The candidate hoping to succeed Caroline Lucas as Brighton Pavilion’s MP says she has listed an address in Camden for the London elections as she currently splits her time between the two cities.
Sian Berry has been selected by the Greens to contest Brighton Pavilion in the next election, when Caroline Lucas will be stepping down.
However, in the meantime, she is standing again in next months’ London Assembly elections, having been a member of the assembly since 2016. A date has not yet been set for a general election has not yet been set, but it is widely expected to take place in the autumn.
Nominations for the London Assembly elections were made public last week, revealing Ms Berry had listed an address in Camden, drawing criticism from local Labour councillors.
Councillor Emma Daniel tweeted: “Sian for the Greens who is also standing in
And Councillor Tobias Sheard tweeted: “But I thought she lived here and was listening to residents!
“When Labour find people don’t live here, we fire them, when the Greens find them, they hire them! I think we can do better than a bet-hedging careerist.”
Sian Berry said: “As we don’t know when the general election will be called, and we all want rid of this failed Government, my work remains in London holding the Labour Mayor to account, especially on housing and transport.
“I am proud of the work I do, and it means I have the experience to be an effective, independent Green MP for Brighton Pavilion.
“I love my flat in Brighton and I intend to stay here permanently. I still pay the rent on my old studio flat in London, where I stay in the middle of the week when I need to for work, and which I will give up later this year.
“Since last summer I have been delighted to make a home here, and to be working very hard as a candidate in Brighton.”
A really bad look. Talk about hedging your bets as a politician. Brighton deserves a candidate who lives here all the time, (the current three MP’s do).
And they won’t have to explain their involvement with the Challenors. Looking forward to hearing more about that from Sian.
Makes 2 Jags Prescott look like an amateur
Hedging her bets and hoping for both roles then plus all the salaries and expenses to go with. Mind you since MPs only work 12 weeks a year, she probably thinks it will be a doddle to run her London Assembly career alongside. it’s a NO from me for this Caroline pretender.
Barry you were being sensible until you said MPs only work 3 months of the year which is patent nonsense.
GLA members get £60k. MPs are on £ 91k. They get very little extra in personal expenses.
If she was elected and kept both roles she would lose 2/3rds of the GLA salary.
I beg to differ when you say MPs ” get very little extra in personal expenses”….they can and do claim up to and over £100,00 a year in expenses as detailed by the National Audit Office.
Are you talking aboit staff costs and the costs of running an office like rent?
Because those aren’t personal expenses.
You’re confusing personal expenses with expenses of running an MP office.
All the time she was telling us she lived in Brighton!
The smug supercilious grin says it all.
Sian – just crawl back to London – brighton residents have had enough of the lying, cheating Greens
All politicians are slippery and most have ready-prepared answers to protect themselves against known incoming questions regarding their fitness for the job. Don’t even be fooled by the party, as all of them are exactly the same.
It takes a particular odd character-flaw to want to be a politician and we should view all of them with utmost suspicion, and see their carefully worded statements for the smokescreen that they are.
When any politician declares that they are driven for public service and the best interests of the people, you know it isn’t true, because it’s never applied to any politician to date, and there is no way that will ever change.
This slipperiness is particularly suspect because she isn’t even installed yet, this is just the positioning campaign. The big machine in the background working overtime, anticipating awkward questions and preparing carefully worded statements in defence. But let’s face it, they are all the same, it’s just that most major parties don’t have the resources and intimate numbers that The Greens enjoy, so making their personal investments more manageable, and the staging better finessed.
Believe the political talk at your peril, and suffer the consequences at your leisure.
So what is your solution to avoiding ALL potential parliamentary candidates per se ?
Perhaps a dictator figure such as Hitler or Mussolini,Franco or Salazar ?
In a democracy we have to have faith in government….or what is the point of elections?
And if we. the people. lose total faith in government then what to replace that with ?
Read George Orwell’s Animal Farm and let me know what you think.
I know all this. My situation is not that I do not believe in democracy, I do, it’s just that a lifetime of disappointment has taken a toll and all I am left with is disillusion. All I now see is lies and slipperiness from these politicians, trying to justify that they live here, half-truths and the same old political agenda.
Politicians are a scourge – all of them. This one isn’t even here yet and already is having to face questions about where she actually resides. All slippery self-serving chancers out for their own gain. Green, Tory, Labour, Lib_dem (Post Office), SNP (fraud). Disgusting people.
Has anyone checked for Leicester connections?
Haha
Red or Fox ?
Oof, they disappeared quite quickly once police were closing in on them, didn’t they?
Had Caroline stood I would have voted for her as she was a really good constituency MP. However I will not be voting for this candidate as she was parachuted in as it was her best chance of becoming an MP. If she wants to stand for the London Assembly I urge Londoners not to vote for her as the moment something better comes along she will jump ship. Also why have two residences; if you work in London and live in Brighton why not use the train to commute? To show she means business she could make it her first task to ask questions about the trains!
Seems odd for a Labour councillor to make noise about this issue, what are they trying to deflect from – the fiasco involving their handling of the two councillors they parachuted in back in May, which is the cause of 2 by elections.
With Council Leader Bella Sankey previously standing to be an MP is Arundel, and more recently in Hastings where she didn’t reach their long list and then issued a statement afterwards saying “my time will come”, how far away exactly do Labour think it’s reasonable to stand!
Over in Adur and Wothing a Lambeth councillor is standing as a Labour’s candidate to be an MP, and someone told me that even in Pavilion that Labour’s candidate lives in Peter Kyle’s constituency.
The whole thing is a merry go round. My priority when I go to vote is whether someone would make a good MP, good councillor, good whatever it is they are standing for, and to block out the noise from people stirring – which just seems odd since Labour clearly parachute people into seats frequently.
If a candidate can only say they are better than their opponent because they live down the road, it doesn’t fill me with confidence they are a strong candidate if that’s all they have got. Wish Labour would stop bickering and just come out with some actual policies and let people decide on the basis of that.
Hedging her bets doesn’t display much in the way of being serious about being the MP for Brighton Pavilion.
Which will be her priority if she is elected to both posts ?
Will she take both pay cheques as well
I thought she said she was living in Brighton !
I guess that’s the sort of honesty and integrity you’d expect from a Green politician !
Oh dear. Why would Londoners vote for someone knowing that they would prefer a job elsewhere, and that this is just a temporary employment stop-gap? For someone so experienced in politics, this seems to be a poor look.
This careering job-hopping seemed to be on trend right now because George Galloway, newly elected MP for Rochdale.has declared he now wants to stand as candidate for Mayor of Greater Manchester to try and oust the current Labour Mayor Andy Burnham !!!
I’m not sure with these folk, running two separate campaigns in two separate constituencies, whether its hubris or the craven need to be all things to all people…at one and the same time.
Such mixed loyalties shows a lack of total commitment to a particular cause.
He said not until 2028 for Manchester Mayor. Besides nominations closed last week.
But he’s showing Rochdale a lot of respect by saying he’ll stand in Angela Rayners seat in the forthcoming general election not Rochdale to try and defeat her.
He’s done this before. Gets elected, uses the fact he’s an MP to promote himself and neglect to do any sort of constituency case work until he moves onto the next gig. Rinse and repeat
So having played the “poor renter”, former Highgate councillor and London Assembly Member, Sian Berry will now be paying rent in both Camden and Brighton until at least the next General Election?
Despite repeatedly claiming her focus was on Brighton, she now seems to be hedging her bets.
And what if she gets re-elected as Assembly Member in May? How will she be holding the London Mayor to account from Brighton?
The Labour candidate is out every day talking to residents. Sian appears to pop down at weekends to do the tourist attractions.
I hear Green members are already regretting their choice and wished they’d gone for localish candidate, Emily O’Brien.
It must be well paid job at London assembly to pay for two flats
A GLA member gets £ 60k
Sian ‘Two Flats’ Berry.
Didn’t she go to greats lengths to tell us she was a Brighton resident?
Slippery Sian. Brighton deserves better than some parachute career politician with no real life experience. Glad labour have put up a really credible candidate with some real world experience and actually lives here and has done for a long time.
To everyone above whinging about MPs renting in their constituency, and in the capital, here are some facts for you to digest:
“For MPs who rent in the London Area, the annual accommodation budget is £22,920. For MPs who rent outside the London Area, the budget is £16,010. This budget is intended to cover the costs of rental payments and associated costs. For MPs who claim associated costs only for a property they own, the annual budget is £5,270. Alternatively, MPs may choose hotel accommodation, in which case there is no cap on the budget, but there is a nightly cost limit of £175 in the London Area and £150 elsewhere in the UK.”
https://www.theipsa.org.uk/freedom-of-information/cas-141556
This makes her look more like a Dangle Berry!
Didn’t think she’d get caught.
A bit like Phelim flying to Glasgow
Has this woman ever had a proper job, she lives of the state and lives very well. I think she is an opportunist and looking for a safe guaranteed salary. Let’s not forget the last expensive useless addition to the city the Greens gave us, I360!!
How she will represented us?
How???
I sick to the stomach of these kind of politician.
It’s politics, my friend ; don’t get ” sick to my stomach” get even by voting for who and what you believe.
No more Green party in Brighton. They messed up the Council finance. £25 millions in deficit. i360 is a flop. 2 bicycle lane on the seafront. They narrowed the motolanes, creating congestion. We don’t want you here.
I’m glad to see this article and that we can all see the truth. I remember her article about Brighton rents and being upset because it is people like her who have 2 homes which is one of the causes of such high rents here. She might be a ‘nice’ person but we really need MPs who actually live in our city, not someone who has a holiday flat here.
If she was just maintaining two addresses while she completes her term of office in London that would be less concerning, but she is standing again in London, with no intention of completing a new term of office as she hopes to parachute into Pavilion. Greens showing their sense of entitlement – the voters are incidental to their thinking.
Sian has a history of helicoptering around various elections. When I first heard of her candidacy, my initially thought was because Brighton was the only Green area, and the easiest place to attempt to get in.
Because of this, I don’t believe she has any interest in representing residents of Brighton.
I simply struggle to support anyone who isn’t already championing communities within Brighton. Those who are already known, and not pushing up the agenda for election season.
You could have said exactly the same of Caroline Lucas in 2010 (she previously lived in Oxford and had no prior connection to Brighton before becoming Green candidate). Whatever you think of her, you’d struggle say that she’s had ‘no interest in representing residents of Brighton’, as evidenced by her large majority.
As for ‘helicoptering around’, very many parliamentary aspirants of all parties stand for different seats.
Let’s face it, if Sian Berry was nothing more than a rider of the political gravy train, she would have joined one of the two main parties, who could have simply awarded her a safe seat.
It’s an interesting point you raise here. Caroline Lucas had a totally different scenario, because Greens only really had one option to go for, and that was Brighton. And yes, she did very well, her legacy very much speaks for itself.
In comparison, Sian has tried several times in various locations, never did particularly well in any election. I’m not sure I’m terribly convinced with the everyone else is doing it argument, I’m afraid.
My local labour councillor in Hove doesn’t live in in Brighton & Hove…..so much political grandstanding….
Ah, but they are not actively standing for elections elsewhere right now, are they? Big difference having an address somewhere, and living there.
London Assembly member rents flat in London.
I’m shocked, shocked …
Consider this: if you had a job that you really liked doing and you’d shown yourself to be pretty good at it, would you chuck it in on the promise that you *might* get another job a few months down the line? Or would you seek to hang on to your existing job until that possibility actually became a reality?
By all means hold politicians to high standards – but not impossibly high standards.
The issue isn’t that she has a flat in London and one here but she’s trying to have her cake and eat it.
She lives in london as far as the GLA election in May is concerned but the literature she’s pushing out here basically says she’s a Brighton resident.
She has two addresses at the moment, having a current job in one place and a job she wants to get in another.
Big deal. How many of the current 650 MPs have just the one address, do you think?
So much humbug about this, you could open the most enormous sweetie shop.
And strange that Labour are pushing it given what happened with the Leicester councillors and now with Angela Rayner, though I am pretty sure that is just a load of politically motivated nonsense pushed by the Tory press.
Tories don’t really have much of a platform for this upcoming election, I suspect we will see a massive wipeout of them at the elections.
I thought at the recent 2023 council elections greens only got 7 seats down from having the most seats of 20.
Bright and Hove said NO to their in competence and vanity ill thought out schemes. i360, Beryl Bikes, constant 3 mile traffic jams on old shoreham road due to bike land for about 200 bikes a day using it….
Caroline has obviously stood down because the people of B&H have gone off the Green’s moronic implementation of Green Policies.and she doesn’t want the humiliation of losing her seat.
Don’t vote for this lady either, I’m not anti Green policy but lets make it sain.
ttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Brighton_and_Hove_City_Council_election
I thought at the recent 2023 council elections greens only got 7 seats down from having the most seats of 20.
Brighton and Hove said NO to their in competence and vanity ill thought out schemes. i360, Beryl Bikes, constant 3 mile traffic jams on old shoreham road due to bike land for about 200 bikes a day using it….
Caroline has obviously stood down because the people of B&H have gone off the Green’s moronic implementation of Green Policies.and she doesn’t want the humiliation of losing her seat.
Don’t vote for this lady either, I’m not anti Green policy but lets make it sain.
ttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Brighton_and_Hove_City_Council_election
Actually I think she is good and having experience is more important. She visited us in Seven Dials to talk to us about our Save Our Shops campaign after co-op’s plans to destroy historic shopfronts and reduce the number of independent shops we have. She is someone who cares and helps and doesn’t vote for genocide. I assume this story came from Labour who was caught saying it will deliberately try to smear the greens.
In any case I think she is trustworthy. Her explanation is reasonable too.