And so the end is near

Tomorrow is decision day. I have been knocking on doors whenever I've had the chance and a great many people still appear to be undecided. Maybe you are too?

To get a look at what I and other candidates think about a selection of local and national issues, click over to the website of They Work For You and punch in your postcode. The absence of some of the candidates is almost as enlightening as the answers of those that replied...

In a last ditch bid for votes, I am also going to post up the address I gave at the start of one of the hustings in Huntingdon. It does a fairly decent job of summing up what I'm about.

Before you read that though, I'll leave you with a link to the Green Party's Policy Matchmaker to see how our policies match up with what you'd like to see happen.

Whoever you vote for tomorrow, make it a vote you believe in....


Good evening ladies and gentlemen. My name is John Clare and I am the Green party candidate for Huntingdon. I live locally with my wife and young son and I share the everyday stresses and frustrations familiar to anyone who juggles work and family.

I’ve now decided to add to all that by standing for Parliament.

Why?

There are a few reasons but they boil down to a sense that we are being taken for granted, that things are badly wrong and that our politics and politicians - the old way of doing business - cannot put things right.

You don’t need me to tell you we face a crisis - in this country and beyond. In fact, I think we face three, linked crisis.

One - the economic crisis: Unemployment, looming cuts to our public services, the uncertainty, stress and the worry it brings people.

Two – the social crisis: The gulf that has opened between rich and poor, young and old, the growing fear and distrust we have of each other in an increasingly unequal and unfair society.

Three – the environmental crisis: In the last 200 years some 500 species have become extinct in England. We have lost many of the wild places where those plants and animals lived and where we looked to for relief from the pressures of life, for a connection to the natural world.

And now climate change – man-made climate change – threatens even further damage to our environment. I say our environment because ultimately we need the natural world for our own survival.

Our children and grandchildren face a future which is impoverished – in every sense of the word.

I said these crises were linked. So too are the solutions. By building a fairer society, by building a greener economy based on creating jobs and on public service, we can also start to heal the environmental hurts that threaten us.

Those figures on extinction come from a report by Natural England. I want to quote their chief executive. She said: “We all lose when biodiversity declines. Every species has a role, and like rivets in an aeroplane, the overall structure of our environment is weakened each time a single species is lost.”

Society is like that too. We are the rivets: us; our heath service; our local businesses, schools and shops and the public transport that links them. When these things start to give – when services are cut, when schools are underfunded, when local shops give way to out of town superstores linked by fast roads which slice through towns and villages, when boredom and crime and fear fill the gaps, then the structure of our society is weakened and we are all the losers.

This is the legacy of the way the old parties have governed.

The ‘Great Car Economy,’ hailed by the Conservatives under Margaret Thatcher has bent our society out of shape. Services are spread out and distant; local businesses go to the wall; all of us are more and more isolated from each other.

At the same time, both Conservative and Labour governments have built us an economy built on the shifting sands of the City – on speculation and debt. The few – the very few – have become wealthy at a huge price to the rest of us and to our environment.

Their solutions are either to roll back the state, slash services and let the Devil take the hindmost or to further increase consumption and debt and waste.

Enough!

A crisis can also be an opportunity and here and now we have the opportunity to take a new way – a Green way.

Not the pursuit of profit above all else, not the loss of community and service and of our natural life support systems.

Instead, investment in training and in jobs that will give us back an economy built on real things, on jobs and a decent wage. Jobs in industries and services that will help us move to a greener, low carbon society.

Instead, more schools and more teachers, streets and towns where people come before cars and where local business can thrive and where we can get to know each other again in a way that seems lost. Life on a more human scale.

That’s the Green way. That’s why I’m standing here as the Green Party candidate and that is why I hope you will vote for me.

Thank you.