Monday 18th November 2019
12 people were present. eight sent their apologies.
Amongst the local meetings about climate change: Hope Valley Climate Action met a week ago; the Hathersage group met earlier this evening; the Food and Farming group will meet this Thursday. We acknowledged that this needed to meet up with local farmers in order to progress.
The Green Party in the High Peak constituency recently held a difficult discussion and finally agreed, narrowly, to stand a candidate rather than support the Labour candidate as they had done in the last General Election. We noted that the Liberal candidate in Canterbury had stood down in order to help prevent a Tory candidate from winning. He was subsequently disciplined by the party. When the Liberal candidate in The High Peak supported his colleague in Canterbury, he was also replaced by another Liberal candidate in High Peak. While rejecting the responses of the Liberal Party, we saw this as more evidence of the need to change the electoral system (FPTP- First Past The Post) but we were at a loss to see how this would come about. Perhaps another hung parliament will encourage moves to change.
We speculated about the possibility of Johnston losing his seat in Uxbridge and noted how the Tory campaign was dominated by references to Corbyn. Political debate in the media was too often centred around personalities.
With the prominence of tactical voting we noted that Ruth George is recommended on tactical voting websites concerned with remaining in EU. Some anger was expressed at the FPTP system and we discussed relative merits of the STV (Single Transferable Vote) and PR (Proportional Representation) systems. The advantage with STV is that the winning candidate will have at least 50% support.
In a discussion of Climate change, we were disappointed with he progress made by UK but had rather conflicting views about Chine which, on the one hand, is exporting coal fired power technology, but on the other has made quite extraordinary advances in re-forestation for carbon sequestration.
Finally we speculated that the Tory party would not get an overall majority in the forthcoming General Election despite opinion polls which give them a clear lead.
The next meeting for conversation will be on January 20th.