Meet the Lib Dem taking on Keir Starmer at the general election
'People are just fed up'
Friday, 12th January — By Anna Lamche
THE Lib Dem candidate hoping to unseat Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer at the next general election hopes to position himself as a champion of voting reform and a “less polarised” politics.
Charlie Clinton, who plays the trumpet in a band and works in marketing after graduating from UCL with a law degree, said his number one priority was addressing climate change.
The 36-year-old, who has lived “all over Camden, from Agar Grove to Kentish Town”, is a strong advocate of voting reform and would like to see the country move away from first past the post voting towards “true proportional representation”, in which the distribution of seats closely corresponds to the total number of votes cast for each party.
Speaking to the New Journal this week, he said: “I’ve done a lot of door-knocking in Camden… people are just saying they’re fed up.
“You will always find someone who says, ‘I’ve given up on politics’.
“To fix the country, we need a different voting system… ultimately, our system is not working. There’s a lot of people who say: ‘Proportional representation doesn’t come up on the doorstep’.
“It doesn’t come up on the doorstep very often. But what you do get is a lot of people saying, ‘I’m fed up. I give up, I don’t think it matters if I vote, I don’t care, I think they’re all the same’. What they’re doing is telling us there’s a problem with the system. It’s not their job to tell us what the solution is.”
Mr Clinton singing with his band
Mr Clinton said he likes to spend his Saturday evenings in Soho playing the trumpet with his band, the 145s.
His music informs his other political priority – securing the rights of musicians to tour Europe, to “protect grass-roots venues”, and to enshrine the right of musicians to practise their instruments in their homes for “up to five hours a day.”
In common with many younger voters, Mr Clinton said: “My number one priority is climate change.
“Every problem we have in this country will be made worse by climate change… the bottom line is, people complain about immigration today, but it will get an awful lot worse.
“We have to fix that. And it’s our moral obligation to fix it, because we started the whole thing with the industrial revolution.”
To tackle climate change, Mr Clinton argues we have to “fix the country… and to fix the country, we need a different voting system.”
In the 2019 general election, the Lib Dem candidate took 13 per cent of the vote in Holborn and St Pancras.
But Mr Clinton is not worried about running against his prominent Labour opponent.
He said: “There’s an opportunity to influence the debate, to make an issue out of things that I think our potential future prime minister should be paying attention to.
“The reality is the Labour party and the Tory party are big coalitions.
“The Labour party is fractured, there is a very left-wing part of that party, and there is a very centrist part of that party.”
In Mr Clinton’s analysis, the Lib Dems will hold the “the balance of power” on key votes under a future “fractured” Labour government.