GP Parliamentary Candidate for South Devon
The son of a World War II RAF veteran and trade union shop steward, and a Finnish nursing auxiliary, Robert was born in Bedford in 1970. Educated in Bristol and London, he joined the Department of the Environment in 1992 before working across the wider public sector, including higher education and health regulation, as well as animal and conservation charities.
In 2008 he and his wife Pamela self-built their own environmentally friendly house, publishing a book on the experience. He is also an award-nominated writer of genre fiction with one novel and around seventy short stories published, several collected in ‘Best of’ anthologies. He and his family moved to Torbay in 2014.
A member of the Labour Party in his youth, he campaigned for the Liberal Democrats in 2019. “I was a Liberal Democrat primarily because I didn’t want a Conservative MP. But late on in the campaign I realised many working people would have been worse off under the Liberal Democrats than under the Conservatives. Our absurd first-past-the-post electoral system had me trying to prevent what I didn’t want rather than support what I really did.”
He joined the Green Party after the 2019 election, motivated by the shocking inequality evident in Britain.
“In Britain we have almost four million people living in destitution, including around one million children[1]. Destitution means not being able to afford the most basic physical needs. Poverty affects the physical and mental health of people of all ages, putting pressure on the NHS. It holds back children in school. It drives people towards crime and drug use. The South Devon constituency includes some of the poorest parts of one of our nation’s poorest regions. It’s an issue everywhere, but particularly here.
“Meanwhile, the richest 1% of Britons hold more wealth than 70% of the rest of us combined[2]. And that gulf is widening. The Conservatives still peddle the beguiling but demonstrably untrue idea of ‘trickle-down economics’, that if you free up business to make money that money will somehow find its way down to the rest of us. The other parties may offer ways of slowing the rate at which the rich get richer and the poor poorer. But only the Green Party, through closing tax loopholes, taxing the super-rich, and redistribution through universal basic income offer a credible means of reversing the trend. That is why I am a Green.”
[1] https://www.jrf.org.uk/report/destitution-uk-2023
[2] https://www.oxfam.org.uk/media/press-releases/richest-1-grab-nearly-twice-as-much-new-wealth-as-rest-of-the-world-put-together/