I'M DELIGHTED today to officially launch our England-wide campaigns for county and unitary authority elections on May 2.
In recent weeks, I’ve been travelling the length and breadth of England, from Cornwall to Norwich, Kent to North Yorkshire, meeting candidates and launching local campaigns, and seeing for myself how the Green Party is becoming an increasingly national party, able to offer the option of voting Green to a wider range of voters than ever before. It’s delightful that we’re reaching into the far corners – standing for the first time in the Isles of Scilly, and the first time for some time on the Isle of Wight.
“We have more than 900 candidates in the county and unitary elections and district by-elections, standing for more than 36% of the seats contested, and more than 94% of the councils with elections have at least one Green candidate.
“We’re looking to significantly grow our number of elected principal authority councillors in these polls – up from the current 138.
“Among the counties on which we are hoping to win our first representation are Essex, Surrey and Cornwall, and we’re working hard to grow our representation in Devon, Suffolk, Hertfordshire, and West Midlands – an area in which our number of councillors has been growing particularly quickly.
The Green Party is also looking particularly forward to the Bristol elections. I’ll be there next week, campaigning in Ashley and Bishopston wards, seeking to build on our success in Ashley in 2011, when Gus Hoyt took the seat from the Liberal Democrats, gaining the highest number of votes for any individual candidate across the city.” (Gus is now the cabinet member for neighbourhood and environments under Bristol’s independent mayor.)
These elections are by their very nature local, but across the country I’ve found there are four big areas of concern that appear again and again.
The first is the impacts of cuts in government services on the lives of all, but particularly the poorest and most vulnerable. Greens are leading the way in trying to reduce these impacts – whether it be fighting to ensure that the bedroom tax doesn’t result in evictions, to keep local libraries, mental health services and a host of other essentials open, or speaking out against privatisation and outsourcing, the expensive option which creates private profits by reducing workers’ wages and damaging the quality of services.
Another of the key issues is transport: local bus services are absolutely critical, whether they're serving rural villages or new housing developments; far too often they’re being cut back when they need to be expanded. In other areas train services are at the centre of campaigns - the need is clearly there for improved services and affordable tickets. Nationally clearly what we need is renationalisation of our railways – in the meantime there are many routes that can be greatly improved with modest investment.
Road safety is also a big issue on which the Green Party is winning many supporters - 20mph limits, whether outside schools or more broadly, can give communities can enjoy enormous benefits from the calmer, safer streets created, and for country lanes the standard limit should be 40mph, not 60.
A third area that comes up again and again is planning - particularly protecting the green belt -- and also the future of local economies. We do need to provide lots of new housing in Britain, but we need to start with brownfield sites, conversions, and ensure that developments are not in strung-out car-dependent suburbs, but sensibly located with access to public transport and jobs. The green belt needs to be protected, to grow our food, provide a haven for our wildlife and room for city and town residents to breathe.
And councils need to be looking to build strong local economies, with manufacturing and food production networks, not rely on the failed 20th-century globalisation model. Instead of protecting high streets, far too many councils regard a new supermarket or chain store as a retail gold, gulliblyaccepting their job creation claims, without asking how many jobs they’ll destroy.
The final big issue is waste management – particularly the many incinerators that can still be stopped. There are pressing environmental arguments against incineration, but also an unanswerable economic case - that locking councils into 25-year contracts to supply large quantities of waste, when the levels are already falling, is a huge financial risk. And ignoring the jobs and industries that can be created by recycling is a huge missed opportunity.
There are many issues on which Green candidates have strong, distinct policies – and many voters I’m finding on doorsteps across the country are also being won over by concern about the quality of their current administrations, a feeling that they haven’t been well represented. A Green voice, or a larger Green voice, on YOUR county council will mean more tough questions will be asked, spending scrutinised, decisions questions – democracy strengthened. And if you think that the current economic model is broken and needs to be radically changed, that we can’t keep living as though we had three planets and need to reshape our way of living to within global limits, then the Green Party is for you.