LABOUR councillor Glyn Heath (pictured) has sensationally defected just weeks before he was to defend his seat in the local elections.

He says is fed up with the party's swing to the right and Tony Blair's non-socialist policies.

He has now joined Environment and Wildlife, a new political group, which is putting up several candidates in May's municipal poll.

Councillor Heath, well known for his "green" views, resigned his membership of the Labour party this week, but is not standing down.

He remains a councillor for Elton ward in Bury until the elections when he will fight the seat under his new banner.

It's the first defection in Labour's ranks locally since the metropolitan council was set up 25 years ago. The last councillor to switch sides was Tory member Paul Nesbit, who crossed the floor to sit on the Labour benches in 1995.

Coun Heath (38), a lecturer in prosthetics at the University of Salford, was elected in 1995 in Elton ward, defeating the sitting Tory councillor Teresa Lasota by a healthy 996 votes.

Coun Heath, a Labour member in Bury for seven years, said he had been thinking about resigning for the last 18 months.

"I'm very disillusioned with the party," he said. "Labour's policies are doing very little for working people, they're not that different from those we've been having over the last 20 years. "The minimum wage is not high enough, they've not started to ban fox hunting, nor repeal employment laws which work against working people, and there's no proper action on transport issues. I would like to see more action and less gas!"

Environment and Wildlife is being led by local ecologist Dave Bentley and will contest at least half-a-dozen wards in the elections.

The Elton councillor will first show his new colours when he sits on next Tuesday's meeting of the planning control sub-committee, which means that the Environment coalition will have a vote, even though it has yet to have a councillor elected.

Coun Heath did not see that as unfair, saying he has always stood up for environmental issues. He said no one would gain from holding a by-election right now because it would cost money and he still had to represent the community in his remaining two months.

"To be honest, my chances of being elected are minimal," he conceded. "People tend to vote for a party, not an individual. You could put a monkey up and it would get in if it had the right rosette, but I feel I should stand for this party because of its policies.

"Dave Bentley and colleagues are stalwarts in ensuring that Bury does its best for environmentally sensitive areas and they come up with results."

Council leader Derek Boden accepted Glyn Heath's resignation from the party "with disappointment", but was unaware that he had joined another group.

"I am sorry that Glyn has decided to leave right now because his term of office doesn't end until May, and he was elected by people on a Labour ticket," he said.

"We would be within our rights to remove him from committees, but it's not worth making a huge fuss about because the planning committee does not come under the party whip anyway. I hope he will decide the issues on the law and the facts."

Coun Boden added: "I think he is misguided. We have signed up to one of the best sustainable regeneration LA21 strategies that exists anywhere in this country. I believe his aims are more readily achievable within the party rather than outside it."

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