I am proud to be a union member today. The Day of Action showed that the unions are as relevant today as on 27 February 1900, when a massed meeting of unions spawned the Labour Party.

Of course we expect the Tories to misrepresent public sector pensions, because the only way the Big Society will work is if there is a Big Underclass footing the bill.

But what is true is that UK pensioners are now among the poorest in Europe. Only Cyprus, Latvia and Estonia treat their pensioners worse than we do; our average public sector pension is now only £5600 per year.

It’s scandalous that the Tories are trying to cut pensions even further, and doubly scandalous that the Lib Dems are standing by, wringing their hands, but doing nothing to help.

So I’m proud to be a union member, because today, 2 million union members decided to do something about it.

I was sent the following email during the recent Norwich South selection.

Isn’t Data Protection a wonderful thing? The way it’s supposed to prevent important personal information from falling into the wrong hands, for instance. It’s rather ironic then, isn’t it, that New Labour were so appallingly lax during their time in office as to leave the digital backdoor open wide to identity thieves, fraudsters, vindictive ex-partners, fanatics, family members, neighbours, work colleagues or anyone with a personal grudge- as well as eagerly welcoming in private companies to data mine information on its own citizens. This was a crass invasion of privacy, totally at odds with European and International human rights, but New Labour and the unelected mandarins tucked away in Whitehall seemed to think that they knew better, and that these piffling rights didn’t apply. If any MPs had pangs of conscience about this, just set up the three line whip and thrash it out of their system!

So it gives us great pleasure to announce that we have been provided with some misplaced CVs pertaining to all of the applicants standing for election as a Norwich South New Labour candidate. Whoops-a-daisy! Some butter-fingered intern’s going to get their plump, fresh, young knuckles rapped! We’re not going to disclose their identity though, as the point is not about apportioning the blame to some poor, inexperienced sacrificial lamb and sweeping the real issue under the carpet. No. This was not a leak, the information was left on top of a bin in the centre of Norwich and found by one of our curious associates who handed it to us. The real issue is, of course, the glaringly gaping holes in the Data Protection Act that allow this to so often and easily occur, and the various protocols and regulations that should be in place in government and in business, but are sadly not.

[... continues for a long, long time, but you get the idea.]

Yours sincerely

The Electric Heretics & Now or Never! Magazine

When you apply for a seat, as with any job, you send in a CV. These are sent out to all the local members (500 in this case), and someone had clearly left them in a bin. The groups concerned had found them, and obviously thought they had stumbled onto something big.  They wrote us all these angular, vaguely threatening emails, gloating over finding my ‘private’ information, including my email addresses, home address, and phone number.

This was my reply:

Dear EH & NoN,

Thank you very much for getting in touch.

I agree with much of what you say about privacy. You may know that I’m a member of the Advisory Council of the Open Rights Group, and we have been campaigning about issues such as the ones you raise for many years now.

You can see our detailed policy positions on these issues at our website:

http://www.openrightsgroup.org/

Regarding my personal details, they are not as secret as you imagine. Candidates for public office must put a contact address on any literature they send out, and their home address is printed on the ballot paper.

My personal email addresses are available on my websites www.nanomation.co.uk (pretty much a dead website these days), and www.davidrowntree.org, and I encourage people to get in touch with me using them to discuss political issues.

Finally, I have had the same mobile number for at least 15 years. If you google me, you can find it quite easily.

If you want to meet up to chat about this stuff, I’d be quite happy to do so. I’m in Norwich for at least the next two weeks…

Thanks again for getting in touch.

With kind regards,

David Rowntree

Rather disappointingly, I didn’t hear from them again.

It is certainly true that I did my share of marching, picketing, and shouting as a youngster. I grew up in a country where we genuinely believed that young people would have to fight to have any future at all, and that real success would be for other people.  Thatcher’s Britain was a depressing place, and it forged my belief in the politics of the left.

Years later, I’m no less ideological, just more focused and determined. The sense of injustice that I raged against in those early years still burns strong now. The lack of decent housing, mass unemployment and the Tories threatening to break up our NHS were defining issues of my young political life, and now things have come full circle again.

I am extremely proud of our 13 years in government but no one can doubt that the Tories – with the help of Simon Wright and his Lib Dem friends – are undoing our many successes. That is why my focus is on winning back Norwich South, and returning a Labour government.

Whether it is Ed Miliband’s talk of the squeezed middle, or Ed Balls’ plan for growth, Labour is tackling the issues that the public care about. As your candidate I will work with the Party, the Trade Unions, and the Co-operative movement to get these messages out and to make them relevant to the voters in Norwich.

The next General Election will be in 2015, so this campaign will be a marathon not a sprint. I’m in it for the long run. As someone who has stood for Parliament before, I am match-fit for this challenge and will be on the front foot from day one.

It is members in Norwich South who will decide the outcome of this race, so I am out knocking on doors day-in and day-out in the way only a good candidate can. I look forward to meeting you and talking about our hopes and aspirations for Norwich and its future.

Making music can be positive, life-affirming, even spiritual. Having been homeless myself when I was young, I know that it’s often the opposite of those things. That’s why I was keen to help out with  a new idea  at ‘Under 1 Roof’, the Training Centre for people “in housing need” in Norwich.

So last Sunday I got together with a team of homeless musicians, and spent the afternoon playing.

We worked on the Rolling Stones classic ‘Gimme Shelter’, which almost certainly isn’t about homelessness, but has a killer groove, and suits itself to an informal group like ours.

We had a fantastic afternoon, and I really hope we can make it a regular event. It was a credit to the staff at Under 1 Roof, who do great work helping homeless people get back on track.

The Tories’ 2010 general election slogan was ‘It’s time for a change’ and this has certainly been borne out in their time in government so far.

• People in Britain are losing their jobs;
• Energy prices are rising;
• University tuition fees have trebled; and
• The recovery has stalled.

But these are just some of the most obvious and visible changes. The Tories have also been slowly changing their policy towards climate change, dismantling what the last Labour government worked so hard for.

In his time as Energy and Climate Change Secretary, Ed Miliband brought in the first legally binding climate change legislation, pledging 35% carbon cuts by 2022 and 50% by 2025. When the Tories came in, they promised to be the greenest government ever. A few months before the election, George Osborne proclaimed that

our commitment to the environment is as strong as ever … the Treasury will lead the development of the low carbon economy and finance a green recovery.

All this is changing. Climate Change has fallen off the agenda. Zero Carbon homes have been scrapped and research into bio-fuels has been cut off. And in George Osborne’s recent conference speech he told a delighted audience that

we’re not going to save the planet by putting our country out of business … carbon emission cuts will be no slower but also no faster than our fellow countries in Europe.

It is no coincidence that the green in the Conservatives oak tree logo has gone and has been replaced with the union jack. They think that abandoning policies on climate change will be better for the country. But economic recovery and care for our environment are not mutually exclusive as George Osborne has suggested.

Recovery can be founded on low-carbon growth with more green businesses, more innovation and more jobs.

Labour needs to put green issues back at the top of the agenda and make it clear to Osborne that we can protect our the planet and grow the economy at the same time!

It’s certainly easy to bash the Lib Dems, their broken promises and their readiness to get into bed with the Tories.  But Labour needs to go further than simply criticising them, if we are to win the next election.

It is certainly true that the Lib Dems haven’t covered themselves in glory so far. They have completely failed to make their mark in government and the coalition is looking increasingly one-sided, with the Lib Dems as the weak submissive partner. They have not found their voice and have not been robust enough in reigning in the Tories’ reckless spending cuts.

But as the Liberals have found, it’s one thing to bash the incumbent, and quite another to offer a coherent and credible alternative. While enjoying watching them roasting on the spit at their conference, my thoughts are on the Labour conference in Liverpool next week.

We need to dramatically up our game. We need to understand why so many voters turned away from us at the last election. We need to correct our mistakes and re-engage with the electorate. And most importantly, we need to be back where we belong, at the cutting edge of politics, setting out new and radical ideas that will change the country for the better.

John Denham was absolutely right when he said that the Lib Dems will be judged by their actions and not their words. But come next election, if wavering voters are deciding where to place their crosses, there needs to be a strong, progressive alternative.

The relationship between trade unions and the Labour party has always had its difficulties, and it is not uncommon for Labour leaders to be met with criticism at union conferences as Ed Miliband was yesterday. But it is certainly true that the Labour party grew out of the trade union movement, and I think that the link is still crucially important to our party, based on the ideals of democratic socialism.

Because of that link, rights that previous generations of workers fought, and in some cases died for, are now enshrined in law. That didn’t happen overnight; it took years of patient organising, negotiation, and sometimes industrial action.

Of course it is important to try and avoid this when possible. No one is more aware of the double-edged nature of the weapon than someone on the picket lines. Despite the media caricatures, few union members actually want to strike. It is always done as a last resort, when all other options are exhausted. When negotiations have failed, I believe that strikes can be legitimate and sometimes even necessary.

And as far as I can see, that’s what Ed was saying too.

Future Projects is charity based in the Marlpit Estate in Norwich, with a resoundingly practical programme of ideas to “inspire, engage, and support” its local community. It includes a recording studio, a community centre and a radio station – Future Radio. It was by giving an interview on the station that I first found out about the charity and the work that they do.

Future Projects also runs Future Education, an independent school, set up to give a good education to some of the most challenging children in the area. Many have behavioural difficulties that have led to them being excluded from mainstream schools, but the ‘holistic’ approach taken by the school has helped many students find their way back into mainstream education and into work.

Future Education has been a runaway success. Local politicians from all parties have pledged their support, Ofstead have inspected and praised the school, and the founder, Dawn Jackson, was awarded an MBE in 2010 for her work.

So it’s astonishing to see that Norfolk County Council, in a bizarre and secretive process seem to have decided to pull the plug on the school.

Local paper the Norwich Evening News is running a campaign to save Future Education. Please help by tweeting messages of support using the hash tag #saveourfuture, or liking Future Education on Facebook. Let’s see if we can persuade the Council to see sense.

I was sent this the other day – I thought it was funny but made some pretty good points. Sorry if you’ve seen it before.

At the checkout in the local supermarket, the cashier told an older woman that she should bring her own shopping bags because plastic bags weren’t good for the environment.

The woman apologised to him and explained, “We didn’t have the green thing back in my day.”

The cashier responded, “That’s our problem today. Your generation did not care enough to save our environment.”

He was right. Our generation didn’t have the green thing in its day.

Back then, we returned milk bottles, fizzy drink bottles and beer bottles to the shop. The shop sent them back to the factory to be washed and sterilised and refilled, so it could use the same bottles again. So they really were recycled.

But we didn’t have the green thing back in our day.

We walked up stairs, because we didn’t have an escalator in every shop and office building. We walked to the shops and didn’t climb into a 300-horsepower machine every time we had to go 100 yards.

But she was right. We didn’t have the green thing in our day.

Back then, we washed the baby’s nappies because we didn’t have the throw-away kind. We dried clothes on a line, not in an energy gobbling machine burning up 240 volts – wind and solar power really did dry the clothes. Kids got hand-me-down clothes from their brothers or sisters, not always brand-new clothing.

But that old lady is right; we didn’t have the green thing back in our day.

Back then, we had one TV, or radio, in the house – not a TV in every room. And the TV had a small screen the size of a handkerchief (remember them?), not a screen the size of the County of Yorkshire.

In the kitchen, we blended and stirred by hand because we didn’t have electric machines to do everything for us.

When we packaged a fragile item to send in the mail, we used a wadded up old newspaper to cushion it, not polystyrene or plastic bubble wrap.

Back then, we didn’t start up an engine and burn petrol just to cut the lawn. We used a push mower that ran on human power. We exercised by working so we didn’t need to go to a health club to run on treadmills that operate on electricity.

But she’s right; we didn’t have the green thing back then.

We drank from a tap when we were thirsty instead of using a cup or a plastic bottle every time we had a drink of water.

We refilled writing pens with ink instead of buying a new pen, and we replaced the razor blades in a razor instead of throwing away the whole razor just because the blade got blunt.

But we didn’t have the green thing back then.

Back then, people took the train or a bus and kids rode their bikes to school or walked instead of turning their mums into a 24 hour taxi service.

We had one electrical socket in a room, not an entire bank of sockets to power a dozen appliances. And we didn’t need a computerised gadget to receive a signal beamed from satellites 2,000 miles out in space in order to find the nearest restaurant.

But isn’t it sad the current generation laments how wasteful we old people were just because we didn’t have the green thing back then?

I appeared on the Daily Politics show on Wednesday, arguing that the Government should think again about cuts to the Housing Benefit system that will lead to 60,000 of the most vulnerable people in the Country being forced to leave their homes.

The cuts are being made to benefits of people aged 25 – 35, the average cut is over £40, and in London nearly £70. Obviously landlords are unlikely to agree to such drastic rent reductions, so people will have to look for shared accommodation. All the evidence suggests that there is nowhere near enough shared accommodation to go round, and being forced to share with strangers is quite often completely unsuitable for the people involved.

Tory Minister Nick Herbert who defended the cuts on the show said some things that, to be charitable, are hard to square with the facts.

He said that vulnerable people would be exempt from the cuts. In fact, the Government has made a relatively small amount of money available, but given that 1 in 5 of the people involved are disabled, and many have mental health issues, many vulnerable people are clearly going to be in the front line.

He also said that the cuts would not increase homelessness. Well everyone else in the field is sure that they will, and it would be astonishing if 60,000 of the poorest people in the Country people could be forced to move, without suitable accommodation being available, and for homelessness not to increase.

Presenter Anita Anand suggested that Labour would have done the same, but of course we wouldn’t. You’d have to be a psychopath to kick 60,000 people out of their homes, and out of all the parties, Labour seems to be the only one that remembers the lessons that Margaret Thatcher learned in the 1980’s. You can’t cut your way out of a recession, just like you can’t burn your way our of a fire, or hose your way out of drowning. You have to plan for growth.

On a happier note, I also helped out at the Sense Drumathon again, and caught up with many of the kids who came last year, as well as making some new friends.

Other drummers who took part included some of the cast of Stomp, the X-Factor star Kieran Gaffney, and a personal hero of mine, the percussionist Dame Evelyn Glennie.

I hugged Evelyn several times. I don’t think she’ll press charges.

Princess Anne, who is a patron of the charity, sprinkled the event with Royal Pixie Dust, and helped persuade the TV cameras to turn up.

All in all, it was a rollercoaster of a morning, and going back to work in the afternoon seemed quite odd…