indy candidate against Labor in Birmingham

In the twenty-fifth of our #CanaryCandidates video interview series, we meet Dr Ammar Waraich – standing up in Birmingham against Preet Kaur Gill

Dr Ammar Waraich is standing in the general election as an independent candidate in Birmingham Edgbaston against Preet Kaur Gill of the Labor Party. On his campaign website, he says:

Political parties have ignored the public for far too long. They are all the same. The interests of the party, big donors and the media are most important to them.

Work: alienating the public

Waraich spoke canary on how the Labor Party under Keir Starmer alienated him and others in the constituency:

I was a member of the Labor Party and I left after the interview with Keir Starmer on LBC. But I’ve always become more suspicious of the party, the way they… treated Jeremy Corbyn unfairly and then the way they moved away from the values ​​I believed in after that…

They became Labor in name only, essentially.

So I felt very alienated. I spoke to my local Labor Party group that I was a member of and people were just as discouraged… I thought “what’s the point?” The purpose of a democratic exercise should be that individuals at the local level who are members of the community can have some input into the party, can contribute to policy making or thinking.

That wasn’t happening. And I compared that and contrasted that with the idea of ​​the citizens gathering.

His Labor opponent, Preet Kaur Gill, has been in charge for the last few years. But as Waraich insisted:

She won elections twice on the Jeremy Corbyn manifesto. And now that Keir Starmer has come in, she’s kind of gone back on all her lines and followed Keir Starmer unchallenged to change the Labor Party… She abstained from the vote on the ceasefire and that angered a lot of people.

Many of the people who have joined my team are actually former co-workers as well… They feel like she doesn’t listen to them.

Dr. Ammar Waraich: Restoring Service to Community and Humanity

Dr. Ammar Waraich strongly criticized the establishment parties’ support for the Israeli state’s genocide in Gaza, saying:

It makes me very sick. It’s inhumane… When it comes to Ukraine, they’re quick to judge… “Yes, it’s war crimes.” And for Gaza, “oh, I don’t know”… Keir Starmer, the human rights lawyer, can’t physically come out and say a single word of support for the Palestinians or the ICC and the ICJ.

He also strongly believes in strengthening the community through investment. He talked about:

Rebuilding and investing in our communities, and a key component of that is actually funding education… There are teachers walking out of our schools in droves because they can’t get paid adequately…

It’s a facsimile… of the health system in a way because (it’s) the same thing there – overworked nurses, overworked doctors and physicians, not paid enough, very hard working conditions on top of that, very long hours and the remuneration financial is nowhere near what it should be.

And he insisted on resisting privatization and protecting the NHS from political power games:

We need to depoliticize NHS funding… if we want, that is, a system that is free at the point of use. We have to invest in it, we have to be prepared to spend on it, we have to be prepared to take it beyond this party politics.

And finally we need to oppose privatization in the NHS too… because every time the NHS has been… exposed to large private firms that add no value and actually reduce the capacity of the NHS, we have lost . Taxpayers must foot the bill.

Another key area for investment, he pointed out, is the environment:

We need a record investment… in the green transition… This investment will pay off… The investment you make, you will get so much back.

On his website, he specifically outlines his commitments to insulate homes, improve public transport and protect water bodies, among many other positive plans for the constituency and the country.

Finally, he stated:

I am not interested in being the representative of parliament to the people. I want to be the people’s representative in parliament… In fact, listening to the people has been the greatest pleasure of this campaign. I listen to people anyway as part of my job as a doctor, but that’s beyond the clinic. This is… understanding issues from a different sphere…

Just listening to people complain about their problems that others don’t listen to. I want to hear all of this, I want to absorb all of this and I want to make a difference by representing them in parliament… I’m just asking people to think differently, to think about the value proposition that an independent can offer… Think different. Think independently.

For more on Waraich’s comments, see the full interview on our YouTube channel:

Watch and read all our #CanaryCandidates interviews here.

Featured image via Canary