Nottinghamshire County Council is failing to deliver on targets for environment, and it’s not clear that the current Councillors really care about actually making things better.
Councillors like to be seen planting a tree here, or opening an electric charging point there, but when it comes to it: these are just small, corporatised attempts of window dressing when the reality is that they’re actually directing the Council away from meaningful improvements!
Even though our Councillors have said that they want the Council to be carbon neutral, these same Councillors voted recently to stop a motion that committed our council to targets on carbon reduction. In fact, Gamston & Radcliffe’s Councillor has happily described herself as a “climate change denier”, and she doesn’t mind that the council has invested £250 million in fossil fuel companies.
Unfortunately, Councillors can get away with such backward attitudes because most of what they do and say isn’t widely known. They behave as they do because they don’t think people notice what they’re actually doing. In fact, you could argue that they prefer residents not to be well informed on local issues because this means that we can’t challenge them or hold them accountable for their performance in office.
We should commit Nottinghamshire County Council to become carbon neutral by 2030; we should set ambitious targets for air quality; we should make it easier to recycle a wider range of things and we should improve our cycle routes to make them safer and accessible for everybody.
We need Councillors who better represent who we are and what we want for the future.
If elected, I would work to put at the environment front and centre of our Council’s priorities for the future. This should be something that influences all areas of Council work, and not just added in as an afterthought.
We should encourage as many people as possible to vote in the election this Thursday. If we don’t vote, we make our Councillors less accountable for the decisions they make. and we end up with people who don’t consider our future environment or even share our same basic values
In Gamston and Radcliffe, it’s usually the Conservative candidate who takes it for granted that they will be elected, but they win only because the opposition vote is split between three parties. If you were to vote for the Liberal Democrats or the Green Candidate, all that’s likely that all that will happen is that you increase the chance that we return the same, tired counsellors to office and nothing will change. If you really want to change the person, we have representing us, I urge you to use your vote wisely and instead, vote for Martin Murphy as he is the only alternative candidate who can realistically win.
Labour Party in Rushcliffe 