Candidate for Newton Abbot
“I want to help create a greener, fairer world where governments prioritise people and planet, rather than economic growth at all costs. That’s why I joined the Green Party, and am standing for election in the Newton Abbot constituency.”
Pauline lives in Ogwell, just outside Newton Abbot, having moved to the area in 2017. She has served as a parish councillor since 2019 and stood as a candidate in district council elections in 2019 and 2023.
She lived in London for many years, working as a financial journalist, mainly for the Financial Times. She covered personal finance, as deputy editor, global markets, as deputy editor, and edited a weekly fund management section. This gave her a deep understanding of the financial system, and enlightened her to the ways in which the deregulation of finance over the past 40 years has contributed to many of the problems we have today. She notes that this career opportunity taught her a great deal more about economics than what she learned during her economics and sociology degree.
This job also offered her many transferable skills. She is practised at researching, analysing and communicating on the subjects she writes about and has many years’ experience of editing copy. She still does some freelance journalism, but mainly fills her time with voluntary work, honing her listening skills and giving her insight into the problems people face in their day to day lives, often caused by the austerity inflicted by our government.
At Citizens Advice, she saw the devastating effects of the crackdown on disability benefits and introduction of universal credit, how debt ruins lives and how hard it is to help vulnerable people with housing. At Samaritans, she listened to people with mental health problems who have nowhere else to turn because mental health services are so under-resourced. During the pandemic, she switched to helping set up and coordinate a mutual aid response to organise food parcels and prescription deliveries, noting how shocking it was to see how unprepared both local and national governments were for such an emergency.
Other activities she undertakes include editing the local parish magazine, which is delivered free to everyone in the parish; being treasurer of a local wildlife group; and being a director of Action on Climate in Teignbridge, a voluntary group set up to help communities and councils lower carbon emissions and increase biodiversity. The last of these is a core focus for her:
“If we don’t change our ways very soon, we risk the catastrophic collapse of the earth systems that sustain us. The Conservatives are committed to “business as usual” and appear to serve the interests of the fossil fuel industry and other powerful lobbyists. The Labour Party is in no rush to make the investment we need in renewables, in retrofitting our homes, in public transport, or indeed in anything much at all.
Only the Green Party has a policy programme seeking to deliver for both people and the planet.”