Mick Gregg who is standing for the Green Party
Goes to the polls next week to decide who will run the country
How would you describe yourself in five words?
Compassionate, respectful, concerned, optimistic, confident
What got you into politics and who influenced you?
I joined the Green Party first in 1988 when it was becoming clear that the world’s climate was being affected by what humans were doing. I wanted to encourage people to change behaviour - to stop polluting, to create sustainable energy and recycle.
Do you have a secret talent or something you are rather good at?
Not really, no! I was half-good at table tennis about 30 years ago...and I have written a book about substance misuse.
Do you cook and what is your favourite dish?
I cook, but mostly ‘Dad food’ like spag bol - although I tried to impress my wife, before she was my wife, with an Italian thing called Puttanesca, which has olives and anchovies in it - not to everyone’s liking, including my wife’s.
What can you offer Hinckley for the next five years, if elected?
I will be working hard to ensure that people in Hinckley get to know about the decisions being taken in London that affect them, to bring democracy home in an honest and transparent way.
On a personal level I am used to helping people with problems to resolve them and making things change, I have good counselling and problem-solving skills - in my work I have had to push through barriers to make things improve for my clients and much of the work in being an MP would probably feel like this as I try to help the constituents that I represent.
A primary school in Desford has just announced job cuts due to a “chronic” lack of funding which many schools in the area face. What needs to be done about it?
My six year old son goes to this primary school.
What needs to happen is that the funding required should be found so the quality of education does not suffer. There is plenty of money in our economy although this seems to be filtering upwards, not downwards.
The Green party are also proposing to end Ofsted’s role in inspecting schools, remove testing for pupils at this age and allow schools the freedom to function.
Brexit, good or bad news for Hinckley?
Very bad for Hinckley because it’s very bad for Britain.
To me, it’s like the Emperor’s New Clothes - we are all blindly being told that it will be okay, and we must leave Europe because of a 52%/48% split vote. But this vote was not made with the full facts.
Promises of money for the NHS (that were not true) are outweighed by the reality that we now know, but did not then, that we are saddling our children with writing a £100 billion cheque just for leaving.
We feel that the referendum should be repeated once we are clearer about what it actually means rather than what we were told before the last vote - we think that this is too important to not give the country a new vote AND we want 16 and 17 years’ olds to be included this time.
Hinckley’s Mount Road hospital - to close or not to close?
Not to close. I have worked in the NHS for 13 years and know that people want local services not vast ‘super hospitals’. A town the size of Hinckley should have services that allow people who cannot travel to still access treatment.
Local services reduce the cars and ambulances on the roads. We want an NHS to run for the people and not for profit. It would take £30 billion to put the NHS back to where it should be and make it better (or about a quarter of the cost of Trident).
How would you solve Hinckley’s traffic problems?
Through making alternatives to driving cheaper and more accessible. Also by adding the true cost of pollution onto the cost of driving, sorry!
There are also simply solutions by joining up the thinking, and funding, of different councils, such as widening the carriage way at the join between Warwickshire and Leicestershire on the A5 (by the Long Shoot/Aldi) where it goes from two lanes to one, which causes a bottle neck, and accidents, in both directions.
We should remove the profit motive to make train fares cheaper - it costs me nearly £9 to get from Hinckley to Leicester for a 17 minute journey. It should never be cheaper to drive than get a train!
What is your idea of a perfect night in or out?
This would be a summer’s evening on a narrow boat moored up outside a pub that served good real ale, and has music playing, a blues band would be good please!