I am very happy to have been selected to stand as the Green Party Prospective Parliamentary Candidate for Bury St Edmunds and Stowmarket in the next election.

I  became more actively involved with The Green Party directly as a result of my botanical artwork.  Spending so much time doing detailed botanical drawings and studying plants, I worked with many local botanists and conservationists. I joined their local plant surveys and spoke to them about what they were seeing and finding. The species loss here in rural Suffolk is truly shocking.  Biodiversity is something that is not easy for most of us to see and measure. If you live in a town, it is probably impossible.    Younger people do not even have these memories to reference.  I am backing the Climate and Nature Bill and the policies outlined in the Nature 2030 Campaign.  There are some places locally where you can still find carpets of wildflowers. The easiest to access are the Suffolk Wildlife sites and another place to look sometimes is in our churchyards. 

The Green Party puts the environment at the forefront of all its policies. They are the only party that do this genuinely.

The new Green Party manifesto is about to be published and will cover all our policies in detail. Locally we are already running the Mid Suffolk District Council and so it is possible to begin to see policy being put into practice.  Changes can only be made slowly and much of what you will see is still a legacy of historic management. Good financial planning is a priority for us and so change must be made carefully.

My priorities locally are housing and transport. Ideally good affordable housing would be available for everyone, but how do we work towards that goal?  It is important that we build the right houses in the right place.  They must be built properly with insulation and solar panels.  We also need central government to enable more social housing.  

Public transport is a real issue in a rural constituency because our shops and services have been centralised.  Good public transport makes environmental sense and prevents rural isolation although it is expensive to put in place.  Mid Suffolk are beginning to tackle this issue.

I will be visiting different areas of the constituency over the next months and hope to meet and talk to as many people as possible.  I can be contacted by email at

Emma.buckmaster@votegreen.uk

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Promoted by Andy Prentice on behalf of Emma Buckmaster c/o Bevants Farm, Combs, Stowmarket, Suffolk.