We need to break the “good cop, bad cop two-party routine”, says independent Damian Read

In the seventeenth of our video interview series #CanaryCandidates, we meet independent candidate Damian Read – standing against Labour’s Seema Malhotra

Damian Read is standing as an independent general election candidate in Feltham and Heston in Greater London against the Labour Party’s Seema Malhotra. A lorry driver and “long-time Palestine activist” who’s “very well known for supporting Palestine”, he told the Canary that:

If elected, I’m gonna be donating 22,000 pound a year from the MP salary to my local community. What that will mean is, after tax, I will take home exactly the same as what I take home now. So I will be no better off, but I won’t be any worse off.

That money, he insisted, “will be going to action groups in the area”. Another plan, meanwhile, is to knock on “10 doors at random” every week after the election to ask constituents if they have any problems.

He also wants to push for measures to “suspend arms sales to anyone who’s in breach of the Geneva Convention”, to ban “people from working or doing business with companies that are in occupied territories”, and investigate “aiding and abetting of war crimes by British ministers, British officials, and the board members of arms companies”.

Break the Tory/Labour “good cop, bad cop two-party routine”

Damian Read believes the Conservative and Labour parties are no different, and argued that parliament is full of careerists:

I would question why… you would want to vote for Labour just to get the Conservatives out… Don’t forget, we voted in the Conservatives in 2010 to get rid of Labour, and we voted Labour in in 1997 to get rid of the Conservatives, and we voted the Conservatives in in 1979 to get rid of guess who? Labour. And this has been going on for 100 years, right?

We all know that this country is broken… And the reason that every single part of this country is broken is because the part of it that’s supposed to stop things from getting broken, and is supposed to repair things when they are broken, is broken itself… And that is the government. And the reason it is is that it’s become this gravy train. It’s become a place where people go to improve their own careers.

He added:

They perform this charade – this good cop, bad cop two-party routine, like ‘you’ve gotta vote for me because the other guy’s really nasty’… You’ve got a red puppet and a blue puppet, and you’ve got the same people with their hands… inside the puppets… They are the same… Replacing Rishi Sunak with Keir Starmer is the same as changing your tie when you’ve shat your pants.

Damian Read: get politicians out of politics

For Damian Read:

The greatest thing would be… if we wake up on the fifth of July and we find out that parliament is actually filled with the people it was intended to be filled with… people that are there to represent their communities. What an amazing thing that would be.

He also explained why ordinary people should be in politics rather than politicians:

The only people that aren’t politicians are independents. And you know that independents aren’t doing it for themselves because they can’t get promoted… Anyone that wants to progress like that and isn’t doing it for their community, they join a party… And they keep their mouth shut when people ask them to vote for a ceasefire, because they don’t wanna fall out with their party.

And he highlighted his own case as an example, saying:

I’m not a politician. They’re all going after the same thing. They all want careers, you know? I’m a 49-year-old lorry driver, ok? Putting on my CV that I stood as a parliamentary candidate in UK elections does nothing for me. If I go for a job as a lorry driver, which I’ve been doing for 22 years, and I go ‘oh look, I stood as an MP’, they’ll go ‘well, so what? That’s completely irrelevant to this industry.”

His message for constituents, meanwhile, is:

Vote for me. One, because I’m not Labour and I will stand up for them. And two, because I live here, and this is where my family live, it’s where I’ve grown up…

I have a vested interest in making sure that this community is as great and as nice as it can be… and everyone gets on and we have a cohesive society where everyone enjoys each other’s company, we don’t have any tensions… and it just looks nice and… we’ve got nice trees and foliage rather than concrete everywhere.

For more on Read’s comments see the full interview on our YouTube channel: