Greens enter the election hunt

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Party selects candidate for Brentford & Isleworth

Hounslow Green Party has selected John Hunt from Isleworth as its candidate in the Brentford & Isleworth constituency for the next general election.

He is a 52 year old nurse who retrained after being a software engineer. John has lived in the constituency since 1987. He has a long history of campaigning on a wide range of Green issues including health policy and human rights issues including gay and lesbian rights.

Last year he became a member of the newly created body the Patient and Public Involvement Forum for the West Middlesex Hospital. He campaigned against Heathrow Terminal 5 with special reference to air quality. In 1999 he was involved with other members of OutRage! in the attempt to arrest Robert Mugabe for torture and other human rights violations.

He says that one of the key issues of the election should be climate change, "The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has predicted rising sea levels and threats to human health, and David King, the UK's chief scientific adviser, has called it a bigger threat than terrorism, yet the government has still raised the limits on CO2 emissions, declined to tighten energy efficiency requirements for new buildings and is falling over backwards to help the airline industry to expand. The talk is the talk of a concerned government but the action is dictated by big business."

He pledges to campaign for investment to prevent the kind of sewage spills that blighted the Thames last year saying, "The proper maintenance of public services is one of the key elements in our programme", he said. "and bringing those services back into proper public control is an essential step in the process. What we are seeing now is a wholesale crumbling of our essential public and community infrastructure. It is absurd that a question of whether the sewage system can be upgraded - and no-one is saying it doesn't need to be - is tied in to whether one of those silly named watchdog's of private sector companies is going to let them increase water prices enough."

On Heathrow he will fight against the continued expansion of the aviation industry saying, "The cost of flights must reflect the environmental cost. Only under the Green Party will you get sensible aviation policies based on respect for people and respect for the environment."

In 2001 the Greens came fourth in the constituency with Nic Ferriday polling over 1,000 votes.

March 30, 2005