24 May 2023
In this month’s Cheshire East Council elections, 3006 residents across Macclesfield town and the wider constituency voted for Green candidates - thank you everyone. That’s over 3000 votes for putting people and communities before corporate interests, for putting our environment and long-term future ahead of short-term “quick fixes”.
Nationally, the Green Party made gains beyond all expectation. There are now 241 more Green councillors across England; Greens now have an outright council majority for the first time (Mid-Suffolk) and form the biggest group on several others. Locally, we made gains in Stockport, Manchester, Trafford and Cheshire West, among others.
Many in Macclesfield voted Labour, believing that they would be best-placed to protect Danes Moss and our other valued green spaces from the bulldozers. They will have been horrified when, not two weeks later, Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer announced that his party would "back the builders not blockers", encouraging the building of more houses on green belt land. In other words, they will support the construction industry over the wishes of local residents fighting to protect their environment. Not such a great surprise perhaps, when locally it’s Labour-led Cheshire East Council that is actually pushing for the “development” of Danes Moss, and other green spaces, as well as the wholesal destruction of trees at Poynton Pool (let’s not forget either that it was a previous Conservative council that originally designated northern Danes Moss as a “development area”).
With no Greens on the council, it will be up to each and every one of us to hold our elected members to account. Write to your councillors, demand that they call a halt to the destruction of rare wildlife habitats and other green spaces (and also that they stop prevaricating and actually implement “20’s Plenty” safer speeds in all our towns and villages).
Green Party Programme for Cheshire East
The Green Party realises that the Biodiversity Emergency is as important as the Climate Emergency, whilst other parties seem to have only just gotten on the train – and the wrong one, with HS2 – at the last moment.
Other parties still think that both as a country and as a county, we can expand our way out of this. The Green Party realises that unless we come up with another couple of planets, we have to do less in future, but make different choices about what we do; so that we radically cut emissions and allow Nature to grow back, recover, remove CO2 naturally and still provide us with food, work, and peace of mind.
It can’t do that if the Council builds unnecessary roads - like the virtually empty Congleton Bypass; or if it allows big unnecessary housing developments run by overseas companies such as the one threatening Danes Moss, or other housing developments like that threatening the rewilded Longridge Wildlife Site in Knutsford; or if it allows HS2 to tear through the countryside of Cheshire East – for a train that nobody can use till 2040 - after which we should have built a society where nobody needs to do much travelling.
The Public recognise this, we are hearing that the public want Cheshire East to have a Green Conscience, and we will be there to do just this.
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