Wednesday

GeneralElection2024Soundtrack

#PaulCroslandIndependentCandidate has selected music and interviews (mostly from his channel) that offer a playlist whilst you still contemplate Putting A Cross For Crosland -in this general election or the nexthttps://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLM4IagQQExozzuihftDYOj79z6KFCFQEj



Tuesday

Paul Crosland Independent Candidate

 The long game for #PaulCroslandIndependentCandidate 

To be clearer about my political ambitions than I’ve ever been before -& some are only just emerging- I’m squaring myself up for a #BuddhistFight with Suella Braverman, who could easily become the Marine Le Pen of British Politics. When I write of #RelearningSpiritualCommunity and seeking #JerusalemInAlbion , the blessed United Kingdom (Albion) with the best possible social contract may prove to be more Islamic than Christian for I struggle to understand on what basis some commentators presume traditional English(Christian) ways to be the best? I am, however, excluding a Hindu solution -unless it can free itself from the apartheid of caste- which would be some squaring of a circle. 


Encouraged by my greatest teacher, #UrgyenSangharakshita, into a study of #ComparativeReligion I’ve found a very lazy, but effective methodology, which is to listen for one faith singing the praises of another. Within my own Triratna practice this has most strongly come across in #TriratnaAssociate #TriratnaPadmavajra’s championing (& singing) #Sufism & in much I’ve heard of both brotherhood & sisterhood in Islam. Where Christianity has most touched my Buddhist teachers (eg Alan Wallace) & other faiths seems to be in Christ’s words on the cross: “Forgive Them For They Know Not What They Do.”


From the sublime to the mundane, this equates to the #PaulCroslandHashtag #CircumnambulateTheElephant  because human life seems mostly to be lived at the #MindReactive (rather than #MindCreative) level and the perception of eg someone standing for election will be like that of the proverbial blind men reaching out to touch an elephant and deciding on it’s nature based simply on the first touch.






Monday

Adopt A Gammon

 The #AdoptAGammon #PaulCroslandHashtag first appeared in response to Keir Starmer's 30th June 2024 comments on countering a populist threat:

Here is the first such tweet:



Sunday

How Many Leaflets?

 In the 2019 General Election, I printed (via Fast Print, St Leonards) 60,000 leaflets (A3 folded down to A5) so that one could be delivered to every one of the 56,400 addresses known to the Royal Mail.

This cost (over £6k) was borne by Mediation Support Ltd; donations to future printing costs welcome here

In the 2024 General Election only 108 of the Campaign Leaflet were printed (on 7th June 2024); 108 being a Buddhist lucky number:




Lobbying Emails Received

Thank you to all who sent an email clarifying the policy that you most want advanced by your MP in relation to the July 4th 2024 General Election.

I am in the process of compiling these emails into an online spreadsheet, currently showing the first 103 lobbying requests from 40 different causes, the most popular (19 of the first 103 emails) being from constituents writing in solidarity with the Palestinian Solidarity Campaign: 

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1J-XGGT7aFydOtp3MgUMTsFa5UwZmTpetKZEiOpMRIcM/edit?usp=sharing

When I have completed the inputting into the offline spreadsheet (estimated 22nd July 2024) then the summary results will be presented in a few paragraphs by my updating this blog post.



Non-attendance At Hustings


To clarify further my non-attendance as the returning Independent Candidate, my email autoreply stated:

“ As regards the constituency hustings I hereby ask the organisers to set out a chair for me and to read out this statement:

"“I’ve gone away from the 5thDec2019 #HowlingHustings#HowlingHustings into a series of Quaker Meetings where an hour communicates a deepening understanding and drawing together of each person’s (often adversity-forged) testimony. I would like there to be space in the hustings just to

silently reflect on the universal needs/values being communicated or frustrated in our different ideas about how to deepen democracy in a much damaged/pilfered state. Pilfered because even interrupting is

“taking the not given”.

I ask the hosts of all this election’s hustings to allocate the time they would have allocated to me in relation to each question instead to silence.

Whilst I will not be there to clutter that sacred space whilst you sort between the representatives of political parties, I will post a sign to be held up during the silences. Thank you”

As I made a contribution to the 5th December 2019 hustings which has been much valued, I invite you to listen to the first 10 minutes (or more!):


.

GE2024 Email Auto-Reply

 I'm known for having a sometimes lengthy auto-reply to my email address, encouraging people to follow-up various links in order to make more informed choices about how we might relate. 

NB The "Paul Crosland Hashtag" used to describe the importance of not mistaking one aspect of another for the whole is #CircumnambulateTheElephant  

(My email address is advertised in election times here

& here's the 2024 Election auto-reply in all it's ....:

“Trust those (in politics) who do most to get their opponents’ voices heard”

(#TTIPWDMTGTOVH)

****************

Most correspondence received by this email address relates to my candidacy as prospective parliamentary candidate for Hastings & Rye:

https://whocanivotefor.co.uk/person/117120/paul-crosland

If you voted in the constituency at the last general election -12th December 2019- regardless of whether you "Put A Cross For Crosland", thank you for subscribing to democracy.  I presume we all agree that "We could do better?"

To everyone emailing if I stand for x or y, after the election in order to move forward on your agenda -or at least make it more visible- I intend to summarise the requests received in a Google Spreadsheet then embedded into the 2066.uk website (AKA additionalinfo.blogspot.com).

What helps greatly is if you indicate which government department you understand to be in charge of your issue of great concern.

Asking a mediator -approaching three decades of service- to take sides may only produce the reply from me:

“I’m on the side of everyone getting their needs met and how to achieve that nonviolently.”

Three Questions:

1) Why would you want an opinionated MP - when you could elect a facilitator #BeyondPolarisationInPolitics & #MoveForwardMoreTogether?

2) What do you make of this article that I wrote with a Centre For Peaceful Solutions colleague in the aftermath of the #HowlingHustings (5th December 2019); an article from me having been requested by the Hastings Independent Press, this one was rejected; reasons not given: 

https://additionalinfo.blogspot.com/2019/12/i-ve-got-your-back-sally-ann-and-peter.html

(I found that in September 2020 I wrote a follow-on piece that, to me, still has merit: https://additionalinfo.blogspot.com/2020/09/struggling-to-embody-kinder-politics.html

3) Whether this YouTube film from Hastings Pier, accompanied by my electoral agent, Patrick Glass, might prompt you to joina #PaulCroslandZoom to contribute your #GrassrootsManifesto (4-10 points) towards the #ConvergentConstituencyManifesto?



(https://youtu.be/9IMshL-Vxjk?si=SsEfkrFZ2R51Wxvz)

***************

#CroslandChallengeToStarmerAndFarage



(https://youtu.be/k0F_o6yEznI)

***************

Since you may well have mailed me to advance a particular policy agenda & since I am not standing as part of a political party, bear with me please whilst I share my thinking to date on how we form policy together.

Running until 24th July 2024 (& resuming before 2025) there are a series of 5.45pm Zoom conference video-calls; I'll be letting into the Zoom conference calls anyone who has sent a policy proposal, their name and their address (which I keep confidential). The page with the link is the calendar page of my blog; the teleconference archaically called "Alobhin Special Please attend to discuss not only the policy matter on which you initially emailed, but your own 4-10point "Grassroots Manifestoes"; what’s most important to you? Here I encourage people to dream big. The nuts and bolts of the Dream Cycle -a "Find Your Power" methodology by Chris Johnstone- are as simple as "Dream, Plan, Do, Review". It will be helpful if you identify which government department(S) would most likely be responsible for enacting the change(s) that you seek.

My work henceforth is to advocate for what you want & bring my (& my associates’) mediation skills to bear. If I had another windfall I would spend it on bringing people together towards establishing a ConvergentConstituencyManifesto and I wonder why social media isn’t used more in this way?

NB Links to my 5 channels of social media (occasional) output are as listed on https://whocanivotefor.co.uk/person/117120/paul-crosland & please note that the bottom link is your oppoprtunity to contribute to the costs of Mediation Support Ltd's work in (y)our constituency

***********************************************************************************

As I made a contribution to the 5th December 2019 hustings which has been much valued, I invite you to listen to the first 10 minutes -or more?- of the on-stage-recording I made & which is part of https://YouTube.com/PaulCroslandRefugeTreeWoods

(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-44M69wrC8)


***********************************************************************************

What does your #GeneralElection2024Soundtrack sound like?

I have put together a series of tracks that remind me of themes of the campaigns or as a form of decompression from this, at times, trying time.

From the following soundtrack (which includes political commentators, including myself and the man who was my oldest (ie going back to school days) friend, #ChrisGidlowAuthorAndHistorian; I say "was" because he has broken off all communication as a result of my standing again as an Independent Candidate. Recorded in Covid-19 days, the discussions in this playlist of note centre around a New Statesman article about Progressive Politics by Tony Blair & centre around Chris working through his 9 or 10 point Grassroots manifesto -the film listing his 10 points is just a minute and a half long; the film explaining his workings -22 minutes.





“One of the #WouldBeWizardsOfHastings produced the #ElectionLeafletfor the #TTIPWDMTGTOVH#TTIPWDMTGTOVH campaign that is pinned to the masthead on 

https://twitter.com/paulcrosland

Since Channel4 news covered the #ChangingHastings agenda on Sunday23rdJune, 

part of my answer to the housing question- as I stated in the 5thDecember2019 #HowlingHustings is #CommunityService of 5-7hrs a week for all home owners over 50.

This should also amuse:

https://www.hastingsindependentpress.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/HIP-254.pdf

Whether or not you’ve seen the election leaflet for

https://facebook.com/paulbasicincomecrosland, as background here's a flavour of how I experienced the 2019 General Election with the constituents of beloved Hastings & Rye:

https://additionalinfo.blogspot.com/p/paulcroslandindependentcandidate-ge2019.html

Expect me to produce on the blog a detailed account of the policy proposals received during the #PaulCreoslandIndependentCandidate 2024 General Election campaign.

My company, Mediation Support Ltd, (Tel 07807-066-202) provides this mediation theory playlist to boost your capacity to bring goodwill and co-operation to difference/conflict:

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLM4IagQQExozL8ltzcK3F_WHxTiWHvv68


(or via https://www.facebook.com/mediationsupportltd/ )


2066.uk <http://additionalinfo.blogspot.com>

* with the help of https://convergentfacilitation.org


Tuesday

Restorative Justice experience and..

…the general direction of travel in the 50percentToElectAnMP campaign is towards Convergent Facilitation 

Just to give everyone a heads up on part of the #PaulCroslandIndependentCandidate election strategy besides the ask for silence in my place at the non-attended hustings and someone holding up the hashtag …. !!!


- the video content I’m producing at least twice a day is mostly along these lines: 


i.e recounting restorative cases I’ve compiled in a (free online) 2003 book.



To any interview requests my standard reply is:
“I’m very interested, in accordance with how experienced you are in convergent facilitation. Please tell me of times when your role was to help political opponents find common ground?”