CROYDON ELECTION QUESTIONS

For this General Election, Inside Croydon has been offering a platform to candidates from across the political spectrum, from across the borough’s four constituencies. Much the same questions, their answers published at length. Here, we speak with PETER UNDERWOOD, pictured right, the Green Party’s candidate for Croydon East

Interviews by VIMAL VIVEGANANDA

Q Why should we trust you or your party?

Those of us who join the Green Party do it because we actually believe in what we’re standing for. It’s not about personal power, personal glory.

If we were doing that, it’d be far easier just to join one of the other parties and follow their standard route to get elected.

I believe in the principles in terms of equality, fairness, tackling the climate emergency, which we’re most known for.

So in terms of reason to trust us, is you know I’m going to stick to those principles. That’s what I believe in.

And those people who followed Croydon politics will know this is what I’ve been doing for over 10 years now.

I’m not somebody who suddenly turned up and started saying this. I’ve been standing for elections for, yeah, it’s over 10 years now in Croydon and standing for the Green Party. I’m not swapping between different parties, just trying to get elected.

I’m doing this because, yeah, I think this is this is desperately what we need. So you can trust that we’re following those Green principles.

We’re not just going to change our mind or switch because that’s what the newspapers want or that’s what the latest survey says people are interested in.

We’re quite clear on what we stand for.

Q What is the single most important issue for you at this General Election?

The most important thing is making politics work for people again. If you think back to the Brexit referendum, there are many things wrong with that.

But the phrase that caught people’s attention was that “Take back control”.

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I could perfectly understand why that meant so much to people because they felt they had lost control. They felt the politicians weren’t working for them any more. They were just working in their own interests.

And no matter who was in government, they were still getting treated really badly. So for me, which comes across into all sectors of society and all elements of politics, it’s about restoring that trust that politicians and politics should work for you.

You know, since Brexit, the Conservatives have got even worse.

Labour have U-turned on every policy they come up with that people actually liked, they’re now abandoned because they think that’s what gets them into power and that’s what pleases the media barons and big business.

It shouldn’t be like this. So  it’s important for me to show that there are people in politics who have principles.

I’ve always said the fact that I stand to be elected to serve people, not to rule over them.

I have stood at hustings next to other candidates who quite clearly were on a power trip. And for them, it was all about having that power and ruling over people.

That has never interested me.

The power of being elected is the power to be able to change things for the better, to work with people, to actually start sorting stuff out.

There’s lots of surveys that have come out recently that show that trust in politics is at an all-time low, and that, to be honest, perfectly understandable.

There’s larger changes we need to make to the system to make sure it is more responsive to people and the politicians are answerable to the people who elected them, they’re not just told what to do by their party, or they’re not working in the interests of big business or whatever the media barons say, they’re actually working for the people who voted for them.

Q After 14 years of austerity, England’s local councils, social care, local services, are in a state of collapse. Including here in Croydon.
What would you, and your party, do to fix Croydon?

We’ve seen, year after year, cuts in funding for our local services and cuts in taxes for the super-rich. And we’re the party who’s actually being honest with people.

If we want to fix the problems, we’ve got to reverse that.

So we’ve come out with a wealth tax for a small amount of increased tax, but on the multi-millionaires and the billionaires, which will produce billions of pounds that we can then invest back into public services, because that’s what we actually need.

The NHS is on its knees, the schools are literally crumbling.

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I know both Conservative and Labour have messed up on Croydon Council and made it even worse, but there has been a fundamental underfunding of councils and a withdrawal of meaningful power from local councils.

So they’ve become less and less able to actually make any difference anyway.

What we want to do is massive investment back into those public services to actually get them back up to a decent standard.

We also want to restore proper decision-making to councils in a democratically accountable way.

So similarly, not just giving powers back to little dictators, but actually have a system that works for people. That includes in the planning system, as we all know how difficult it is to stop developers doing whatever they want. Unfortunately, some of our councils have no interest in stopping developers doing whatever they want, they work along with them.

We should have proper local plans that are developed by local people and that work for the good of the area.

And yeah, giving the councils powers to both set those plans and then enforce them. And they need the resources to do that.

There are, despite the bad decisions made at senior level in the council and by councillors, there’s a lot of people who work in our local authorities who are working really hard, and we need to actually enable them to do a good job.

I mean, in terms of other things for Croydon, the obvious things include more social housing, giving councils power to control rents to keep them down to a reasonable price, revaluing Council Tax, which hasn’t been done since the 1990s.

Council Tax is a bad system as it is, but we can at least make it fairer before longer term, moving towards a land value tax, which is a much fairer system.

And yeah, as I’ve said before, investing in public services, public transport, getting a better and more trustworthy police service so that it is actually back to serving people, investing back in those community and youth services that have all disappeared over the past 14 years and, you know, being a Green, obviously looking after our precious green spaces and not just surrendering them all to be concreted over by developers.

Q What will you do to improve education in our schools and for our students?

Again, a long list, starting with the sure start centres and investment in childcare for younger children before they even start school.

I would give credit to the previous Labour government, that was one of the successes with the sure start centres, which made a major impact in reducing poverty and giving children a better start in life. So I think we need to reinvest in those to get that running again.

In terms of schools, we promised £8billion a year to go back into schools. That’s not only about investing in the schools themselves, but also giving teachers a decent pay rise, which they haven’t had for years.

The other parties talk about, oh, we’ll have more teachers, but they’re not actually putting the salaries up for teachers. They’re not creating better conditions for teachers. I don’t know how they think they’re going to attract all these thousands of people to come back into teaching, or even come into teaching in the first place.

So yeah, part of our investment in schools is actually investment in teachers, in terms of giving them a decent pay rise and making sure they’ve got the equipment they need to do the job they want to do.

Crumbling schools: we’ve said we’ll put £2.5 billion in to fix the RAAC concrete scandal.

It should have never been allowed to happen in the first place, but yeah, they have and so we need to fix that.

One of the things that’s not being talked about enough in this election, and I’m very keen, is actually putting money into special educational needs as well.

We’ve said £5billion into special educational needs. Talking to parents of children with SEND, it seems that the whole system is actively trying to restrict the number of children that receive help and reduce the amount of help that they receive.

We want more help for children with special educational needs, both in mainstream schooling and in other schooling, if that’s what’s appropriate.

But that needs a massive investment, and yet it’s sadly not being talked about enough.

The general principle of that we think public services should be under public control applies to schools as well.

So it’s about bringing academies back under public control and giving parents much more of a say in how they’re run, so that it’s not just some chief executive who pays himself an absolute fortune and invents all these strange rules, which we know happens in quite a few of the academies.

We would also get rid of all the unnecessary testing. As somebody who works in the environmental sector, you don’t help a tree grow by digging it out of the ground and measuring its roots every six months.

Measuring and testing is not the way to improve education, and so  we would also get rid of Ofsted, which is doing no benefit.

Education needs to be back about children learning and about helping children. Not every child is going to be a brilliant mathematician, not every child is going to be a brilliant artist, not every child’s going to be a brilliant writer, but helping children achieve what they can achieve in the best way possible is what education should be about.

Ensuring everybody gets up to a minimum standard, but helping them flourish in the way that they’re suited to.

Going further up to university, we’d restore grants to remove that financial barrier for students.

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I remember when I was going to university,  I had friends who were told they couldn’t go because their parents couldn’t afford to look after them. They needed to go out and get a job because the household needed the money.

The idea of getting rid of grants altogether has become even more of a financial barrier to stop people fulfilling their potential and being able to go on to university. So for me, that’s really important to remove that barrier.

And then finally, beyond the formal education environment, we’re really keen on helping people gain new skills, but not just for work. That’s skills and lifelong learning, which is about people’s self-fulfilment as well. It’s about people fulfilling their potential in all sorts of directions.

Q Brexit?

It’s quite clear, Brexit was a really bad idea. It has been of no benefit to anybody.

It was based on lies and false promises and we could rake over all of that again, but what’s done was done, it was done very badly and an advisory referendum was treated as a mandate to do whatever they wanted and we’ve seen the damage it has caused.

Brexit dropped brick: leaving the EU was supposed to be about ‘taking back control’

The Green Party has also been very clear, it’s the fact that we’re the one that’s got in our manifesto that we want to rejoin the EU and that is our long-term goal.

The other parties seem to not even want to talk about it now, but for us, we know that’s one of the biggest obstacles to actually sorting out a lot of the problems we face in terms of economics and what’s happened to the country recently.

But equally, we’re not going to do that overnight.

When we’re talking about rejoining the EU, we want to do it in a sensible, methodical way.

Whenever people talk about borders, they seem to think they only work one way and forget that borders work in both directions and stopping Europeans equally stops British people actually going, living and enjoying and working, being part of Europe.

I used to work in the European Parliament and there are other countries going through that accession process. It is about looking to align rules in terms of workers’ rights and trade and restoring a lot of those standards, bringing the UK back up to a decent standard again, in line with the European rules.

It’s about cooperation, it’s about working with other countries. It’s like, no, we don’t have to be better than others, we work with other people.

In terms of the big thing, the climate crisis, we’re not going to solve that on our own. We need to be working with people globally to solve this problem.

There are so many areas which we could make the world better for us and everybody else by cooperating with other countries.

And being part of the European Union, you know there is power in a union, as Billy Bragg famously said, it’s that whole idea of the fact that when we work together with our European partners, we can have more of a say in the world, we can have more influence on what goes on.

At the moment, we don’t and we will just continue to get ignored because we’re less and less relevant.

And so, yeah, part of rejoining the European Union is to improve that opportunity to have a positive influence on what happens in the world.

But we must live up to that ourselves.

There’s no point in going around telling other people how they should live if we’re not following those same rules and principles ourselves. Living to the values that we’re trying to preach to everybody else is really important.

And in fact, learning that other people have got things to teach us, it’s not about the UK going around and telling everybody else what to do.

It is about its partnerships.

And sometimes that will be another country coming to us and going, you could do that better if you did it like we’re doing it.

And it’s not being so ridiculously proud that we won’t actually look at what other countries are doing really well or other cities are doing really well or other peoples are doing really well and going, “Maybe we should be working more like them and we can actually learn from other people.”

Q Gaza?

I’m really proud that immediately following the atrocities of October 7 the Green Party stood up and said, “We need a peaceful solution to this.”

We need to actually sit down and find a political solution. It’s the only way of solving this.

I’ve been saying that a long time before October 7. There is no military solution to this problem. And nobody’s going to win this conflict.

It’s a lot of people suffering: the attacks on civilians in Gaza continue, nine months since the Hamas attacks

It’s just lots of people suffering.

But the only way you’re actually going to stop more hurt is to sit down and actually come up with a proper political solution that’s democratic and that works for the people.

For me, part of that is recognising Palestine as a state in terms of international law.

I would say throughout all of this, and I’m very proud of the Green Party as well, is about supporting international law and international law should apply to everybody in every circumstance. There shouldn’t be exceptions, excuses.

One of the things that I think has infuriated so many people, regardless of what they may view about the situation, Palestine and Israel, is the fact that Palestine being invaded by Israel has been treated in a completely different way to Ukraine being invaded by Russia, and that the way that politicians in Labour, Conservative and LibDems have talked about the two in completely different ways.

You know, Keir Starmer was quite happy to condemn Putin as a war criminal and saying he should be dragged before the Courts of Justice. Asked the same about Netanyahu and he’s saying, “Oh no, no, we can’t possibly make judgements.”

Politicians shouldn’t be doing that. It’s complete hypocrisy. It’s double standards.

So I’d say I’ve been really pleased that the Green Party supports the International Court of Justice case and the fact that Israel and Hamas should be properly investigated for war crimes. And if they have committed war crimes, they should face justice.

And all of the international community should be pushing for that.

The immediate priority is to save lives and stop suffering, so for me, that’s calling for the immediate ceasefire. Also return of the hostages and the detainees held by Israel, which often get forgotten.

And I would also say not forgetting the rest of Palestine and the fact that while the focus has quite rightly been on Gaza, what’s been happening in the rest of Palestine and the West Bank and areas like that where illegal settlements, illegal settlers have continued to commit atrocities against Palestinians.

In fact, that’s escalated during the situation because people have been distracted by what’s going on in Gaza.

I don’t agree with any theocratic-based government.

Fundamentally for me, religion should be kept separate from government and you shouldn’t be discriminating against people based on their religion.

But yeah, that’s a personal view. But for me, equally, I’m not Palestinian and I’m not Israeli. So it’s not for me to tell Palestinians or Israelis what the solution should be.

I would say that this needs to be sorted out through politics, not through weapons and killing people, because that’s not the way of actually solving the problem.

Q Under the first-past-the-post system, the Greens have struggled to win seats. Would you ever advocate tactical voting?

No.

Tactical voting is not tactical.

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Most of the tactical voting websites I’ve seen are actually run by Labour supporters or they’re run by LibDem supporters.

They’re pushing people to vote in those directions and calling it tactical voting.

They’re not really tactical voting.

And I fundamentally believe in democracy, which means you only have one vote. You only have one chance to say who you want, who you support, who you want to be your MP.

So that’s who you should vote for.

The Green Party has got over 800 councillors, all of those were elected under first-past-the-post. Now yeah, we’re probably not going to be the government after July 5, but we’re going to get more people elected.

Greens still can win under the system.

It’s quite clear that lots of people actually support what the Greens stand for.

And if they all voted Green, we would get a lot more MPs elected.

So even under the first-past-the-post system, people should be voting Green.

The other parties pay attention to the way people are voting. So even if Greens don’t get MPs elected, but Greens are getting 10% to 15% of the vote, the other parties have to look at what we’re saying that is appealing to people, because they want those votes.

So if they want those votes, they’ve got to find out what it is we’re saying.

A vote for the Greens is saying: these are the policies you should be paying attention to.

And so even if you’re not getting MPs elected, you’re actually influencing the people who have been elected to say, “These are the things you should be paying attention to, because this is what we’re actually willing to support.”

And that’s a really powerful message to send.

Q The Green Party nationally has stated that it’s trying to win in four English seats. Croydon East is not one of them. How does that feel for you?

It is what it is.

The thing we know, you know, the SNP aren’t trying to win in Croydon East.

It’s like the LibDems aren’t trying to win in Croydon East, realistically, the Conservatives aren’t trying to win in Croydon East.

We know the Green Party is a smaller party. We don’t have the huge amount of money.

We don’t get given huge amounts of money by big business and rich people like Labour and the Conservatives and LibDems do because we have ethics and that means we do have less money to spend and we know we are building as a party.

Now, yeah, we publicly announced four seats where we at the moment could quite possibly win all four of those seats and we will have at least four MPs.

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There are a number of other seats in the country where people are also working hard and we could still end up winning. It’s not saying we will only win four.

We’ve just said with the resources we’ve got, we’re going to focus most of those resources into those seats.

For me in Croydon East, it’s not that I’m not doing nothing. We are still putting leaflets out to people. We are still going out and talking to people.

I’m still doing interviews like this and I will be at a hustings on Thursday night and things like that.

I’m still doing all I can to convince more people to vote Green and in Croydon particularly, as I said, I’ve been doing this for 10 years.

I’m not starting from scratch. I hope over the years, I’ve managed to build up with people an understanding of who I am and from what I’ve picked up and things that, you know, I hope that’s a very positive reputation of somebody who is trustworthy, who does answer questions, who will actually stand up for what’s right and do the right thing.

Now that’s what I’m offering people.

And yeah, the Green Party as a party is focusing on those four seats because for us moving from one MP to four MPs is obviously a massive difference, but it doesn’t mean we can’t win anywhere else and it doesn’t mean we don’t want to win anywhere else.

We actually want to win as many seats as possible and yeah, as I say, we’re still working hard.

Polling has shown that in some areas of Croydon, the Greens are already up to second place. Once you’re in second, the next step is to be first.

We’ve already got our first two councillors elected in Croydon, Ria and Esther in Fairfield ward. We’re showing we can do it.

We know a heck of a lot of people at this election are deciding to vote differently. There’s a lot of people who are really disillusioned with the Conservatives because of what they’ve been doing for the last 14 years. There are also a heck of a lot of people who are really disillusioned with Labour, with their shift majorly rightwards, their appalling behaviour over Gaza, their U-turning on every policy that people support, and the way that they ran the council.

There’s a lot of Labour supporters moving in our direction as well.

And so in Croydon, yeah, if you’re not voting for Labour or Conservative, Green is the obvious option.

It’s a democracy. And as I always say to people, if most people vote Green, then I’d win.

Previous Croydon Questions:

Claire Bonham, Liberal Democrat, Streatham and Croydon North
Mark Samuel, Independent, Croydon South

Tomorrow: what Labour and Conservative candidates have to say for themselves

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