Welcome

Councillor Jane Brophy's Climate Emergency speech at 1 hours 34 minutes:

Scientists have been warning us for decades that Climate Change is the greatest threat to humanity for thousands of years.

The continuing emission of greenhouse gases and resulting global warming overshadows every other political issue.

Councillor Jane Brophy's Fracking speech at 2 hours 14 minutes:

Fracking speech

This motion reaffirms Trafford's opposition to Fracking.

It is now very clear that consequences of fracking will be harmful for our borough, our region and our planet.

Fracking is a harmful distraction from investment in clean and renewable energy.

Councillor Jane Brophy's Badger speech at 2 hours 14 minutes:

Culling badgers is not only cruel it is flawed.

Here in Trafford I believe we must completely oppose it.

Bovine TB is a problem for cattle, not wildlife.

Nearly all infections are transmitted between cattle and only a tiny number come from badgers.

Motion to Southwark Council
from Councillor Graham Neale (GLD Chair)
Seconded by Councillor Damian O'Brien
Wednesday 28th November 2018

Third runway at Heathrow

1. Council assembly notes:
a. The recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report detailing the urgency of alleviating the extent and rapidity of man-made climate change.
b. That aviation is a major worldwide contributer to man-made climate change.
c. That the expansion of Heathrow airport by building a third runway is targeted at securing Heathrow's status as a hub for international connecting flights rather than in response to demand from London residents.
d. That the planned third runway will mean more than 250,000 additional flights into Heathrow a year.

As both an advocate and a practitioner of Community Politics it has never ceased to amaze me that as both a Party and as Green Liberal Democrats we have overlooked either the most important or the second most important community in most people's lives - the workplace community.

Why aren't we looking for opportunities to utilise community politics in the workplace not so much to promote the Liberal Democrats or the Green Liberal Democrats but to share and promote our core principles and policies?

Ten years ago, the Climate Change Act was a radical piece of legislation - made more radical by Lib Dem input.

For the first time, it set meaningful and achievable targets to help us decarbonise. It's a model that has been adopted all over the world and it has been a great success.

And in Government, Liberal Democrats ensured Britain met the early targets from the Act, and kept future targets ambitious.

The biggest Lib Dem successes came on renewables and European co-operation

We more than trebled investment in renewable electricity. We turned Britain's off-shore wind industry into the world leader, with policies that have helped reduce dramatically the cost of green power.

A few months back, the BBC produced a rather depressing programme - The Secret Life of Landfill. I gave up watching it after a while, as it was just making me angry.

The site operators were clearly putting a lot of effort into storing refuse in high technology landfill, as if that made the refuse go away permanently. But it doesn't - unless the site is steadily covered up with sediment, buried and converted into rock over the next hundred million years, the contents will, in time, be released into the environment.

At the recent AGM of the Association of Liberal Democrat Trade Unionists (ALDTU) they elected Sir Simon Hughes as their new President who is a former President of the Green Liberal Democrats and a respected campaigner on green issues.

It was fitting that they also debated and passed an Emergecncy Motion on Climate Change in which they described Climate Change as one of the biggest, if not the biggest, issue facing humanity. They criticised the decision by Clearcast to ban the Iceland Foods Christmas advert which highlighted the contribution of Palm Oil production to deforestation which significantly contributes to Climate Change. ALDTU felt that the urgency of Climate Change had also been highlighted by the recent report from the IPCC which says that we have 12 years to tackle Climate Change or face irreversible Climate Change.

Trade Unions have a key role to play in protecting our planet as well as campaigning on a wide range of issues including Climate Change; Fracking; Greening the Workplace; single use plastic; renewable energy, electric cars and many other environment issues. You could start by asking your Trade Union Branch and your national trade union to affiliate to the Campaign Against Climate - here is a model motion which you can use for this purpose