THE Green Party has picked its candidate to fight for the Barnet and Camden seat in City Hall next year.

Hampstead activist Stephen Taylor was chosen by party members from a shortlist of three to stand for the London Assembly.

He won by a slender margin against New Barnet-based builder and Occupy activist Raymundo Obedencio. In third place was Maria Park, from Childs Hill.

A computer programmer by trade, Mr Taylor has spent a decade promoting the community group he founded in the street where he lives with his partner Miki.

In 2011, he founded Londoners On Bikes, a popup campaign to make cycling an issue in the 2012 London mayoral election.

Mr Taylor said: "London is the most international city in the world, bound in a global web of trade agreements, finance, politics and tax shelters. Very little of this activity serves the common good.

"I have spent most of my working life in and around the financial markets, growing more uneasy the more I understand. Our system, our economy, is ruining us.

"Our most immediate local problems – overpriced housing and the lethal air pollution – have their roots deep in the global web. We Londoners need a liveable city that serves us. We need local solutions. We can get them – if we think globally."

He was selected by a postal ballot among nearly 1,000 Green Party members in Barnet and Camden, and after a lively internal hustings at The Bohemia pub in North Finchley earlier this month.

Voting closed last night (November 23).

Mr Taylor will challenge the incumbent London Assembly member, Labour’s Andrew Dismore, and Conservative candidate Councillor Daniel Thomas.

The Green Party says it hopes Mr Taylor will improve on its performance in the 2012 London Assembly elections, when its candidate AM Poppy came third with 10.7 per cent of votes.

Highgate councillor Sian Berry has been chosen as its London mayoral candidate.

Andrew Newby, chairman of the Barnet Green Party and the party's agent for the Barnet and Camden constituency, said: "The build up to the coming climate summit in Paris highlights that neither the Conservatives nor Labour have a realistic policy on fighting global warming and neither seems to regard this enormous problem as a priority issue.

“The Greens do.”