Some people say to us ‘why do you deliver so many leaflets? – that’s a waste and you’re the Green Party!"
There’s a few different parts of the jigsaw which together explain why we deliver leaflets regularly to you.
- Conservatives and Labour rely on masses of national free publicity through the media. Think about how often you hear Boris Johnson or Labour mentioned or getting a chance to talk about our policies compared to the Green Party on TV, radio or social media. For people to be aware about the work we are doing we need to find other regular ways to keep in touch.
- We all know that social media is full of echo chambers, but we think politics is about constructively reaching out to people that don’t all think the same, about building bridges and bringing people together to create positive change. So social media is not an easy place to reach people for local elections. Leaflets help us to reach everyone in a particular area.
- The Green Party can’t afford to pay for masses of social media advertising. To give you an example Conservatives, Labour and Lib Dems spent over £13 million each at the last General Election. Green Party spent £746000 in total, about 3% of the amount. We have to focus our shoe string budget on efforts in specific areas where we can make an impact for our communities. This is extremely difficult to do on social media, even if you pay for targeted advertising.
- We take seriously the paper we do use and every sheet of paper we use will be covered in terms of trees and carbon emissions in full by a donation to the Heart of England forest at www.heartofenglandforest.com We made this choice because of our scepticism of many ‘carbon offset’ schemes. We also review our strategies and decisions after every election so please do give us your feedback.
If we are elected and as a result..
We don’t really like means justifying the ends arguments. However, just to give you an indication:
If we are elected and as a result we persuade the Council to:
- Install renewable heating systems in just 3 houses rather than gas boilers
- OR Insulate 16 houses or 1 office block to reduce the heating bill by 15%
- OR Invest in just 1 safe cycle & walking route to a secondary school that just 3 children use for 1 year instead of their parents dropping them in the car
If we do any of this we will have saved the Carbon emissions of all the paper that the Green party will use in the whole of Warwick District during the entire 2021 election.
Any more than 1 of these or larger numbers and we will be in credit, even without taking into account our tree-planting offsetting!
Our record in the past 2 years suggest that if you choose to elect us we will far, far exceed that.
To give two examples:
- In 2018 the Council didn’t have any costed cycle path programme. Now they have a fully costed out list for each district of the county.
- We helped negotiate the most practical and ambitious Climate Emergency declaration meaning that the Council as an organisation should be carbon net zero by 2025 and the area as a whole as close to zero by 2030.