BARRIE HUDSON chats to Poppy Hebden-Leeder, standing for the Green Party in North Swindon, in our series on all the candidates in the General Election on May 7.

POPPY Hebden-Leeder admits to having been thoroughly turned off politics for much of her adult life.

“It didn’t appeal,” she said. “It seemed to be a lot of people standing around, saying, ‘We’re going to do this, we’re going to do that,’ and not doing anything.

“I joined the Green Party two years ago, so I suppose that’s when something changed.

“I’ve always voted; I think there’s a moral obligation to vote and to be part of democracy, but I did feel very much that it was hard to find someone who was standing for the things I wanted.

“That’s changed over the last 10 years, with more people standing for the Green Party.”

Why the Greens?

““My husband and I had been talking about it for a while and one day I just sat down in the kitchen and signed us up. I don’t think anybody in my family has joined a political party, but I was just so angry at seeing what was going on around me.

“When the current Government came to power in 2010, I was a single parent and felt very much like a sort of undesirable type of person. It felt very much like it was ‘proper’ two-parent families only.

“I’ve watched over the last five years as things have happened, targeting some of the most vulnerable people in society. Having spent time in one of those groups that could be a target of these cuts, I thought, ‘Gosh, somebody needs to speak up about this.’ These are people. These are human lives that are being affected by the policies.”

Poppy is 40 and worked until recently for the Natural Environment Research Council. She came to Swindon a decade ago for the research council job and soon grew to love the town.

She is originally from Essex, and her parents were teachers. Poppy has a daughter and three stepsons.

Her membership of the Green Party, she says, reflects not just a sense of justice but a long-established environmental consciousness.

“When you live in one of the richest countries in the world, it’s bizarre to look around and not understand how we’ve got to such an unequal way of living.

“I would hope that it would be a much fairer society. We’ve got staggering inequalities – we’ve got super-rich people and we’ve got people relying on food banks. I would get rid of that. There’s something very wrong to have that happening with the wealth we’ve got.

“There’s generational unfairness and there’s inter-generational unfairness. We’re loading the dice against our children and grandchildren on not tackling some of the issues we’re facing.

“This is about making it fairer for a lot of people. At the moment it’s very fair for some people but not for everybody.”

Poppy would like to see Swindon finally have its own university, for the NHS to be entirely publicly owned and for society to be run for the many rather than the few, and insists such a society can only be delivered by the Green Party.

She added: “We’re not answerable to businesses or individuals who have a particular policy focus. We are answerable to the people who elect us in the local areas because it’s them and only them that actually matter.”

Also standing in North Swindon are: Justin Tomlinson (Conservative); Mark Dempsey (Labour); Janet Ellard (Liberal Democrat); James Faulkner (UKIP).