This edition is about the General Election
SVP CAFOD Election Campaign Thanks to the 71 people who signed the sheet of questions to the candidates. Here are the answer’s received
Sir Peter Conservative Worthing West would be pleased to discuss the matter further with parishioners. We replied saying there isn’t time to arrange a meeting but if re-elected we could arrange a meeting with him later in the summer.
Tom Rutland East Worthing & Shoreham Green Party Election Candidate Thank you for getting in touch.
As a parliamentary candidate, a voluntary and unpaid role, I have no office or staff team, have been working in a full-time, regular job alongside being a candidate.
Now that the general election has been called for Thursday 4 July, I am on unpaid leave from work and campaigning full time, focusing on meeting voters at their doors. I hope that either I or one of our campaign volunteers will be at your door in the days and weeks ahead of 4 July. I will respond as soon as I’m able to – prioritising urgent cases – but this may take some time, as I am receiving a very high volume of correspondence. Thank you for your understanding.
If you live locally and haven’t already provided your address, please do as I prioritise replying to local people in the East Worthing and Shoreham constituency and – in line with parliamentary convention – I’m only able to pick up issues for people who live locally.
If I am fortunate enough to be elected, I will have a full staff team – including caseworkers – and a local office here in the constituency. I will hold regular advice surgeries and arrange community events to open up politics more. Representing you will, rightly, be my only job – I will be the active, full-time and focused MP you deserve.
Debbie Woudman East Worthing & Shoreham Green Party Election Candidate
Thank you to the SVP & J & P groups for the marvellous job you are doing to build a sense of community with your parishioners. I am grateful to receive interesting and passionate questions about our wider society and the world we share with nature.
As your questions require detailed answers, I wanted firstly to share a link with you to our manifesto: https://greenparty.org.uk/about/our-manifesto/
This document clearly evidences our commitment to addressing wealth inequality and opportunities for innovative wealth distribution which will tackle food poverty and homelessness.
It also explicitly states our position on reinstating the Foreign Aid budget.
Finally, I believe you will also see our commitment to ensuring accountability of all corporations to uphold the rights of workers, as well as the rights of the natural world.
Thank you for your understanding that at this busy time I am unable to go into any greater detail, but assure you of my willingness to work hard to ensure the above three items are actioned in the next government in the event I were to be elected.
Best regards, and again my thanks to the parishioners for actively engaging in the democratic process.
Debbie Woudman
Sonya Mallin Worthing West Green Party Election Candidate
1. Cost of Living Crisis:
I think it’s helpful to remember that it’s not simply a cost of living crisis, but a cost of inequality crisis. Never before has there been such a disparity between high earners and the rest of society. If elected, Greens will campaign to:
- Increase Universal Credit and legacy benefits by £40 a week.
• End the unfair five-week wait for benefits which is pushing people into debt.
• Abolish the two-child benefit cap and lift 250,000 children out of poverty.
• Increase all disability benefits by 5%.
• Ensure that pensions are always uprated in line with inflation and keep pace with wage rises across the economy.
• Increase carer’s allowance by at least 10% a month.
• Scrap the bedroom tax
The Green Party has additional measures which are aimed at helping people struggling with the cost of living including free home insulation, subsidised public transport, and investment in the public services.
- International Aid:
The Green Party can do better than that and so we should. The UK carries a particular responsibility for its high share of historic global emissions and as a former colonial power. In recognition of the importance of supporting countries in the Global South to decarbonise their economies and be resilient to climate impacts, Greens would ensure that the UK’s existing climate finance commitments are delivered in full. Elected Greens will also push for the UK to:
- Go beyond restoring international aid to 0.7% of GNI, raising this to 1% by 2033.
- Increase the climate finance budget to 1.5% of GNI by 2033, with an additional contribution to a newly established Loss and Damage Fund in order to help climate vulnerable countries to respond to increasingly severe storms, floods and rising temperatures.
- Support a new international law against ecocide and stand with those protecting biodiversity globally, including indigenous peoples.
- Enable the people of the Global South to take the lead on how aid is spent, as those with most at stake know best how to solve their problems. In some cases, this may mean direct support to affected populations rather than working through authoritarian or corrupt governments.
- Establish a Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry for Truth and Reparatory Justice to address reparations needed to redress global inequalities caused by the trans-Atlantic trafficking of enslaved Africans.
- Work within international frameworks and with international partners to remove the burden of debt from the Global South.
- Make finance and technology available to support the development of environmentally and socially sustainable economies of low-income countries to tackle the causes and impacts of the climate and nature emergencies.
- Business Accountability:
Businesses do need to be held accountable for their operations at both home and abroad. Workers rights have been in decline for decades with too many people being exploited in the workplace with too little protection from the law. We believe the trade unions are a vital partner in building a fairer, greener economy and so we would campaign to:
- Repeal current anti-union legislation and replace this with a positive Charter of Workers’ Rights.
- Introduce a maximum 10:1 pay ratios for all private and public-sector organisations so no worker has to see their CEO getting paid more in a day than they do in an entire year
- Introduce a minimum wage of £15 an hour for all, no matter your age, with the costs to small businesses offset by increasing the Employment Allowance to £10,000.
- Deliver equal rights for all workers currently excluded from protections, including ‘gig economy’ workers and those on ‘zero hours’ contracts.
We will legislate for workers to have full employment rights from day one of their employment and properly fund the enforcement of workers’ rights and abolish tribunal fees, to ensure that bad employers have nowhere to hide.
All large and medium-size companies will be required to carry out equal pay audits and redress any inequality uncovered both in terms of equal pay for equal work, and unfair recruitment and retention practices.
And we will campaign for safe sick pay, because it’s good for workers, good for employers and good for public health.
‘Gig economy’ workers – like those working for Uber and Deliveroo – are excluded from fundamental workers’ rights and we believe every worker deserves equal protection. So, we will bring platform workers under a single legal status of ‘worker’, with full and equal rights from the first day of employment.
Regarding taxes, Green MPs will support an increase in the rate of the windfall tax on oil and gas production and the closing of existing loopholes and tax-relief mechanisms. We would introduce a windfall tax on banks when excessive profits are being made. We would also propose a range of changes to VAT, reducing it on hard-pressed areas such as hospitality and the arts and increasing it on financial services and private education. These changes would raise up to an additional £40bn in business taxes during the five years of the next parliament.
Elected Greens will advocate for a carbon tax to incentivise businesses to decarbonise their supply chains and to help raise the money needed to shift to a zero-carbon economy. There will be an alignment of all existing taxes on fossil fuels and carbon emissions to aid compliance. Elected Greens will propose levying a carbon tax at an initial rate of £120 per tonne, rising to a maximum of £500 per tonne of carbon emitted within ten years. This is deliberately designed to make it cheaper for the emitter to take steps to reduce emissions rather than pay the tax. We estimate we will be raising up to an additional £80bn by the end of the parliament, then falling back after that as carbon emissions reduce across the economy.
And finally, to ensure our natural environment is protected, we will introduce a new Rights of Nature Act giving legal personhood to nature. For the first time, it would give Nature legal personhood, meaning that it could not be exploited for financial gain. The Act would also set standards for soil quality and phasing out the most harmful pesticides immediately (including glyphosate) and, as we move towards regenerative farming methods, introduce rigorous tests for all pesticides. Only pesticides that pass this test, and demonstrably don’t harm bees, butterflies and other wildlife, would be approved for use in UK and we would end the emergency authorisation of bee-killing pesticides.
The Act will work in tandem with our commitment to a separate Climate and Nature Act. This will address the full extent of the climate and nature crisis in line with the most up-to-date science – and ensure a comprehensive and joined-up approach to the ecological emergency. Elected Greens will also push for a Clean Air Act, which will set new air quality standards for the UK. We would enshrine the right to breathe clean air in the law. Elected Greens would seek to strengthen and prevent any rollback of existing protections of the Green Belt, National Landscapes and Sites of Special Scientific Interest.
We will also set aside 30% of our land and seas by 2030 in which nature will receive the highest priority and protection and take the water companies back into public ownership.
We believe the only way to end the scandal of our filthy water is to end the failed experiment with privatisation and bring the water companies back into public ownership. Money that is now being extracted by shareholders would be invested to fix the leaks and rebuild infrastructure.
Public water companies must also ensure that abstraction respects nature. Elected Greens will push to restore rivers and take a nature-based solutions approach to the prevention of flooding and storm overflows.
We would increase DEFRA’s budget by £1.5bn, allowing an increase in funding for the Environment Agency and Natural England, to support the vital work they do to protect our environment. This would include developing a soil health monitoring programme for England, to match those in Scotland and Wales, to assess and understand changes in the health of soil over time. This would end the flow of pollution into rivers and the sea from fertilisers, agricultural waste and sewage, through effective monitoring and enforcement.
These are the replies to date any further ones received will be added
