The Green Party’s victimisation of Alison Teal, the Sheffield Green Party Tree Campaigner

Latest news – read all about it in the Yorkshire Post .

Alison Teal, who was given a national award by the Greens in 2017 in recognition of her campaigning against the Sheffield tree-felling scandal, was selected in September 2022 by local members as the party’s candidate for the Sheffield Central seat.

Ms Teal had previously stood in the same seat in the 2019 election, finishing third. But she has been suspended since October 2022 after a formal complaint was made about her by a Sheffield councillor Ms Teal did not wish to name.

She believes the party is deliberately dragging out the disciplinary process so they can replace her with an ’emergency selection’ when the next election is called.

She said: “The complaint consisted mostly of tweets over the last few years which were supposed to be evidence of my so-called transphobia, which I didn’t agree with. They are not transphobic at all”.

And adds: “They’ve let go of the accusations of transphobia now. What they are more focusing on now was that I was dishonest on my nomination form because it says: ” do you have any significant disagreements with the 2019 General Election manifesto?”. We got down to quibbling about what ‘significant’ means. My argument is that this gender identity stuff isn’t significant to me and I don’t think it is significant to the population at a general election. I’m accused of trying to hoodwink them. It is a contradiction because the implication is I was being deceitful, but the complaint also included a slew of Twitter posts about my views. You can’t have it both ways and say I’m hiding my views but I’m also trying to publicise them”.

“Me stepping down”, she says, “would be a subversion of the democratic vote – I’ve got an obligation to see it through. People have resigned over this and left the party – not just in Sheffield but around the country.”

You may wish to visit an earlier post about Alison Teal’s suspension from her membership of the Green Party here https://thegreenlight.blog/2023/05/04/alison-tealselected-parliamentary-candidate-still-suspended-from-the-party/

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