Meet our candidates: Jon Maxted, Brookfield

“I was born and raised in Littlehampton and I’ve lived in the area for most of my life.

I’m a former Labour member that has found their way to the Workers Party after personally witnessing the decline of Labour under recent generations of its leadership. After working alongside them in east and west Sussex for almost a year I can confidently say that today only the Workers Party has an uncompromised commitment to representing the British working class.

As with the rest of the country, Littlehampton has been rocked by the back to back crises of the pandemic and the ongoing economic depression. These crises compound each other, with many unable to work in lockdown while at the same time receiving insufficient support from governmental institutions that’ve already been weakened after having weathered more than 10 years of Conservative austerity policies. Under these circumstances a great many have lost their jobs and even their homes. While this has gone on, Britain’s wealthiest have gorged themselves on record profits. The retail industry for example enjoyed its biggest month ever last year at the height of the lockdown. Under the workers party’s “Corona tax” campaign, a paltry 5% will be levied on individuals with fortunes in excess of £10m, netting £17 billion that can be used to support the ordinary working public who’ve found themselves pushed to the brink throughout this hugely expensive crisis while the wealthy have flourished.

Serious problems have remained a constant feature in Littlehampton’s education system, despite the promises of previous councils and Tory governments that academisation of Littlehampton’s former community school would deliver an improved and more efficient system that could better prepare young people for their futures. Instead, we’ve seen the opposite happen; almost ten years since its first Ofsted report in 2011 Littlehampton Academy has consistently failed to meet the necessary standards to be deemed a good school. Two more generations of Littlehampton’s young people have been let down as a result, with the most recent report from 2018 still finding that students are failing to achieve as they should by year 11. If elected, one of my top priorities will be to break this endless cycle of bad schooling that has repeatedly failed generation after generation of Littlehampton’s youth and deliver education services that guarantee a fair chance for everyone in our community.”