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The party’s only MP, Caroline Lucas, is checking out of Westminster after 14 years. “I mean, I’m exhausted,” she says of her long stint as the Green Party’s “frontline spokesperson for everything.”
“But I don’t feel any less committed to ensuring we have the Greens in the corridors of power. I feel more urgent than ever,” she said. I. “If we have a Labor government, we need to push for a bolder, braver and better government given that Keir Starmer has reversed course on his promises and is not standing up for himself at the moment.”
The Green Party is already starting to show signs of momentum, as Thursday’s local election results showed. It gained a further 74 MPs, bringing the total number of MPs in England and Wales to 812.
They are now the largest party in Bristol with 10 seats and eight in Hastings. They hope to retain their seat in Brighton, while also targeting wins in Bristol and Suffolk in the general election.
It doesn’t take a political genius to see that this party could emerge as a real force in the coming years, as a bastion for those disillusioned with what has been interpreted as a pale Starmer government.
At the end of his lonely vigil guarding the Green Flame, 63-year-old Lucas hopes to prepare the next generation for an isolated Britain as other countries cede from Britain.
her latest book, another englandportrays an alternative to exceptionalism, xenophobia, and worse, which she says is “disgusting” to people on the left trying to capitalize on national identity.
Unless and until that happens, the left cannot complain that England’s story is only being told by the right, nor can it hope to build consensus on the kind of agenda Lucas says it has. ) The storm moves on.
“If the left concedes to the right on the debate about Britain and Britishness, it is no surprise that the story being told is one of Brexit cheerleaders, such as imperial nostalgia and exceptionalism.”
She is not the first to make this claim – George Orwell also made a similar point in his essay. lion and unicorn.
“The sound of clogs in a Lancashire mill town, the sound of lorries on the Great North Road, the queues outside the Labor Exchange, the rattle of pin tables in Soho pubs, the old maids hiking to the Holy Land on an autumn morning. Communion in the fog – these are all more than just fragments; Characteristic A fragment of the British scene,” he wrote in 1941.
In other lines of their essay, two Labor politicians, Lisa Nandy and John Cruddas, call on left-wing politics to claim England as its own “behind the scenes”.
So what is Britain to Lucas? Although reluctant at first, she took up the offer: walking her dog on the South Downs, crowds of people at London’s Victoria Station, Ralph Vaughan Williams’ Rising of the Skylarks, and the writings of Edward Thomas. (though she admits that the Welsh have a strong case for the Lambeth-born poet).
But her point is that every British person has a unique identity, and that identity, like the flag itself, is woven from multiple threads. And, crucially, according to Lucas, these threads are drawn from nature, not from the postcard Beatrix Potter version, but from the everyday realities of the British environment, warts and all. It means that it is.
She clearly hopes that with a deeper understanding of our national identity and history, we might be able to reclaim our birthright to nature.
“What I want to tell are stories like the Forest Charter of 1217, which had to be read four times a year in every church that gave landless people access to land,” she said. Told.
After the national outcry over sewage in our rivers, she hopes we might become more proactive about our right to roam and start being more curious about who owns our land. is.
“In Scotland, comprehensive roaming rights are being considered, but here we only have roaming rights on 8 per cent of our land and 3 per cent of our riverbanks. Why?”
Furthermore, she added: “England is one of the most unequal countries when it comes to land ownership, with just 1% of the population owning half of England. So what can we do about it? can be made transparent.
Lucas concludes his book with a plea to repair the democracy he believes is in crisis.
She recalled feeling “punched in the stomach” when Prime Minister Boris Johnson prorogued Parliament to force Brexit through. Her prescriptions, starting with abolishing beyond her post, are all very familiar.
What is different is her call for the left to start thinking about what an independent United Kingdom would actually look like if Scotland voted for independence and Northern Ireland chose to leave the United Kingdom.
When asked about the Scottish Green Party and whether she thought its sister party’s focus on gender identity issues risked undermining its core mission, she chose her words carefully.
“I think the green agenda is really an all-encompassing agenda because I don’t think you can separate the environment and the climate on their own. I think the issue of gender identity has taken up a huge amount of oxygen and time and energy. I think most people would answer “yes” because it’s clearly a very divisive event in our society. ”
So what’s next for Lucas? After the election, she enjoyed three blissful months of reading, walking her dog, and gardening, and although she hasn’t decided yet, she says, “I want to do something with climate and art.”
She also plans to complete training in end-of-life care, a so-called “death doula.” Witnessing her parents’ deaths, she says, made her realize that just like her birth, there are often recognizable stages in the dying process.
“That was just a revelation to me. And I just thought, God, why didn’t anyone tell me that? So by the time my mom died, I felt more useful. I felt that way.”