Green Party Campaigns in Kirklees: Thinking Global, Acting Local

Kirklees Green Party has worked for many years with local people to help create a better local area, where the Council uses its resources fairly and effectively.

 We have:

- campaigned to stop the proposed building on greenbelt land in the current and previous versions of the Local Development Framework for Kirklees. Our council group leader, Andrew Cooper, recently secured the support of the national Green Party conference to oppose Conservative-Lib Dem Government plans to make development of greenbelt and green field land easier for developers to apply for and more attractive for local councils to approve. Greens want to see existing buildings refurbished and empty ones brought back into use before there is any new building. We also want to see the LDF or its successor plan widened to include jobs, food, transport, leisure and the environment in order to make it a genuine plan for better communities rather than a blueprint for construction.

- promoted  a wide range of alternative energy programmes which have created local jobs and saved local people money, as well as reducing carbon emissions. These have included the free element of the Kirklees Warmzone scheme - although other parties have claimed credit (in spite of actively opposing it in some cases), it was a Green Party initiative that ensured that all householders, regardless of owner/rental status, were insulted free of charge if their homes qualified for the scheme - this has saved householders over £400 per year and cut emissions. It also created around three dozen local jobs for tradespeople in Kirklees, all at no additional cost to local taxpayers.

Green Councillors Cooper and Simpson secured extra funding for free insulation 

- opposed the cuts in social care agreed in April this year by the three big parties on Kirklees Council. We produced an alternative budget which would have prevented the cuts to vulnerable adults and children, but national Coalition Government guidelines prevented it from being debated and the Conservatives, Lib Dems and Labour combined to vote through their cuts package. The 4 Green Councillors were the only group to oppose the proposals.

- worked with local groups in Newsome and Kirkburton to promote local food growing, in allotments and in community projects. Newsome councillors are currently promoting a project to planet a thousand fruit trees for communal use around the area.

- our local councillors on Kirklees and in Kirkburton Parish have also been involved in a wide range of local work with individuals and groups to improve local amenities, transport links and the environment. In Kirburton, an initiative by Parish Councillor Michelle Atkinson has seen the promotion of local walkways, including the installation of durable, ecofriendly carved signposts, again a small boost to local craft skills.

Leafleting against the bankers' levy on mutuals'

customers  in Huddersfield

- Greens have also campaigned in the district on a range of national themes, including leafleting against the last Labour Government's levy on mutual building societies to help pay for the scandal of the private banks' bailout, joining protests against cuts to public sector workers pay and conditions and supporting the peace movement against the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya. We also hosted Bahraini students at Huddersfield University who came to speak to our group about the failure of the British Government to oppose the suppression of pro-democracy protests in their country, which is seen as a close business partner of the Conservative-Lib Dem Government. 

Yorkshire Greens rally in Leeds for peace inthe Middle East, 2009 

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