General Election candidate selected for Stockport
Stockport Green Party has unanimously selected Peter Barber as its Parliamentary candidate for Ann Coffey's constituency in the next General Election. Peter explains his background and key campaign issues:
"I have been a member of either the England and Wales or Scottish Green Party since 2001. Before that I was a member of London Cycling Campaign. This was in response to my discovery of the convenience of cycling, and my discovery of the poor facilities for cycling in our capital city, where I lived for three years.
I eventually joined the Green Party having moved to Manchester and realising that London was cycle-friendly by comparison, and that single-issue campaigning alone would never achieve the change I wanted tosee. However I was an inactive member, as my time was occupied by my job as an information officer for a local company and extensive renovation on our first house.
I then took up a PhD studentship at Glasgow University, studying the mechanism of action of a biological pesticide derived from the Indian neem tree. Simple and cheap to extract, completely safe to use and readily biodegradable, this product has great potential in India where the outmoded organochlorines and organophosphates are often only affordable pesticides, agricultural workers are not sufficiently protected while applying them, and where pesticide ingestion is the most common method of committing suicide.
While in Glasgow I started getting involved with the Scottish Greens, canvassing at polling stations and observing the Glasgow count for the 2003 Scottish elections, where our local list candidate, Patrick Harvie was elected as an MSP, and occasionally helping out in the Glasgow office.
In 2006 we moved to Australia for a year with my wife's job. While out there I assumed house-husband duties (and two months of nannying for a colleague of my wife) and wrote up my research. This gave us a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to travel this great continent and see its unique flora, fauna and geology.
If any country is showing the effects of climate change early on, that country is Australia, and it is ironic that I only saw it by flying there. We saw first-hand the devastating bushfires and water shortages. Many sections of the Great Barrier Reef are already bleached beyond repair. Farmers are being driven to despair (and worse) by repeated crop failures in the Murray-Darling basin, the bread-basket of Australasia. An unheard-of five years of rain failures in the Daintree rainforest were followed in our year there by three times the average annual rainfall, drowning en masse the young of many indigenous species whose numbers were already cut by the dry years.
I have returned to the UK somewhat overwhelmed by the magnitude of the problems we have created. Indeed, Greens are often told by other politicians and commentators how we simply stop here, opposing everything and offering no solutions. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Our message to voters should be this: We can achieve a zero-carbon UK by 2050. We can achieve it without relying on future technological advances to save the day, and we can achieve it without sacrificing our quality of life, if we simply recognise how much we confuse consumption with happiness. We can achieve it with measures like this:
Nationally
- Better land-use planning - mixed housing, office, retail and cultural space centred on reliable public transport links would drastically reduce the demand for travel, and place public transport within walking or cycling distance of nearly everyone.
- Shift taxation to resource use - high fuel taxes can discourage unnecessary transport of goods, protecting local economies; use of renewable materials such as wood for building both reduces embodied energy and helps sequester carbon.
- Energy-efficient housing - old houses can be upgraded to current UK standards for new-build, and zero-carbon housing is already being built in Europe. Tighter energy standards and better enforcement would focus designers' and builders' efforts, and financial incentives would be quickly repaid in lower fuel bills, less expense on energy infrastructure and less cold-related illness in the elderly.
- Renewable energy, not nuclear - from wind to biomass, there is a wide range of energy sources already available that neither emit CO2 nor dump hazardous waste on future generations, that can be owned and managed by the communities they supply, and that create more jobs than the alternatives.
- Citizen's Income - the current tangle of means-tested, time-limited
benefits, rebates, allowances coerces many people into jobs that are
unrewarding, at odds with their principles or to society. It can
simultaneously leave them worse off than if they stayed at home. A basic
income available as a right would reward currently unrecognised voluntary
and childcare work, give unemployed time and space to retrain or find the
job they really want, and remove financial disincentives to starting paid
work./li>
- Fair international aid - we should not be demanding that poorer countries privatise their public services or compete with each other to supply us with cheap fruit from which they take little of the profit. We should be setting a good example at home, and offering them the grants and advice to enable them to avoid making the mistakes we made.
Locally
Stockport could be doing a lot better on environmental issues, but there is plenty of latent support for individual Green policies. For example, we would:
- Improve frequency and integration of public transport and vastly improve the status of cyclists.
- Promote a Stockport Car Club, giving people the convenience of a car or van when necessary without needing to own one.
- Protect Stockport's open spaces and visitor attractions and make them accessible to all without a car.
- Support neighbourhood shops and services across Stockport.
- Encourage zero-emission developments including high-quality social housing.
- Commit the Council to reducing its CO2 emissions through insulating and installing microgeneration on all council buildings; offering a pool of bicycles and zero-emission vehicles; sourcing local food and products where available; and training staff in energy conservation at work."
