Julia Hilton, second right, helping to hand in a petition in March calling for divestment by the East Sussex Pension Fund.

Julia Hilton selected as Green candidate

The line-up of parliamentary candidates for Hastings and Rye is now complete – unless Ukip against expectation put up a candidate – with Julia Hilton’s selection to represent the Green Party. Nick Terdre reports.

Julia Hilton emerged as the Green Party candidate at an internal hustings on Friday at which, as she confirmed to HOT, she was the only one seeking nomination. Come the general election on 8 June, she will be competing, alongside Labour’s Peter Chowney and the Liberal Democrats’ Nick Perry, to unseat the Tories’ Amber Rudd, currently Home Secretary and in her second term as MP.

Ms Hilton, a landscape architect and artist, also stood for Old Hastings and Tressell division in the county council elections last week, taking third place with 284 votes.

The general election campaign should be used to show how green policies could improve Hastings, she says in her hustings statement. “This means our key messages should be about our local campaigns including promoting low traffic neighbourhoods, and campaigning for a local community energy company to reduce fuel poverty and create local jobs.”

As well as secretary of the local Green Party, Ms Hilton is also involved in the campaign to have the Walking and Cycling Strategy implemented and in efforts to set up a Sustainable Transport Forum for Hastings, is a non executive director of Energise Sussex Coast, on the steering group of 1066 Energy Campaign which is working to create a local energy co-op, and a participant in  Fossil Free, which campaigns to have East Sussex Pension Fund divest out of fossil fuel companies.

Among key Green Party policies, her statement cites ending austerity and creating over one million jobs, free social care for over 65s, the construction of 500,000 social rented homes, the return of railways to public ownership and “serious action on climate change and pollution”.

An upcoming announcement will state how the party intends to pay for its programme, she told HOT.

Perry blasts government on air pollution

The illegally high levels of air pollution and the government’s failure to take serious action to deal with it prompted a response last week from the LibDems’ Mr Perry. “This is the second time in 18 months that the Government has failed to comply with a British Court’s directive to publish a policy for dealing with the toxic levels of air pollution that are killing between 40/50,000 people every year,” he said in a statement.

“After the High Court’s first ruling that the Government’s existing plan for tackling our air pollution crisis was ‘illegally poor,’ Amber Rudd (the then Climate Change Secretary) promised that the ‘full details’ of a new emissions reduction policy would be revealed by the end of 2016.

“Despite repeated promises her department ‘put a red light on green issues,’ and now, nearly 18 months later, the High Court once again had to demand that the Secretary of State for the Environment, Andrea Leadsom, honour the Government’s commitment to publish new, legally acceptable plans.

“It seems that preventing people dying from the air they breath is not a priority for the Conservative Government.,” Mr Perry said.

Also in: Election 2017