Caroline Lucas

And I think the way that some party figures have worded it to me was that Rather than there being an ideological difference, it's more that the party has gone through different phases in its electoral strategy over the years.

So under the leadership of Caroline Lucas, kind of building that credibility, building up the party as just a credible party that people would want to vote for.

And then under...

So Sian Berry and Adrian Ramsey kind of starting to look more at where they could actually win parliamentary seats and starting to get those numbers up.

That was my feeling reading it, was that this is incredibly timely.

And you have a forward from Caroline Lucas.

Yes.

And almost anyone listening to this podcast, so, so for the people in the UK, that's obvious.

I mean, I think it's quite telling that there are reports that... people within the Greens do not universally want him to stand, which definitely shows that there is some frustration with him.

There was a lot of unhappiness about the fact that the Greens decided to stand and make a field from the likes of Caroline Lucas and others who felt that it was potentially risking, you know, what could have been a progressive win.

Labour, you know, they could have eaten into Labour's vote and reform could have won.

which would have been a huge disaster for the progressive left, was the argument.

And that's not a new strategy.

The Green Party have been doing that ever since they got Caroline Lucas elected in 20 whenever it was, 10 or 11 or something.

That's a very well-tested strategy for the Green Party.

They've just got much better at it.

When things were announced, it was very special.

And alongside Mary Colwell and Caroline Lucas as well, who's been really instrumental.

And then, yeah, that's when we really sort of started work on the kind of the subject.

content and yeah and that's where my work with stakeholders really feeds into that so i basically bring the external voice into the the organization

A lot of pressure to go to the left, make bigger, bigger deal out of, uh, Gaza and such, uh, issues such as that.

Uh, and also, uh, on things like, um, uh, government, full government boycott of, um, elements of the Israeli economy versus those who say, and I think Caroline Lucas is interesting on this, that the party needs to have a more inclusive, conservationist, traditional Green agenda.

So it's very clear the Green Party is struggling to work out who it is, uh, in this new Burnham era.

Um, I know you're coming to talk about the reform in a sec, Nathan.

I mean, so far the sort of sensible Greens, the, uh, the, the, the, the former leader of the Brighton MP, whose name escapes me now.

Caroline Lucas.

Caroline Lucas.

And the, uh, the, the, the previous joint leaders, the, the, the MP up, up in Herefordshire and the one in Bristol, who were sensible and who were basically t- uh, ousted by Polanski.

We haven't heard from, very much from them.

Projects that the government decides fall under that scheme bypass local planning applications, with the dec-decision to go ahead being made by, you guessed it, the same government that fast-tracked the project in the first place.

Former Greens leader Caroline Lucas had this to say about the scheme: "In order to be able to make sensible decisions on which projects should go ahead and where they should be, we need to have more information in the public domain.

We need to have more scrutiny, not less, and yet things like the NSIP regime are moving things in the opposite direction." Now, there is obviously very good reason to avoid local planning processes in the case of data centers, and it's because people hate them.

Polling by Politico conducted in July shows just how quickly opinion has swung against data centers amongst US voters.

It's been kind of a, a, a, an area of interest for people who are into that kind of thing.

But it, with the massive increase in climate propaganda and this drive, particularly with young people, towards these new systems that are gonna be required by the climate transition that is desired by the international ruling class, the City of London, all of these people, uh, it's actually hitting the mainstream of political discourse, um, not least through this recent visit by Caroline Lucas, former head of the Green Party here in the UK, to Retrofit House in Birmingham, which took place last weekend.

So we've been spending the afternoon with Immy Kauer, the truly inspirational co-founder of Civic Square, and we're standing outside one of the houses that Civic Square have taken over really and turned into a kind of a living workshop.

In each room of this house, there are different things being learned, from how to repair things, how to, uh, properly retrofit things.

Um, it would be enforced through re- legislation.

Um, and the political case for it, the kind of manufacturing of consent, is coming from the mainstream political parties now.

So that was obviously Caroline Lucas, who very recently handed over the leadership of the Green Party to Zac Polanski.

Zac Polanski, one of the key figures in, uh, political discourse in this country, whether we like it or not, quite frankly.