BARRIE HUDSON chats to Damon Hooton, standing for the Liberal Democrat Party in South Swindon, in our series on all the local candidates in the General Election on May 7.

DAMON Hooton, 56, is a Southport-born supermarket worker who joined the Army at 17.

When he left in 1998 he was a staff sergeant, having served across the world for nearly 23 years.

His other work includes being a governor of a school for children with special needs and serving a group advocating assisted dying for mentally-competent terminally ill people.

On leaving the Army, he settled in Frome, Somerset, where he is a former mayor and has served as a local councillor for a dozen years.

Damon, a married father and grandfather, was initially a Conservative, but that allegiance didn’t last long.

“I very, very quickly became disillusioned,” he said. “I didn’t like – having worked with them for a couple of years – the way the Tory party then treated what you might call ordinary people.

“I thought it was very arrogant, very cold, very patronising, and that just wasn’t me. So I left them.”

Neither was the Labour Party an option, as Damon feels it lost its founding values long ago.

“The Liberal Democrats is my political home. They’re fair, they’re open, they take you for what you are.

“You clearly have to toe the party line, but that’s a very loose rein.

“The expression used is that it’s a broad church, and you are allowed to rise in the Liberal Democrats as far as your talents, abilities and wishes allow it.

“I would never be here under the Conservative Party I left.”

Damon sees the economy, housing, the benefits system and the NHS as being among the most pressing ones for the constituency.

If elected next month he promises, like his South Swindon Lib Dem counterpart, to relocate immediately.

“I will put the people of the constituency first,” he said.

“If that means going against the party I will do that.

“It’s people first, party second for me. I will work with whoever I need to work with, or whoever is willing to work with me, to achieve the best for the town.”

Damon stands by the record of his party in government.

He said: “I think the achievements of the coalition are that they have put this country back on a more stable financial platform.

“We have better trading and people have a better opinion of us abroad than they did. We’re not quite the basket case that some people in this country think we are.

“I think, by and large, if this was a school report I’d say, ‘Good but could have done better.’

“To qualify that, I don’t agree with everything that’s been done in the coalition, but that’s politics and that happens.

“I don’t agree with a lot of what my party’s been forced to swallow, if you like, in exchange for the good stuff that we have done – and we have done a lot of good stuff.

“I know that because the Tories are stealing the ideas and claiming credit for them.”

Examples of this, he added, include raising the tax threshold, free school meals, more funding for education, shared parental leave, investment in renewable energy and marriage equality.

Also standing in South Swindon are: Robert Buckland (Conservative); Talis Kimberley-Fairbourn (Green); John Short (UKIP); Anne Snelgrove (Labour).