Council Candidate Interview: Adrian Alexander (Labour, Saddleworth West and Lees)

Labour candidate Adrian Alexander, pictured in spring sunshine in Dobcross yesterday.

Labour’s candidate for the Saddleworth West and Lees ward on Oldham Council has said a mixture of local and national issues will feature in his campaign between now and polling day on 5 May.

Adrian Alexander told Saddleworth News: “In the local, a lot of it is about the roads, the potholes, and all the damage to the cars that this incurs. In the national of course it’s the EMA, the tuition fees, it’s everything that they (the government) are doing. It should be slower, and people are panicking, people are going into debt and getting very upset.”

The Liberal Democrat/Conservative administration’s most recent budget for the council included £41m of cuts, and Mr Alexander said Labour would look again at some aspects of that if it takes control next month. Praising Labour’s alternative budget as “very good” he added, “If we do get in we have to re-assess it, and sort out different things that we keep or we don’t keep.”

Mr Alexander called for more encouragement for local sporting clubs in the ward, which covers Springhead, Grotton and Lees, as a way of helping keep young people out of trouble: “There’s nothing worse than people near your house creating trouble, even though they’re not really creating trouble they’re just being there, and that’s down to finding things for them to do. We could possibly make sure that a lot of these kids or youths are enticed to the sports, or the sports clubs are given perhaps more funding, and allowed to go in the schools to teach.”

He continued: “I saw that with the issue over Churchill Playing Fields. I couldn’t work that out… why they can’t dovetail the whole situation in together is absolutely beyond me. Why can’t you have an athletics club that’s geared in to the rugby, the football, the hockey? Because every sport that I’ve ever done, every one is geared to athletic running.”

The BNP is not standing anybody in the whole borough of Oldham, amid claims of a split following the party’s fielding of a Manchester-based candidate in January’s Oldham East and Saddleworth by-election. Mr Alexander urged BNP supporters to rejoin mainstream politics: “I just hope it’s a turn to the right way, that they come back to all the parties, whichever party they want to go back to. As long as they want to change, and realise that there’s no more scapegoats.”

Mr Alexander recently left Oldham Council after nine years, to begin work at Manchester Airport as a security profiler for American Airlines. He came to my house in Dobcross yesterday for the interview.

You can listen to our conversation in full by downloading it from here.

Also standing in Saddleworth West and Lees are Liberal Democrat Brian Lord and Conservative Pam Byrne. I intend to interview as many of the borough and parish candidates as possible between now and polling day on 5 May.

For full Saddleworth News coverage of the parish election go here, and articles about the Oldham Council election are here.

Author: Jude Gidney - Editor

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