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Just 21% of Tory MPs put the environment as their top priority, compared with 75% of Lib Dem MPs and a mere 40% of Labour MPs, says a survey for House magazine highlighted by ConservativeHome.

So what is the Tory top priority? 81% said international security, 38% financial stability and 38% NHS privatisation reform. These are all of course valid political concerns, but putting them in that order proves a remarkable lack of understanding about the threats and opportunities environmental politics throws at us.

It seems to me that the environment, climate change, natural resource availability and consumption and so on, well, these are the major threats to international security facing us this century. And, whilst I would contend that most of our Lib Dem MPs have so far shown little understanding of this, things like the "green tax switch" could be a massive force for economic stability and equity, not just means to an environmental end.

Neither MI5 nor the Royal Navy can control the weather, or help ensure we don't have hundreds of millions of the world's coastal have-nots displaced and looking for a culprit amongst the haves of the world to blame for their plight. The City of London cannot keep us warm when Russia turns off the gas taps, and especially if it's under seven meters of water!

ConservativeHome concludes by suggesting that the new candidates selected for seats under Cameron's leadership will be more attuned to Cameron's priorities. Maybe, but who is selecting them? What priorities do they have? Is not the party membership likely to reflect those they already have representing them? They won't all be selecting flip-flop wearing trustafarian environmentalist milionnaires.

Technorati Tags: conservatives, Dave the chameleon, tories, environmental politics

When I started this blogging lark, I chose Blogger mainly as a way of getting a blog up quickly with as little effort and learning as possible in order to support Chris Huhne for Lib Dem party leader. I'd always intended when possible to move my blog to my own URL here at www.jockcoats.org.uk and my own server and software I could play with.

Since I went and bought another server, and set up a personal site using www.jockcoats.org.uk when I was running for election as university governor (which I've won, by the way thank you for asking, but more on that later no doubt) and since my Blogspot address got hijcaked rather embarrassingly by someone redirecting to a pretty explicit gay porn website at the weekend, I've decided to carry out that move now.

So I grabbed back my Blogspot address and redirect it to here, but if you are reading this and link to my blog at http://jockcoats.blogspot.com/ in your blogrolls and so on, maybe you could change that over to http://www.jockcoats.org.uk/ as soon as you can be bothered. I'm still getting used to the software, so things will probably change quite a lot over the next few days. For information, I'm using Drupal, and its blogapi module to allow me to continue posting through ecto.

Technorati Tags: blogging

Over at Guido's he's got a discussion going about the possibility of pursuing a private prosecution after the CPS decided not to press charges in the cash for honours investigation. At the very least such a challenge would force all the evidence out in the open. There is still apparently some notion that Lord Levy and others will themselves prosecute the police for wrongful arrest, also thereby bringing all the evidence out - if they dare.

I can't imagine many readers of these pages do not also keep an eye on Guido's blog but in case you don't, I've got a link to Guido's Pledge-Bank entry in my sidebar (or here) for you to sign up to support such a move. It does NOT involve any financial commitment at this stage - it is merely to try to gauge the level of potential support. So if you want to see the peerage posse have their day in court, you might think about signing up to this.

Remember - a decision not to prosecute is not the same thing at all as an acquittal - it merely means that the CPS don't think they can prove something beyond a reasonable doubt in court. The posse should not be so smug or shrill in their denouncement of the investigation when it seems clear from the CPS statement that there probably are areas where there could be a case to answer.

Most right-thinking people, and I hope all Lib Dems, have castigated this government for the provisions of the Serious Organized Crime and Police Act that restrict protests within 1km of parliament, which was the thing under which Maya Anne Evans was prosecuted for reading the names of Iraqi war dead out at the Cenotaph.

Some of us signed one of those vacuous Downing Street Petitions on the issue a while back and we received notice of an even more vacuous government response to that today, published at the Number 10 site. So I thought it was worth highlighting from it that the government have (quietly so far as I can see) snuck out a consultation paper called "Managing Protest Around Parliament" on 25th October, which you can read and submit comments on until 17th January if you're interested.