Four-horse polls race

Published: 19 March 2010

IT was no great surprise to receive the latest Lib Dem leaflet through our letterboxes, showing a supposed graph of how Highbury East voted in the last local elections and suggesting once again that “only the local Lib Dems can beat Labour” in our ward. 

The graph, however, is more than a little misleading, as it inflates the Labour column to look more threatening, shrinks the Conservative one to seem a hopeless cause and simply omits the Green vote altogether, even though voters gave more than 20 per cent of their votes to the Greens in 2006, and one of our candidates, Emma Dixon, was only 200 votes from taking the third seat. 

Since then, Greens have outpolled Lib Dems in Highbury East in the 2008 London Assembly election; the 2009 Euro elections saw us push them into third place across the borough as a whole; and voters in Highbury East are noticing Katie Dawson’s achievements as a lone Green councillor, just over the road in Highbury West. 

As far as the Greens are concerned, Highbury East is a four-horse race. At a time when politicians need to be restoring public trust, we don’t believe cynical distortion is the best way to do it.

Emma Dixon, James Humphreys and Andrew Myer 
Green Party candidates, Highbury East