Great Guardian headline on Friday morning! The North Devon Green Party donated £400 to help the push to elect our first Green MP in the North of England. Some of our members helped with the phone banks, joining a team of 150 other volunteers from around the country on the phones on election day. People power defeated a campaign funded by fossil-fuel money, genuine reforming impetus won over faux ‘Reform’ and hope beat hate.
On Monday my wife Rosie and I joined Cllr Peter Bishop for a guided tour of the Growforward project at Chelfham Mill, near Barnstaple, by its director and inspiration Danny Argent. I first came across Danny at a recent meeting in the Guildhall to discuss a possible bid by Barnstaple to become Town of Culture 2028. He spoke impressively and with real knowledge - he was one of the champions of Hull’s successful bid a few years ago to become Britain’s City of Culture in 2017. (I think he should be credited with the great phrase HullYes). For our campaign Danny suggested BarnParty28. As it happens, Danny grew up at Chivenor and was a boarding pupil at the old Chelfham Mill School. He told us that while the teaching was good, the conditions after the teachers left at 5pm were very different. The school was closed because of abusive behaviour by the residential staff. Now it will become, Danny hopes - we hope - a new kind of institution: a wellbeing haven and a not-for-profit community hub with a focus on encouraging the creativity of the neurodivergent. We also met Alex of WayMakers (based there) which is committed to neurodiversity acceptance and inclusion. To get a better idea of what’s planned, follow The Growforward Project on Facebook. We are in awe of these splendid people.
XR North Devon organised an excellent Stop Geoffrey Cox event in Bideford on Tuesday evening. Cleodie Rickard from Global Justice Now told us about the iniquitous role played by Investor-State Dispute Settlement courts. The Singapore-based owners of the Whitehaven coalmine in Cumbria have employed Sir Geoffrey Cox KC, Conservative MP for Torridge and Tavistock, to advise them on suing our government for loss of earnings - plans to develop the coalmine were quashed by the High Court as its emissions would negate progress to net zero: this was not taken into account when the Conservative government unwisely gave the go-ahead. I learned about these secretive courts years ago from articles by George Monbiot. Astonishingly, Labour is still including ISDS in its trade agreements - yet another reason why their performance in government has been so deeply disappointing.
Good news: first, at its budget meeting this week Devon County Council dropped the demand for over £600k savings from running its libraries. Let’s hope this means our valued libraries are safe from drastically reduced opening hours, even closure. Second, there will be no judicial review of the White Cross Wind Farm planning decision I have covered here before: a judge found no irregularities in the procedures we followed as the planning authority. This is a relief for the council but we sympathise with those who opposed our decision: it was a very complex case.
This was an excellent webinar organised by South West Councils for members of Audit and Governance committees - I’m on the latter at North Devon Council. We heard about excellent uses of AI in, for example, using Magic Notes to transcribe conversations between social workers and clients into case notes and using AWS Readable to turn complex documents into the much easier-to-read simplified texts which some clients need. This process used to take weeks and cost over £500 per piece: now it can be done in 30 minutes for £7-10. Not everyone has digital access so Greater Manchester set up a Peoples Panel to make sure this large section of the population is well catered for. There are caveats: AI is based on data from the period of its creation so can degrade over time. It can, like humans, move away from what it was designed to do in ‘model drift’. It can have biases. It is ‘like a very fast intern’, so its results are drafts that need checking and signing off by well-trained professionals.
Talking of tech, I recommend the Guardian article published on Thursday about weaning ourselves off big US companies that are now toxically close to President Twerp: ‘Leave big tech behind! How to replace Amazon, Google, X, Meta, Apple - and more’. I don’t use the first three. I’m still working on leaving Substack.
On Friday morning I combined water-testing (citizen science for the Westcountry Rivers Trust) at our local river, which we call Landkey Water (a tributary of the Venn), and litterpicking (happening around Swimbridge this weekend) on the bridleway down to it. The wild daffodils are looking marvellous. New arrivals in the hedgebanks include the pinks of Herb Robert and Red Campion. Driving into town on Thursday morning, I saw these raptors near Codden Hill: two Buzzards, one Kestrel and a Red Kite which swooped down to the road just in front of me to pick up a dead vole or rat. The tight turns it made were an aeronautical marvel. Thank you for reading.