Jill Perry

Candidate for Copeland

Jill Perry, 52, is married with two grown-up children. She has been a high profile and tireless campaigner for Friends of the Earth for 18 years. She has focused mainly on energy, climate and nuclear issues.

Born, brought up and living in West Cumbria, Jill has a degree in German. She taught French and German for many years in West Cumbria. She served on the Lake District National Park Authority and is a Parish Councillor.

She gave up teaching in 2000 and became a maker of fine jams and preserves. She specialises in using local fruit and vegetables and selling through locally owned outlets.

Green Energy and Jobs

Jill joined the Green Party in 2004. She feels strongly that the Green Party is the only party with strong and coherent policies on:

• · the environment
• · poverty
• · equality.
• Jill is motivated by the need to make a difference on these issues at a local and national level.

• She would like to see Cumbria investing its future in renewable energy technologies. It should move away from its past lead in the dirty old technologies of coal and nuclear power.

Green candidate achieves 30% of vote

• In 2007, as a member of the newly formed Allerdale Green Party, Jill stood in the Borough Council elections. She gained over 30% of the vote, second to the man who became leader of the Council.
• She continues to support candidates who stand in by-elections in the area.
• Candidate profile
• Jill was born in Loweswater, the daughter of an evacuee and a tenant farmer, farming at Watergate. Her father had been a veteran of the First World War and had previously farmed at Sandwith, nr Whitehaven.
• She went to school first at Lorton and then at Cockermouth Grammar School, going on to study French and German at Bangor University, North Wales, before returning to Cumbria to teach languages at St Benedicts, RC High School, Whitehaven. By this time she was married and living at Winder nr Frizington.
• On the birth of her second child she gave up teaching for two years, working as a self employed seamstress. Afterwards she returned to part-time employment at Keswick School and then at Wyndham, Egremont.
• By this time she had become involved in local environmental campaigning with Friends of the Earth and in 1995 she left teaching to work for the Cumbrian Friends of the Earth groups during the Public Inquiry into Nirex’ proposals to bury nuclear waste deep under the village of Gosforth.
• Victory came on the same day that the General Election of 1997 was announced, and she, like a lot of people, was cheered by the success of the Labour Party on May 1^st, but disillusionment soon followed.
• In 2000 she left teaching permanently, having had a series of short-term part-time work in a variety of different schools and took up childminding, worked in a café and eventually settled in the job that she does now – making high quality jams and preserves for award-winning company Wild and Fruitful www.wildandfruitful.co.uk
• She took a month out to work in Poland teaching English in 2004 and six months out to do the same in China in 2006 returning via the Trans Siberian Express to Moscow where she spent her 50^th birthday reunited with her husband.
• Later that same year she joined the Green Party and became one of the founder members of the local branch, standing for election in Crummock Ward in the Borough Council elections and being selected as Copeland’s candidate for the General Election.