Vocal Voices

There are some beauties.

* No more building new roads.

* Spend £1.8 billion a year on "promoting walking and cycling"

* Impose VAT and fuel duty on all flights (so no more cheap holidays abroad)

* Phase out nuclear power stations in ten years (to be replaced with what?)

* All children to be made to take equality and diversity lessons from year 1 of primary school

* Ban on keeping rabbits in cages

* Party review to look into the future of horse racing (to possibly ban it).

* No immigration controls at all. (So concreting over more fields for houses - not very green, that?)

* Tax everybody for everything (an exaggeration, but only just)

Honestly, these people are mad; they are control freaks who haven't got a clue.

Why vote Green when you just can go and live in North Korea?

I have just had a skim of their manifesto, all 84 pages, and there are some very good ideas, or should I say interesting topics for a debating society to have a go at. However, there is a huge disconnect between the ideas, how they could be implemented and at what cost.

It is sad to say that even when you dig down the detail is still not there. There is a lot of 'history of' and wishful thinking, but few hard facts about how to achieve real change. I think that is a shame because it leads the media to highlight some of the bonkers ideas in Cromwell's list.

I was talking to a Belgian guy who is very "green" orientated here. I used my usual comments about "Green's" and he said to me.

"You are only saying that because you are British".

I asked him to qualify that and he told me.

"They are a bunch of rabid lunatics who give sensible Green people a bad name".

After a hour of discussing things, I decided that he was right. He was reasonable with a slant to environmental sustainability.

The UK Greens are howling at the moon. The saddest thing is the number of people not only listening but sitting along side them howling in harmony....

Barking. Absolutely barking. And my tendency is to be on their side. They are worse than communists, you can't agree with them on anything, they just use it to take their radical agenda even further.

I'm sure we could find a nice spot for them in darkest Africa where they could live the "real Eco life" for themselves...... Not sure how many would survive though.... Not that sure I care.

Suff, I think you have hit the nail quite firmly there.

My sentiments are also to be on their side, environment and ecology wise, and to be honest they do have some pertinent things to say.

Then they go off on all these weird and woeful directions trying to solve every problem in the cosmos or coming up with solutions to problems that do not exist.

If they took a more Euro Green view, where a good dose of pragmatism works hand in hand with aiming for change or trying to make things work, or work better, they could go some way to winning me over. However, as things stand, they are as mad as Hatters and not worth wasting a vote on.

Exactly my view.

They are needed. They have a point. They are ignored for being somewhere left of Stalin's deepest most hidden desire....

The German Greens, die Grünen, started when I was in Germany and were opposed to pollution, nuclear power, NATO, industrialisation - modern life in general. They were an interesting bunch and open to debate - a sort of unofficial political wing of Friends of the Earth.

We used to say that they would have us all live in Cobb houses, own free-range chickens, pigs and cows and brew our own pale ale and make cheese. The planet's population would be about three billion and we would go on forever.

Looking back they may have been right.

Some of the Green Party's ideas make sense, but they have fallen into the trap
of exaggerating, which destroys their image completely. I used to be Secretary
of a local Nature Conservation group, and spent much time telling members not
to go 'over the top', which only served to ridicule our otherwise reasonable and
obtainable objectives.