“Literally every vote will count”: In conversation with Mark Stevens, Green Party candidate

With 300 Instagram followers and having recently obtained new SU-affiliated status, the Warwick Greens are the latest political movement to sweep campus.

The revival of this Green Party society, which last collapsed in 2022, is part of growing momentum locally for a political party that netted its best ever result at the general election last year, and is now eyeing elections for Warwickshire County Council this May.

As part of the vote, encompassing all of Warwickshire including Warwick, Kenilworth, and Leamington Spa, the campus accommodations of Heronbank, Lakeside, Sherbourne, and Cryfield Village will elect their own county councillor. There are five candidates standing here in Lapworth and West Kenilworth: Mark Stevens, a Kenilworth town councillor campaigning on behalf of the Green Party, is one of them.

Having been approached with the proposal of an interview by the Warwick Greens, The Boar sat down with the candidate to discuss his key platform issues, including climate policy and public transport, and the importance of local democracy for students.

What ties do you have to the University?

Stevens started by touting his attendance at Warwick lectures; gesturing to a large poster of David Bowie hanging on the wall behind him in his office, he mentioned a lecture on the pop musician he sat in on recently. Continuing the theme of an interest in music, he claimed to be a frequent attendee of Friday night jazz sessions at the Warwick Arts Centre. Certainly, his social media team have made sure to emphasise this, posting about it several times on the candidate’s Instagram. Stevens suggested that the jazz sessions are a great venue, too, to meet students to discuss their issues: “You get students coming up to talk to you, as well. We can talk about lots of issues, not just the jazz side of things, which is great as a platform.”

By actually turning up to campus, he said, you can “see what’s happening”, and understand the issues actually affecting students. The most notable of these, easily, is problems with buses, which Stevens has seemingly made a central aspect of his platform in response. Just being on campus allows him to see how the vehicles “stack up like crazy” at the Interchange.

So why should students care about local politics, when so many of them don’t live near the University out of term?

Stevens rejected any notion that students shouldn’t be attached to the local area. When Warwick students spend “an awful lot of time” at the University, he proposed, it is key that they “not only express their concerns about things that they don’t think are working”, but actually get involved with trying to shape some of those issues.

A central part of this, he claimed, is working with political candidates local to the University, and he credited two members of the Warwick Greens – Jacob McMullan and Will Shearman – for spearheading his own campaign among university students.

Beyond that, however, Stevens affirmed that if any student intends to spend a lot of time around Warwick – which, he noted, they all will by attending the University – it is important that the area “is one that supports what you actually care about”. That could be climate policy; he mentioned efforts to improve “active travel” – cycling and walking – and cited the absence of footpaths on some roads in the area as a “crazy” problem. “Rather excessive” maximum-permitted speeds on some of the roads, as well as potholes, were other infrastructure-related issues he attacked.

“I think it’s important to play the part as much as you can in actually influencing some of those decisions at a county, at a town, and at the district level as well,” he suggested. The local government system will be changing soon, both in Warwickshire and across the country, he acknowledged, because of impending government reforms. But on this occasion, students still have the opportunity to vote under the existing system.

As a Green, climate policy is obviously central to your platform. What, then, are your main points around that?

Stevens referred back to his earlier-mentioned policy on active travel, highlighting the need to improve cycle lanes in the University’s area: “We need cycleways which are actually joined up, not just ones in splendid isolation.” Such developments could focus not just on cycle routes leading to and from the University, he claimed, but could run “from Birmingham all the way through to the Cotswolds, potentially, in time” – though of course, as a mere county councillor in Warwickshire, this would be technically beyond Stevens’ remit.

The other aspect of the candidate’s push for environmentally friendly transport, he emphasised, is raising the standards of buses. “I want a service that actually is a service they value. It’s one which actually meets their needs, and one which actually gives them the opportunity to avoid having to hit an Uber, or get a taxi everywhere they go.” The more people that use public transport, the better it is from a carbon footprint point of view: “We don’t want thousands of different car travel plans, when, in fact, we can have maybe 40 bus trips instead.”

Such improvements, he said, will have a meaningful benefit on “the air we breathe”, by reducing pollution sources as much as possible. While he noted that electric cars, an alternative solution to this, are “gaining traction”, Stevens claimed these are “going through a tricky period”, and so is facing his own focus on public transport.

This part of your platform has largely focused on the ‘Better On Buses’ pledge: could you expand on that?

Stevens offered a multitude of possible solutions to improve the state of buses for Warwick’s students, one of these being “actually having a service that meets the timeframe which you need it to work”. Students, he said, have told him they feel the buses to and from Leamington Spa in the early hours of the morning cut off too early, and that they’d like these extended by an hour.

He also suggested that the state of bus shelters poses an issue, given the “wonderful array of different weathers” in Britain. Students being forced to wait outside in the rain because bus shelters can’t accommodate a “reasonable number” of commuters is a major problem, especially when buses are “often” delayed or cancelled. “We want to get away from that unreliability”, he posited. “We want people to actually be encouraged to use them, and the more efficient something is, the better it works. The word gets around very quickly – as it does, of course, if it doesn’t work well.”

Linked to the state of buses and local public transport, the cost-of-living crisis has been a persistent issue for students in recent years. What would you do if elected to make this easier?

“Well, I think going to university is expensive enough full-stop these days,” the candidate said immediately. Staying on the subject of public transport, he observed the recent rise in bus fares locally, and ventured his own ambition to return to what he calls the “real value-for-money trip” of a £2 ticket.

If that can’t be done with the current bus operators, Stevens said, intriguingly, that he would like to “explore some other alternatives” of transport to key student areas like Leamington, Coventry, and Kenilworth. As he presented it: “Is there an alternative that could actually deliver the service compared to what we have today, if the ones that we are working with today aren’t able to support that change?”

Among many students, there’s a growing disillusionment with politics: the idea that it might be ‘broken’ in this country. Do students actually have a meaningful choice in this election?

Stevens readily affirmed his belief that any students are “not alone” if they can’t differentiate between the “blurred messaging” between the governing Labour Party and the opposition Conservatives. For him, it is obviously the Greens who offer an alternative: “But obviously, to get to that level, we need to actually elevate and grow our power base in the local government first.”

He emphasised the local success experienced by the Greens in recent years, including on his own Kenilworth town council where the Conservative administration was displaced by a Green–Liberal Democrat agreement. At a higher level, he brought up the working agreement on Warwick District Council brokered between the Greens and Labour – “That doesn’t mean we agree with everything that Labour does”, he claimed, but that instead his own party wants to ensure “the vast majority of common areas of interest” can be achieved.

Coming on to the Green presence at a county level, which is the body actually holding its elections this May, he admitted that his party only has a “relatively small” foothold on the council – just three of its 57 seats are Green politicians. His party’s aim is simply to get “as many of those 57 divisions represented by a Green Party member as we can”. Stevens segued slightly into his own motivations for standing – “the only way we’re going to change things now is to actually do it from the inside out”. He said he has spent his time as a town councillor lobbying from the outside to get action on child safety issues: “Children being unsafe when they’re going to school, things like that.” He called these “knee-jerk, instant recognition” problems, but claimed the response has been “horrendous” – “We’re getting responses like, ‘well, nobody’s died yet’.” Lobbying from the outside, he concluded, has had “limited success”, necessitating Green candidates standing on a county-wide level “to get inside”.

If students have been interested by anything in this interview, how can they actually get involved in local politics?

Stevens, naturally, took a Green Party angle to the question, playing up his campaign Instagram, MarkStevensHQ, as well as plugging the Warwick Greens’ own account: “That will actually get you into a lot more material specific to student life, and specific to the campaign at the moment.”

He hugely stressed the need to register to vote, and to get out and vote, if eligible, on the day itself, “because literally every vote will count”. Stevens claimed that the Greens came a “close second” at the last election in 2021 (the Conservatives, it should be noted, won more than twice the total of the Greens, with 1,450 votes), and that this time every single vote will make a difference. If successful, students can “displace the people who are really what I call career politicians”, he said, “instead of people who genuinely care and make a difference”.

From a community aspect, Stevens referred back to the new Warwick society: “Reach out to Jacob and Will […], and they’ll connect you with other folks in the group.” The Young Greens, the Green Party’s youth wing, are another “great opening” for getting involved in wider local politics, he opined. In essence, it is that degree of acting on a collective level which is so important, “because that’s where real things change”.

Mark Stevens closed the interview with his pitch to the readers as embodying a voice for student interests: “You know, I’m all about giving that voice to people, and making sure that voice is heard at whatever level is appropriate.” His candidacy, he acclaimed, is about action, and that his “genuine care” for the area is evident in his involvement locally. Stevens is a member of the Kenilworth Lions, a service club and local charity, as well as a trustee for the children’s charity KidsOut. He also noted that his current position as a town councillor is a volunteer role, without pay (though councillors do receive an annual allowance to reimburse for council duties).

Supporting community actors, he said, “is key to making a difference”, because of the importance community holds: “That’s what makes your life better when you’re actually at university in Warwickshire, and it’s a perfect catalyst for your life going forward in terms of change as well.” He ended by urging readers to reach out to him directly, through the Green Society or via his Instagram.

“Tell me what you want to do, tell me what you care about, and how you want to get involved. You’re very welcome to join the quest,” he finished with a grin.

Mark Stevens is a candidate for Lapworth and West Kenilworth in the Warwickshire County Council elections. All candidates for the seat can be found here.

Watch the video interview here.

Polls will open on 1 May at 7am, and close at 10pm. You must have a valid form of ID, and be registered to vote.