Bristol West Green candidate called Fidel Castro “an inspiration”

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This election the Green Party have pledged to step outside the ‘old politics’ box and break with the tired old thinking of the past. This begs the question: who inspires the Greens?

Is it Noam Chomsky? Alan Titchmarsh? A primordial earth goddess dwelling in the old oak at the bottom of Caroline Lucas’ garden?

Well for Molly Scott Cato, the Green parliamentary candidate for Bristol West,  the late Cuban dictator Fidel Castro appears to be the answer. Following the death of the beared tyrant in November last year, the incumbent Member of the European Parliament praised his radical left wing reforms, placing him amongst the great and the good of twentieth century leaders.

The Green’s praise of “#Fidel” is not limited to Cato:  their official magazine praised Cuba’s current sustainability in January this year as “borne of his struggle to… help steer the country towards eco-socialism”, rather than the famine and fuel shortages wrought by the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991.

Fidel Castro conducted 3615 executions by firing squad, yet ironically in a recent Daily Politics interview it was Theresa May that Cato slammed as  “an extremely authoritarian leader” who treats reasonable opposition as “dissidents”.

The praise for Castro moreover sits uneasily with Cato’s call for an end to persecution in Chechyna, given that under Fidel’s regime many LGBT people were fired, imprisoned or sent to one of 200 “re-education camps” because homosexuality was considered a “deviation incompatible with the revolution”

On the plus side, if elected Cato pledges to scrap tuition fees and lower rents.  It is therefore hoped she will support students seeking to bulwark against the worst excesses of Bristol’s cutthroat market: the prices at ‘Source café’.