About
Openly a campaign. Scrupulously sourced.
Green Hastings is a campaign, and says so. What makes it worth your trust is not neutrality but discipline: every factual claim is sourced, dated and correctable in public.
What this is
Hastings has a mild climate, compact streets, and a seafront most towns would envy. It is also, visibly, not a green town. The central stretch of the seafront is given over to parked cars. Walking and cycling get whatever space is left after traffic. Community environmental action exists here, and the people doing it are excellent, but there is less of it than this town deserves.
Green Hastings exists to change that, openly. We have a point of view: the town should be greener, and specific things should happen. We make proposals, we cost them where we can, we show the evidence underneath them, and we ask residents to act. We do not pretend to be neutral, and we never hide behind data we selected.
The model is the one Surfers Against Sewage proved on this same coastline: a campaigner gets trusted when its data discipline is better than its opponents'. What makes campaign copy different from civic reporting is the conclusion drawn, never the accuracy of the facts underneath it.
Who runs this
Green Hastings is built and written by the same person who builds Swim Hastings and Live Hastings, the neutral information services for this town. That is worth saying plainly, because the difference in role matters more than the overlap in authorship: the family services report facts and never campaign; Green Hastings campaigns and shows its facts. Both charters are published, and each side is easier to hold to its rules because the other exists.
This campaign is not a job, a company, or anyone's political ladder. It runs on public data, spare evenings and the belief that a town this size can be moved by a few hundred people who turn up.
The firewall — one builder, two hats
We are independent of every political party. That includes the Green Party, whose name is one word-order away from ours and which currently leads Hastings Borough Council. We take no party money, coordinate with no party, and endorse no one. We judge policies and outcomes, never people or parties. Wins are celebrated whoever delivers them; failures are named whoever presides over them. During election periods we publish nothing that compares parties or candidates.
The neutral instruments stay neutral. Trackers, indicators and archives that report what the council and others actually do belong to the family's civic observatory, not to this campaign. We cite those instruments; we do not run them. The family sites do not promote Green Hastings, and its supporter list is never mixed with their subscriber lists. Links flow one way: from the campaign to the evidence.
The conduct charter
- Every factual claim is sourced and linked, with the date we last confirmed it.
- Proposals are specific, costed where possible, and name a comparable place that has done the thing.
- Counterarguments are engaged in their strongest form, not strawmanned.
- We criticise decisions and outcomes, never motives or individuals, and anyone discussed here has a right of reply.
- No party is ever endorsed, compared or scored; election periods get extra restraint.
- Illustrations of what could be are labelled as sketches, never passed off as schemes.
- Corrections are made in public, in the corrections log.
- Supporter data is minimal, consented, exportable, deletable, and never shared.
Right of reply
If a decision you made, a business you run, or a position you hold is discussed on a case page and you believe we've been unfair or inaccurate, write to us and we will publish your reply alongside the case, in full, unedited. We criticise decisions and outcomes — never motives, never individuals.
Corrections
Every factual claim on this site links to its source, and the date we last confirmed it. When we get something wrong we fix it and log the fix, publicly, at /corrections/. A stale campaign claim is worse than none.