Caroline Lucas has today issued a striking public call for a new politics of unity among ‘progressives’ – among those, that is, who seek at minimum to rein in the excesses of neoliberal ‘business as usual’, Tory-style.

Caroline opens her article by praising Jeremy Corbyn, one of the Labour leadership contenders – and one whose view chime with the Greens on nuclear missiles, climate change and austerity. I second that praise. But let’s be honest. Corbyn’s chances of winning the leadership election are slim.

But many Labour voters, members, candidates and Parliamentarians – and by no means just those who support Corbyn – share much in common with Greens. And it’s crucial that all of us interested in implementing a genuine political alternative work together, whatever leader Labour elects.

Because the alternative is grim: it’s the risk that the awful moment when we saw the exit poll on the night of 7th May will be repeated again in 2020. And again, in 2025.

Constituency boundary changes in progress only make such outcomes all the more probable. The Telegraph told it straight when it reported senior Tories as saying: “Redrawing constituency boundaries to lock Labour out of power for a decades is at the top of the agenda for the new Conservative government.”

We desperately need electoral reform – but how to get it?

The 2015 General Election resulted in a radically distorted electoral map of Britain, and a majority Government lacking a solid democratic mandate, voted for by under a quarter of the electorate.

It’s now clear to anyone with a sense of justice that this country must abandon its antiquated electoral system and adopt a system of proportional representation. Especially promising is the ‘Additional Member System’ employed in the Greater London Assembly, which preserves the constituency link while ensuring overall proportionality of outcome.

The question that Caroline addresses in her Guardian piece is how we can make such electoral reform becomes a practical political possibility. For the next five years, we will be governed by the most reactionary beneficiaries of the current undemocratic system – and they won’t change it.

Like Caroline, I believe the time has come to consider a bold step. ‘Progressive’ parties need to discuss an informal electoral pact to avoid fragmenting the vote in winnable seats, if we are to elect a Parliament in 2020 that would have a progressive majority for democratic change.

Important testing-grounds are coming up: the London Mayoral election in 2016, for example, and the 2017 County Council elections – which are likely to result, if there are no pacts, in radically distorted ‘one-party-state’ outcomes. Both could serve as test runs for the 2020 general election.

Key to this is that the five ‘progressive parties’ should seek, regionally or nationally, to assist local parties to win ‘quid pro quos’ if some candidates are prepared to stand down for the greater good. If, for example, Green candidates are willing to stand down in Labour’s favour in some seats, then the compliment needs to be repaid, in a few others.

It won’t be plain sailing! But we must still try

The first criticism is that such a pact is unlikely to be able to be formed. Labour may cling, as it has in the past, to the idea of an all-out victory, the dream of an overall majority – and see the Greens, SNP and Plaid as enemies not allies.

Others may question whether Labour and the LibDems should even qualify as a ‘progressive’ parties, given that they fought the last election on pro-Trident, pro-austerity, neoliberal political platforms that put ‘clear grey water’ between them and the Greens, Plaid and SNP.

But if the logic of the position that Caroline and I are defending is strong, as I think it is, then we ought at least to try, and we certainly won’t succeed unless we try!

And there are historical precedents, that were no doubt similarly disparaged as pipe-dreams when they were first floated. The most striking such precedent is the 1906 pact with the Liberals that in effect enabled Labour to get into Parliament in the first place in numbers.

A more recent precedent is the little-known ‘non-aggression pact’ between Labour and LibDems which in 1997 was responsible for the scale of the destruction of the Conservatives, and in particular of the largely successful ‘decapitation strategy’ that they put into effect.

The unofficial pact, which involved Labour and Libdems not campaigning in each others’ target seats, received little attention in the mainstream press, but here is a rare mention of it in the Independent.

Others may ask, why exclude UKIP? Of course we should make common-cause with the ‘Kippers in relation to the undemocratic outcome of the 2015 General Election, and Greens have been doing that. But I believe a pact must involve a commitment to action on climate change, and UKIP stand diametrically opposed to any such idea.

So for all our sakes, it is vital that the ‘progressive’ parties open up now the question of working together. MPs, councillors, local party members, supporters, bloggers, trades unionists, citizens at large, all can create the pressure to make it happen.

And I can only agree with Caroline as she concludes: “I hope that Labour’s leadership candidates recognise that multiparty politics is here to stay – and I look forward to hearing how they’ll embrace the change rather than attempt, against the tide of history, to clamp down on it.”

Rupert Read was Parliamentary candidate for Cambridge for the Green Party in  the 2015 election, and remains Green Party national Transport Spokesperson. In his day job he’s Reader in Philosophy in the School of Politics, Philosophy and Languages at the University of East Anglia, and Chair of Green House.

Caroline Lucas has today issued a striking public call for a new politics of unity among ‘progressives’ – among those, that is, who seek at minimum to rein in the excesses of neoliberal ‘business as usual’, Tory-style.

Caroline opens her article by praising Jeremy Corbyn, one of the Labour leadership contenders – and one whose view chime with the Greens on nuclear missiles, climate change and austerity. I second that praise. But let’s be honest. Corbyn’s chances of winning the leadership election are slim.

But many Labour voters, members, candidates and Parliamentarians – and by no means just those who support Corbyn – share much in common with Greens. And it’s crucial that all of us interested in implementing a genuine political alternative work together, whatever leader Labour elects.

Because the alternative is grim: it’s the risk that the awful moment when we saw the exit poll on the night of 7th May will be repeated again in 2020. And again, in 2025.

Constituency boundary changes in progress only make such outcomes all the more probable. The Telegraph told it straight when it reported senior Tories as saying: “Redrawing constituency boundaries to lock Labour out of power for a decades is at the top of the agenda for the new Conservative government.”

We desperately need electoral reform – but how to get it?

The 2015 General Election resulted in a radically distorted electoral map of Britain, and a majority Government lacking a solid democratic mandate, voted for by under a quarter of the electorate.

It’s now clear to anyone with a sense of justice that this country must abandon its antiquated electoral system and adopt a system of proportional representation. Especially promising is the ‘Additional Member System’ employed in the Greater London Assembly, which preserves the constituency link while ensuring overall proportionality of outcome.

The question that Caroline addresses in her Guardian piece is how we can make such electoral reform becomes a practical political possibility. For the next five years, we will be governed by the most reactionary beneficiaries of the current undemocratic system – and they won’t change it.

Like Caroline, I believe the time has come to consider a bold step. ‘Progressive’ parties need to discuss an informal electoral pact to avoid fragmenting the vote in winnable seats, if we are to elect a Parliament in 2020 that would have a progressive majority for democratic change.

Important testing-grounds are coming up: the London Mayoral election in 2016, for example, and the 2017 County Council elections – which are likely to result, if there are no pacts, in radically distorted ‘one-party-state’ outcomes. Both could serve as test runs for the 2020 general election.

Key to this is that the five ‘progressive parties’ should seek, regionally or nationally, to assist local parties to win ‘quid pro quos’ if some candidates are prepared to stand down for the greater good. If, for example, Green candidates are willing to stand down in Labour’s favour in some seats, then the compliment needs to be repaid, in a few others.

It won’t be plain sailing! But we must still try

The first criticism is that such a pact is unlikely to be able to be formed. Labour may cling, as it has in the past, to the idea of an all-out victory, the dream of an overall majority – and see the Greens, SNP and Plaid as enemies not allies.

Others may question whether Labour and the LibDems should even qualify as a ‘progressive’ parties, given that they fought the last election on pro-Trident, pro-austerity, neoliberal political platforms that put ‘clear grey water’ between them and the Greens, Plaid and SNP.

But if the logic of the position that Caroline and I are defending is strong, as I think it is, then we ought at least to try, and we certainly won’t succeed unless we try!

And there are historical precedents, that were no doubt similarly disparaged as pipe-dreams when they were first floated. The most striking such precedent is the 1906 pact with the Liberals that in effect enabled Labour to get into Parliament in the first place in numbers.

A more recent precedent is the little-known ‘non-aggression pact’ between Labour and LibDems which in 1997 was responsible for the scale of the destruction of the Conservatives, and in particular of the largely successful ‘decapitation strategy’ that they put into effect.

The unofficial pact, which involved Labour and Libdems not campaigning in each others’ target seats, received little attention in the mainstream press, but here is a rare mention of it in the Independent.

Others may ask, why exclude UKIP? Of course we should make common-cause with the ‘Kippers in relation to the undemocratic outcome of the 2015 General Election, and Greens have been doing that. But I believe a pact must involve a commitment to action on climate change, and UKIP stand diametrically opposed to any such idea.

So for all our sakes, it is vital that the ‘progressive’ parties open up now the question of working together. MPs, councillors, local party members, supporters, bloggers, trades unionists, citizens at large, all can create the pressure to make it happen.

And I can only agree with Caroline as she concludes: “I hope that Labour’s leadership candidates recognise that multiparty politics is here to stay – and I look forward to hearing how they’ll embrace the change rather than attempt, against the tide of history, to clamp down on it.”

Rupert Read was Parliamentary candidate for Cambridge for the Green Party in  the 2015 election, and remains Green Party national Transport Spokesperson. In his day job he’s Reader in Philosophy in the School of Politics, Philosophy and Languages at the University of East Anglia, and Chair of Green House.

Caroline Lucas has today issued a striking public call for a new politics of unity among ‘progressives’ – among those, that is, who seek at minimum to rein in the excesses of neoliberal ‘business as usual’, Tory-style.

Caroline opens her article by praising Jeremy Corbyn, one of the Labour leadership contenders – and one whose view chime with the Greens on nuclear missiles, climate change and austerity. I second that praise. But let’s be honest. Corbyn’s chances of winning the leadership election are slim.

But many Labour voters, members, candidates and Parliamentarians – and by no means just those who support Corbyn – share much in common with Greens. And it’s crucial that all of us interested in implementing a genuine political alternative work together, whatever leader Labour elects.

Because the alternative is grim: it’s the risk that the awful moment when we saw the exit poll on the night of 7th May will be repeated again in 2020. And again, in 2025.

Constituency boundary changes in progress only make such outcomes all the more probable. The Telegraph told it straight when it reported senior Tories as saying: “Redrawing constituency boundaries to lock Labour out of power for a decades is at the top of the agenda for the new Conservative government.”

We desperately need electoral reform – but how to get it?

The 2015 General Election resulted in a radically distorted electoral map of Britain, and a majority Government lacking a solid democratic mandate, voted for by under a quarter of the electorate.

It’s now clear to anyone with a sense of justice that this country must abandon its antiquated electoral system and adopt a system of proportional representation. Especially promising is the ‘Additional Member System’ employed in the Greater London Assembly, which preserves the constituency link while ensuring overall proportionality of outcome.

The question that Caroline addresses in her Guardian piece is how we can make such electoral reform becomes a practical political possibility. For the next five years, we will be governed by the most reactionary beneficiaries of the current undemocratic system – and they won’t change it.

Like Caroline, I believe the time has come to consider a bold step. ‘Progressive’ parties need to discuss an informal electoral pact to avoid fragmenting the vote in winnable seats, if we are to elect a Parliament in 2020 that would have a progressive majority for democratic change.

Important testing-grounds are coming up: the London Mayoral election in 2016, for example, and the 2017 County Council elections – which are likely to result, if there are no pacts, in radically distorted ‘one-party-state’ outcomes. Both could serve as test runs for the 2020 general election.

Key to this is that the five ‘progressive parties’ should seek, regionally or nationally, to assist local parties to win ‘quid pro quos’ if some candidates are prepared to stand down for the greater good. If, for example, Green candidates are willing to stand down in Labour’s favour in some seats, then the compliment needs to be repaid, in a few others.

It won’t be plain sailing! But we must still try

The first criticism is that such a pact is unlikely to be able to be formed. Labour may cling, as it has in the past, to the idea of an all-out victory, the dream of an overall majority – and see the Greens, SNP and Plaid as enemies not allies.

Others may question whether Labour and the LibDems should even qualify as a ‘progressive’ parties, given that they fought the last election on pro-Trident, pro-austerity, neoliberal political platforms that put ‘clear grey water’ between them and the Greens, Plaid and SNP.

But if the logic of the position that Caroline and I are defending is strong, as I think it is, then we ought at least to try, and we certainly won’t succeed unless we try!

And there are historical precedents, that were no doubt similarly disparaged as pipe-dreams when they were first floated. The most striking such precedent is the 1906 pact with the Liberals that in effect enabled Labour to get into Parliament in the first place in numbers.

A more recent precedent is the little-known ‘non-aggression pact’ between Labour and LibDems which in 1997 was responsible for the scale of the destruction of the Conservatives, and in particular of the largely successful ‘decapitation strategy’ that they put into effect.

The unofficial pact, which involved Labour and Libdems not campaigning in each others’ target seats, received little attention in the mainstream press, but here is a rare mention of it in the Independent.

Others may ask, why exclude UKIP? Of course we should make common-cause with the ‘Kippers in relation to the undemocratic outcome of the 2015 General Election, and Greens have been doing that. But I believe a pact must involve a commitment to action on climate change, and UKIP stand diametrically opposed to any such idea.

So for all our sakes, it is vital that the ‘progressive’ parties open up now the question of working together. MPs, councillors, local party members, supporters, bloggers, trades unionists, citizens at large, all can create the pressure to make it happen.

And I can only agree with Caroline as she concludes: “I hope that Labour’s leadership candidates recognise that multiparty politics is here to stay – and I look forward to hearing how they’ll embrace the change rather than attempt, against the tide of history, to clamp down on it.”

Rupert Read was Parliamentary candidate for Cambridge for the Green Party in  the 2015 election, and remains Green Party national Transport Spokesperson. In his day job he’s Reader in Philosophy in the School of Politics, Philosophy and Languages at the University of East Anglia, and Chair of Green House.

In 1997-98, extremely dry El Niño conditions in Indonesia kicked off a wave of large-scale uncontrolled burning, destroying about five million hectares of tropical forest (equivalent to seven million football fields).

Much of the burning occurred in carbon-rich peatland forests and continued in two phases from July 1997 until March 1998, releasing vast amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, and huge clouds of smoke and haze across the region.

Present conditions in the Pacific Ocean are similar to what they were in mid-1997. El Niño is set to strengthen, and seasonal weather prediction models point towards this being an exceptionally dry season. Indonesia and its neighbours should be worried.

In order to predict, and hopefully prevent, such fires in the future, we’ve looked at how far in advance they can be anticipated using a seasonal weather prediction model.

Deforestation, peat drainage and El Niño

During the dry season, numerous fires occur in Indonesia’s peatland forests, particularly in the southern region of Kalimantan and eastern Sumatra. Although some rain falls during a normal dry season, it is sporadic, leaving many windows of opportunity for burning.

Most of these fires are deliberately lit to clear rainforest to establish oil palm and Acacia pulp and paper plantations. Fire spread is enhanced by the increased availability of combustible material, notably, woody debris as a result of wasteful logging practices, and the widespread practice of draining peatlands.

When El Niño strikes, however, the situation changes drastically. During strong El Niño episodes, almost no rain falls during the dry season and the monsoon is delayed.

So in areas where peatlands have been degraded by logging and draining, fires ignite easily and once started, the peat is so dry that fires escape underground, and cannot be put out until after the monsoon reappears.

At their worst, the fires have enormous impacts on carbon emissions, regional haze production, biodiversity, and the economy, and are recognised as a serious health risk in Indonesia as well as neighbouring Singapore and Malaysia. The fires are a major threat to the remaining orangutans who live in the forests – the Bornean orangutan is rated endangered, and the Sumatran orangutan is critically endangered.

During past El Niño years, around one gigatonne of carbon was emitted from peatland forest fires, equivalent to about 10% of annual global fossil fuel emissions, and regional haze from such fires has caused major disruptions to air traffic in nearby Singapore and Kuala Lumpur.

Sea surface temperatures from the vast array of sea buoys established across the Pacific Ocean plus other important meteorological data are now telling us that El Niño conditions are already in place.

Furthermore, most seasonal weather prediction models, which are driven by observed SSTs, predict El Niño will strengthen over the coming months. This means the upcoming dry season in Indonesia will probably be much drier than usual, and the fires worse.

Early warning systems

The regional haze problem has become so serious in recent years that the Singapore government passed the Trans-boundary Haze Pollution Act in 2014.

This act financially penalises companies listed on the Singapore stock exchange deemed responsible for smoke-haze affecting the city-state but originating elsewhere. The governments of the ten ASEAN member states signed the ASEAN Agreement on Trans-boundary Haze Pollution on 10th June 2002, which Indonesia finally ratified in September 2014.

The agreement requires all states to implement measures to prevent, monitor and mitigate trans-boundary haze pollution by controlling peat land and forest fires. It makes explicit mention of the development of an early fire warning system to help prevent and mitigate major haze events.

Since burning is opportunistic, it can happen as soon as conditions will allow it. Research since the 1997 haze disaster has given us a fairly reliable understanding of how dry conditions must be in order for severe fires to happen.

But by the time these conditions occur, burning has already started, fires have escaped, and it is too late for prevention. Dry conditions instead need to be forecast weeks to months in advance for any prevention to be effective. Up until now, the forecasting component has been missing.

Advance warnings to enable rapid responses to fire outbreaks

We wanted to see if past fires, especially severe El Niño-influenced fires, could have been predicted using seasonal weather forecasts.

Using satellite observations of fire activity and the case study region of southern-central Kalimantan, which is characterised by a June-November dry season, we demonstrated that most of the severe fires (and associated haze) since 1997 could have been anticipated using rainfall predictions from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts seasonal weather prediction model.

A second part of our work confirmed a clear link between severe fires and massive forest loss (also estimated from satellite data). Our findings were recently published in the journal Natural Hazards and Earth System Science.

The implication of our work is that regional weather services, fire-fighting and resource management agencies are potentially able to identify areas that are likely to be dangerously dry ahead of time.

Preventing severe uncontrolled burning in Indonesia and associated impacts will ultimately depend on how well fire is managed. This is a complex problem involving governments, multinational companies and indigenous people. Nonetheless, knowing ahead of time about a potentially bad fire situation will no doubt form part of the final answer.

While seasonal predictions are not perfect, and occasionally a year may turn out differently to what was expected, seasonal forecasts are anticipated to continue to show improved skill in future.

The challenge remains to build on these advances to create an Indonesia-wide early fire warning system for operational use.

Allan Spessa is Research Investment Fellow, Dept Environment, Earth and Ecosystems at The Open University.

Robert Field is Associate Research Scientist, NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies at Columbia University.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

A couple of weeks ago, at 7pm on a Friday night, my husband and I stood in one of our fields in West Wales guesstimating how much of it was in green manures (fertility building crops), what was in vegetable crops and how much of the field margin was in permanent grass.

We had a long discussion about what constituted ‘fallow’ and looked for a code that represented ‘ploughed but not planted’, to no avail. At that point, we were half way between laughing hysterically and tearing our hair out.

At one point, in exasperation, I nearly asked him why on earth he couldn’t grow just one crop in one field like the rest of conventional farming?

We were standing out in that field attempting to fill out the Welsh Assembly Government’s Single Application Form (SAF), through which we receive a small sum of money each year.

We’re organic farmers and our rotations are pretty complicated, in part because we’re small. Our fields are a mix of many crops and also green manures.

By the time I filed the form online at nearly 10pm, I was wondering why we bothered. For the amount of time we spent trying to make our farm fit into the proverbial administrative box for the subsidies, it hardly seemed worth it.

The problem? The new ‘greening’ measures in the CAP

The subsidies come down through the European Common Agricultural Policy which funds farming across Europe. This year, the SAF is different (adding to our stress) because of the new ‘greening’ measures introduced to improve environmental practice on farms.

It means that we get a little bit more this year as organic farmers – but not much more, and definitely not as much as a big intensive farm, which could opt out of the greening measures and forego 30% of the subsidy, and still garner a large sum of money. This is because the amount of the subsidy is based primarily on the size of the farm.

We’re about 8.5 hectares – pretty small even for a small farm. But we’re not just playing at farming: we have an on-site farm stand, run a vegetable box scheme, sell at two producers’ markets each week and supply a range of local restaurants and shops. We’re proud that we sell all our veg within a 25-mile radius of the farm. We have employees and we work our tails off.

We didn’t bother applying for our hedges, a further greening measure – even though we would receive more funding – because we’d have had to measure them and we just weren’t up to it.

OK, maybe we should not have left it so late, but still …

I had spent the day turning over our holiday cottages, which provide us with a vital supplementary income, and the weather was turning, so my husband was out sowing parsnips and carrots as fast as he could before the rain came.

We’d been flat out all week – I have multiple freelance projects on the go that pay our household expenses and we have about a third of the labour we actually need on the farm, so spring is always fraught in the fields.

Now I know that we shouldn’t have waited until late afternoon on the 15th (the final deadline) to look at the form, but it was so much harder than it had to be. The greening measures represent an important concession to sustainability – and, yes, I’ve thought about my use of the word ‘concession’ rather than ‘shift’ or ‘transition’.

As organic farmers we automatically qualify for them without having to fulfill the specific greening measures. But the form was hard to complete because the Rural Payments Office has changed the designations of our land and got rid of codes that we had previously used to describe our planting.

Our orchard is now down as permanent grass instead of permanent crop for some reason and the MP1 code (‘mixed vegetable production’, the only one that described our crops) has disappeared, leaving us only with MC3 (‘arable crop – mixed’, a catch-all code).

But at least we didn’t have to detail each and every one of the different crops we grow – more than 50 altogether.

Farming bureaucracy should make room for us!

If the detail in my description is starting to wear your attention down, that’s exactly what it did to us. We don’t fit into the current model of farming that the Welsh Assembly Government is trying to assess, but the thing is, we should.

What the government is asking for in the greening measures is what we already do as part of our ethos: our crops are many and diverse; rotation is critical in our care of the soil; and biodiversity is necessary for the farm’s health. Farming bureaucracy should make room for us, because we can’t be treated as an “exotic niche” any more, as Harry Greenfield writes this week in his SFT piece on politics and food.

If we want to move towards a sustainable future in farming, it’s got to be about more than a few minor adjustments to how we farm. We have to change our way of thinking, and part of that thinking must be reflected in the governmental accounting of the sector.

Make room for the small farm and take its impact seriously. Help it to survive and thrive as much as other scales of farming. We must realise that sustainability is small, and the small mixed farm is integral to how agriculture must change. It is the way forward.

Alicia Miller runs Troed y Rhiw Organics, an organic horticulture farm in West Wales, with her partner Nathan Richards. Born in the United States, she’s a long way from home but loves her life in the wild west of Wales. She works as a freelance writer and editor and understands sustainable food from the hands on perspective of growing food on a small family-run farm. She graduated with distinction from Stanford University and is currently pursuing a phd at Birkbeck College, University of London, writing on issues of artists practice and gentrification.

Facebook: Troed y Rhiw Farm.

This article was originally published by the Sustainable Food Trust.

Caroline Lucas has today issued a striking public call for a new politics of unity among ‘progressives’ – among those, that is, who seek at minimum to rein in the excesses of neoliberal ‘business as usual’, Tory-style.

Caroline opens her article by praising Jeremy Corbyn, one of the Labour leadership contenders – and one whose view chime with the Greens on nuclear missiles, climate change and austerity. I second that praise. But let’s be honest. Corbyn’s chances of winning the leadership election are slim.

But many Labour voters, members, candidates and Parliamentarians – and by no means just those who support Corbyn – share much in common with Greens. And it’s crucial that all of us interested in implementing a genuine political alternative work together, whatever leader Labour elects.

Because the alternative is grim: it’s the risk that the awful moment when we saw the exit poll on the night of 7th May will be repeated again in 2020. And again, in 2025.

Constituency boundary changes in progress only make such outcomes all the more probable. The Telegraph told it straight when it reported senior Tories as saying: “Redrawing constituency boundaries to lock Labour out of power for a decades is at the top of the agenda for the new Conservative government.”

We desperately need electoral reform – but how to get it?

The 2015 General Election resulted in a radically distorted electoral map of Britain, and a majority Government lacking a solid democratic mandate, voted for by under a quarter of the electorate.

It’s now clear to anyone with a sense of justice that this country must abandon its antiquated electoral system and adopt a system of proportional representation. Especially promising is the ‘Additional Member System’ employed in the Greater London Assembly, which preserves the constituency link while ensuring overall proportionality of outcome.

The question that Caroline addresses in her Guardian piece is how we can make such electoral reform becomes a practical political possibility. For the next five years, we will be governed by the most reactionary beneficiaries of the current undemocratic system – and they won’t change it.

Like Caroline, I believe the time has come to consider a bold step. ‘Progressive’ parties need to discuss an informal electoral pact to avoid fragmenting the vote in winnable seats, if we are to elect a Parliament in 2020 that would have a progressive majority for democratic change.

Important testing-grounds are coming up: the London Mayoral election in 2016, for example, and the 2017 County Council elections – which are likely to result, if there are no pacts, in radically distorted ‘one-party-state’ outcomes. Both could serve as test runs for the 2020 general election.

Key to this is that the five ‘progressive parties’ should seek, regionally or nationally, to assist local parties to win ‘quid pro quos’ if some candidates are prepared to stand down for the greater good. If, for example, Green candidates are willing to stand down in Labour’s favour in some seats, then the compliment needs to be repaid, in a few others.

It won’t be plain sailing! But we must still try

The first criticism is that such a pact is unlikely to be able to be formed. Labour may cling, as it has in the past, to the idea of an all-out victory, the dream of an overall majority – and see the Greens, SNP and Plaid as enemies not allies.

Others may question whether Labour and the LibDems should even qualify as a ‘progressive’ parties, given that they fought the last election on pro-Trident, pro-austerity, neoliberal political platforms that put ‘clear grey water’ between them and the Greens, Plaid and SNP.

But if the logic of the position that Caroline and I are defending is strong, as I think it is, then we ought at least to try, and we certainly won’t succeed unless we try!

And there are historical precedents, that were no doubt similarly disparaged as pipe-dreams when they were first floated. The most striking such precedent is the 1906 pact with the Liberals that in effect enabled Labour to get into Parliament in the first place in numbers.

A more recent precedent is the little-known ‘non-aggression pact’ between Labour and LibDems which in 1997 was responsible for the scale of the destruction of the Conservatives, and in particular of the largely successful ‘decapitation strategy’ that they put into effect.

The unofficial pact, which involved Labour and Libdems not campaigning in each others’ target seats, received little attention in the mainstream press, but here is a rare mention of it in the Independent.

Others may ask, why exclude UKIP? Of course we should make common-cause with the ‘Kippers in relation to the undemocratic outcome of the 2015 General Election, and Greens have been doing that. But I believe a pact must involve a commitment to action on climate change, and UKIP stand diametrically opposed to any such idea.

So for all our sakes, it is vital that the ‘progressive’ parties open up now the question of working together. MPs, councillors, local party members, supporters, bloggers, trades unionists, citizens at large, all can create the pressure to make it happen.

And I can only agree with Caroline as she concludes: “I hope that Labour’s leadership candidates recognise that multiparty politics is here to stay – and I look forward to hearing how they’ll embrace the change rather than attempt, against the tide of history, to clamp down on it.”

Rupert Read was Parliamentary candidate for Cambridge for the Green Party in  the 2015 election, and remains Green Party national Transport Spokesperson. In his day job he’s Reader in Philosophy in the School of Politics, Philosophy and Languages at the University of East Anglia, and Chair of Green House.

A couple of weeks ago, at 7pm on a Friday night, my husband and I stood in one of our fields in West Wales guesstimating how much of it was in green manures (fertility building crops), what was in vegetable crops and how much of the field margin was in permanent grass.

We had a long discussion about what constituted ‘fallow’ and looked for a code that represented ‘ploughed but not planted’, to no avail. At that point, we were half way between laughing hysterically and tearing our hair out.

At one point, in exasperation, I nearly asked him why on earth he couldn’t grow just one crop in one field like the rest of conventional farming?

We were standing out in that field attempting to fill out the Welsh Assembly Government’s Single Application Form (SAF), through which we receive a small sum of money each year.

We’re organic farmers and our rotations are pretty complicated, in part because we’re small. Our fields are a mix of many crops and also green manures.

By the time I filed the form online at nearly 10pm, I was wondering why we bothered. For the amount of time we spent trying to make our farm fit into the proverbial administrative box for the subsidies, it hardly seemed worth it.

The problem? The new ‘greening’ measures in the CAP

The subsidies come down through the European Common Agricultural Policy which funds farming across Europe. This year, the SAF is different (adding to our stress) because of the new ‘greening’ measures introduced to improve environmental practice on farms.

It means that we get a little bit more this year as organic farmers – but not much more, and definitely not as much as a big intensive farm, which could opt out of the greening measures and forego 30% of the subsidy, and still garner a large sum of money. This is because the amount of the subsidy is based primarily on the size of the farm.

We’re about 8.5 hectares – pretty small even for a small farm. But we’re not just playing at farming: we have an on-site farm stand, run a vegetable box scheme, sell at two producers’ markets each week and supply a range of local restaurants and shops. We’re proud that we sell all our veg within a 25-mile radius of the farm. We have employees and we work our tails off.

We didn’t bother applying for our hedges, a further greening measure – even though we would receive more funding – because we’d have had to measure them and we just weren’t up to it.

OK, maybe we should not have left it so late, but still …

I had spent the day turning over our holiday cottages, which provide us with a vital supplementary income, and the weather was turning, so my husband was out sowing parsnips and carrots as fast as he could before the rain came.

We’d been flat out all week – I have multiple freelance projects on the go that pay our household expenses and we have about a third of the labour we actually need on the farm, so spring is always fraught in the fields.

Now I know that we shouldn’t have waited until late afternoon on the 15th (the final deadline) to look at the form, but it was so much harder than it had to be. The greening measures represent an important concession to sustainability – and, yes, I’ve thought about my use of the word ‘concession’ rather than ‘shift’ or ‘transition’.

As organic farmers we automatically qualify for them without having to fulfill the specific greening measures. But the form was hard to complete because the Rural Payments Office has changed the designations of our land and got rid of codes that we had previously used to describe our planting.

Our orchard is now down as permanent grass instead of permanent crop for some reason and the MP1 code (‘mixed vegetable production’, the only one that described our crops) has disappeared, leaving us only with MC3 (‘arable crop – mixed’, a catch-all code).

But at least we didn’t have to detail each and every one of the different crops we grow – more than 50 altogether.

Farming bureaucracy should make room for us!

If the detail in my description is starting to wear your attention down, that’s exactly what it did to us. We don’t fit into the current model of farming that the Welsh Assembly Government is trying to assess, but the thing is, we should.

What the government is asking for in the greening measures is what we already do as part of our ethos: our crops are many and diverse; rotation is critical in our care of the soil; and biodiversity is necessary for the farm’s health. Farming bureaucracy should make room for us, because we can’t be treated as an “exotic niche” any more, as Harry Greenfield writes this week in his SFT piece on politics and food.

If we want to move towards a sustainable future in farming, it’s got to be about more than a few minor adjustments to how we farm. We have to change our way of thinking, and part of that thinking must be reflected in the governmental accounting of the sector.

Make room for the small farm and take its impact seriously. Help it to survive and thrive as much as other scales of farming. We must realise that sustainability is small, and the small mixed farm is integral to how agriculture must change. It is the way forward.

Alicia Miller runs Troed y Rhiw Organics, an organic horticulture farm in West Wales, with her partner Nathan Richards. Born in the United States, she’s a long way from home but loves her life in the wild west of Wales. She works as a freelance writer and editor and understands sustainable food from the hands on perspective of growing food on a small family-run farm. She graduated with distinction from Stanford University and is currently pursuing a phd at Birkbeck College, University of London, writing on issues of artists practice and gentrification.

Facebook: Troed y Rhiw Farm.

This article was originally published by the Sustainable Food Trust.

A couple of weeks ago, at 7pm on a Friday night, my husband and I stood in one of our fields in West Wales guesstimating how much of it was in green manures (fertility building crops), what was in vegetable crops and how much of the field margin was in permanent grass.

We had a long discussion about what constituted ‘fallow’ and looked for a code that represented ‘ploughed but not planted’, to no avail. At that point, we were half way between laughing hysterically and tearing our hair out.

At one point, in exasperation, I nearly asked him why on earth he couldn’t grow just one crop in one field like the rest of conventional farming?

We were standing out in that field attempting to fill out the Welsh Assembly Government’s Single Application Form (SAF), through which we receive a small sum of money each year.

We’re organic farmers and our rotations are pretty complicated, in part because we’re small. Our fields are a mix of many crops and also green manures.

By the time I filed the form online at nearly 10pm, I was wondering why we bothered. For the amount of time we spent trying to make our farm fit into the proverbial administrative box for the subsidies, it hardly seemed worth it.

The problem? The new ‘greening’ measures in the CAP

The subsidies come down through the European Common Agricultural Policy which funds farming across Europe. This year, the SAF is different (adding to our stress) because of the new ‘greening’ measures introduced to improve environmental practice on farms.

It means that we get a little bit more this year as organic farmers – but not much more, and definitely not as much as a big intensive farm, which could opt out of the greening measures and forego 30% of the subsidy, and still garner a large sum of money. This is because the amount of the subsidy is based primarily on the size of the farm.

We’re about 8.5 hectares – pretty small even for a small farm. But we’re not just playing at farming: we have an on-site farm stand, run a vegetable box scheme, sell at two producers’ markets each week and supply a range of local restaurants and shops. We’re proud that we sell all our veg within a 25-mile radius of the farm. We have employees and we work our tails off.

We didn’t bother applying for our hedges, a further greening measure – even though we would receive more funding – because we’d have had to measure them and we just weren’t up to it.

OK, maybe we should not have left it so late, but still …

I had spent the day turning over our holiday cottages, which provide us with a vital supplementary income, and the weather was turning, so my husband was out sowing parsnips and carrots as fast as he could before the rain came.

We’d been flat out all week – I have multiple freelance projects on the go that pay our household expenses and we have about a third of the labour we actually need on the farm, so spring is always fraught in the fields.

Now I know that we shouldn’t have waited until late afternoon on the 15th (the final deadline) to look at the form, but it was so much harder than it had to be. The greening measures represent an important concession to sustainability – and, yes, I’ve thought about my use of the word ‘concession’ rather than ‘shift’ or ‘transition’.

As organic farmers we automatically qualify for them without having to fulfill the specific greening measures. But the form was hard to complete because the Rural Payments Office has changed the designations of our land and got rid of codes that we had previously used to describe our planting.

Our orchard is now down as permanent grass instead of permanent crop for some reason and the MP1 code (‘mixed vegetable production’, the only one that described our crops) has disappeared, leaving us only with MC3 (‘arable crop – mixed’, a catch-all code).

But at least we didn’t have to detail each and every one of the different crops we grow – more than 50 altogether.

Farming bureaucracy should make room for us!

If the detail in my description is starting to wear your attention down, that’s exactly what it did to us. We don’t fit into the current model of farming that the Welsh Assembly Government is trying to assess, but the thing is, we should.

What the government is asking for in the greening measures is what we already do as part of our ethos: our crops are many and diverse; rotation is critical in our care of the soil; and biodiversity is necessary for the farm’s health. Farming bureaucracy should make room for us, because we can’t be treated as an “exotic niche” any more, as Harry Greenfield writes this week in his SFT piece on politics and food.

If we want to move towards a sustainable future in farming, it’s got to be about more than a few minor adjustments to how we farm. We have to change our way of thinking, and part of that thinking must be reflected in the governmental accounting of the sector.

Make room for the small farm and take its impact seriously. Help it to survive and thrive as much as other scales of farming. We must realise that sustainability is small, and the small mixed farm is integral to how agriculture must change. It is the way forward.

Alicia Miller runs Troed y Rhiw Organics, an organic horticulture farm in West Wales, with her partner Nathan Richards. Born in the United States, she’s a long way from home but loves her life in the wild west of Wales. She works as a freelance writer and editor and understands sustainable food from the hands on perspective of growing food on a small family-run farm. She graduated with distinction from Stanford University and is currently pursuing a phd at Birkbeck College, University of London, writing on issues of artists practice and gentrification.

Facebook: Troed y Rhiw Farm.

This article was originally published by the Sustainable Food Trust.

A couple of weeks ago, at 7pm on a Friday night, my husband and I stood in one of our fields in West Wales guesstimating how much of it was in green manures (fertility building crops), what was in vegetable crops and how much of the field margin was in permanent grass.

We had a long discussion about what constituted ‘fallow’ and looked for a code that represented ‘ploughed but not planted’, to no avail. At that point, we were half way between laughing hysterically and tearing our hair out.

At one point, in exasperation, I nearly asked him why on earth he couldn’t grow just one crop in one field like the rest of conventional farming?

We were standing out in that field attempting to fill out the Welsh Assembly Government’s Single Application Form (SAF), through which we receive a small sum of money each year.

We’re organic farmers and our rotations are pretty complicated, in part because we’re small. Our fields are a mix of many crops and also green manures.

By the time I filed the form online at nearly 10pm, I was wondering why we bothered. For the amount of time we spent trying to make our farm fit into the proverbial administrative box for the subsidies, it hardly seemed worth it.

The problem? The new ‘greening’ measures in the CAP

The subsidies come down through the European Common Agricultural Policy which funds farming across Europe. This year, the SAF is different (adding to our stress) because of the new ‘greening’ measures introduced to improve environmental practice on farms.

It means that we get a little bit more this year as organic farmers – but not much more, and definitely not as much as a big intensive farm, which could opt out of the greening measures and forego 30% of the subsidy, and still garner a large sum of money. This is because the amount of the subsidy is based primarily on the size of the farm.

We’re about 8.5 hectares – pretty small even for a small farm. But we’re not just playing at farming: we have an on-site farm stand, run a vegetable box scheme, sell at two producers’ markets each week and supply a range of local restaurants and shops. We’re proud that we sell all our veg within a 25-mile radius of the farm. We have employees and we work our tails off.

We didn’t bother applying for our hedges, a further greening measure – even though we would receive more funding – because we’d have had to measure them and we just weren’t up to it.

OK, maybe we should not have left it so late, but still …

I had spent the day turning over our holiday cottages, which provide us with a vital supplementary income, and the weather was turning, so my husband was out sowing parsnips and carrots as fast as he could before the rain came.

We’d been flat out all week – I have multiple freelance projects on the go that pay our household expenses and we have about a third of the labour we actually need on the farm, so spring is always fraught in the fields.

Now I know that we shouldn’t have waited until late afternoon on the 15th (the final deadline) to look at the form, but it was so much harder than it had to be. The greening measures represent an important concession to sustainability – and, yes, I’ve thought about my use of the word ‘concession’ rather than ‘shift’ or ‘transition’.

As organic farmers we automatically qualify for them without having to fulfill the specific greening measures. But the form was hard to complete because the Rural Payments Office has changed the designations of our land and got rid of codes that we had previously used to describe our planting.

Our orchard is now down as permanent grass instead of permanent crop for some reason and the MP1 code (‘mixed vegetable production’, the only one that described our crops) has disappeared, leaving us only with MC3 (‘arable crop – mixed’, a catch-all code).

But at least we didn’t have to detail each and every one of the different crops we grow – more than 50 altogether.

Farming bureaucracy should make room for us!

If the detail in my description is starting to wear your attention down, that’s exactly what it did to us. We don’t fit into the current model of farming that the Welsh Assembly Government is trying to assess, but the thing is, we should.

What the government is asking for in the greening measures is what we already do as part of our ethos: our crops are many and diverse; rotation is critical in our care of the soil; and biodiversity is necessary for the farm’s health. Farming bureaucracy should make room for us, because we can’t be treated as an “exotic niche” any more, as Harry Greenfield writes this week in his SFT piece on politics and food.

If we want to move towards a sustainable future in farming, it’s got to be about more than a few minor adjustments to how we farm. We have to change our way of thinking, and part of that thinking must be reflected in the governmental accounting of the sector.

Make room for the small farm and take its impact seriously. Help it to survive and thrive as much as other scales of farming. We must realise that sustainability is small, and the small mixed farm is integral to how agriculture must change. It is the way forward.

Alicia Miller runs Troed y Rhiw Organics, an organic horticulture farm in West Wales, with her partner Nathan Richards. Born in the United States, she’s a long way from home but loves her life in the wild west of Wales. She works as a freelance writer and editor and understands sustainable food from the hands on perspective of growing food on a small family-run farm. She graduated with distinction from Stanford University and is currently pursuing a phd at Birkbeck College, University of London, writing on issues of artists practice and gentrification.

Facebook: Troed y Rhiw Farm.

This article was originally published by the Sustainable Food Trust.

A couple of weeks ago, at 7pm on a Friday night, my husband and I stood in one of our fields in West Wales guesstimating how much of it was in green manures (fertility building crops), what was in vegetable crops and how much of the field margin was in permanent grass.

We had a long discussion about what constituted ‘fallow’ and looked for a code that represented ‘ploughed but not planted’, to no avail. At that point, we were half way between laughing hysterically and tearing our hair out.

At one point, in exasperation, I nearly asked him why on earth he couldn’t grow just one crop in one field like the rest of conventional farming?

We were standing out in that field attempting to fill out the Welsh Assembly Government’s Single Application Form (SAF), through which we receive a small sum of money each year.

We’re organic farmers and our rotations are pretty complicated, in part because we’re small. Our fields are a mix of many crops and also green manures.

By the time I filed the form online at nearly 10pm, I was wondering why we bothered. For the amount of time we spent trying to make our farm fit into the proverbial administrative box for the subsidies, it hardly seemed worth it.

The problem? The new ‘greening’ measures in the CAP

The subsidies come down through the European Common Agricultural Policy which funds farming across Europe. This year, the SAF is different (adding to our stress) because of the new ‘greening’ measures introduced to improve environmental practice on farms.

It means that we get a little bit more this year as organic farmers – but not much more, and definitely not as much as a big intensive farm, which could opt out of the greening measures and forego 30% of the subsidy, and still garner a large sum of money. This is because the amount of the subsidy is based primarily on the size of the farm.

We’re about 8.5 hectares – pretty small even for a small farm. But we’re not just playing at farming: we have an on-site farm stand, run a vegetable box scheme, sell at two producers’ markets each week and supply a range of local restaurants and shops. We’re proud that we sell all our veg within a 25-mile radius of the farm. We have employees and we work our tails off.

We didn’t bother applying for our hedges, a further greening measure – even though we would receive more funding – because we’d have had to measure them and we just weren’t up to it.

OK, maybe we should not have left it so late, but still …

I had spent the day turning over our holiday cottages, which provide us with a vital supplementary income, and the weather was turning, so my husband was out sowing parsnips and carrots as fast as he could before the rain came.

We’d been flat out all week – I have multiple freelance projects on the go that pay our household expenses and we have about a third of the labour we actually need on the farm, so spring is always fraught in the fields.

Now I know that we shouldn’t have waited until late afternoon on the 15th (the final deadline) to look at the form, but it was so much harder than it had to be. The greening measures represent an important concession to sustainability – and, yes, I’ve thought about my use of the word ‘concession’ rather than ‘shift’ or ‘transition’.

As organic farmers we automatically qualify for them without having to fulfill the specific greening measures. But the form was hard to complete because the Rural Payments Office has changed the designations of our land and got rid of codes that we had previously used to describe our planting.

Our orchard is now down as permanent grass instead of permanent crop for some reason and the MP1 code (‘mixed vegetable production’, the only one that described our crops) has disappeared, leaving us only with MC3 (‘arable crop – mixed’, a catch-all code).

But at least we didn’t have to detail each and every one of the different crops we grow – more than 50 altogether.

Farming bureaucracy should make room for us!

If the detail in my description is starting to wear your attention down, that’s exactly what it did to us. We don’t fit into the current model of farming that the Welsh Assembly Government is trying to assess, but the thing is, we should.

What the government is asking for in the greening measures is what we already do as part of our ethos: our crops are many and diverse; rotation is critical in our care of the soil; and biodiversity is necessary for the farm’s health. Farming bureaucracy should make room for us, because we can’t be treated as an “exotic niche” any more, as Harry Greenfield writes this week in his SFT piece on politics and food.

If we want to move towards a sustainable future in farming, it’s got to be about more than a few minor adjustments to how we farm. We have to change our way of thinking, and part of that thinking must be reflected in the governmental accounting of the sector.

Make room for the small farm and take its impact seriously. Help it to survive and thrive as much as other scales of farming. We must realise that sustainability is small, and the small mixed farm is integral to how agriculture must change. It is the way forward.

Alicia Miller runs Troed y Rhiw Organics, an organic horticulture farm in West Wales, with her partner Nathan Richards. Born in the United States, she’s a long way from home but loves her life in the wild west of Wales. She works as a freelance writer and editor and understands sustainable food from the hands on perspective of growing food on a small family-run farm. She graduated with distinction from Stanford University and is currently pursuing a phd at Birkbeck College, University of London, writing on issues of artists practice and gentrification.

Facebook: Troed y Rhiw Farm.

This article was originally published by the Sustainable Food Trust.