Prominent trade unionist and former Labour candidate backs Greens

Geoff Martin, Labour's parliamentary candidate in Sutton and Cheam in 1992 and a leading campaigner in the fight to save services at St Helier Hospital today called on local voters to back Sutton's Green Candidate Peter Hickson.

Geoff Martin, who lives in Sutton and who was expelled by the Labour Party last year, said: "Voters sick and tired of the spin and sleaze of the main Parties have a real choice in Sutton and Cheam and I would urge them to vote for the Green candidate Peter Hickson and give the political elite a real kick up the backside.

"The Greens oppose privatisation of services like the NHS and support workers rights and decent pay and pensions. I would call on all trade unionists and socialists in Sutton to make a positive decision and give Peter Hickson and the Green Party your vote. The Labour Party in this area is dead in the water and traditional Labour voters who feel badly let down by 13 years of Blair and Brown have a real alternative in Peter Hickson and the Greens. My advice is don't stay at home getting angry on May 6th - get down the polling station and vote for Peter."

On clean campaigning..

We really would love to believe that Nick Clegg and the LibDems are serious about wanting to 'clean up politics'.
But we can't.
Take the sordid episodes from the Norwich by-election last year, where our candidate Dr Rupert Read, himself an ex Lib-Dem, got the full tratement from his old friends. Oner leaflet put out by LibDems had a banner headline: "Residents shocked by Green Party candidate's terror views", and went on "Little is known about Rupert Read, but one thing is certain, local people have taken against his extreme views."
Dr Read, said the flyer, believed that "Britain simply had the terrorist attacks on 7 July coming to us". One safely anonymous "local resident" was then quoted as saying: "What planet is he on?" Another, equally shy, "Norwich resident" opined: "I can't believe that anyone could think that."

The voters of Norwich would have been right not to believe it, since it was a wholesale distortion of something Dr Read had written, four years earlier, equating terrorism with acts such as the Iraq war, but very clearly condemning both and calling for an "ethic of non-violence", as practised by Martin Luther King and Gandhi.

Dr Read, a philosophy lecturer, said: "The whole Liberal Democrat campaign was sickening. I look now at Nick Clegg promising to clean up politics and I remember that he was specifically asked to criticise his party's tactics in Norwich, and he refused."
Dr Read was also the victim of bogus Green party leaflets, produced by the LibDems in Green and in Green party style, urging voters to vote LibDem!
"People were telling me on the doorstep: 'I got your leaflet telling me to vote Lib Dem, so that's what I'm doing'," says Dr Read. "Anyone who's in politics knows that the Liberal Democrats are the dirtiest in their campaigning techniques, and I'm saying that as a former Lib Dem. It's one of the reasons I left."

In York, the Tory website was hacked into and redirected to the local Lib Dem one; in Cornwall, a Lib Dem candidate distributed flyers calling his opponent a "greasy-haired tw*t"; in Liverpool, a Lib Dem councillor was caught stuffing letterboxes with leaflets supposedly from a fringe party which smeared his Labour rival as a "lap-dancer". In Liverpool they have even accused the Green Party of wanting to limit the number of children people have!

Lest we think these merely local excesses, it may be worth quoting from an official Liberal Democrat election manual, Effective Opposition, obtained by The Daily Telegraph, published by the Association of Liberal Democrat Councillors in 2002 and still in use, judging by the techniques seen around the country. On page 21, it instructs Lib Dems to "be wicked, act shamelessly, stir endlessly". Page 23 advises: "Don't be afraid to exaggerate. For example, responses to surveys and petitions are always 'massive'. If a council is doing something badly, public expressions are always of 'outrage'." Page 4 advises: "Positive campaigning will NOT be enough to win."
if this sort of stuff is clean, what is dirty?

Sutton Green local election candidates

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