By John Collins, Highgate Green Party member
Nationwide, only 20 Tory parliamentary candidates have signed the Equality Pledge I wrote about here last month, compared with 103 Green Party candidates.
George Lee, the Tory candidate for Holborn & St Pancras still hasn’t signed – neither has Chris Philp, the Tory standing for Hampstead & Kilburn.
Their failure to sign stand out like a sore thumb on the Equality Trust website, because our two Greens, the two Lib Dems and the Labour candidates for the two Camden constituencies have all signed.
We’re talking about the pledge promoted by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, authors of The Spirit Level – the book mentioned here by Natalie Bennett after she read the review of The Spirit Level in the CNJ.
The pledge, now signed by 282 parliamentary candidates from eight different parties, says it all, and is worth repeating here:
“Compelling new evidence presented by The Equality Trust shows that more equal societies – those with a narrower gap between rich and poor – are more cohesive, healthier, suffer fewer social problems and are more environmentally sustainable. In view of these findings I am committed to making the UK a more equal society as the most effective means of building a better society. I will therefore actively support the case for policies designed to narrow the gap between rich and poor; and engage with the debate on which measures should be implemented to achieve that aim.”
Is that too much to ask? Or are the Conservatives, like Labour, “relaxed” about a society where, as the National Equality Panel recently reported, the 90th percentile of households now has 100 times the wealth of the 10th percentile.
For the record, the parties of the 282 candidates who have signed so far, from 215 constituencies, are:
Green Party 103
LibDems 88
Labour 60
Conservative 20
English Dems 6
Plaid Cymru 1
SNP 1
UKIP 1
Independents 2
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