We have been made aware of some ill-informed comments made by the Liberal Democrat candidate for Leigh about the Greens.
In a column written by Carole Mulroney in the Leigh Times (19th April), she claims that the local Green Party branch has a “tight focus” and goes on to infer that we have no policies on social care, education, housing, culture, and tourism.
Whilst this makes for entertaining reading, this is factually incorrect, and we wish to correct the councillor’s wrong account.
The Green Party has a raft of innovative and transformative policies on the aforementioned topics, all available for public reading in our manifesto published on our website.
Such policies include;
We will lead a dynamic change of council effort, away from the provision of high-profit luxury homes and apartments, to the creation of genuinely affordable and sustainable homes and new social-to-rent homes for our residents. We will lead the way in making sure all Southend’s residents have a safe, warm, and efficient place to call home.
We will lead by example in the push for wage equality, the rollout of a Living Wage across the city, and by seeking an end to the zero-hours contracts that hamper the upward mobility of our often-overlooked essential and young workers. We support local traders and seek to form new local business opportunities afforded by renewable energy technologies and responsible food production.
We put individuals’ health and wellbeing first, and we have a strategy to ensure that our city is healthy. We will strive to deliver a substantial investment into the health of residents, working with the NHS and public health professionals across the city to improve access to mental health care, ensuring a commitment to maintain and improve our outdoor leisure and play spaces, and by actively working to improve the water quality at our beaches.
Southend hosts one of the most vibrant and thriving artistic communities in East Anglia, and our wealth of talented artists, writers, and musicians not only significantly contribute to the overall identity and wellbeing of the city, but additionally attract inward investment into the borough. We will support our flourishing networks of creatives by introducing a number of small bursaries for locally-derived cultural contributions and public-realm artworks, and we will aid our local artists in securing external grants, investments, and commissions.
And many, many more such policies in our Manifesto – which you can read here: https://southeastessex.greenparty.org.uk/manifesto/
We won’t resort to pointing out the obvious holes in the Councillor’s own manifesto, as her long and dry record of tepid inaction speaks for itself sufficiently.
The Green Party doesn’t resort to such dirty campaigning, and we believe that residents expect better from seasoned politicians. How on earth are the residents of Leigh supposed to take this candidate seriously if she openly publishes mistruths in the local paper.
We invite Cllr Mulroney to actually read our local manifesto before commenting further and to publicly correct her ill-informed comments.
We await her apology.
– Thu 21st April 2022.