Biog:
Emma’s home base has been in the constituency since the age of five. “I grew up spending the holidays roaming across our Wiltshire countryside, building dens, and learning about the wildlife,” she says.
After school in Wiltshire, Emma studied materials science at Cambridge University and did a PhD. She went on to do an executive MBA at the London Business School, where she discovered a passion for economics. In 2005 she joined the New Economics Foundation (nef) where she wrote an influential report on Behavioural Economics.
Before returning to live in Marlborough, she spent two years in Switzerland with her family, where she worked with an organisation focusing on monetary reform.
Emma is determined to bring about positive change: “We need to develop an economic and financial system that will benefit all of society and will stop us from using the planet’s resources in an unsustainable way.”
“This is a wonderful part of the world, and I feel very privileged to live here. I’ve always thought of our area as relatively affluent, but I have been shocked to discover that families in Marlborough and Devizes are relying on food banks. That shouldn’t – and doesn’t need to be – the case.
“I will campaign for greater local power over decision-making and over how our taxes are spent. I believe in a land value tax, and progressive taxation. We need to reform the education system to enable school pupils to spend time in local businesses, so they are better prepared for the world of work on leaving education.
“We need large-scale investment in low-carbon technologies. There is great expertise in this constituency, and we need to harness it for the benefit of the people who live here. “We also need to sort out public transport system so that bus and train services are linked. This is vital in rural communities in order to stop our reliance on cars – and will both reduce our carbon impact and reduce stress on the road infrastructure.
“The Green Party has come of age in this election and is the only party that understands both the underlying economics and the importance of long-term investment. So I became a member. When the candidacy for Devizes suddenly became free the question changed from ‘why don’t politicians do something?’ to ‘why don’t I do something?’. It was time to stand up for what I believe in.”
Immigration:
People are understandably angry about the decline in living standards, and immigrants are often blamed for low wages, lack of housing, and squeezed public services.
The Green Party believes the root cause of these problems isn’t immigration itself, but failed government policy in other areas.
To redress these failings we are committed to:
• Increasing the Minimum Wage, aiming for £10 an hour by 2020.
• Building much-needed social housing, neglected for decades by previous governments.
• Properly funding and protecting our public services; halting the privatisation of the NHS, and investing in adequate provision in schools.
The Green Party doesn’t believe in open borders, but nor do we support an arbitrary cap on numbers. Our long-term vision is to work towards not just a fairer society for the UK, but a world where migration is less necessary. We will do this by working to reduce wars, climate change and limited economic opportunities. We welcome the diversity and cultural awareness that immigrants bring to society, and want to reduce restrictions on foreign students.
With increasing globalisation, it’s more important than ever that we integrate with each other, learn from each other and respect each other.
Education:
Green Party leader Natalie Bennett describes our current education system as a place where students are “treated like mince in a sausage machine, shoved through exam after exam”. The Green Party believes education is a lifelong learning process, and more education benefits everyone. It should allow everyone to reach their full potential, and be free and accessible to all.
We will scrap university tuition fees, and restore the Education Maintenance Allowance for 16 and 17 year olds. We’ll introduce a more comprehensive system of local schools with mixed ability teaching, qualified teachers, and smaller class sizes. We also want better provision for creative subjects in schools, and would reverse the recent cuts to the Music Service by Wiltshire County Council.
Cuts to core youth services have really affected the young people in Marlborough and surrounding villages and put pressure on voluntary groups. The Green Party would introduce Youth Schools – safe places for young people to socialise in the evenings, with options to participate in vocational training or life skills lessons.
Parents, teachers and local communities should all have a say in how our schools are run, so we’ll make schools more democratic and accountable to local people.
Health:
Our NHS is fantastic, yet the current government believes that “competition” and encouraging provision by private firms will make it better and more efficient. We don’t. Setting up an internal “market” is costly, inefficient, and impossible to regulate well. Patients come after profit.
At the Great Western Hospital in Swindon patients have been put at risk due to the poor hygiene standards provided by penny pinching, tax avoiding private firms.
The Green Party will restore the NHS to a fully accountable public service with a minimal role for commercial companies. Mental health will also be treated as a much higher priority, with increased funding and resources.
Our health policy promotes a healthier society, preventing illness by having a clean environment, encouraging cycling and walking, insulating homes and giving everyone access to a balanced diet.
We will make sure that elderly people are provided with good free social care so that they can stay in their homes for as long as they choose, avoiding hospitalisation due to lack of care at home.
We believe social care should not be a privilege, but a right.
The Economy:
The Green Party’s main economic focus is on building an ecologically sustainable economy that will work for everyone. Inequality has been rising: real incomes of poorer people have reduced whilst the wealth of the richest has soared. Over 3000 homes in this constituency are in fuel poverty. We want to change these things.
We believe that the government must balance its books over the medium term, but that the current obsession with reducing the deficit using austerity is wrong.
The economy needs investment to generate sustainable growth. Nationally, we’d fund the biggest ever programme of home insulation, creating over 100,000 jobs and tackling fuel poverty for millions. We’ll build 500,000 new zero-carbon socially rented homes. And we’d invest in alternative energy industries, making us world leaders in this field. Wiltshire already has a great record on solar power, which brings millions into the county every year in business rates as well as delivering a reliable carbon-free source of local energy.
Investing in Wiltshire would result in thousands of new jobs, new homes for local people, less fuel poverty, a thriving economy for local businesses, and more funds for Wiltshire Council to do the jobs we expect it to do.
Transport:
Transport is a huge problem in a rural constituency like this one. People who can’t afford to buy a car find their opportunities for jobs, apprenticeships or further study severely limited. Elderly people who can no longer drive can be forced to move into old-people’s homes, as they can’t get to shops. Train fares are prohibitively expensive. There aren’t enough cycle paths, and minor roads which should be cycle friendly often have dangerous pot holes.
The Green Party would stop the austerity drive that is causing Wiltshire Council to cut bus services such as Connect2, and campaign for better services such as a direct service between Marlborough and Devizes at suitable times for commuting to work or study.
We’d bring the rail service back under public ownership, ensuring that profits are reinvested and fares reduced and we’d campaign for the lost rail services to Marlborough and Devizes to be reinstated, paid for by the scrapping of the High Speed Two project.
Our local road building policy would focus on improved safety, especially for cyclists.
We aim to reduce the need for transport by supporting local facilities and by facilitating working from home with better broadband.
Environment:
The failure to tackle climate change properly and the resulting extreme weather is doing disproportionate damage to the world’s most vulnerable. The Green Party’s foreign policy priority is to work at the global level to keep within 2 degrees of global warming.
Despite serious public concern, the government has ploughed ahead with fracking in the UK. This is not in the interests of the people or the environment, but simply a quick way to short term profits for the energy companies. The Green Party will ban fracking and work to gradually phase out fossil fuel based energy generation. We will instead invest in renewable technologies. We will also improve flood defences, to avoid a repeat of last year’s devastating floods.
We will invest in proper home insulation, to reduce our use of energy, which will help the 3,200 local homes in fuel poverty. We will campaign for local services that will help people to reduce their carbon footprint – such as reversing the charge Wiltshire Council are introducing for green waste collections and making sure that recycling centres remain open.
The Green Party will seek to integrate environmental, social and economic objectives in all areas of environmental and rural policy.
election special 2015
