YOUR readers who have studied the various parties’ manifestos, heard about them on the media, or attended hustings, might wonder if we need so many parties.

There is a lot of common ground between the Green Party, Labour, and the Liberal Democrats – and even the Yorkshire Party. We share more than divides us.

We all want an end to doctrinaire austerity and growing inequality. We want proper funding for the NHS, social care, education, and council services that we all use. We would pay for these necessary services through progressive taxation, with the better-off paying more.

This level of consensus is why some parties have agreed to stand down in one another’s favour elsewhere in the country. Why, then, am I standing against Labour and Liberal Democrat candidates in Richmond? The Green Party’s position is distinctive in at least the following ways.

  • We put the environment front and centre. Climate change is a real, urgent problem and the solution is to move as fast as we can to a zero-carbon economy. Step one – ban fracking – leave the gas in the ground.
  • We would scrap Trident, an unusable and grotesquely expensive relic of the Cold War.
  • We would replace our cumbersome and bureaucratic social security system with a Universal Basic Income, which would prepare for the transition to an economy in which much of the work will be done by robots.
  • We oppose Theresa May’s hard Brexit. With last year’s referendum, the country shot itself in the foot. A hard Brexit, rather than healing the wound, would amputate the foot. The country should have a chance to vote on the final deal.

I hope this helps your readers to make up their minds – better still, I hope it moves them to vote Green on 8 June.

Fiona Yorke, Green Party Parliamentary candidate, Richmond constituency, East Cowton