Why I want to be the Green Party MP for Poplar and Limehouse

Hi, I’m Neil Jameson and I am proud to be the the Green Party Parliamentary Candidate for Poplar and Limehouse.

I want to be MP for Poplar and Limehouse because I believe that the Green Party has the most appropriate and exciting platform for our time and for my own values and experience – and I aim to win.

I am the local candidate, for local people, acting on local issues and concerns.

I have lived in Tower Hamlets for over twenty years and organised in the East End since 1994. This means I am well known in the constituency not just by residents and organised community groups, but also by the global corporations and businesses of Canary Wharf.

I have not been parachuted in and am not a career politician. I am standing as a Community Organiser/MP with a commitment to involve the voters of this historic constituency and their institutions at every step, listening, organising, acting, and learning and training together.

I want Poplar and Limehouse to be known as the most participatory constituency in the UK with diverse neighbourhood groups, along with schools, mosques, health centres and churches organising to find shared solutions to local issues, as well as the great challenges of the climate crisis and inequality.

I believe that the EU is one of the best initiatives for peace that the modern world has seen. The UK is not just less likely to face the horrors of war and violence by remaining in membership, we are also more likely to be better protected in human, trade and economic rights, as well as being so much better neighbours.

I am standing on my record of what I have done, collaboratively, and not on what I will do if elected.

I am proud of my thirty-year record of winning major campaigns that have not just delivered systemic change but also involved thousands in participating, struggling, negotiating and then sharing the privilege of winning, compromising and even, sometimes losing, only to fight another day. And in the process, we build a stronger community as strangers become neighbours and neighbours become friends.

My record includes:

• winning £1bn in higher wages for low income workers through the Real Living Wage Campaign
• persuading the Cameron government to introduce a cap on the total cost of credit, thereby seeing off many pay day lenders
• initiating the largest and most successful campaign ever in the UK for a one-off amnesty for long term irregular workers with no papers
• pioneering the first urban Community Land Trust (CLT) for truly affordable homes for local people – sold at one third of the market rate
• overseeing a two-year enquiry which led to the publication of Citizens’ ‘Missing Muslims’ Report in 2017 calling for action by government, business and civil society to support British Muslims who are keen to participate in public life
• trained over 4,000 civil society leaders from across the UK, and the world, in the tools and craft of Community Organising.

Watch Neil’s video here.