Liberal Democrats have selected a candidate with a strong environmental track record to fight the seat of Britain’s only Green MP at next May’s general election.
Chris Bowers, 53, was the founder director of the Environmental Transport Association in 1990. MOre recently he has been better known as a writer and broadcaster, mainly on tennis.
For 13 years he was a member of the BBC 5 Live commentary team at Wimbledon, he commentates regularly for Eurosport and ESPN, and has written biographies of Roger Federer, Novak Djokovic, and the deputy prime minister Nick Clegg.
Chris, said: “The Pavilion election will be an exciting four-way battle in which the Lib Dems offer environmentally concerned voters a real choice.”
“There is relatively little on which I would disagree with Caroline Lucas, but the best she can hope for is to be a one-woman protest group at Westminster, whereas the Lib Dems have been in government and could be again, so we can get a lot more done.
“The Lib Dems have achieved a lot over the past four years, both running the Department for Energy and Climate Change and generally in government. We have created the world’s first green investment bank, we have introduced a safety framework for shale gas extraction that will make it much harder than people think for fracking to get a foothold, and we have stood up against unreconstructed Conservative right-wingers who view all attempts to protect the environment and fight climate change as ‘green crap’.”
Chris stood for parliament in 2010 in the Wealden constituency (Crowborough, Uckfield and Hailsham), and since 2007 he has been a councillor on neighbouring Lewes District Council. He was re-elected in 2011 with an increased majority.
He added: “Our main task between now and next May is to tell people what the Lib Dems have achieved in government.”
“The media may have been reluctant to give us any credit, but we have created large numbers of new apprenticeships, restored the link between the state pension and inflation, made education fairer via the Pupil Premium, and raised the starting level for income tax to £10,000. None of this would have happened without the Lib Dems in government.”
Commenting on the contentious issue of tuition fees, Chris said: “We were put in a very difficult position with a massive dilemma, and I think we made a good fist of a bad situation. Access to higher education for children from disadvantaged families is much fairer now and the student loans payback facility is more realistic. Anyone wanting to debate higher education funding with me will find me robust, not apologetic.”
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