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Jun
'I'm no yes man', says Conservative election candidate
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, Andrew Jones of the Conservative Party talks about what his priorities would be if elected.
Seventy-five Conservative MPs will not be standing for re-election at the general election on July, but Andrew Jones is not one of them.
The Harrogate and Knaresborough MP, who first took the seat in 2010 and has won it at the last four elections, says he has no intention of going anywhere and is “in it to win it”.
But if he is re-elected to parliament on July 4, what can constituents expect? According to Theyworkforyou.com, a website dedicated to parliamentary transparency, Mr Jones has 'hardly ever' rebelled against his party line, so does he have an independent voice, or is he more of a 'yes man'?
He said:
Whenever you stand for parliament, you stand on a manifesto. The manifesto for a sitting government is your democratic mandate to implement the policies within it.
So to suddenly say, ‘I'm standing on this manifesto, but actually what I'm really going to do is implement a different one’ is an astonishing breach of trust.
So, this isn't about being a yes man – it's about being trustworthy.
Mr Jones told the Stray Ferret that his priorities would not necessarily be the same this time around as they were at previous elections. He said:
At every election, you have to face the challenges that are ahead of you. In 2019 we didn’t anticipate that there would be a pandemic followed by the energy spike caused by the Ukraine war. That’s dominated the last parliament.
The next parliament will be a different place. My priorities will be about making sure that we take advantage of the opportunities that have been created.
One of the opportunities, he said, was presented by the trade deals the UK has entered into since Brexit, which he opposed. He said:
We have local companies which export. I’ve run things like export fares, basically encouraging people to think about more export work, to think about the support that is available to them.
We can look at other things, such as life sciences or fintech or green industries, or AI. These are the interests of the future. It's about making sure that we get our share of these markets.
Closer to home, one of the biggest issues locally over the last year has been water quality.
Mr Jones successfully campaigned to get bathing water status for the River Nidd in Knaresborough, and yet parliamentary records show he has generally voted against measures to improve water quality.
In 2021, he voted against requiring polluters to pay for rectifying the damage they have caused, and later in the same year, he voted against requiring a reduction in the harm caused by untreated sewage discharges. But he said:
I have voted for a costed action plan to improve water quality in this country. I have not voted for uncosted action plans.
I have voted to make the water companies more accountable, including the amount of fines which can be levied for illegal breaches.
He does not back the renationalisation of the water companies – a policy favoured by the Green Party – but agrees that despite investment into the industry having risen since privatisation 35 years ago, it nevertheless “has been under-invested in”.
Mr Jones was a junior transport minister under David Cameron and Theresa May and pushed through a number of measures locally in this field, getting rid of the old Pacer trains, bringing in new rolling stock, and working for the introduction of direct rail services between Harrogate and London.
He also threw his weight behind HS2, but ultimately in vain, as it was cancelled by his boss, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak. He said:
HS2 is the first railway line built north of London since the reign of Queen Victoria.
So when you think that we also haven't had a runway built in the south-east of England since the passenger jet was invented, and we haven't had a road-building programme since the 1970s, you can see that we've had a long-term failure to invest in transport infrastructure. So I set about changing as much as I could of that.
For the coming parliament, Mr Jones, who describes himself as “socially liberal and economically conservative”, lists other priorities as an increase in special educational needs (SEND) school places, the construction of more starter homes and small business units, and tackling the backlog in healthcare provision.
And he insists that he, not his main rival, the Liberal Democrats’ Tom Gordon, is the man for the job. In a swipe at his opponent, he said:
When I look at the Liberal Democrat candidate, I see somebody who's on his third constituency in five years, having also been a councillor in Wakefield and in Newcastle, having run the office for the MP for North Shropshire and worked in the House of Lords. That is a lot of political geography.
That message may not have landed just yet with the electorate, though – the Liberal Democrats are currently ahead of the Conservatives, by between half a percentage point and 16 percentage points, depending on the polling company.
But Mr Jones believes there’s everything to play for. Although he acknowledges a certain degree of disenchantment among voters, he does not believe that they want wholesale change. He said:
I think people are a bit fed up with politics as a whole, actually, but I think that there's no real desire for a comprehensive set of changes.
People know we've been through a long, hard slog, and they know we need to come out of that on the other side, and we are. So I don’t think that I feel out of touch.
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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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