How would you spend £100 Billion?

The government estimates replacing Trident as costing £80 billion. Other estimates are higher. It’s a lot of money. The Green Party does not believe we need the fire power to kill 45 million people. There is no situation in which that kind of carnage could possibly be justified.  Labour and Tories alike have claimed Trident means jobs, but according to this article, Ministry of Defence figures say we’re talking more like 520 jobs based on Trident at the moment. Obviously making new weapons will involve more people, but perhaps not on the scale that has been suggested. If the only interest is job creation, there might be safer, more productive ways of creating jobs that actually achieve something good, if you had a hundred billion to play with.

What would you spend it on?

We want to hear and share alternatives. How would you deploy that much money? What are your priorities? Do you think it’s the best value for money in terms of defence? Write in. Leave a comment.  Tweet at us (@stroudgreens) put a comment on the facebook wall https://www.facebook.com/pages/Stroud-District-Green-Party/178834628826252?fref=ts and if you want to get indepth, send longer pieces to brynnethnimue (at) gmail (dot) com and I’ll put them up as guest posts.

Let’s get an alternative conversation going about what we might spend one hundred billion on for the common good. This is not pie in the sky thinking, because if the money is there to pay for weapons, the money is there to pay for other things and if we want alternatives, we should not just talk about them, we should demand them!

(The photo shows a sew up session from Wool Against Weapons. How many war refugees could have not just blankets, but food and proper shelter, for £100 billion?)

Purple Politics

Purple Politics by local cartoonist Russ

There’s an idea I’ve been seeing online, a way of summing up the merging of agendas between what was once left and right: Purple politics. As Labour and the Conservatives offer fewer alternatives and fight over some (perhaps imaginary) middle ground, many of us feel there are no real differences on offer there. Both parties will stick with the same systems that have been failing us for years. There is no will to make real changes, or to think creatively. In the mingling of red and blue, we get purple politics, and nothing improves.

It’s easy to forget, as the Conservatives dish out misery, that Labour are the ones who introduced student tuition fees, failed to rein in the banks and brought us the public disasters that are Private Finance Initiatives. There’s not much to choose between, and when it comes to long term sustainability, both are so obsessed with the idea of economic growth, that they cannot get to grips with sustainable necessities.

In fiction, there is something called ‘Purple Prose’ and it isn’t a compliment to label a piece of writing that way. Purple prose is overblown, and ridiculous. It uses misleading metaphors where a bit of plain speaking would do a lot better. If you’ve got to call a penis a ‘throbbing manly edifice of joy’ you’ve got purple prose. If you over describe everything with unnecessary melodrama, you’ve got purple prose. A lot of words to no good effect. The parallels between purple prose and purple politics are many: They do not work. They are not clever. It’s really embarrassing when you run into it. The world would be a much better place without them.