Anders Hanson

When you’re involved in politics in Sheffield you quickly get used to Greens behaving oddly. But you have to wonder why they bother being politics at all when they vote against the very measures they keep talking about, as they did in last week’s budget meeting in Sheffield City Council.

The Liberal Democrats in Sheffield proposed:

• An extra £1.4 million for kerbside recycling of glass or tin.
• £115,000 to provide green waste sacks (currently £1 each) for free.
• £500,000 to help regenerate local shopping areas to make communities more sustainable and to help local businesses.
• £287,000 to provide a ‘green pot’ for local community groups to bid for funding to carry out community environmental projects.
• Scrapping the use of bottled water in the council in favour of tap water.
• … and much more

But instead the Greens voted against this and just backed Labour who were offering far less for the environment, and who in the last year have voted to shut down a successful community school and who opposed Lib Dem attempts to introduce tough targets for the council on carbon emissions.

As one person put it to me, “it seems as though the Green Party is more committed to the Labour Party than to the environment.”

Pay attention all political anoraks who also write Focus leaflets, because here’s an exciting posting on fonts. That particularly includes you Duncan Borrowman and Ed Maxfield (sorry, private joke).

It turns out that Paul Mijksenaar, the person who designed the signage at the airports in Amsterdam, Athens and Frankfurt, has Gill Sans Serif as his font of choice.

Gill Sans also happens to be the standard font used by Lib Dem campaigners for their Focus leaflets (many are written in other fonts of course, but it is the one that party training usually recommends).

What I hadn’t realised is how much the font is used when I have only ever heard of it in the context of the Liberal Democrats. According to the Wikipedia article on Gill Sans (who spends their time writing these things? Mind you, who apart from me reads them?) it is also the original font used by Penguin Books, as well as being used by Fox News, the band Bloc Party and the Communist Party of Great Britain. Given that fonts are usually a key part of the brand and image of a company or organisation, I’d be intrigued to know what the similarities are between the ones I have just mentioned and the Liberal Democrats.

For anyone who cares and who doesn’t know, and more importantly hasn’t fallen asleep by this point, the font of choice for headlines in Lib Dem Focus leaflets is usually Democrat Sans. I understand this was created specifically for the Liberal Democrats and so there probably isn’t much to say about it.