22
Jun
Greens stand 'serious chance' in Skipton and Ripon, says Brown
The Stray Ferret has spoken to all the candidates running for election in the Skipton and Ripon constituency and will be running features on each of them. Here, Andy Brown of the Green Party talks about what his priorities would be if elected.
The contest for Skipton and Ripon is, according to the pollsters, a two-horse race. Pollingreport.uk is predicting a Tory win, while Electoral Calculus is giving it to Labour. The Greens, currently polling at between 4 and 7%, don’t appear to be in a position to worry the bigger parties.
But that’s not stopping Andy Brown, the North Yorkshire councillor for Aire Valley who was one of the earliest candidates to throw his hat into the general election ring. An economist by training who made his career in further education, he told the Stray Ferret:
I genuinely think that in Skipton and Ripon we stand a serious chance. We have strong support, not just in Skipton, but across the whole of the Aire Valley.
The polls haven’t taken into account how well we’ve done locally. I won 79% of the vote [in Aire Valley at the council elections] and have the largest majority of anyone on North Yorkshire Council.
So, if Mr Brown’s optimism is backed by the voters’ trust and he ends up winning at the general election on July 4, what will he do with the opportunity? He said:
Ripon is a city that’s crying out for serious government investment in change. It’s got a stunning cathedral, the beautiful river and some lovely old buildings, but it’s been badly neglected over the years. It’s the most undertouristed city of its size in the country.
But the main issue I would try to focus on would be making sure that things like housing and GP services actually work for people.
Housing is a hot issue across the country – it's estimated that the UK has about 4.3 million fewer homes than it needs – and Skipton and Ripon is not immune.
Mr Brown said:
We should be living in a society where if you work hard you can either pay a reasonable rent or buy an affordable starter home. But instead of building affordable homes, developers have been allowed to build large numbers of executive homes, and with utter disregard for local styles. You look at the the centre of Harrogate or Ripon and the older buildings are beautiful, but the new houses being built on the fringes could be in Milton Keynes or anywhere else.
There are no extra GPs, no improvements to the sewage system, and where they’ve been built means that almost all journeys will have to be by car. Incredibly, not one of the new houses being built in Skipton has solar panels, an air-source heat-pump, or an electric vehicle charging point. They’re not fit for purpose – they'll all have to be retrofitted.
As for where he’d like these homes to be built, he says the greenbelt is not the answer:
'Gentrification’ is unpopular with some people, but I’d want to gentrify large parts of our neglected areas before I built on too many green fields that we need for food.
Another area of concern for Mr Brown is the usage and cost of energy. The Green Party would enable communities to own their own energy sources, and allow them to use any profit from selling excess energy to reduce their bills or benefit their local people.
Mr Brown believes the dominance of the big energy companies is not doing the public any favours. He said:
As a country, we’ve spent £51.1 billion subsidising energy bills. But at the same time, Shell has made £42 billion in profits and BP has made £27.7 billion. Essentially, we’ve allowed these companies to make excess profits. We got ripped off and then they used our own money to pretend they were helping us.
The Greens are constantly accused of wanting to put up energy prices, but the exact opposite is the case. For years, we’ve advocated the installation of more solar panels and better insulation. If we’d done that, people would be saving hundreds of pounds a year. I am absolutely convinced that Green policies will cut our bills because they would cut our consumption.
The notion that the public is being conned by big business is one that crops up in other areas of policy. One of the hottest environmental topics currently is the state of our waterways. Water companies have come under increasing scrutiny as raw sewage is pumped into watercourses after heavy rain, and partly as a result of that, only 14% of English rivers are in good ecological status.
Mr Brown said:
The Aire Valley has the most releases of sewage of any river in the UK – about twice as many as there are into the Wharfe. All local rivers are being treated in a shoddy way.
Yorkshire Water is owned by a Hong Kong consortium, the Singapore government and an Australian pension fund – and they don’t have the interests of Yorkshire Water customers at heart.
Yorkshire Water started with no debts whatsoever, but they now have huge debts and need to put up our bills. They took out every penny and loaded it with debt. We’ve been utterly taken for a ride.
Mr Brown added that ultimately, voting Green didn’t just make sense in terms of sustainability, but also financially. He said:
There’s only one party taking seriously the biggest challenge for our nation. There’s not just a moral reason to vote Green – it's the only economically practical way forward.
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