nicola.pickering

Strip away the noise and two convictions stand rock solid: the environment and housing, both voted unanimously left, both non-negotiable. Everything else — welfare, business, energy — bends right when the question is about who pays or who's protected, so this isn't utopian idealism, it's a practical left-green core wrapped in a fairly hard-headed, often fiscally conservative shell.

You break from the national mood more than most — siding with the majority on fewer than half of your votes. You said no to the Global Combat Air Programme when most of Britain backed it, and no to British-made cement preference when two-thirds said yes; you're not reflexively patriotic on procurement, you ask what it actually delivers.

Newcastle Central and West, though, is where you feel at home — you're usually rowing with your area's majority, not against it, on ID cards, steel quotas, the Motability VAT change. Your one real local dissent is instructive: you backed AI research funding while your area shrugged it off, a rare moment where student instinct beats local scepticism.

You've never voted on immigration, health, rights or employment — a striking gap for someone this engaged, and one that's currently doing a lot of work keeping your "leans left" label vague rather than sharp.

This is early days for a fuller picture — 33 scored votes is a start, not a verdict. Cast a few on immigration or rights and the Green Localist either hardens into something more precise, or reveals a contradiction worth naming. Come back next week and we'll tell you which.