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Why should you vote Green on 4th July?

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So the day is finally here. The chance to vote to end 14 years of Tory misrule and see change. But is it really?

Two parties are saying they would provide change, but only one is offering REAL change and REAL hope – The Green Party.

The Labour Party slogan ‘Change’ is so reductive and self fulfilling it’s almost worthless as an electoral ambition. Will Labour provide change? Well yes, if they’re elected as the majority government we will see a change by definition. Where there was once Rishi Sunak, there will be Keir Starmer. A clear change of leader and administration, but is that all we want? Will we see REAL change? I rather doubt it.

Labour’s manifesto suggests otherwise with so many policies seemingly just a continuation of what we have with the Tories. Things like the Bedroom Tax, The Two Child Benefit cap, a continuation of the oil and gas drilling licences granted by the Conservatives, including the highly questionable Rosebank. None of that will change and neither will things like private provision in the NHS or a really progressive tax regime.

So what real change will we see with Labour, or any of the other parties for that matter? It looks like the only thing that will be changing will be the climate!

Even the Liberal Democrats haven’t really committed to change on important things like tax reform or tuition fees which of course they were instrumental in bringing in. Their candidate in Bicester & Woodstock is a well meaning guy, but he was also an adviser to the coalition government during the first period of austerity, as was the Conservative candidate, so not much change for the better there!

Can I win in Bicester and Woodstock? That depends on you, the voters. It’s a circular argument that Greens can’t win so we don’t get votes, but if we don’t get votes we can’t win. But even if I don’t win my purpose is still to raise more awareness of the Green Party and our values. A party I’ve supported for 12 years and voted for for even longer, back when they were even more unlikely to be elected. Since then there’s been a huge surge in support for Greens, something I’ve seen first hand after being elected to 5 different councils as a Green and re-elected to one of those since.

If the Green Party didn’t exist and people hadn’t voted for them, do you think the other parties would have taken any notice of climate change or other Green issues? I very much doubt it and that’s even more obvious now that parties like Labour and the Conservatives are backing away from their climate change commitments because to stick by them is electorally inconvenient.

So the Greens have brought about real change over the past decade and will continue to push for more in the coming years, especially as we are looking set to at least triple our representation in Westminster. Change on things like the NHS, social care, social security, justice, equal rights, animal welfare, nature recovery, climate change and so much more.

I’d of course love to be one of those parliamentarians helping to make those changes, as our new MPs will do through careful lobbying and internal pressure on whomever is in power by the end of this week. But I know that’s unlikely. But every vote for me and every other Green candidate still counts. It counts as part of the message the whole country needs to send to Westminster, even more so as the ruling party is likely to have a majority so large that they probably won’t be in the mood to listen to anyone else.

But I have faith that Greens will always find a way to move the needle and work for positive change. And I’ll continue to do that whatever happens in the polls on Thursday. I’m content to play a role, no matter how small in helping to make the future a brighter place for the next generation. Your vote can help me and every other Green candidate to do that, so I hope you’ll give that thought some serious consideration when you mark that cross on the ballot sheet.

The polls suggest that the outcome to this election is a foregone conclusion. Labour will comfortably win a huge majority and in Bicester & Woodstock the Lib Dems will romp home. If nothing else people will vote for them just to stop them sending any more leaflets! So you can safely vote Green, knowing it’s extremely unlikely to change that outcome.

So more than ever in this election you can vote with your heart to make real change happen. Change that means more than a different name on the House of Commons letterhead. Otherwise we’ll be right back here in 5 or 10 years time, probably with the Conservatives promising the change that we never really seem to get.

As someone else said during this election “If you want change you have to vote for it”. If you want REAL change you have to vote Green!

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Our Rivers in Peril

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I’ve just spent a couple of days in the gorgeous village of Stonesfield researching the state of the river Evenlode which was recently given the unenviable title of the most polluted river in England.

And it’s hardly surprising given that in the past few years the amount of sewage being pumped in to the river has risen from 8000 hours per year to 12000 hours. The river itself is not insubstantial, being deep enough in some areas to swim in, although these days you’d be brave to risk it given the level of E coli and other nasties lurking in its once crystal clear depths.

I spoke to brilliant local councillor Genny Early about the history of the river that she’s lived near for the past 30 years and the tale was not a happy one. Where once you could look out from the local footbridge at fish swimming amongst the river weeds and watch local dogs play happily in the waters, we now have a soupy grey clag, virtually devoid of life and reputedly toxic to everyone including our canine companions.

The cause is toxic dumping from up to 9 different local sewage works, given effective carte blanche by the Conservative government to use this river, and others in the area, as an open sewer to enable companies like Thames Water to pay out record dividends to investors whilst doing next to nothing to fix inadequate infrastructure.

This is the starkest example of how privatisation has failed us all with greedy and cynical corporations grabbing every opportunity to make obscene amounts of money by (in this case) quite literally shitting on local communities.

I made a video with Genny showing just how bad things have got in this area, in sickening contrast to the beautiful local landscape. You can watch it by clicking here.

We simply can’t allow this situation to continue and only the Greens have the real solution to take privatised utilities back into public control where they belong. Water is quite literally an essential for life on this planet. If we’ve reached the point where that is simply a commodity to be bartered between corporations on the open market we really have reached the bottom of a very murky barrel.

Greens would take water and other essential public utilities and services back into public control as the only way to deal with this obscene failure of duty to keep our waterways and rivers clean and accessible for wildlife and recreation. Other parties are suggesting half way houses of fines and extra taxation. None of that will work in an industry that simply doesn’t care any more.

We need radical solutions to these unprecedented outcomes and only the Green Party has a vision bold enough to deliver those.

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High Street Recovery Needs Input from People Who Have Been on the Inside

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I’ve been involved in retail for as long as I can remember. From my first proper job as a Saturday boy in a menswear store in Lewisham through my days as a market trader in Camden Lock and Greenwich to being co-founder of a national high street chain that started with a small store in Oxford selling silver jewellery. and grew into a national chain trading in 6 of country’s major retail locations, including London’s prestigious Covent Garden.

In that time I saw almost as many ups as I did downs. I’ve half jokingly said that I spent 20 years building the business and then another 10 trying extricating it from the failing high street. Like so many other retailers who entered the high street during the boom years in the early 1990s, I fell foul of the simultaneous boom in commercial property development. So many new malls were opened in the 90s and early 2000s it was difficult to keep up and I opened stores in some of the most iconic examples such as the New Bullring in Birmingham and Bluewater in Kent.

The other boom at the time was in business rates, which along with rents skyrocketed through that period as institutional landlords, mostly backed by large pension funds, cashed in on the retail bubble ploughing millions into new shiny malls based on the emerging US model. It was great while it lasted and we all became caught up in the heady days of seemingly limitless opportunities. But we soon discovered there were limits.

The Financial crash in 2008 gave us all a pretty sharp reality check and things soon started to become far less buoyant and rents that had been agreed on the back of rude profit margins started to look far less tenable as turnovers started to fall.

I’ve been fighting for a fairer deal for High Street retail for over 15 years

There soon followed a series of frantic rounds of renegotiation with landlords who themselves were facing the prospect of huge hole in their new developments as retailers started to fall over with alarming regularity. In many cases we were able to come to mutual agreements to keep us trading at the shopping malls looking full, but the one thing that couldn’t be re-negotiated were business rates. Set as they were, by the central valuation office, and administered by local authorities, they were completely devoid of any chance of concession unless you had an understanding council. In my experience their understanding was rather limited, and after 5 years as a local councillor myself I now understand more about why that was.

So we were all caught in a perfect storm that only a few managed to emerge from. My business was one of the luckier ones as I managed to negotiate deals that gave us breathing space. But I could see the writing on the wall and it was telling me to get out of the high street and decamp to the internet where so many of our competitors were lurking. Thereby hangs another very long story.

But suffice to say I have an intimate understanding of the plight of the high street, in fact much more intimate than I would prefer. For that reason one of my personal priorities as a fresh faced new MP would be to push for a new system of business rates or local high street taxation. Other things like rent controls and use classes would also be high on the agenda, but none of this will be an easy fix for an industry in the doldrums after so many years in decline. But I know from my own experience that smaller independents are both the lifeblood of local high streets whilst also being the most vulnerable.

In terms of the dreaded business rates, I think I could take elements from the land tax approach of the Green party and add in some aspect of a local purchase tax as seen in the USA. Such a tax would be far more progressive and have more respect for the ability of businesses to pay such an additional tax. That would give a far greater connection between the local community, local authorities and the retailers themselves. If all retailers did well then they would all reap the benefits.

Speaking to local councillors and retailers about business rates reform

I don’t really have the answer to full business rates reform, but I’ve been campaigning for a better system for over 10 years. I would advocate a situation where we involved existing high street retailers in the process of finding a solution. There have been past attempts at doing this, but very few, if any, involved small independent retailers. I think that was a mistake.

The Labour Party have boldly announced that they would scrap the current business rates system, but they haven’t said what they would replace it with. I’ve been here before many times, and both Labour and the Tories have frequently promised reform but never delivered on that. One of the biggest reason is that business rates are a virtually guaranteed income for government bringing in over £13bn a year. Even if the premises are empty, the landlord cops for the bill so it’s a win-win for Westminster. So any new system is likely to be just as iniquitous and damaging, especially to smaller operators.

I think there is a way of developing a system of local high street taxation that could benefit all sides of the equation, including the consumer. Just scrapping the business rates system with no plan for what would replace it is not a solution, yet its the current proposal from the part that is most likely to form the next government in a few weeks. If I was in Westminster I’d hope to be able to provide a far better insight into the problems on the high street and how to engage with the people who face those problems every day.

I’d like to see genuine consultation with high street stakeholders, including landlords and local councils, about the best way forwards. As a long term retailer, having moved from being a small business, through a larger expansion and back to being a ‘born again independent’, I’d like to be involved in that process. But I guess it remains to be seen what the outcome is on July 4th.

I’ve just published a video I made during a recent visit to Bicester with some thoughts on how we can work towards a better system of high street business taxation and help to repair our broken high streets and you can watch that by clicking here.

If you’re a retailer or just someone who enjoys browsing physical shops, I’d suggest you vote for someone like me who has the experience to make that a viable possibility again. Retail is at the heart of every village, town and city and needs political support to make it vibrant again. Many politicians claim to have the answer but few of them have been on the inside of the industry. I think that needs to change. I’d like to change it.