'If I Can Do it, Anyone Can!'

David Hughes sits down with Green Party councillor Maru Mormina

Elected this year, councillor Maru Mormina – who, with Greg Smith, represents the Chilterns’ Haddenham & Stone ward, is one of two Green Party councillors on Buckinghamshire Council. Here, she explains her journey from Corbyn-era Labour supporter to Green councillor.

TL;DR? Skip to the end for the video version.

I’ve never been a card-carrying member of any political party, but my traditional voting alliances would be with Labour, and I was very interested in the Corbyn project at the time, and when he lost the leadership election, I was also very interested in what was coming next. But after the initial enthusiasm with Starmer, I lost faith in Labour – it didn’t feel like my natural home any more – and started looking around, and the Greens was the obvious choice at the time [because it] aligns with my values. And shortly after I joined, I got a welcome email, and I turned up one day here in Haddenham, where I live, to help deliver leaflets, and I met a few of the local Green Party members, including councillor Greg Smith. A few weeks later, Greg turned up to my house, asking me if I would stand for the next local elections. And I thought, you must be joking!

He certainly puts the ‘Greg’ into ‘gregarious’. When you accepted his offer, did you have any inkling you might be elected?

I didn’t really have a huge deal of expectations because the demands of work and family meant that I hadn’t been hugely involved in the life of the community up until then, so most people in Haddenham wouldn’t know who I was. I was more interested in getting Greg elected, to be honest, because I always thought he was a brilliant councillor. So you can imagine my surprise when I went to the count the day after the election, and I was told, ‘You got in.’ So I arrived at Buckinghamshire Council very unprepared, and I’m still learning the ropes.

What has your impression of the council been, since you were elected in May?

The council is actually an interesting place because there are all sorts of characters in there. There are those who are very kind of community-minded; you can tell that they have a vocation of service – that they want to serve their communities. And there are others who are more motivated by political aims. So you have to find out who your allies are who you can work with, and collaborate where there are things in common and where there are causes that you share and where you can work together, regardless of party affiliation. I went up to a Conservative councillor not long ago and I said, ‘I think you’re doing a brilliant job,’ despite the fact that they’re from a political party from an opposite kind of persuasion. I think we also need to recognise that different visions of how society can work can coexist and it’s healthy to have different visions, to disagree, and use those differences to come to something that is bigger than the sum of the parts. Collaboration is key.

Buckinghamshire is a vast county with hundreds of councillors, but both Green Party councillors are from Haddenham and Stone. What’s your secret?

I need to preface this because I always describe Haddenham as a little green island in the middle of a blue sea, right? It is unusual demographically in many other senses as well, but politically, it’s always been kind of a progressive type of village. We deliver a a leaflet 3 or 4 times a year called The Village Green, a newsletter where we update residents on what the Green Party has been doing locally. We normally deliver it door to door and this time I decided that instead of just putting it through the letterbox, I was going to knock on a few doors, because I am very aware that people only see their councillors or their candidates at election time when you’re going canvassing and asking for their votes. And I thought, ‘I want to find out how people are doing, what issues they have,’ because it helps me represent them better. As you can imagine, delivering these leaflets is taking 2 or 3 times as long as if I was shoving it through the letterbox, but it’s been absolutely fantastic and really interesting. Most people are not interested in talking to their local councillor, so they take the newsletter and say, ‘Thank you very much,’ and they shut the door. Those who do engage spend a bit of time chatting to me on the doorstep, and many of them are telling me that Zack Polanski’s message is hitting the right notes.

You’re seeing evidence of ‘the Zack bounce’ on the doorstep?

Absolutely. Yesterday, I was talking to a young woman who moved to Haddenham a year ago from London. She’s an actor and a writer, so she feels very much identified with, with Zack, and she was telling me the usual story – that she was a member of the Labour Party, got disillusioned and moved to the Greens. And so we spent a little bit of time talking about trans rights, Palestine, inequality, all these things. And, you know, basically, she was saying to me, not with these words, but that was the gist of it, that, you know, the Green Party is hitting all the right notes on these and other issues.

Your story is a testament to the fact that what once were paper candidates now have a real shot at being elected in future elections or even sudden by-elections. That could be a little bit scary for potential candidates. What would you say to someone considering running for the next open seat?

One of the things that I felt talking to people on the doorsteps in the last few days is a huge sense of responsibility. There is all this momentum. And hopes are high in the message that the Greens are bringing to the nation. And I feel a huge sense of responsibility, that we mustn’t let those hopes down. So I think to anyone considering standing for, for local elections – and it’s not, you know, four years from here because by-elections do happen all the time – is that if I can do it, anybody can do it, basically. It is something you do as a service to your community, and one of the things I like most about the Greens is how focused in community we are. Tat means really being out there, talking to people, participating in and supporting local initiatives. The more procedural parts of being a councillor, you can learn. But what you cannot learn is your inner motivation. We want to have many more councillors come the next election – we came second in Long Crendon, for example – because we do want to have a bigger and more impactful Green presence. We are doing our bit and we are trying to make an impact where we can, but with more councillors, it would be, the impact would be magnified.

For people who are not intending to stand as a candidate, what can they do?

Engaging in a bit of activism, helping us deliver leaflets, helping us campaign, getting involved – those things make a huge difference and allow us to put our Green ideas out there and start shifting public opinion, because that’s what local elections are fought on: public opinion. If public opinion is with us, we’ll we’ll win the seats. If it’s not with us, we will not. Somebody said ‘Your election campaign starts the day after you get elected,’ and I think there is an element of truth to that. Zack is doing a great job shouting our values and ideas from the rooftops, but we also need to bring it down to our local level and make sure that message gets through, and what those wider issues mean in Haddenham, in Chinnor, in Princes Risborough, or wherever.