The Green Party has chosen Barnstaple town councillor Ricky Knight to fight the Bristol West seat at the next General Election.

Mr Knight, 59, is a retired languages teacher who stood for the Greens in North Devon at the last election in 2005.

He was also the party's leading South West candidate in the European elections in June, polling more votes than Labour.

Mr Knight has described Bristol West as a "very exciting seat" because he believed there was "a real potential of breaking the mould of our deeply flawed first-past-the-post system".

He said: "The Bristol West electorate is pretty sophisticated and is quite capable of seeing through the reality of Westminster politics, where the whipping system guarantees that MPs rarely step out of line and where all three major parties have merged to the centre right."

He believes that the MPs' expenses scandal would be a key issue at the election.

"The fallout from the expenses revelations prior to the European elections is still reverberating with the electorate – and there is a very real feeling that nothing has fundamentally changed," added Mr Knight.

He said boundary changes meant that seven of the nine wards in Bristol West were among the Green Party's best voting wards in the city.