{"id":901,"date":"2006-10-05T11:11:00","date_gmt":"2006-10-05T11:11:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/maddruid.com\/wp\/?p=901"},"modified":"2006-10-10T11:24:18","modified_gmt":"2006-10-10T03:24:18","slug":"899-of-tories-are-green","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/maddruid.com\/?p=901","title":{"rendered":"[899] Of Tories are green"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I first noticed David Cameron when he took over the UK Tories&#8217; leadership last year from Michael Howard. First of all, I&#8217;ve always liked Blair; charming, young and best of all, green. That doesn&#8217;t necessarily translate into support for the Labor Party though. (Okay, okay, Labour. Happy now?) I don&#8217;t know enough of British politics to choose side but Blair&#8217;s personality and his green tendency is strong enough for me tip my hat to the Labour Party. However, Blair&#8217;s possible successor, Gordon Brown isn&#8217;t as fun as Blair himself. And Brown seems a little bit closer to the red side as far as I&#8217;m concerned. Cameron on the other hand, while coming from a conservative, is green. With a green leadership, the Tories are starting to suit me. It&#8217;s a sort of a green-blue party. I consider myself as a libertarian green and hence, it&#8217;s only natural for me to be attracted to the new Tories.<\/p>\n<p>Nevertheless, there are accusations that David Cameron is doing a Kerry &#8211; trying to impress too many people at once. New stuff is also coming out about him; despite earlier the media hailing him for cycling to the Houses, that cycling activity is <a href=\"http:\/\/news.bbc.co.uk\/2\/hi\/uk_news\/politics\/4953922.stm\">apparently a gimmick<\/a>. I really hope hypocrisy isn&#8217;t the case. Reason is, if Cameron&#8217;s really sincere, this is something good for the green. Why? Simple. When was the last time two major parties in a country with great global influence last tried to be greener than the other?<\/p>\n<p>From the top of my head and from my limited knowledge, I can&#8217;t think of any.<\/p>\n<p>And certainly, Malaysia comes nowhere near such scenario despite the Badawi administration&#8217;s initial green slogans. Like so many of the administration efforts, his green effort is starting to look like greenwashing.<\/p>\n<p>Coming back to the main issue, usually, it&#8217;s the race to the center. But perhaps, this race towards the green is really a race to the center. Maybe \u2014 for those in the UK, correct me if I&#8217;m wrong  \u2014 environmental issue is a centrist&#8217;s issue in the UK. If that is so, what a wonderful place the UK is right now.<\/p>\n<p>Of course, the unfortunate part is that both the Labour and the Tories support the invasion of Iraq. Another thing is that, the Tories are Euroskeptics. I&#8217;m pro-EU simply because I&#8217;m for a more integrated ASEAN. I see a successful EU as a brownie point for those that are for a stronger ASEAN.<\/p>\n<p>Still, whichever side wins next year, I&#8217;m happy to speculate that the UK would be green.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I first noticed David Cameron when he took over the UK Tories&#8217; leadership last year from Michael Howard. First of all, I&#8217;ve always liked Blair; charming, young and best of all, green. That doesn&#8217;t necessarily translate into support for the Labor Party though. (Okay, okay, Labour. Happy now?) I don&#8217;t know enough of British politics [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-901","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-environment","category-politics-government"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maddruid.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/901","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maddruid.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maddruid.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maddruid.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maddruid.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=901"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/maddruid.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/901\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maddruid.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=901"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maddruid.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=901"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maddruid.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=901"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}