North Herefordshire's first Green MP discusses her journey into politics, UK democracy’s flaws, and the importance of finding common ground.
What motivates an academic who studied and worked in International Development for years to get into politics midway through her career? For Ellie Chowns, it was the rise of UKIP in 2015. With Douglas Carswell’s election as the right-wing party’s first MP that year, Chowns became increasingly worried about misinformation and UKIP’s “nasty politics”. She knew this was her call to action.
“I was really worried about the rise of really negative trends in politics and I just wanted to see my sorts of values winning,” she says in an exclusive interview with Left Foot Forward.
Fast forward to 4 July 2024, and Chowns saw her values translated into a historic election win. She became the constituency’s first female MP, the first Green MP in the Midlands and the first to unseat a Conservative MP there since 1906.
The new North Herefordshire MP says it is “absolutely fantastic” to be part of the second cohort of Greens in Parliament and “taking on the baton from Caroline Lucas”.
Chowns spoke to Left Foot Forward about the environment, her frustrations with UK democracy and why she believes politics is all about finding common ground.
An ‘energising’ election campaign
Chowns won the seat with a nearly 6,000 majority and a 69% turnout. She describes the campaign as “energising” and says everyone involved felt proud they’d achieved “real political change”.
Now one of four Green MPs in Parliament, she maintains the same enthusiasm eight months on from her win. “It’s a hugely demanding, energising job, and there is no shortage of momentum from my perspective,” Chowns tells Left Foot Forward.
Like most MPs, Chowns entered Parliament with a long list of campaigning priorities. But she is realistic in her approach: “I didn’t promise that I was going to fix X, Y, Z, because I knew I couldn’t. I promised I was going to work flipping hard.”
‘I didn’t have any thoughts about getting involved in being elected myself’
Elected politics was not always where Chowns saw her future.
Chowns has worked for international development charities, including Christian Aid and Voluntary Service Overseas. In 2014, she obtained a doctorate in International Development, writing her thesis on water infrastructure in rural Malawi.
At age 40, Chowns started campaigning in 2015 because she wanted to do “something constructive”. However, she admits: “I totally didn’t have any thoughts or expectations about getting involved in being elected myself”.
As it happened, Chowns then ended up running as a non-target candidate in the 2015 local elections, but didn’t win. In 2017, she was elected as a Green councillor on Herefordshire County Council. She was re-elected as a councillor in 2019.
‘People want political representatives who’ve got some clear values’
From the outset, Chowns was struck by how much “common ground” she could find with people while out campaigning.
She ran monthly street stalls in a local market town. She recalls a conversation she had with two older women who said: “We’re terribly worried about the suffering refugees have gone through taking these dangerous journeys, but we’re really worried about integration”.
Chowns told the women about her experience of welcoming families through the Freedom from Torture holiday scheme, which provides respite breaks for refugees who have experienced trauma.
“I shared my experience with the refugee families I had met, and we sort of agreed to disagree,” she says.
However, half an hour later, one of the women returned and said: “I’ve been thinking about what you said, and I’ve changed my mind.” Similarly, out on the doorstep, Chowns says that plenty of people have said they would vote for her despite not agreeing with her on everything.
“People want political representatives who’ve got a bit of conviction and some clear values. They don’t even need to agree with you all of the time to vote for you,” she reflects.
From Brussels to Westminster
While Chowns is new to the Palace of Westminster, she has served in another chamber. She was the Member of the European Parliament (MEP) for the West Midlands for just under a year before the UK officially left the EU on 31 January 2020. Now, she has been an MP for roughly the same length of time.
What are her thoughts on how the two Parliaments work? “There’s lots of ridiculousness about the way we do things [in Westminster],” she says.
One issue she’s been campaigning on since July is Parliament’s need to modernise, specifically by introducing electronic voting for MPs.
“My experience of being in the European Parliament is you have the buttons in front of you, you vote. It’s immediately shown on the screen who’s voted, and you can get through a bunch of stuff really quickly,” she says.
She contrasts this with the House of Commons, where each vote involves “15 minutes of walking through corridors”. Not only that, but the timing of votes is uncertain.
“So there was one time a few months ago, we were all supposed to be going back to our constituencies that evening, but we didn’t start voting until 7pm,” she says.
10 votes and several hours later, those who didn’t live in London were unable to get back to their constituencies. Chowns wasn’t able to get back to Herefordshire until lunchtime the next day, meaning all her constituency duties scheduled for the morning had to be pushed back.
Chowns has been equally vocal about the need for proportional representation. She reflects on how much she appreciated the proportional system in the EU Parliament, saying, “It just incentivises cross-party working all the time”.
While our Parliament has all-party parliamentary groups (APPGs) and select committees, there isn’t the same proportionality, “The injustice of our electoral system is that parties have a huge majority [of seats] on a minority of the vote.” This is also reflected in how MPs are represented on select committees, where the composition doesn’t always match with a party’s share of the vote.
Speaking up in Parliament
In Parliament, Chowns is committed to standing up for Green values and issues that her constituents raise with her.
She went to visit a group of people in another constituency recently and they said, “‘You do realise you’ve spoken more than 50 times in Parliament, our MP has spoken once’”.
“I was gobsmacked, because part of the job is, in my view, speaking up in Parliament” she says.
Ellie Chowns speaking about climate protestor arrests in Parliament.
She has spoken in Parliament about flooding for the fourth consecutive month: “I’ve spoken about flooding in Parliament because it’s the fourth month running we’ve had flooding in my constituency”.
Water pollution is another issue Chowns has frequently spoken about. Asked how the issue should be tackled, Chowns, a member of the environmental audit committee, says “equal attention needs to be given to agricultural pollution as to sewage pollution”. In her constituency, which includes the Wye and Lugg river, she says agricultural pollution, primarily caused by animal waste and fertiliser runoff, is the biggest contributor to water pollution.
Chowns, who lives on a farm, emphasises the need to discuss agricultural pollution, as well as the role water companies are playing in contributing to water pollution.
“Agricultural pollution is harder to deal with [than sewage pollution] as it’s diffuse. It kind of trickles in all sorts of places, whereas sewage pollution comes out of a pipe,” she says.
She says water protection zones need to be established to create incentives and penalties for farmers to prevent pollution. She also emphasises the need for increased investment in nature-friendly farming programs and more effective regulators.
“The Environment Agency needs funding and teeth,” she says, adding that it has become “a shadow of its former self” due to funding cuts over the last 15 years.
In addition, she says that supporting farmers to take up nature-friendly farming schemes, which reward farmers for protecting nature, is “good for livelihoods, jobs and food production, and it’s essential for tackling the nature and climate crises”.
Thinking beyond five-year election cycles
Chowns says that farmers are the biggest advocates of nature-friendly farming, but that, as with many policies, they need long-term government support.
“If we’re serious, and this applies in so many areas of policy – health, social care, housing – we’ve got to be thinking beyond just a maximum five-year election cycle and adopt a generational mindset,” Chowns stresses.
She points out that a major flaw in the political system is its tendency to prioritise focusing on the next election, meaning politicians throw soundbites at each other and engage in lowest-common-denominator politics.
Instead, Chowns would like to see MPs stop using issues as political footballs, and build consensus across party lines to make policy for the next generation.
With her values-driven politics, Chowns is keen to play her part in bringing that vision to life.
Olivia Barber is a reporter at Left Foot Forward
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