting at the neighbourhood scale in England. Town Planning Review, 83(1), pp. 1–28.

Parker, G. and Salter, K. (2017) Taking Stock of Neighbourhood Planning in England 2011–2016, Planning Practice & Research, 32:4, pp. 478-490.

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Sturzaker, J and Gordon, M. (2017) Democratic tensions in decentralised planning – Rhetoric, legislation and reality in England. Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space, 35(7), pp. 1324-1339.

Turley Associates (2014). Neighbourhood Planning – Plan and Deliver? London: Turley Associates, London.

Vigar, G. Gunn, S. and Brooks, E. (2017) Governing our neighbours: participation and conflict in neighbourhood planning, Town Planning Review, 88(4), pp. 423-442.

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Why voting Green in Bristol West will NOT let the Tories in

We’ve already knocked on thousands of doors in Bristol West in this campaign, and the most common reaction we get is “we must keep the Tories out”.

As Greens, we agree. As a party, we have led on attempts to negotiate deals in seats the Conservatives hold or threaten to take without a strong, singular progressive-minded voice on the ballot paper.

However, Bristol West is different. The result in 2015 shows a few things:

1. Labour just beat the Greens last time leaving the Lib Dems and the Tories in a distant third and fourth place.
2. Even if the entire UKIP vote from 2015 went to the Tories, they would still be in fourth.
3. The Tories cannot win this seat (and won’t be attempting to), so progressive voters can back the Greens and make history by electing Bristol’s first Green MP.

A Green MP would work cooperatively with other progressive MPs but hold Labour to account where the party’s policies veer away from the progressive values this constituency holds dear.

The differences between a Green MP and the Labour Party’s approach are profound:

  • A Green MP would campaign for a final referendum on the negotiated terms of Brexit. The Labour Party are not in favour of this referendum, preferring to let Theresa May push through her plans rather than let the people decide.
  • A Green MP would campaign to halt NHS privatisation and invest in our health. The Labour Party did not back Caroline Lucas’ NHS Reinstatement Bill and during the last Labour government, began the process of privatisation through PFI schemes.
  • A Green MP would campaign for a fairer voting system to make votes matter. The Labour Party are divided on the issue and have made no clear statement that they would change to a proportional voting system.
  • A Green MP would campaign for action on climate change. The Labour Party barely ever mention climate change, the country’s greatest threat to security.

A second Green MP would do more to push a Labour or Conservative government to do what is right by providing effective opposition and critique when it matters.

Theresa May does not want another Caroline Lucas in Parliament. She does not want Molly Scott Cato to be elected – an economist who can lay bare the inadequacies and falsehoods of the Conservatives’ disastrous economic policies.

If you want a future to believe in, it’s time for a Green MP in Bristol.

#TonyFirst: Why you should give Tony Dyer your first preference vote on Thursday 5th May

Why you should give Tony Dyer your first preference vote on Thursday 5th May

I’ve known Tony for quite a while. I can’t remember exactly when I met him, but like many people in the Bristol blogosphere I was impressed by his incredibly detailed writing  for a previous incarnation of the website Bristol 24/7. He clearly puts the time and effort in to understand a subject. It might not seem like a big deal, but Tony reads books, and he learns things from them. I think this is hugely important in terms of the over-arching reasons for voting for him. Intelligence, principle and pragmatism are Tony’s chief qualities – he knows the issues inside out, he knows what the right thing to do is on those issues, and he knows which issues it is realistic to focus on for his term of office.

If you’re reading this, perhaps you’ve already made your mind up about some of the candidates. But if you’re still thinking about who would make the best Mayor, I would implore to look closely at Tony’s proposals, available here: http://www.bristolgreenparty.org.uk/mayor2016

Let me tell you more about Tony. Tony is a kind, genuine, funny and down-to-earth person. He is undoubtedly a policy wonk, but he wears it lightly…and anyway, since when was it a bad thing to know what we should do to make things better? When he suggested his idea for an immediate call for George Osborne to allow us to keep our business rates in Bristol (already Osborne’s policy, but Tony would negotiate speeding the process up in exchange for  freezing council tax, a Tory sacred cow), it would  free up millions of pounds he could then use for infrastructure spending. In an era of Conservative government-imposed austerity, we need someone who has genuinely tried to think of alternatives that are achievable and workable, who isn’t just accepting austerity as a necessity, and who knows what he wants to get out of central government.

Tony is well-liked by people, even his political opponents. He is known to be straight-talking with everyone he meets, frames all of his conversation positively and doesn’t belittle others – in fact, he believes he needs people from all political persuasions and none if there is any chance for economic, social and environmental justice to be advanced in any meaningful way. If elected as Mayor, he would be collaborative to a far greater degree than any of the other main candidates, utilising his Cabinet’s expertise in far deeper ways than is presently being achieved, listening to communities first rather than imposing solutions straight away, and – yes, it’s important to acknowledge, given the other candidates’ situations – being consultative with the local Green Party, who will hold him accountable for his decisions on a regular basis through our democratic structures.

The media had formed their narrative on this mayoral election campaign before it even started. For them, it was between Ferguson and Rees again…and they seemed to be ignorant of the large increase of the Green vote share year after year in  Bristol. Another jump, and we will get a Green Mayor. This would cause a national shockwave in a way that no other half-likely result will and will instantaneously make Bristol the most progressive and forward-thinking city in the country.

And just one more thing. You may be aware that the voting system for this election allows you a first and a second preference. That means you can vote for who you really want to win first, and who you would put up with second. Above all, Tony really needs your first preference – so put #TonyFirst!

General Election 2015 Election night result at Brislington Enterprise College for  Bristol South Tony Dyer - Green Party candidate Date: 07/05/15 Photographer: Michael Lloyd/Freelance Copyright: Local World
Photographer: Michael Lloyd/Freelance
Copyright: Local World

Why I am standing for Central ward

It has been an absolute honour to serve the residents of Ashley ward for two and a half years as one of their two Green local councillors. Gus and I have always worked as a team and split the casework pretty much down the middle, even when Gus was the Assistant Mayor for Neighbourhoods, and also during the last few months when I have been the Green group leader.

It has been great to work with him and with residents. Even during a period when local government has been under attack by successive Coalition and Tory governments, we have been able to help people on lower incomes to get their housing issues resolved or their benefits situation reviewed, as well as leading in the challenge of getting clean streets and the resources to keep them that way. Amongst all of our work, I have been particularly pleased with the new Albany Green improvements, and I look forward to a huge increase in the number of bike parking spaces in the Stokes Croft/Picton Street area in the next few months.

My term as Ashley councillor will be coming to an end in May and I recently made the decision that I would stand for a different ward, the new Central ward, which stretches from Stokes Croft and the Dove Street flats in the north, to the University of Bristol in the west, to Temple Way in the east, to the New Cut in the south.

I have taken this decision for a few reasons.

Firstly, and after 2.5 years, it has become clear to me that electing a gender-balanced pairing is better for residents – particularly for women who may need a female councillor to represent them on particular issues. I am convinced that the Green Party’s new Ashley council candidates (when announced) will be a well-balanced team and will serve the communities of St Pauls, St Werburghs, Montpelier and St Andrews with dedication and perseverance if elected in May.

Secondly, I am excited about a fresh opportunity, that of standing alongside Ani Stafford-Townsend to make Central a fully Green ward. The approach Ani has taken in her first year as a councillor has been fantastic – leading on crucial issues such as small business support, the homelessness crisis and the protection and improvement of the city centre’s green spaces. She has excelled herself in chairing a Development Control committee and is available for face-to-face meetings with residents, which is the first job of a good local councillor.

Thirdly, I have realised that two of the biggest challenges we face in making Bristol a Green city – sorting out a transport system that still does not do enough to de-incentivise motor vehicles, and ensuring we create safe, warm, low energy affordable homes – are being played out in Bristol City Centre. I am particularly energised by the idea of the centre of Bristol becoming much more pedestrian and cycle-friendly, with the four-year goal of closing more streets to through-traffic. This is an undeniably Green direction to take, because it would not only improve our air quality, but also improve social conditions – the centre would be more liveable, legible, and far more open to local traders and businesses. Our centre promenade often doesn’t feel like a “location” in the same way other cities manage with their central squares – and I want to work to make this happen.

The city centre has undergone big changes in the last decade, not least in the number of people who have come to live there. The task of bringing together diverse, sometimes isolated communities as one city centre community is one I relish and I can’t wait to get out and listen to the views of residents on what would improve things.

The recent political history of Cabot ward is not lost on me. George Ferguson and Stephen Williams, both purveyors of economic neoliberalism, have both been councillors in the central ward in the past. If elected, I will look to challenge this outdated economic consensus that they have both, in their differing ways, chosen to comply with – and provide an alternative Green vision of economic prosperity for all.

I’ll get to know a lot more about residents’ needs in the coming months, but I think one of the first challenges in Cabot/Central is to get more residents registered to vote. Cabot has had a worryingly low response rate to the Household Enquiry Form, which is in part because of the large student population, but with wider impacts too. We know that Individual Electoral Registration has caused a huge democratic deficit in the UK, with millions of people falling off the electoral register, and it is, alongside the council’s Electoral Services team, mine and Ani’s task to ensure that people are able to use their democratic right – whether they decide to vote for us or not. My overarching passion remains reforming our anachronistic and discredited electoral system so that power at the ballot box is given to people, not parties – and I will continue to work for this at all levels, not least in my current role as a council member for the Electoral Reform Society.

As always, I remain contactable on rob.telford@bristol.gov.uk if you have any questions.

Ani Stafford-Townsend, Rob Telford, in Redcliffe, Welsh Back to rear
Ani Stafford-Townsend (L) and Rob Telford, Green candidates for Central ward, May 2016

LEADER’S BLOG: October 2015

A monthly look at what assorted Green councillors in Bristol have been getting up to…

Jerome Thomas (Clifton councillor)
Councillor page: https://bristol.gov.uk/councillorfinder/?Task=name&CouncillorId=28

Bristol Green Party page: http://www.bristolgreenparty.org.uk/Clifton
YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCGnAN_THWdwQLNlSUduIe7A
Twitter: https://twitter.com/bristoljerome
Jerome@RegAt a City level I have been working with the Green Party Transport Group to propose Transport policy and campaigns for 2016. With that group and with the Green Party councillors we have been looking at Air Quality in Bristol and have  proposed our approach for the launch of a low emissions zone in central Bristol. We will be consulting on that with Green party members in the coming weeks. In Clifton we have been progressing an enhanced role for Clifton Library. On Tuesday 6 October we held a very well attended Friends of Clifton Library meeting. This was led by local Green Party member Paula O’Rourke.

I’ve been working with John Grimshaw (founder of Sustrans) on his proposal for a zebra crossing on Jacobs Wells Road and better access onto Brandon Hill. I’ve also met with the council’s cycling officers about the unacceptable life risks to cyclists on the Jacobs Wells roundabout and have proposed a number of measures, some of them very low cost, which will reduce those risks to acceptable levels.

Gus Hoyt (Ashley councillor)
Councillor page: https://bristol.gov.uk/councillorfinder/?Task=name&CouncillorId=91

Bristol Green Party page: http://www.bristolgreenparty.org.uk/Ashley
Blog: https://greengus.wordpress.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/MrGreenGus
Cllr Gus Hoyt
The main issue locally has continued to be the Carriageworks (Westmoreland House – the derelict building on the corner of Ashley Rd and Stokes Croft). The developer Fifth Capital London has worked closely with the community liaison group (CAG) since their planning application was deferred at committee in April. This leads many to believe the development is likely to go ahead despite 25 years of set-backs.

The main concern is that there is local representation on a future management committee so that future use is in keeping with the Community Vision. The decision is going to planning committee on the 14th October. Following on the housing theme, I was the only councillor not on Place Scrutiny to attend an excellent full day for the Bristol Housing Enquiry where we explored the situation in Bristol and looked to other authorities and organisations to see what they are doing around the country to solve the housing crisis.

Prior to this I joined other councillors and members for the formulation of the Green Housing Policy working group which met for an evening to discuss what our short, medium and long term goals need to be within the city. This will feed into the Mayoral Manifesto for next May’s elections.

Earlier this week I also met with local campaigners who want to solve the growing problem of homelessness faced by the city. The aim is to creating temporary shelter leading to continued support to those who have found themselves in the downward spiral of homelessness. The main problem at this stage is lack of suitable buildings available and I will be working with Cabot Cllr Ani Stafford Townsend as this issue crosses both our wards.

Likewise litter, fly-tipping and the general rubbish on our streets is continuing to be the number one complaint, and rightly so. Lower Montpelier and St Pauls are continuing to be blighted by a dismal street-scene and it is hoped that now the waste contract is brought back ‘in house’ that some progress can be made.

Interestingly, we are being approached by residents in St Andrews asking for an extension to residents parking as the displacement of extra and commuter cars are spreading further north now the zone is active in Montpelier.

Carla Denyer (Clifton East)
Councillor page: https://bristol.gov.uk/councillorfinder/?Task=name&CouncillorId=30
Bristol Green Party page: http://www.bristolgreenparty.org.uk/Clifton-East
Twitter: https://twitter.com/carla_denyer

CarlaRather than summarising a whole month, this time here’s a day in the life of Cllr Carla Denyer. This was 7th October, slightly busier than the average day, but far from unusual.

9:30am-10:30am – Emails (backlog = 378, as I was at a conference last week)
11:00am-12:00pm – Met a business-owner in my ward to address waste collection and fly-tipping issues on her property, complicated by neighbour relations. One of them did not take kindly to being asked well-meaning questions… sometimes being a councillor entails being a counsellor too. I am now following up on the issues with the Waste Services team.
12:20pm-2:00pm – Lunch and scheduling
2:00pm-3:00pm – Budget briefing from the Finance Service Director at Bristol City Council to the Green councillors
3:00pm-4:00pm – Jointly drafted the Green councillors’ contribution to the West of England Spatial Strategy (how and where to build the tens of thousands of new homes needed in Bristol)
4:00pm-5:45pm – Emails
5:45pm-6:00pm – Grabbed a quick supper
6:00pm-7:00pm – Meeting of the Environment Sub Group of my local Neighbourhood Partnership to discuss how to spend delegated money on environmental improvements. (Left 1 hour early to get to…)
7:00pm-9:00pm – Meeting of Bristol Green Party to discuss policy proposals and campaign ideas
9:30pm – Home

Martin Fodor (Redland)
Councillor page: https://bristol.gov.uk/councillorfinder/?Task=name&CouncillorId=74
Bristol Green Party page: http://www.bristolgreenparty.org.uk/Redland
Blog: http://martinfodor.com/
martin-fodor-bristol-2013Redland councillors are now grappling with continuing problems over the Bristol North Baths Redevelopment (a new library, medical centre, flats and toilets above the car park on Gloucester Rd). Since the Medical Practice serving most of Bishopston announced they will no longer seek to relocate there many questions have come up.

While the plan adopted was controversial and some residents are saying now is the time to revisit the shape of the project, with a close to completion development it makes sense to get the best from the investment, protect the council’s interests as freeholder, and ensure local medical services are not jeopardised. We want our local library to open and Drs to have a base with more facilities.

We are pressing hard for the long awaited proposals on review of the new Residents Parking schemes to be published so that those affected by the commuter parking around our current zone get a solution, and the proposed minor changes to the existing scheme can be implemented. There is widespread support for the scheme now in place and many outside it are very keen to see parking managed. We’re committed to getting as many local residents and traders’ ideas incorporated as possible so the scheme is shaped by people using it.

Months ago the Gloucester Rd and many other local streets were resurfaced. We are still pressing for reinstatement of all the markings which still fail to restore the cycle tracks that provide some protection for cycle users on the city’s busiest cycle road.

Daniella Radice (Bishopston councillor and Assistant Mayor for Neighbourhoods)
Councillor page:
https://bristol.gov.uk/councillorfinder/?Task=name&CouncillorId=82
Bristol Green Party page: http://www.bristolgreenparty.org.uk/Bishopston
Blog: http://bishopstongreencouncillors.info
Twitter: https://twitter.com/GreenDaniella
daniellaAlthough I haven’t had any major papers to take to cabinet this month, it hasn’t been that quiet. I seem to get about 100 e-mails a day, a variety of issues relating to my portfolio, dealings with officers and of course ward work.

This week I spoke at a conference on rethinking parks, attended a celebration of the Playing out charity and also chaired a meeting of the partnership advisory group for Muslim women which is planning a conference for Muslim women next year. As part of my role in Sports I am helping convene an open space session to help start a women’s sports strategy for the city next month. Part of my work involves being part of the sports commission shadow board which is setting itself up as a community interest company. I am also now the Green representative on the Bristol Cultural Development Partnership that runs the festival of ideas.

Steve Clarke (Southville councillor)
Councillor page: https://bristol.gov.uk/councillorfinder/?Task=name&CouncillorId=29
Bristol Green Party page: http://www.bristolgreenparty.org.uk/about-stephen
Blog: http://votegreeninsouthville.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/southvillesteve
photo-cllr-stephen-clarkeI have attended a number of council and commission meetings (including a cabinet meeting on 6.10.15 where I asked a question about the environmental sustainability of the Arena). There was a very informative Housing Inquiry Day (with four separate briefing meetings beforehand) where councillors, experts and officers discussed innovative ways for Bristol to try and tackle the housing crisis.

I have also had a busy month dealing with a number of urgent local issues. Regarding the stadium parking, we now seem to have engaged the Council’s senior leadership team (including Assistant Mayor Simon Cook and Transport Service Director Peter Mann) in a meaningful effort to try to come to some worthwhile solutions regarding the parking and travel issues. They seem to be talking to Bristol Sport again and we we will watch closely where that goes. Unfortunately, there looks like little danger of City getting promoted in the near future in any event so we may not feel the full impact of the 27,000 seater stadium for a while…

I met an interesting delegation of citizens from Hanover (one of Bristol’s twin-towns) and discovered that they have many of the same problems that we do; public transport, air-quality, lack of really affordable housing etc. I enjoyed meeting them and they loved Bristol.

Finally, myself and Charlie Bolton (co-councillor for Southville) are continuing with our initiative to talk to the voters in the nine tower blocks in our patch by having regular surgeries. The biggest issues are dog-free blocks and illegal tenancies. Generally the residents are very pleased to see us as they have been ignored and forgotten for a long time.

Green group