Labour: Daniel Zeichner

No stranger to the political limelight, Daniel Zeichner has stood as a Labour candidate in every general election since 1997 – and lost every time.

When not trying to get elected, he has served as a councillor from 1995-2003, a Parliamentary researcher in the mid-90s, an MEP from 1994-99, and a national political officer for the trade union UNISON.

Despite a lenghty political career, Zeichner has generally managed to keep a significantly lower profile than his rivals for Cambridge. That was until, as Labour’s candidate, he performed a Nazi salute at a Union debate in the run up to the 2010 general election.

The debate, entitled “This House believes the Conservatives are ready to run the country again”, received national attention. Describing the Polish Law and Justice Party as “fascists”, he accompanied the remark with a Nazi salute and imitated a Hitler moustache.

He then criticised Cameron for taking Tory MEPs out of the European People’s Party EU Parliament grouping of centre-right pro-European parties, instead joining the Eurosceptic European Conservatives and Reformists group.

Despite Labour’s attempts to keep the consistent rumours of Party dissatisfaction with him out of the headlines, doubts were raised publicly about his proficiency as a parliamentary candidate when George Owers, Labour city counsellor and former CULC Chair, described him as a “terrible candidate” and said he had “0 per cent confidence in him” in 2012, according to the Ely Standard.

Conservatives: Chamali Fernando

In 2007, Chamali Fernando sought the Liberal Democrat nomination for the London Mayoral election when she was less than 30 years old; she was unsuccessful, losing to Brian Paddick. Two years later, Fernando defected to the Tories.

She raised eyebrows when she quoted Churchill on one of her pieces of promotional material. “If you are not a Liberal in your twenties you have no heart, and if you’re not a Conservative by the age of forty then you have no brain,” she told potential voters in a student constituency.

The Conservative PCC made international headlines last week when she appeared to suggest that mentally ill people “ought” to wear wristbands to better identify their condition. Dubbed a “silly Tory candidate” in a Daily Mail headline, while also making the front page of the Daily Mirror, the story of these allegations was reported extensively by the press including The Independent, The Guardian, the BBC and the New York Daily Times. An online petition calling for Fernando to step down over the comments has received over 1,100 signatories.

Fernando subsequently accused the local Cambridge blogger who broke the story of “completely distort[ing] the comment” and emphasised that any mental health illness identifier would be optional.

Fernando then indicated she was pursuing legal action against incumbent Huppert after he made comments to the media stating his shock “at the suggestion that people with mental health problems should be expected to wear wristbands”, pending a refusal to publicly apologise for his comments.

Liberal Democrats: Julian Huppert

Incumbent MP Julian Huppert is known locally for his involvement in pretty much everything; recent local headlines have included his donning of a onesie to raise money for charity and his Easter egg design for a local chocolatier that “reflects his personality”.

In the nationals, however, he has procured a slightly different reputation. In 2013, the Daily Mail named Huppert “the Commons’ dullest MP” after he complained about the bad example set by other MPs, who allegedly groan when Huppert stands to speak.

Responding at the time to reports of these parliamentary antics, Zeichner, the current Labour PCC for Cambridge, said to the Cambridge News that he “wouldn’t encourage that kind of behaviour” in the House of Commons, but that “Julian can sometimes be a touch annoying”.

Huppert has also ben noted for his work on the issue of revenge porn – his efforts to criminalise it came to fruition when it was passed in a unanimous vote by the House of Lords in Octobe, and recently the law has gained national attention when it came into effect earlier this month.

Huppert was also one of the 21 Lib Dem MPs to vote against the rise in tuition fees. Speaking at an event last month held by the Times Higher Education, Universities UK, the Open University and the Higher Education Policy Institute, Huppert said: “The fee cap I would like to see is zero,” but feared that such a proposal would lead to a funding shortfall.

“I simply don’t know how to get funding for that, because I would not do so if it meant destroying the quality of education,” he said.

Greens: Rupert Read

Read was forced to publicly apologise in the local and national press after tweeting about the use of the term ‘cis’, which denotes the matching of individuals’ experiences of their own gender with the sex they were assigned at birth. He was accused of transphobia, and then with siding with anti-trans feminists after sharing a previous blog post that defended some feminist authors who had themselves been accused of trans erasure.

There was a large Twitter backlash following his comments, prompting an immediate apology from Natalie Bennett, leader of the Green Party in England and Wales. Read followed with a full clarification and apology in The Independent, stating that he “reject[s] transphobia completely” and said his original tweet had been “over-interpreted”.

As the Green Party’s national Transport Spokesperson, Read has also attracted attention for his promotion of the Green Party’s proposal to renationalise the railways. The Greens claim this will save £1 billion a year. Further Green transport policies, unveiled in their manifesto earlier this month, include scrapping HS2, and a discontinuation of the current plan for a £15 billion road building programme.

Speaking to Cambridge News, Read said of railway fares: “I am not promising we will slash those prices, but we would stop them continuing to increase.” The Green Party Manifesto also outlines plans to spend £30 per head per annum on pedestrians and cyclists to ensure that they “get their fair share of road space”.