Greens Announce Martin Dobson as Candidate for Riverside Council Byelection

Liverpool Green Party has selected Martin Dobson to stand in the Riverside Ward by-election on December 5th. Martin is a Save Sefton Park Meadows Campaigner and has lived in South Liverpool for 28 years. A former campaigner for Oxfam Martin now has his own company making accessible information for people with learning disabilities. He has recently developed the world’s first search engine for people who are unable to read and write: Dobson’s Choice and has already been selected as our Parliamentary candidate for Liverpool Riverside constituency in 2015.

Martin will be campaigning for the restoration of bus lanes to help people who have no car to get to work on time, protecting other Green spaces and putting alternative Green ideas forward at a city council level.

A little bit of background on Riverside ward. There was a byelection last year after Joe Anderson became Mayor, which followed on from the 2012 Local Election result:

Local Election May 2012

Labour 81%
Green 6%
Tory 4%
TUSC 3%
Eng Dem 3%
Liberal 2%


By-election 2012

Labour 77%
Green 9%
TUSC 6%
Lib Dem 4%
Tory 4%

In both of these elections I was our candidate and in the by-election we did run a basic campaign. We'll be doing a bit more this time, but clearly we are not expecting a 34% swing in just one election. However, it is important that we keep up the momentum in Liverpool. TUSC also campaigned hard last time and should do again, but the wild card will be UKIP who will almost certainly run a candidate this time with some form of campaign. It will be interesting to see how effective that is from a standing start.