Following the Green Party’s local election surge in Kirklees, its local group leader and deputy leader told the Canary about their bold ideas for the West Yorkshire borough.
In particular, Andrew Cooper and Alex Vickers want to:
- Push for what is essentially a type of Green Industrial Revolution;
- Oppose austerity and outsourcing, while securing alternative funding sources;
- Bring people together by pushing for more community spaces and community ownership;
- Improve support for people who are entitled to benefits, as Cooper highlighted in a previous article.
Kirklees Green Party leader Cooper explained how Green Party membership has quadrupled in Kirklees since Zack Polanski became national leader, saying:
Kirklees has gained about 1,000 members in the last six months. We’ve gone from about 300 members to nearly 1,300 members. So we’ve got a lot more people who are active and involved in our campaigns… In the wider community, we’re out and about and involved. We’ve got our – now 12 – councillors who are getting stuck in.
They’re really enjoying getting out there and mobilising, getting involved in clean-ups, taking up local issues, cleaning road signs, getting involved with planning applications. And so, all the things that people appreciate in their everyday lives, the Green Party are part of the solution and are very visible on the streets of Huddersfield.
A Green Industrial Revolution hub in Kirklees?
Kirklees played a prominent role in the Industrial Revolution. Huddersfield, for example, became “a textile powerhouse“. And Dewsbury emerged as the centre of the Heavy Woollen District. But in recent decades, establishment politicians have managed industrial decline in the area appallingly.
Cooper has hopes for turning this around, though, especially if the Green surge continues in the next general election. With a strong possibility of Huddersfield getting a Green MP in 2029, he said:
What I would really like is for us to be a hub for the new industries around retrofit, around small-scale renewables. Those are the sort of things, if we had a big programme of government putting into retrofit and into renewables, that young people around here could build a life upon, in terms of the money that they would need to get by. And there’s loads of work to do.
And that large-scale public works programme would bring a lot of benefits to the community around them. They would see that it’s worthwhile stuff. It’s not being a hedge fund manager. It’s being someone who brings real benefit to the community and for people’s lives.
Retrofitting is about improving existing buildings to make them more energy efficient and less reliant on fossil fuels.
Cooper also spoke about ensuring:
some of our poorer quality land and post-industrial buildings are brought into use.
For example, he said:
We’ve got a mill in Newsome, Old Newsome Mills, which would make brilliant social housing.
Opposing austerity and securing alternative funding
Cooper challenged the way establishment politicians have been passing on national austerity politics at a local level, insisting:
We oppose austerity. One of the ways we oppose it is by highlighting the impact on the council’s finances of government funding settlements… While Labour were in charge, they wouldn’t be as critical as we might be about highlighting the inadequacies of local government funding.
One way to avoid the fluctuations depending on who’s in charge down in London, he said, is:
drawing as much money as we can from elsewhere to make sure that we mitigate the impact of government funding [changes].
When the previous Labour council failed to apply for the Warm Homes Local Funding, for example, he stressed:
It was the Greens who highlighted that and put the spotlight on it.
The local Green Party has also joined efforts to oppose the highly controversial privatisation of local dementia care homes.
Overall, Cooper was clear that voters punished Labour in Kirklees because:
Labour didn’t stand up for them. They didn’t stand up for the things that they were concerned about. They operated the council in a very managerial way… They appeared to be very officer-led and it had been like that for quite a few years.
Rather than finding ways around government austerity or really calling it out, Labour simply passed it on to people in Kirklees. And Cooper thinks there were many ways to avoid doing this:
Parish councils, town councils have access to national lottery funding, which the council doesn’t. They could deliver some of the services and priorities that we’ve got in some areas… There is money from the Combined Authority that sometimes I don’t think we’ve taken the best advantage of, like the Brownfield Housing Fund.
Meanwhile, regarding the problems that come with outsourcing council services to private providers, he insisted that:
The Green Party does not believe that public money ought to be used to fund private organisations. We want services to be insourced. We’ve seen councils where they’ve outsourced services and then find that the service that they get is not as good as it could be. We should not be funding the profits of private individuals or large commercial investors, which takes money out of the council. We should be keeping that within.
But there’s also a big issue there about control and about [how], once you’ve actually lost the ability to provide services from within your council, it’s then very hard to bring that back again. So I’m pleased that there is still quite a lot of services actually that we still have in this council that other councils don’t… I’ve never been a fan of people making profit out of public services…
We did have housing management, which was outsourced. That was outsourced for quite a number of years. And lo and behold, we found that actually what we were being told was being delivered was not what was being delivered. We looked under the bonnet and found that the information we were told was not what was actually happening. And so that’s why housing management came back in-house in Kirklees… So I don’t think that we will be outsourcing again in the near future.
Empowering local communities and challenging neglect
We also spoke briefly with Alex Vickers, the deputy leader of the Green Party group on Kirklees Council. She told us of the neglect of community spaces that local people are facing:
The upkeep of green spaces and playable spaces is a really big issue for us… They’re overgrown… Some paths people literally can’t get through because of nettles and brambles… They’re not usable.
There’s also fly-tipping. We’ve had issues with vehicles being driven onto them and kids on scooters and bikes and cars. So we’ve managed to get barriers up on one of them, but only on one end. And it’s two entrance areas, so we’d like one on the other end too.
In one place, however, she said something as simple as a temporary camera has been able to stop fly-tipping quickly.
She’s clear that community spaces are a priority, though. She stressed:
There needs to be somewhere where kids can go and hang out. There’s nowhere. And we’ve got a massive clean up on the 10th and 11th of July to try and sort out this big green space that’s just covered in fly-tipping grossness, because there’s nowhere for kids to play football. There’s nowhere for kids to play cricket.
There’s a basketball pitch on that piece of land, but it’s going to take a bit of work to uncover it. So for me, it’s about bringing the communities together and giving them somewhere to own. That’s a priority for me at the minute, as well as all the fly-tipping, planning issues, potholes, all of that.
She said the more she’s got to know people, the more passionate she’s become about their lives. And although being a councillor is tough, she asserted:
I would just like to say that it’s brilliant… and to encourage people to stand forward if they’re passionate about their areas. Because yeah, it’s hard work. Yeah, I haven’t had a day off in four weeks. But it’s great. And you get to do brilliant things like presenting prizes and I’ve got, you know, school sports days coming up and Year Six leavers days and all of that kind of stuff, which people don’t talk about…
We talk about the money and the fly-tipping and the potholes and the tough stuff. But actually, building communities is just a brilliant thing to do.
A new collaborative reality and the chance of a Green council leader
As the Canary has reported, Kirklees Council still doesn’t have a leader two months after the local elections. Reform and the Green Party are the two largest groups on the council, so the heads of both groups are candidates for council leader. But Conservative councillors, in particular, have opted to back neither, so there’s a deadlock.
Independent councillors are a formidable force in North Kirklees (old Heavy Woollen District areas) and Holme Valley North. Greens, meanwhile, tend to do well in South Kirklees (areas in and around Huddersfield). As Cooper told us:
In many ways, we don’t conflict in terms of territory. There’s definitely room for cooperation. Obviously, with the leadership bid, they backed me for the leadership bid. So that was very positive. We work together and we liaise over things like motions and things like that. So there is a good working relationship, a mutual respect. There’s no tribal politics involved.
He added that:
The Greens, Independents of a variety of different hues, and the Liberal Democrats are working extremely positively together. So I’m very pleased that they backed my bid to be leader of the council. That’s been good because we’ve demonstrated that we can act cooperatively, that actually we’re pretty cohesive. Some people might have expected us to break apart. Actually, we’re sticking together quite well.
Ahead of the next council leadership vote on 15 July, the key question is whether Conservative councillors will pick a side, keep blocking progress, or just stay at home so the council can finally determine who its leader will be.
As we learned from Cooper and Vickers, the Kirklees Green Party has bold ideas that focus on social justice and building community power. Reform, meanwhile, doesn’t have a clue what it’s doing.
The upcoming leadership vote will be an important moment for Kirklees, offering two very different directions of travel for the borough.
Featured image via the Canary
By Ed Sykes
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