The General Election is fast approaching, and Sheffield’s candidates have been busy campaigning for your vote.
With political apathy increasing, understanding who you’re voting for and what they advocate is hugely important.
Forge Press approached every candidate for the Sheffield Central and Sheffield Hallam constituencies and offered them a chance to speak through their manifestos.
Andrew Cowell, the Social Democratic Party (SDP) candidate for Sheffield Hallam, accepted our request for an interview.
The Interview: Andrew Cowell
Mr Cowell has stood for election once before, as the SDP candidate for Ecclesall ward in the 2021 Sheffield local elections.
He has a background in teaching, and spent the last 18 years of that career as a headteacher.
He said: “My family always said to me there’s no point sitting here pontificating, you need to do something.
“The SDP appealed to me because it sits very nicely with my views- it’s culturally and socially conservative with a small c, but it’s left leaning on economics, and that’s me.
“The country has been running a low wage economy for a very long time, we’ve got to get back to having the kind of jobs in Sheffield 30 or 40 years ago, we’ve got to reindustrialise.
“This is where universities come in – we would put in regional development sectors in places like Sheffield to help businesses transform innovation into investment and production.”
Specifically on higher education, Mr Cowell said that the party would look to help students by reforming the loan system, as well as fees by capping the maximum tuition fee for undergraduates at £7,000 a year, and offering zero fees for courses that would provide “vital infrastructure of services of the future”, such as engineering and nursing.
“We also think we should reduce student loan interest, it’s far too high, should be capped no more than CPI.
He also said as many people are promised more than they get from it, the party wanted fewer people going to University.
He also suggested that the UK needs to reform the electoral system, saying: “We don’t think it’s fair.
“We’d like to see some form of PR so every vote matters, and so people don’t have to vote for the least bad option.”
He said he believed there is a lot of wastage in public sector, and that this has grown exponentially over last five years, so we need to make sure we’re getting value for money out of our public services.
Cowell also said the NHS is struggling to cope with demand and an aging population so we have to look at its funding, and make sure we’re getting the best out of it.
“We take our hat off to the NHS, but there’s definitely work to be done to make it a world class service.”
On the cultural side, he said: “!t’s sad that there’s not enough opportunity to give views that are counter to the narrative.
“We at the SDP accept that climate is changing, we’ve got to make sure we look after our environment, we have clean air, clean seas and rivers.
“But the whole thing needs to be looked at in detail, because it’ll cost a lot of jobs and hit the least well off the most.”
On how climate change should be combatted, he said: “If we’re going to have these wind turbines and solar panels, we should be producing them here.
“We’re simply offshoring our emissions to China.”
Mr Cowell also pledged that the party would work with Europe to reinstate the Erasmus programme, a student exchange programme that the UK pulled out of following Brexit.
Cowell called immigration “one of the few things on which we agree with Reform”. He said: “We welcome immigration, we realize what it’s done for this country over the years. It’s enriched us in many ways.
“We just think that the current rate of immigration is unsustainable. It’s very difficult to provide the public services that the growing population is going to need.
He also suggested that investing in poorer countries may be a way of helping the world to reach net-zero, and said about people in sub-Saharan Africa: “I have to say the people down there don’t have very much they are absolutely delightful. They have wonderful values.”
On the subject of Gaza, he said: “My heart bleeds for the families of the Jewish refugees, Jewish hostages, the people who have been killed on October the 7th and also for the Palestinian people who are in Gaza seeing their loved ones suffer through lack of food, lack of water.
“The trouble is that we’ve got the two main protagonists are both extremists. They’re not prepared to consider the kind of peace deal that’s going to help them to form some kind of two-state solution, which is really the only way forward.”
He also said he was worried for Jewish people being made “unsafe” despite being nothing to do with the Israeli state.
The candidates for Sheffield Hallam constituency are:
Olivia Blake – Labour
Sam Chapman – Rejoin EU
Andrew Cowell – Social Democratic Party
Isaac Howarth – Conservative
Jason Leman – Green
Shaffaq Mohammed – Liberal Democrats
Mo Moui-Tabrizy – Workers Party of Britain
Interview conducted by Alex Simpson, Editor-in-Chief
