politics

Image by Lee Jordan

The government recently announced it is considering selling off large areas of woodlands. Forested areas in the UK are important for local biodiversity, and while Greenpeace campaigns are focused on tropical rainforests, the Woodland Trust is all about our own trees. Guest blogger Kaye Brennan from the Trust explains what's going on in our own backyard.

For the latest news on the proposed forest sell-off, visit the Woodland Trust's website.

First of all, let me say that yes, we are worried, and no, we're not campaigning... yet!

Shocking news burst our peaceful Sunday bubble recently, as the Guardian and several other newspapers announced that Defra were considering the mass sale of at least half of the public forest estate.

Several petitions were swiftly started, between them gathering signatures from hundreds of thousands of concerned people and they are still growing in numbers. Online, views were made clear in the hundreds of comments left on articles, blog posts, Facebook pages and tweets.

Daniel Vockins and Maddy Carroll get ready to present 9,000 letters written by Lighter Later supporters to their MPs at the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills

Daniel Vockins from the 10:10 Lighter Later campaign explains how a simple change of the clocks can have a host of benefits, including reducing emissions.

Everybody loves the sunshine. But every year we set our clocks so that we get less of it in our lives, sleeping through the sunlit mornings while we use expensive, polluting electric lights to keep out the dark nights. Lighter Later is a campaign to brighten our days by changing the clocks so we are awake when the sun is out.

The idea is simple: we shift the clocks forward by one hour throughout the entire year. We would still go forward in spring and back in autumn, but we would have moved an hour of daylight from the morning to the evening, when more of us are awake to enjoy it.

Greetings from a bustling Liberal Democrat party conference in Liverpool! Team Trident (aka Simon, Zoe and me) are here to talk to people about one of the big issues of the day – whether or not the coalition government proceeds with hugely expensive plans for a new generation of nuclear weapons in the midst of the biggest cuts to public spending in living memory.

With the Liberal Democrats' first conference since they entered government looming later this week, we commissioned a poll to see how party members are feeling about Trident replacement. Not surprisingly, given that the party campaigned on scrapping 'like for like' replacement during the election campaign, not many are in favour.

This is going to be a bit off-topic but stick with me as given the circumstances I think it's relevant for this blog. That a party can get 23 per cent of the vote but only claim 9 per cent of the seats in parliament seems grossly unfair. As does the notion that another party can garner 36 per cent of votes, and see that translated into 46 per cent of seats. Yet, more or less, that's what our electoral system has delivered.

As I write, the eventual outcome of the general election is still in the balance and with parliament well and truly hung (although I prefer the less pejorative phrase 'balanced parliament'), it's anyone's guess as to who will actually form a government. But it's clear that the Lib Dems are going to have a major influence on whatever form that government eventually takes.