The Greens gained their first Weymouth and Portland Borough Council seat this week. It was a team effort like Leicester Football Club and whilst I was the striker the win was based on the work of my friends.
Why would a GP General Practitioner want to join the GP Green Party? The answer is seeing the links between health, wealth and nature. I have worked now for 30 years as a doctor and listened to the daily stories of 30-40 people. Firstly, dealing with what the illness is. Next thinking about how they got ill and moving onto why they got ill. The simplistic answer is individual lifestyle choices or bad luck. However, deeper thinking shows that poor people get more poorly and rich people live longer. This was shown by Rowntree whose reports inspired Beveridge’s welfare state. Latterly we have seen rich people dismantle this caring societal safety net as shown in the Black report, then Townsend report and more recently in more digestible form in “Spirit Level” by Dr’s. Pickett and Wilkinson. The 1980’s promise of trickle down money from lax regulation of the rich was a lie. The poor are getting poorer while the rich are becoming fabulously wealthy.
Does this matter? What difference does it make? I see the impact daily in the lives of my patients. Grown men reduced to tears and desperation by DWP ATOS medicals that disregard obvious disabilities. People driven to dispair by sanctions and loss of housing benefit. Patients are now suffering greatly from austerity viciously applied to the weakest and sickest members of our society. It kills people. The difference in life expectancy between patients round my surgery in Weymouth and properous Tory voting villages is 8-12 years.
So now to the answers. I have long held Green beliefs on care for the creation and folly of destroying the planet for the sake of short term profit. However, my support for apparently pro NHS major parties was successively dashed when on seeing them enter power with majorities or coalition they promptly carried on the same Thatcherite privatisation and dismantling of the NHS and support for the poor. So with one betrayal too many I took the step of moving to the party where my core beliefs on protecting both people and planet are most strongly matched.
I hope to use my term to tackle air pollution especially on Boot Hill in Weymouth and tackle the poor quality of some privately rented flats in the town. In the longer term I want to encourage the third industrial revolution, that of renewables. We need to capture the free tidal surge at Portland Bill and establish marine conservation zones in the bay. If we look after the planet it will look after us. If we trash the world we will suffer from climate chaos.
The US theologian Thomas Berry observed “Human health is a subsystem of the Earth’s health. You cannot have well humans on a sick planet”. I am a watermelon Councillor: Green on the outside and red in the middle. I pray that I may be granted the wisdom and strength to serve Weymouth East in the coming years and make the town an healthier place to live.
Jon Orrell
Result:
A majority win for Jon Orrell in Weymouth East. Jon Orrell 55% 573 votes
Con 21% 220
UKIP 12% 133
Lab 10.5% 109
