Many thanks to Hawick Community Council for hosting such an interesting hustings and so good to hear from constituents.
It’s the first hustings I have spoken at since May 2015, so I was extremely nervous and very rusty, but some of my answers and manifesto points seemed to land, even if I did not always say what the audience wanted to hear. I really welcomed the chance to meet my fellow candidates and grab a quick chat afterwards to compare notes.
Although I say it myself, we are a very good, broad and deeply democratic selection of candidates. Between us, we all offer at least one thing each that would appeal to every voter, so there is no excuse not to exercise your vital democratic right to vote on 04 July, or send back your postal vote today.
The drive home after the hustings, however, was seriously spectacular. Those views and that summer time sunset are some of the many reasons why I love Berwickshire, Roxburgh and Selkirk so much.
Hope to see some of you at Scottish Borders Chamber of Commerce hustings in Kelso tomorrow.
Below is a version of my speech that I gave by way of introduction:
Hello!
I’m Ellie Merton and I’m your only independent candidate at this general election.
Everyone else on this platform belongs to a party, which largely tells them what to say, what to do and how to do it.
I think for myself and draw my ideas, and how to act, from observing and understanding what constituents close to home need, what our island country as a whole could do with, and what geopolitical issues beyond our seas are pressing us to do for the planet.
I have always been an independent thinker and, largely by serendipity, a ground breaker despite not intending to break the mould.
Given none of you will have met me before and most of you have not even received my manifesto flier yet, let me tell you a little about myself so you can know who I am.
I was born in Cambridge where my father was a lecture in medicine, and from my earliest memories, the geopolitical world would fetch up around our dining room table, usually weeping into copious cups of tea. I would listen to my mother engaging international students in lengthy and revealing conversations, whose families were in some kind of extremis, caught up in wars or other disasters.
My connection to Scotland as a visitor started from the B of Birth, with every main academic holiday filled with slogging up and down the A1, the A9, the A835, picking our way through the sheep and occasional deer, along single-track roads north of Ullapool to the beautiful and deeply welcoming Coigach peninsula where my family owned a crofting cottage.
My earliest memory, however, is aged very little: a particularly uncomfortable feeling of washbasin taps pressing into my plump little rear whilst being prepared for bed in a motor-rail sleeper car by my mother. The excitement of going on the overnight train to Inverness has never left me and in 1988, I went interrailing on my own and 1999 I took the train across Europe to watch the Eclipse from Romania.
I’ve also loved cars from an early age with my father sourcing dirt cheap, defunct cars to use for spare parts to keep one car actually functioning. I developed a passion for Formula 1 and I spent about a decade going to Silverstone on my own, until the engine noise was turned down and the pumping track-side music noise was turned up so loudly one could not hear Ted Kravitz’s words of wisdom.
In the late 1970s, my mother bought a campervan, and we expanded our regular holiday-time progress from Cambridge to Coigach to include several days in the Borders, exploring this area. This led to my mother buying what is now my home in the east of our constituency near Eyemouth in 1988 and, from then on, I have felt fondly attached to the region.
My initial ground-breaking moment was being one of the first girls in 1976 to go to a boys’ only school from Henry VI’s time and, aged 6 ¾, I was the first girl at that school to take up a brass instrument, the French Horn. I later took up the viola and whilst at a girls’ only secondary school, went to the same junior music conservatoire as Keir Starmer had been to in the mid 1980s.
At university in London, reading Classics, I believe I was the first woman to write the incidental music for the annual Greek Play and once I had become a student politician by accident, I was certainly the first and only woman to hold both a University of London Union sabbatical officer welfare role, a National Union of Students London Office ex-officio role and volunteer for Newham Monitoring Project’s overnight helpline to force Newham’s emergency services to answer calls from Newham families being petrol bombed by the far-right British National Party or, worse, being assaulted by highly racist Met police officers. Stephen Lawrence was just one of a number of black student deaths during my time in student politics in early 1990s, carried out by white English racists.
My proudest work as a welfare sabbatical was with the Independent Welfare Officers’ Network, which I helped found. We point-blank refused to be told what to do by the posturing Labour Student politicians who ran NUS at the time, several of whom went on to be MPs, and as independents we got on with tackling the main issues of the day for our constituents: the students. My colleague welfare officers ran some astounding campaigns, including getting carbon monoxide testing legislation on the books and tackling student suicide and meningitis deaths. I did my bit largely specialising in overseas postgraduate student cases of discrimination and victimisation carried out by university supervisors.
Then I trained as a secretary, played viola in a vast number of amateur orchestras, founded my own orchestra to fundraise for small-scale international humanitarian charities, worked my way through a fascinating array of industries by typing and answering the phone and, eventually, in response to Israel’s then shockingly devastating Operation Cast Lead in Gaza in 2009, broke ground again by helping found the Waltham Forest branch of Palestine Solidarity Campaign, which I chaired, working cross-party very successfully, until 2014. I drove an ambulance across Europe in an aid convoy from London to Gaza with two other dear women, arriving on 10 January 2010. I have met those Palestinian families and visited those Palestinian streets that are now being decimated.
I began beating my retreat up to the Scottish Borders from 2014 and have mainly been dealing with health issues since decamping here, with a short spell as a Visitor Welcome Assistant for the National Trust and then a period of retraining as a theatre producer.
Perhaps I will break ground again if you elect me as your first female MP for the Scottish side of the Tweed?
And what kind of MP would I make?
As you may have noticed, I don’t let convention or the supposed rules of the game get in the way of me speaking up and taking practical and progressing action to assist any constituency struggling to get on, for whatever reason. I don’t do injustice. I always push back.
During Covid, when Butcher Boris forced me to be reliant on the DWP, Citizen’s Advice Bureau and, bizarrely as a trenchant atheist, Christians Against Poverty to keep me alive, I started campaigning about Long Covid (of which I was an early adopter) and took the disability role for a branch committee of my trade union, BECTU, to keep engaged.
I decided at that point I wanted to stand for Parliament come hell or high water because I was so infuriated with what the Conservative government was doing to our country. This was despite battling three health conditions including the alarming spirals of depression that still fluctuate all over the shop.
When Rishi gave his “things can only get wetter” speech, I was even more outraged because I was still recovering from my third bout of Covid earlier this year and, like everyone else, had not had time to prepare my candidacy. My manifesto has been drawn, as a result, only from observation and knowing what I as a constituent am experiencing, not from testing it on the ground.
My rule of thumb, however, has always been: if I am finding something impossible to sort out or negotiate or obtain, then it’s unlikely I am alone: there will be many others like me. I decided long ago it was my moral obligation to speak up if I was able, to help get matters sorted for all of us, not just me.
Over years, by playing in classical orchestras, advocating for human rights in Westminster and beyond, and working in a broad range of industries, I have gained many amazing friendships and pulled my weight with plethora of phenomenal colleagues at all levels of society and in most professions and many institutions.
I put this breadth of experience and extensive network to good use. My way of operating is to engage anyone whom I identify as appropriate to solving a problem, mobilising them along with those who have user experience and those with policy understanding, to come up with solutions that work, to deliver a creative, positive and effective end result.
As an MP, I would capitalise on this, free-range roaming the corridors of Westminster and Whitehall, identifying who is best placed to get manifesto pledges achieved for us. I have no problems at all working with people from any party or none, in any chamber of parliament, in Westminster, in Holyrood, wherever. I am even happy for anyone other than me to take the credit, just so long as the problem at hand is solved and people’s lives in my constituency get easier.
Which leads me onto my manifesto. I want Berwickshire, Roxburgh and Selkirk to become the best place in UK to live, work, learn, thrive and visit.
I want to create the conditions where living, working and learning anywhere in the constituency is not just consistently manageable and safe, but a fulfilling pleasure at any age and from any background.
Just because a person may not be able to work for whatever reason, it should not mean that person is suddenly less valuable to society or must be stopped from thriving. On the contrary, I want to create the conditions that enable people of non-working age and people who cannot work temporarily or permanently, to thrive irrespective. When everyone is allowed and enabled to live with dignity and pride, then suddenly the whole community around them lifts.
I also want to improve the attractions and connectivity conditions for our thousands of much valued visitors from far and wide, for them to get the most out of our region and for us to get the most out of them, but in a way that nourishes our biodiversity and our ways of life, not destroys them.
That’s my overview and I can go into individual manifesto pledges during your questions on
- regional creative industries education and career stability
- restoring local nature through piloting a Hedgerow, Costal and Rivers Economy
- instituting better means for artisans to get their produce to market
- lifting constituents out of homelessness and foodbank reliance
- tackling crime and alcohol and substance abuse as a public health issue
- cranking up the Block Grant from Westminster to Holyrood
- reforming Whitehall and getting rid of SpAds
- instituting a raft of small legislative tweaks that would have major local effects
- and, in supporting Palestinian human rights, stopping our area from aiding and abetting in Israeli genocidal crimes against humanity.
Vote for me, Ellie Merton, Independent, on 04 July 2024!
