In the tenth of our video interview series #CanaryCandidates, we meet independent candidate John Urquhart – standing against Labour’s Alex Barros-Curtis
Harmony UK founder John Urquhart is standing as a candidate for Cardiff West on a unique manifesto. As they explained to the Canary, “my campaign is almost entirely about the idea of empowering the community” by creating a local assembly so that constituents all have a say in what happens.
Keir Starmer’s Labour Party, meanwhile, has parachuted its legal director Alex Barros-Curtis into the traditionally safe Labour seat, as the Morning Star reported. Barros-Curtis is a controversial figure because he oversaw the party’s vengeful legal claims against “five Corbyn-era staff members over the leaking of a report exposing malfeasance and racist attitudes in the Labour apparatus”. The Labour Leaks scandal revealed how right-wing figures in the party did what they could to undermine Jeremy Corbyn and the movement around him.
So Labour is offering an out-of-towner loyal to Starmer. John Urquhart, meanwhile, is someone who has lived in the city for years and who wants to give power back to local people.
John Urquhart: Cardiff West deserves a say in its own destiny
John Urquhart has many great policies, but as they said, one is that:
I’ve promised to give up most of my wage if I’m elected…
I’ve committed to basically taking no more than minimum wage, and the rest would then be donated to mutual aid projects in the constituency itself. So that’s a way that we can immediately connect something back to the community rather than taking from it.
And giving something back to the community is a recurring them for them. As Urquhart highlighted:
A lot of the crime here is because it’s been marginalised by the rest of the city. And that’s because it was a council estate, because it was social housing, and because of marginalisation to do with that. And as I’ve said in my manifesto, I think that a lot more has been taken out of Ely than has been given back over the years. And I think people are due something back.
At the centre of this is giving people meaningful power:
There needs to be a lot of money spent on social projects, and those projects need to be led by local people. They need to be the social projects that are chosen by the people here. And that’s why I want to set up the Cardiff West Assembly, it’s why Harmony wants to set up the Cardiff West Assembly here.
It’s because it’s sort of an ideal place to demonstrate how democracy itself can be a healing way forwards for a community, because it enables us to say ‘these are the things we want, these are the things we need’, and it enables the community to, together, take action to try to get them, even if members of that community wouldn’t normally be able to do them.
So I think my campaign is almost entirely about the idea of empowering the community via the assembly.
They continued by stressing that:
If I go to the Commons, and I stand up and say ‘this issue is plaguing Cardiff West, we need this to be solved, the people here have said they want this to happen, and we think this should happen in X time span’, and whoever is in power doesn’t do anything, if they don’t act, we will take action directly.
The wealthy few have too much power. To change that, we all need to act.
John Urquhart’s campaign is committed to standing with Palestine, against genocide and apartheid. And as they insisted:
I think our addiction to genocide is probably the biggest problem the country’s facing, both internally and externally. That’s rooted in our authoritarianism, so I guess the authoritarianism. The verticality of our society is a huge problem…
I think hierarchy is ultimately the biggest problem facing the UK, because we’re unable to move to the extent that most people can’t detect the chains that are holding them down.
In a similar vein, they want to empower journalists and weaken the power of wealthy media barons:
We also have a policy relating to the media, which is that we want the entirety of the media to be converted to co-operatives, and majority-owned by their workers… I think it’s a better approach to media freedom. We don’t wanna tie the media down. We want to free the media.
Speaking about the power of connecting with others and taking action, however small, Urquhart stressed that:
Just emailing people, talking to people, you can achieve so much more than people realise, just by acting. I think that that opens up possibilities, and I think that’s the way to approach Britain’s problems as well – it’s from the ground up…
The main core of the message is that we can do a lot more than we think we can…
The littlest nudges sometimes can have big impacts.
For more on Urquhart’s comments on the election and other issues, see the full interview on our YouTube channel:
Watch and read all our #CanaryCandidates interviews here.
Featured image via the Canary
