*Lush supports hunt sabs

The cosmetics company Lush is launching a bubble bath it hopes will raise tens of thousands of pounds for anti-blood sports activists.

The Hunt Saboteurs Association will be the latest beneficiary of proceeds from Lush, the ethical producer of handmade soaps which has gained a reputation for backing radical protest groups.

The citronella and peppermint bubble bath, called The Fabulous Mr Fox, will arrive on the shelves in the coming weeks and will be on sale until Boxing Day, a traditional day for fox hunts. The company hopes the product will raise £50,000 for the activists, and said they money will be used to fund vehicles and video equipment.

Mark Constantine, the 59-year-old co-founder of Lush, based in Poole, Dorset, has previously donated large portions of his profits to human rights groups, the Green Party, animal welfare organisations and environmental protesters such as Plane Stupid, who promote non-violent civil disobedience to opposed airport expansion.

Proceeds from the Lush cosmetics empire, which is thought to be worth around £150m, have also been used to fund campaigns to support Sumatran orangutans and oppose the widening of the M1 motorway. Sea Shepherd, that operates vessels to scupper rival ships it finds whaling in the middle of the ocean, has received £22,000 from the sale of Lush products.

Lush, founded by Constantine in 1995, has become a multinational company, with branches in N. America, Japan and Australia. The company claims to give around 2% of profits to charity and is keen to promote itself as an ethical brand. Constantine said funding activists groups was "central to what we do".

*Errors by NHS staff led to 5,700 deaths in six months

More than 5,700 patients died or suffered serious harm as a result of staff errors in the NHS over a six-month period, figures showed today.

Figures from the National Patient Safety Agency showed that 459,500 patient safety incidents and near misses occurred in England between last October and March.

This is a 12% increase on the previous six months but the agency, which collects and monitors safety data in the NHS, said that better reporting was fuelling the rise.

Read more on this story in The Times

Millions of pensioners will go cold as energy prices soar

Five million people will avoid switching on their heating to keep warm this winter as they struggle to afford higher fuel bills, according to new research.

Polling of pensioners by the charity Age Concern found that 38 per cent were cutting back on gas and 41 per cent on electricity this year because of fears that they could not afford the prices. With 13 million pensioners in the UK, the charity's findings suggest that 5.2 million people over 60 will go cold at some point this winter.

Read more on this story in The Independent

*LEADING GREEN LAUNCHES NEW EURO CAMPAIGN TO REPLACE ANIMAL TESTING

The South East’s Green Euro-MP launched a new campaign in the European Parliament today to urge EU lawmakers to replace the use of animals in testing and research with non-animal alternatives.

Caroline Lucas MEP, who was recently named the new President of the European Parliament’s influential cross-party Animal Welfare Intergroup, has joined with fellow MEPs to sign a Written Declaration calling for increased funding for the development of alternative methods to animal testing – and a 1% ‘research levy’ on products that contain ingredients tested on animals.

The Written Declaration (1), like an Early Day Motion in the House of Commons, will become the official position of the European Parliament if it can attract the support of at least half of all MEPs.

Dr Lucas MEP said: “Since 2007, I have been working with MEP colleagues and animal protection groups across Europe on a campaign urging the EU to replace cruel, unnecessary and misleading animal experiments. The existing law on the use of animals in experiments is over 20 years old, so action on this is long overdue.

“The European Commission has already stated that one of its ultimate aims is ‘to replace animal experiments with methods not entailing the use of an animal’ (2). It must now increase funding for the development and validation of alternative research methods – and make the administrative processes more efficient.

“We propose that the Commission now assesses options for increasing the funds available, including the introduction of a ‘research levy’ of 1% of the selling price of products that contain ingredients tested on animals.”

She continued: "More than 12 million animals are used in EU labs each year, yet experiments on animals can be unreliable as a guide to human biology and the range of viable alternatives, such as epidemiology, the use of cell cultures, human tissue and computer simulation, is increasing all the time.

"The Commission should increase funding, introduce quantitative targets for reducing the number of animals used in experiments, and bring in compulsory inspections of testing facilities in order to dramatically improve standards of animal protection.”

*Urban Green Fair this Sunday 20th Sept Brockwell Park

The date is drawing near and the excitement is mounting. Yes the 2009 Urban Green Fair is set to go for next Sunday- 20th sept- from 11am to 7pm in Brockwell Park, Lambeth.

There is loads on offer:
Mark Thomas, Paul Mobbs on secretive police, Clarence Thompson MBE talking after the Sam the Wheels local heritage film project about Railton Rd, a topical panel on policing protests with the TSG, Jenny Jones, Climate Camp and Liberty.

Also providing a great wealth of fantastic workshops is the Food and Garden Zone, including the prestigious Brockwell Bake Competition, - get your home made bread entries in.

The kids zone is rammed with exciting and creative activities including free food for early risers.

Visit the Lambeth Green Party stall.

Health and Healing will be providing a huge range of alternative and holistic therapies as well as proving a space for user-led groups to discuss issues on mental health, women’s health and community resilience.

Powerful and practical talks at the Climate Change & Energy Transition Zone as well as innovative and practical solutions and demonstrations in the new Building Zone.

Climate camp will have a space with talks and a big push for the next coal power station action on 16/17 Oct in Nottingham.

Free Bike repair from Dr Bike and sustainable transport solutions and a great line up in the Solar Cinema including Age of Stupid, End of the Line, Sam the Wheels and the Agricultural Rebel.

The Urban Green fair will powered by the sun and bicycles and will not use any fossil fuel power.
Full schedule will soon be posted on the homepage but check out the website for further updates:
www.urbangreenfair.org
http://www.facebook.com/l/35577;

* MUSIC GIG – this Friday night.

MUSIC GIG – this Friday night.

Green Party supporter Relentless MC has a music gig coming up. He is a highly talented and entertaining performer and helped us during the election.

It would be great if we had a good turnout of green supporters.

Venue: Elixir Bar, 162 Eversholt Street, NW1 1BL (Close to Euston and
Mornington Crescent Tubes)



Date: Friday, September 18th.



Start 9pm.



He will be joined by guest DJ and GP member T.R.E. who wrote the ‘Green Bus’ rap which some of you will have heard during the election bus tour.


Hope to see many of you there.

More on: www.myspace.com/mcrelentlessuk

*England canal system

From Karen Varga:

As someone who has lived on a narrow boat until very recently, it is a fascinating subject, can be a brilliant way of life, has a very rich heritage and the waterways can be beautiful, educational and interesting from an ecological point of view but the canal network is suffering from lack of maintenance due to cuts in funding by DEFRA, and British Waterways is potentially going to be part privatised. Living on a narrow boat as a way of life is something that is being eroded by the government too due to under funding, poor management and a system that favours the wealthy (moorings are now auctioned to the highest bidder and a lot of old moorings are being rebuilt with very strict rules about ages and conditions of the boats on the new moorings to favour new, expensive boats). If you don't have a mooring and don't continuously move around (difficult with children at school) you can have your boat seized and sold or crushed. In the economic climate with people losing their homes (as I did) or trying to find a cheaper and more sustainable alternative to the modern way of life it could be a great way of life (but quite hard work too) and a source of investment into the waterways - but as always it is sadly being mis-managed on various levels on a capitalist agenda. It is very sad for those who know and love the waterways and the way of life.

*Met Police still entering innocent people on DNA database

A year after the decision by the European Court of Human rights' that the holding of the DNA samples of innocent people needed to be curtailed, large numbers of innocent Londoners are still being entered onto the national DNA database. In 2006/07 the Met Police provided a quarter of all DNA samples added to the national database.

Green Party London Assembly Member,Jenny Jones, said:

"The European Court made the right decision, but the whole wrong headed system is carrying on as before whilst the Government carries out a consultation. It is clearly wrong that thousands of innocent Londoners are still having their DNA added to the database on the assumption that they may be guilty of a future crime."


"The Met take around 80,000 DNA samples every year, but much of this is a waste of effort and money. The DNA records of children arrested but not charged continue to be put on the database. The Met Police do not even know how many dead people are on the database. It is vital for public confidence that the Mayor asks the police to implement the changes that must flow from this decision as soon as possible."

*Attempt to silence sheltered housing solicitor.

Yvonne Hossacks, is the solicitor who has been effectively acting on behalf of Sheltered Housing residents up and down the country. She now needs your help.

She is being taken to court by several different councils who are attempting to get her struck off as a result of the work that she has been doing on our behalf to save the wardens. The reasons for the tribunal are:-

1) Improperly encouraging clients to court politicians and media
2) Not acting in the clients best interests
3) Making too many time consuming and costly applications to the councils

All ridiculous, I hope you agree!

Tribunal will be taking place on the mornings of the 14th, 15th and 16th September. The address is 3rd Floor, Gate House, 1 Farringdon Street EC4M 7NS.

There will be a protest giving support to Yvonne each morning from of the tribunal from 9 - 9.30 to let the court know how much we appreciate what she is doing. If anyone can attend on any of these days it will help Yvonne to continue the legal campaign.

*Arms fair "shames London"

Below is a statement against this obscene event from Jenny Jones, Green Party Member of the London Assembly and of the Metropolitan Police Authority. I remember when I was an Assembly Member asking the same question to the Mayor and was told "The police are there to keep you and your friends out"

As London prepares to host the DESi Arms Fair to-day, Jenny Jones has called on the organizers to pay for the cost of policing the event.

"I can't think of anything more wasteful than the London police using their precious time protecting a marketing place for guns and bombs. It is unacceptable to expect Londoners to foot the bill for an event that they don't want. I will be pressing the London Mayor at question time on Wednesday, to ask the organisers to cover the whole cost of policing the event. At a time when police have been working hard to tackle the problem of knife crime, it is appalling that they have to waste around four and half thousand police officer shifts protecting the international arms trade."

"I've been inside this event to take a look for myself and I think it is obscene. The Government should end all its subsidies for the arms industry. I hope this is the last arms fair ever held in London."


Policing the Arms Fair in 2007 took 4,475 police officer shifts and 294 police staff shifts to police the arms fair at a total cost to the MPS of £1.469m (£1.178m in opportunity costs, £153k in overtime and £138k in non-pay costs).

*The two-bed thermal envelope

In a Somerset village, a builder is creating zero-carbon homes for less than the cost of conventional ones. By Ashley Seager
The Observer, Sunday 16 August 2009
It's unlikely that you would turn up at a pretty, quiet Somerset village in search of any kind of revolution. In fact, you'd be hard pushed to spot anything revolutionary in the village of Chewton Mendip, save perhaps for a few solar panels on top of the local school.
Blink and you'd miss three terraced houses forming a corner of two streets in the village. They blend in perfectly with the other traditional stone houses. But behind the facades lie brand new homes built with ultra-modern materials and which already meet the government's strict zero-carbon rating that all new houses will have to meet from 2016.
And, crucially, they have been built to a comparable cost to conventional houses, blowing away in an instant the claims of the big housebuilders that meeting the 2016 target will entail huge cost and put up property prices.
It's generally true that in any industry, innovation comes from the small start-ups rather than the big incumbents, and local builder Arthur Bland, combining for the first time some advanced new floor, wall and roof technologies already available in Britain, is proving the point.
"These are the most thermally efficient houses built in the UK in 2008 and are twice as good as the PassivHaus [energy efficiency standard] in Germany," says Bland. "And if I had built them on a larger scale on a larger plot, they would have been cheaper to build than conventional houses; I am quite sure of that."
They say the three most important things in building an eco-house are insulation, insulation, insulation. And maybe airtightness too. And that is what Bland's house embodies: it is so efficient at retaining heat that it does not need any form of heating. In an English house? Surely some mistake?
Bland explains that the revolutionary insulated floor system, from a company called Ecoslab, combined with a polystyrene-and-concrete wall system from Logix and a roof system from Unilin, give the house a "thermal envelope" from which heat and air cannot escape. Daily living generates enough heat - from TVs, kettles, the warm backs of fridges and the people who live in it - that no further source is needed.
Airtightness might sound suffocating, but in fact the houses have a circulation system that changes the air five times an hour. And the clever bit is an exchanger that captures the warmth from stale air, which is extracted from the house by vents, and reuses it to heat water and the air in the rooms. That system is made by a Swedish company called Genvex and costs about £6,000 to install - but once you deduct the cost of a traditional heating and hot water systems, Bland says you are left with a negligible extra cost per house of £500. For the homeowner, the advantage of Genvex systems is that they last much longer than traditional boilers, which need replacing at least every 10 years.
The windows are all triple-glazed and wood-framed to keep heat in. They can, of course, be opened if the house gets too hot in the summer but the Genvex will also provide cool air to keep the places at a constant temperature.
The windows and walls are also very good at keeping sound out - a significant advantage for future homes being built on brownfield sites near other houses and roads. The absence of radiators leaves walls freer than they would have been and the airtightness, if nothing else, means there are no nasty draughts in the winter.
Bland's former wife Linda lives in the middle house with her two children and loves it. She moved in last December when it was completed and so tested it through the cold snow of the spring, when temperatures dropped to -9C.
"For a few days I had a small electric heater on in the living room just to raise the temperature a bit. But after half an hour the house was too hot and I had to turn it off," she says.
"It is a great house to live in and I have no complaints at all. The air does feel dry, though, and I have to water the plants more than I would have done. But that is the only thing I would say. I don't have to lug solid fuel around any more like I used to in other houses I have lived in so I love it."
The house has low-energy lightbulbs, not only because they consume less electricity but also, explains Bland, because the heat from conventional ones would make the house too hot.
He points out that the best thing to do when you have had a bath is to leave the hot water in it to cool, since the heat will be sucked through the bathroom's vents and recycled by the Genvex system into more hot water. "You can get obsessed by this heat business - but it is important," he says.
The three houses share a rainwater harvesting system via a big tank in the communal garden to the rear. The rainwater is used for dishwashers, washing machines and toilets. About 75% of the houses' annual water consumption is provided in this way.
The houses are not yet zero-carbon in the true sense of the phrase since the planning laws in the village's conservation area prohibit the use of renewable energies such as solar panels or wind turbines. As a result, each uses about £600 a year of electricity from conventional sources.
But Bland stresses that the houses meet all the Code Level 6 requirements of the government's code for sustainable homes - a set of rules which is gradually tightening the regulations for new buildings to reduce their carbon output - in terms of the construction.
The addition of, say, solar photovoltaic panels would easily make them zero-carbon or even carbon-negative in the sense that they generate more clean energy than the consume, exporting the surplus to the grid.
The building cost for the three houses was £300,000 for a total dwelling space of 280 square metres. That sort of figure - about £1,100 a square metre - should make the big housebuilders sit up and take notice, especially as Bland says the awkward plot shape and stone frontage added about 20% to his costs. In other words, slightly more standard houses would be cheaper than conventional dwellings even if the solar panels were added on. His system is also quicker than conventional housebuilding.
"There is no great mystery to building houses. If I had not faced the constraints I did on this project, I could easily come in cheaper than conventional houses," he says. "I have simply put some new kinds of products and processes together for the first time. But they can be used flexibly to create any kind of building."
But the big boys, of course, don't like change. Bland took his system to the Ministry of Defence, who had a long-running contract with a volume housebuilder for homes for service personnel. The big housebuilder is charging the MoD £2,000 per square metre for the homes - a high price - and was, not surprisingly, impervious to the MoD's request to copy Bland's model, which would have saved the public purse money both in construction and running costs.
Although producing concrete needs a lot of energy, the Bland houses use much less than traditional houses and require many fewer truck journeys, saving on emissions as well as noise and disturbance - because they use the excavated earth from the foundations as a base for the Ecoslab floor system instead of carting it away to landfill.
You no longer have to imagine the future of housebuilding. It is already here.

*Support the Chagos Islanders.

Please add your name. These islanders were forcibly removed from their island.Between 1965 and 1973 the former inhabitants of the Chagos archipelago in the centre of the Indian Ocean were expelled from their homeland to make way for a joint UK and US military base on the island Diego Garcia. They have ever since fought compensations and their right to return.

A reminder about the petition at Number 10: please will you sign this and ask your friends and contacts to do the same?

http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/Diego-Garcia/

When they reach 500 signatures, the government are obliged to reply. The deadline is 23rd September.


Here is a link to the artwork of Clement Siatous:
http://chagosarchipelago.blogspot.com/

* Jayne for Chair.

Jayne Forbes is a candidate for Chair of the Green Party Executive.

I have known Jayne as a strong Green Party activist for many years. She was my predecessor as London Coordinator. She was previously Management Coordinator on GPEX and her years as Chair of the World Development Movement brings valuable NGO experience - this is not a time to be learning on the job. She will be ‘a steady hand on the tiller’ - something that will be vital in this coming year.

http://jayneforbes.wordpress.com

*Support Tracy.

Green Party Executive elections are coming up. I am backing Tracy Deighton-Brown for the important post of External Communications Coordinator.

I have known and worked alongside Tracy for many years. She is a professional to her fingertips which is what the Green Party will need in this coming year, not inexperienced amateurs.

She also knows how to win elections having being a core member our London victories in 2000 and 2004. This year we got our highest vote in a long time. She also masterminded what the Guardian described as the best broadcast of the election - on a shoestring.

She took over External Comms, last year, when it was a shambles and got it into shape. She fought off calls from some of the wilder elements of the party to go for negative campaigning. In this, she was backed by all the top elected people.

Caroline Lucas MEP, Jean Lambert MEP, Darren Johnson (Chair of the London Assembly) and Jenny Jones AM are all highly experienced election winners - they all back Tracy!

As Party Leader, Caroline Lucas states:
“As we enter a General Election year, it would be very damaging to risk disrupting all the good work she has done"



http://tracyforcomms.wordpress.com/

*Pigeon website

A new pigeon website has just been launched which will provide us all with more information on pigeons and the humane control of them. It should help those of you who often actively campaign against cruelty against them. There are loads of product reviews of all of the different types of products available on the market as well as documents discussing the law when it comes to pigeon control, do-it-yourself controls, bird flu and 21 amazing facts about the pigeon, it's all there!

The website address is: www.pigeoncontrolresourcecentre.org