For this week’s general election, OTS News invited all six Southport parliamentary candidates to interview. Patrick Hurley, Sean Halsall, and Edwin Black were interviewed in person. Damien Moore and Erin Harvey agreed to recorded interviews, but due to internal constraints, these were conducted in writing. Reform UK’s Andrew Lynn declined to participate.
OTS News: I think of all of the candidates when I was looking into who they were and what they stood for. There’s loads of on the Green Party, but it was yourself actually I probably struggled with the most So the obvious question first how the average voter who you are, what you stand for, and what they would get if they put their cross next to you in a couple weeks time.
So I live in Tarleton, which is now part of the Southport constituency as part of the Northern Parishes, well it’s Hesketh Bank, actually. I’ve run there previously as a candidate for local council in the last two local elections. It’s quite a Tory stronghold in that area. But we’ve got increasing numbers, we’re doing a bit better. The West Lancashire Green Party itself has only just started up. So we’re quite new to campaigning in the area. I’m originally from Marple in South Manchester and I moved up to Preston way when I was going to university before moving across here when I had a kid. So I’ve got an eight year old now he’s been at school in Tarleton, he’s been pulled out of school – we homeschool him now. Not in a particularly hippie way, but he’s SEN, and he was struggling in school. And only really got politicized since moving here. So part of that is the school system, things like that. But obviously, the worst is the cost of living crisis and the inequality crisis, which I think has definitely been prominent in the last few years, as I’ve been living in, in the area. And I was a Labour member back in the day. I was a Momentum member during the Jeremy Corbyn years. And increasingly labour didn’t speak to me, didn’t feel like a home, in terms of what I believed it didn’t match up. I’d certainly never want to be one who would toe the party line. And, you know, have to campaign for things I don’t agree with. And certainly that’s why I found my home in the Green Party because we do line up a lot. And then what we believe in, especially people have this idea of the green party as being kind of a one issue party, I think comes from decades ago, really, we are very much not that. The social policies are more important to me than the green policies in that respect. And I think they have the best policies for the economy, to sort out the cost of living and the inequality crisis that we have. And being the only party willing to increase taxation.
OTS News: I think when you when you talk about the Labour Party, I didn’t realize you’re a member the Labour Party. And we spoke to Sean Halsall earlier today. We’ve spoken to him a couple of times, and I would say it’s the same. There’s a broadly similar story there. He was a former Labour representative and he was dissatisfied with the party. And what I put to him is the same thing I put to you is that essentially locally, there seems to be pretty high levels of satisfaction with the Labour Party. Patrick Hurley, the Labour Party representative has polled quite well. Nationally the party looks almost certain to become the governing party. Sefton Council is Labour controlled. Surely that’s an indication that there’s quite a lot of satisfaction in what Labour doing wouldn’t you say?
I certainly think nationally, that’s not the case. There’s a hell of a lot of dissatisfaction with the Conservative government for the last 14 years. People know that the best way of getting rid of the Conservative government is to vote for the next biggest one in power. This is how first past the post works. The problem with the electoral system that we have in this country is effectively makes us a two party state. I mean, we know America is a two party state – they have a green party, they have independents that run every year, but they’ve got no chance because of the way the political system is set up. If you don’t vote for the Democrat or Republican that you want, then there’s no point in voting. That’s the way it’s seen over there. But it’s not quite as bad here. We do have representatives in Parliament, we’ve had a Green Party MP for 12 years. But because first past the post system, because we don’t have proportional representation in Parliament, that is going to be tactically the best way of getting rid of the Tories. And I think that’s what people want. I don’t think there is a huge amount of support personally, for Keir Starmer or Patrick [Hurley], or particularly for any of the Labour policies, bar them not being Tories. Certainly for people who used to vote for Conservatives, a lot of them have gone to Reform. And as for people on the left, a lot of them have come to the Green Party now, or they’re going independent. People like Jeremy Corbyn are independent. You’ve got Faiza Shaheen, who’s been removed from the Labour Party for being too far to the left.. too socialist for them. She’s running as an independent. We’ve got a candidate in the Wirral who used to be a Labour member who is now a Green Party candidate. And I think there is a lot of dissatisfaction from traditional Labour voters with the way that Labour is currently being run. But the effective thing is, nationally, people want to get rid of the Tories. I would also say I don’t think there’s a particular satisfaction with Sefton Council. Certainly in Bootle there would be. Further south where, it seems, all the money is going to. Where they let Southport decline was not having our own town hall and having our own way of dealing with things, meaning money has to be allocated. And the increasingly small budgets that local councils have continued to decrease. Everything I see online and everything I see door knocking… I don’t see a lot of satisfaction for Sefton Council either.
OTS News: You’ve partially answered my next question in that, but I’ll give you the chance to to address it fully. At the last general election, the Green Party in the UK received a little less than 3% of the vote. Last week YouGov polled the Green Party nationally about 8%. Support is clearly growing. I think my twofold question would be why do you think that is? Secondly, is it growing quick enough to be considered a major party or major opposition? How do you see the sort of rise of the Green Party going?
We’re not going to be in government. We’re not expecting to get a majority of MPs and be able to form a government. That’s not what we’re here for. We’ve got four target candidate seats, which we think we can win. And then we have candidates in every other constituency in the country. One of the big reasons for the rise from 3% to 8% is the fact that we haven’t always run someone everywhere. We haven’t run paper candidates. And we’ve always been told on the doorstep, “I would vote Green if Green was there as an option, but it’s not.” And we don’t have the funds to always be able to run a campaign in every single constituency. But also I think people have become more aware of our social policies and more aware that we’re not a single issue party. Certainly, during the election period, we get a lot more national coverage. People are seeing Carla Denyer on the TV, Adrian Ramsey. I think they’ve connected with them quite a lot. And then there have been fairly high-profile people who have traditionally supported the Labour Party have come over and advised people to vote Green.
OTS News: On the flip side to that, is that in the last couple of weeks, we’ve seen elections for the European Parliament all across Europe, not applicable to the UK. But when you see the results from European Green parties they’ve not been great. European Greens dropped about 20 seats in the European Parliament. Why is the movement in this one instance contracting in Europe?
Partially that’s because in Europe in the last ten or so years there’s been centre-left parties in power. So the Green Party is a lot bigger in most European countries, they tend to be coalition partners with equivalents to the Labour Party and the like. And they have a lot more representation there. And there is a general dissatisfaction. Now, the parties that aren’t in power can say a lot. I mean for example Reform UK can basically say what they want. And we can say what we want. We’ve costed our manifesto, we believe in it. But we can appeal to people in ways that the party in power and the party that is almost definitely going to be in power – can’t. So in European countries, the protest vote is to move from left to right. They’ve got an answer to the housing crisis, which might be to remove immigrants, it might be to push for growth. In our country, we’ve had those policies, and they haven’t worked for us. So our protest vote has been to go to the left, and to increase immigration or to promote growth in a different way. Essentially, everyone is dissatisfied with the current state of the world. And everyone’s looking for a different answer. It just happens to be the flip side here.
OTS News:I’ve hit you with a barrage of questions about where the Greens are nationally and internationally. So looking a bit more locally, if you were elected to the seat, what would your key priorities be? What would you want to bring to the town?
I mean, nationally, my key priority is inequality. And I think that locally hits Southport as much as anywhere. The high street is bad, because people don’t have money to spend. If there was people spending money in the shops, the shops would stay open, they would have a high quality of shops, we’d have a better town. But people don’t have money. And that money hasn’t disappeared from the economy. The money has gone to billionaires, it’s gone to mega-corporations. And what I want to do is redress that balance, at least back to where it was, hopefully more, so that so that working-class people, working people, and middle-class people have not only the freedom to.. for instance having your own money is freedom, not being in debt is freedom, being able to change jobs, being able to spend the money on what you want, and not feeling the fear of being able to do something new, like start a business or even start a creative project because you need to work 40/50 hours a week. That’s something that the entire country needs. More locally, people talk a lot about the Pier and the high street. But the reason all those things exist in Southport is because of the coast. Southport wouldn’t exist as a town if we didn’t have the beaches and wetlands that we have. At the moment that is being pumped full of sewage on a regular basis. And we very much want to nationalise the water companies completely.
OTS News: We’re coming to the end of our time. I’ve just got one final question for you. I saw in research for this interview, and you mentioned it here, that The Greens have four key target seats when they believe that they can win – and this obviously isn’t one of them. Can you win the seat?
I can win the seat if people go out and vote for it, we end up winning the seat. That’s how voting works. If people have the courage to go out and vote Green as they believe in it, which they should. Everyone should vote for the policies they believe in, not the party to get someone else out. Whether that be us whether it be Reform, whether it be the Conservatives, I encourage everyone to go out and vote for the policies that they believe in.
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