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Jun
Greens 'will not be knocking on doors' in Harrogate and Knaresborough, candidate reveals
The Stray Ferret is speaking to all the candidates running for election in the Harrogate and Knaresborough constituency and will be running features on each of them. Here, Shan Oakes of the Green Party talks about what her priorities would be if elected.
The Green Party will be campaigning in Harrogate and Knaresborough, but not as hard as they might, candidate Shan Oakes has revealed.
She said that a deal with local Liberal Democrats will see the two parties help each other out in neighbouring constituencies by standing aside in a joint effort to oust the Conservative incumbents.
She told the Stray Ferret:
I’m standing because it’s very important that we get the Green message out, through hustings and interviews, but we will not be knocking on doors here. We’ll be doing that in Wetherby and Easingwold.
The Lib Dems will be knocking on doors here, but not in Wetherby and Easingwold. We have come to the most sensible arrangement we can.
She added:
The main thing at this election is to get the Conservatives out.
They have had their day, and they’ve shown how nasty they are, with their hostile environment for migrants. It’s becoming a hostile environment for everyone anyway.
It’s not the first time Ms Oakes has stood for election in the constituency. She stood in 2015 and garnered 4.4% of the vote, and again in 2017 and 2019, but stood down at both those elections to give the Lib Dems a stronger chance against the Tories.
Ms Oakes said that one of her main priorities if elected would be working for more and better public transport, and favours the renationalisation of the buses. She said:
We could make them run properly for people, so they could confidently leave their car at home and get on a clean electric bus, knowing that one will come, that they can be under shelter if it’s raining, and that there’ll be good information.
It’s not rocket science to get that organised, but there just hasn’t been the political will. That’s an example of this kind of laissez-faire politics, where people just go ‘oh yeah, this is how it is – this is how it will always be’. We don’t accept that.
The bus services would be integrated with the railways, which would also be renationalised. Ideally, a network of paths would be created between settlements so that people could walk or cycle instead of taking the car.
Ms Oakes said:
That might sound incredibly radical, but it isn’t. It would actually be relatively cheap to do that.
She believes that the water companies should also be brought back under state control. She said:
The Greens are very much about public services owned by the public, run for the public, not used as cash-cows.
At the moment, the money is just siphoned off to [water company] shareholders and not put back into the system. Massive infrastructure work needs to be done on the drains and sewage system, but it’s not being done. It’s all for profit and not public service.
We hardly hold the water companies to account at all at the moment, because the Tories have slashed all the regulatory bodies, including the Environment Agency – there's hardly any of it left.
The result, she said was high bills for customers and high pollution levels in waterways including the River Nidd. She said:
The blame is firmly with [Conservative MP] Andrew Jones and his lot on this issue. For him to say ‘oh, we’ve got bathing water status’ is absolute poppycock. It’s just ridiculous. All it means is that the remnants of the Environment Agency will test it and it will be ‘poor’, ‘poor’, ‘very poor’.
If you don’t change the the whole the arrangement, the whole commitment to have clean rivers where things can live, everything will be dead.
Still on the subject of water, albeit of a different kind, she said that Harrogate Spring Water “shouldn’t be expanding – they should be disappearing”. She said:
Does Harrogate want to be the centre of plastic bottle creation? Absolutely mad. On top of that, to say we can take away trees planted specially by the Rotary Club with schoolchildren. On all fronts, it’s wrong, wrong, wrong.
In light of the acceleration in housebuilding across the country, she also believes there should be a different approach taken to development. She said:
Housing is a huge issue in Harrogate and Knaresborough. It makes me so angry. Inappropriate housing built on the wrong sites, all over land which should be either for nature or for growing food.
We’ve got a lot of brilliant places to live, if only we could renovate them. One of the major problems, which nobody ever mentions, is VAT. You don’t pay VAT on newbuild, but you do on renovation. How crazy is that?
Renewable energy should be built into houses. They’re building some houses with roofs that can’t even support solar panels – they're not strong enough. And they’ve all got gas boilers in.
She added:
I can’t understand what’s the matter with humans, especially governments.
Voters will head to the polls in Harrogate and Knaresborough on July 4.
The deadline to register to vote is 11.59pm on June 18. You can register online here.
The full list of candidates for Harrogate and Knaresborough are as follows:
Tom Gordon, Liberal Democrat
Paul Haslam, Independent
Andrew Jones, Conservative
Shan Oakes, Green Party
Stephen Douglas Metcalfe, Independent
Jonathan Swales, Reform UK
Conrad Whitcroft, Labour
The Stray Ferret will be hosting hustings events in both Harrogate and Ripon ahead of election day. You can sign up to attend the Harrogate event here and Ripon hustings here.
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