This is what I’m expressing regret about to my MP.

Hi Caroline

I just wanted to say thank you so much for expressing regret about the decision to leave an EU referendum out of the Queen’s speech.

I’m sure you’re scared by the challenges ahead – I know I am – and this is no time for civic leaders to shirk their responsibilities. In this decision you have stood up for what you believe, and that is fantastic.

Unfortunately it leaves me utterly bewildered and not a little disgusted.

What on Earth are you thinking?!

As we soar past 400ppm atmospheric CO2, face crises in food, farming, healthcare, and energy, and systemic failures in transport, education, biotechnology – at the very time we need to focus on what is important and work together at the most effective levels, you have bothered to make such trivial and time-wasting mutterings a headline issue.

Please reassure me that you were being advised by some incompetent octogenarian who can be shuffled out of the picture, and that you weren’t acting of your own volition? And if you did decide this all on your own, can you please let me know how this decision has accelerated our progress to an abundant, peaceful, prosperous, and secure Britain?

Would you perhaps like to have a coffee soon to learn from this constituent what I expect of you as my representative in Parliament, and a few useful tips on how to differentiate between “important” and “not important right now”?

 

If your MP is on this list, please write to them and give them a piece of your mind so that maybe they’ll have at least one brain between them.

PS if you happy to live near me you can tweet Caroline Nokes right here.

Update

Kudos to Caroline – barely 6 hours later I had a reply in my inbox.

Dear Mr Dowding

Thank you for your email of today’s date and for having taken the trouble so promptly to let me have your thoughts on last night’s vote.

There is, however, one aspect I feel obliged to correct you on. You have assumed for some reason that I am of the view that the EU is the most important issue facing the country right now. Far from it, yesterday there was a vote on an amendment to the Queen’s Speech, nothing more than that, it probably took about 5 minutes of my time.

Just as an example, yesterday I spent 2 hours in the Environmental Audit Committee, and I certainly regard the work of that committee as more important than an expression of regret that the Queen’s Speech did not include legislation to hold a referendum. I also replied to about half a dozen constituents who had invited me to the Friends of the Earth “Bees Tea” – that also probably took more time than one trip through the lobby, and the event itself today will take considerably longer, and in my view, is considerably more important. I know I don’t have to outline to you the concerns which have been raised about neonicotinoids and their impact on pollinators as you are one of the constituents who has asked me to attend today’s event.

It is a shame you could not come along to my last drop in surgery in West Tytherley, we could have had a cup of coffee and a chat then, however I hold them regularly on the first Saturday of every month at various venues around the constituency. All constituents are welcome to call in, no appointment is necessary.

Yours sincerely

Caroline Nokes

Caroline Nokes MP
House of Commons
London
SW1A 0AA
Tel: 0207 219 1468
www.carolinenokes.com

Brilliantly prompt and thank you for fitting so much, including this, into your days.

Perhaps you might help me understand by explaining how spending even 5 minutes of your time on this issue helps progress those other more significant issues?

Many thanks

Sent from my mobile so please forgive any typos, brevity, or indecipherable jibberish.

Dear Mr Dowding

Thank you for your further email – obviously it doesn’t. But the amendment was tabled, the Speaker selected the amendment, John Baron who proposed the motion pressed it to a vote, therefore there was one.

Regrettably, I have a speech to prepare for this afternoon, so I am going to have to cut this exchange short.

Yours

Caroline Nokes

Me too, so just one more question when you get the time: why not just abstain and not show up to the vote at all?

We’re most certainly not doing anything about climate change, bank regulation, social inequality, preparing for the robot-cause unemployment boom, regulating biosciences, or ensuring we have a basics sorted.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-22436103

There’s a charity water company which raises £10k/yr from bottled water sales. This funds 3 clean water projects in India.

The person running this activity costs £10k/yr in salary. Externalised costs include extraction, bottling, labelling, transport, and refrigeration.

Costs: £10k + externalities
Yield: £10k + cascading benefits

So by now you might be thinking there’s probably a better way to do this. After all, shipping bottled water around a well-developed country to attend to an understandable but misguided desire to feel good by buying a redundant and resource-inefficient product probably isn’t the best way to help us transition to a better society.

Here’s the challenge to you:

If you can think of a better way to help fund clean water projects, they’ll shut down their activities, and tell the world why they’ve changed their approach.

(Which, it seems, would be a pretty potent and wonderful message since there are very few companies who are prepared to change everything they do to make the world better.)

Ideas in the comments, please.

Every single day there’s another damned petition to sign. Is it about anything sensible or reasonable? No. It’s about trying to prevent only the most stupid / villainous / malicious / self-serving people from doing the most ludicrous and outrageously stupid things they could ever possibly dream up to do.

It makes me wonder: when are we going to get petition fatigue?

NEVER.

And here’s why:

1. Because passivity is exactly what they want. The same MPs who think that clicktivism doesn’t have value “because it’s not real action” want you to stop clicking, because then they can show how little the public care about this issue, and can vote how they like. (It might be noted, too, that saying “Yay” or “Nay” in Parliament is not very far removed from clicking on website, but let’s not judge these cretins by their own standards or we’ll be here until Christmas cataloguing their hypocrisies.)
2. Because engagement is a stepping stone to a better democracy. By realising we can express our desires granularly, and this has an effect, we are awakening to the possibilities of a truer democracy which encourages genuine progress in harmony with our human and humane desires. The age of subjugating ourselves to outmoded, outdated, outrageous economics is coming to and end. This is where and how we define and decide what we want the future’s values to be.
3. Because this is how we express ourselves. We are too busy, too disenfranchised, too disconnected from the decision makers, too small to feel we matter. We matter. We really, really matter.And this is how we show it. And this can be the new picket line.
4. Because this is important. We have been made aware that OUR resources OUR heritage OUR lives OUR commons are being frittered away, privatised, destroyed, and put beyond reach by a reckless minority. And the fact that some individuals do all that on a deluded ideological whim or self-interest is disgusting.
5. Because we want a say. We don’t buy the bullshit that A or B is the only option. We demand better. We deserve better. We do not believe that we need to kills bees in order to have food, because that’s demonstrably nonsense. We do not believe that all seeds must be privatised in order for farmers to make a living, because we’re not idiots. We do not believe that privatising the NHS is sensible, because if the private sector worked we wouldn’t have needed an NHS in the first place. We want to agree that this stuff matters.

We shall fight them from our mouse-pads, we shall fight them from our tablets, we shall fight them from our mobiles in the fields and in the streets, we will text and share from the hills and valleys and we will never, ever surrender to the banalities presented to us by spineless corporocrats - because we know this is a tipping point. We know this is a moment upon which the entire future trajectory of all humanity rests – and we know that it is up to us to make the difference – and we know that this is one of the only weapons we have left.

So, please, take to your mice once more and join me now in another click, because they’re at it again. The very essence of all life, no less, as today they’re legislating to ban the sale and exchange of traditional and niche adapted seeds – the very same ones we need so desperately to grow to feed each other in our climate-changed resource-depleted future.

Get on it, because the future is in your hands.

Route 1: Very clear information, alternative solutions, and insights, and  a list of the right people to email via Open Seeds (h/t @permagriculture)

Route 2: Background, links to petitions, links to emails via Real Seeds

If you tweet this article please include the hashtag #saveseed