64. Caroline Lucas: Leading the Green Party, leaving politics, and the importance of protest

24:37I mean, there was a debate. It's in Hansard. You can read it. There's debate with all of these people arguing against being given the information about what they're voting on. It is extraordinary. And yet, Rory, you will know that when the bell goes for a vote and we're running to get to the chamber, what you hear people saying all the time is, what are we voting on? I don't know. Anyone know what it is? No one knows what it is. They're just doing what their phone has told them to do. From my office, I don't know what to do unless some poor person has sat there going through it all because I don't have a whip telling me what to do.

25:03So I'm often the only person who actually knows what we're bloody voting on. It's just a shambles. And Alison, can I bring you in on this? Because I think I'm wonderful to have Caroline on this. Why do you not see that as more of a problem? Why were you not massively affronted when you were in that Labour government from 97 onwards by the way the whips behaved, by how disgustingly little your members of parliament knew about what they were voting on, how totally trivial and meaningless so much of their lives were in parliament well very tendentiously put may i say look i think is the i guess maybe i i sat there naively thinking that mps would be taking interest in all these things in the same way that we were um and and were sort of genuinely sitting there worrying about what this meant for the country as opposed to what they were being told now look i agree with you about the whip system um my worry caroline about rory's book is that i think it's a brilliantly written account of all that is wrong and the danger of that is it just turns people off politics where i think we we have such a problem getting good people into politics that we i feel we have to say there is a good side to politics there is a good side to parliamentarians and there are many good people in there yeah it's just that in recent years in particular we've had this succession of awful people, really high profile, not just in the UK, but around the world.

26:27And that has given the message that they're all terrible. I'd just like to say they're not terrible. But I think this, just to come back on this, Caroline, Alistair tends to think it's that we've had a bunch of terrible Tories who've come in, and that's the problem. My sense is it's much more structural, that it's not just a question of there's been a few rogues that have come in in the last 15 years, that the whole system is rotten. and that actually I can see these problems across all these parties. And that even if the individuals who enter are impressive individuals when they come in, Parliament wrecks them.

27:00The actual practices contort their brains and turn them into much less than they were when they came in. I do sadly think there's some truth in that. And I think it is structural. And I think what we've seen in the last sort of five or ten years is that the kind of the norms that more or less stopped people from taking advantage, real advantage of the structural weaknesses have gone. And so suddenly you did have a prime minister who would lie regularly at the dispatch box. And the tools that we had to try to hold him to account were utterly, utterly pointless. They were so weak. We couldn't stop him lying.

27:39And so in a sense, I think what we've seen more recently is the fact that when the kind of old boy school of how you do stuff is thrown out the window and when people just take advantage day after day as as boris johnson did you know more than anything in actually proroguing parliament when he decided it was getting in the way of what he wanted to do then i think we've we've seen those weaknesses in a much more highlighted way because they have been taken advantage of so much but i think they were certainly there before that as rory said and i think the whipping system needs to be looked at But again, I think that even things like the voting, the voting takes so long because you have to go through the I lobby or the no lobby.

28:16And on the one hand, you can say, well, that doesn't really matter very much. But actually, it does because it limits the number of amendments that can be put to a vote. I remember when I first put my amendment down, it was on a debate on defence, the defence budget, and I wanted to amend the defence budget so we could talk about Trident nuclear weapons because it felt quite a big oversight not to be talking about them when we were talking about defence. And so I had an amendment down on the order paper so that we would discuss that. And the Speaker just kind of bounced over my amendment and went to another one to put to the vote.

28:44And I was busy kind of trying to get his attention to say, why isn't my amendment going to the vote? And I hadn't understood that the Speaker gets to select a very small number of amendments out of a huge number that are put. And one of the reasons that we can't go through all of those amendments, as they do, let's say, in the European Parliament, is because we'd be there till Christmas if we did. If you're taking 20 minutes on a vote, then you can't do very many votes. Okay, Caroline, Alistair, let's take a quick break.

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30:15Your book, the latest book, Another England, you're not going to do very well in Scotland with that title, are you? Oh, I think the Scottish are going to love it. It's very much about England, isn't it? And what comes through the book, which is a really interesting mix because it sort of combines your, not just your love of, but your knowledge of English literature and its role in sort of telling the story of England with what's gone wrong in politics and with some of your more political views. And I think they weave together really well. but two things that come to me through to me very very strongly even though i know you disagreed with a lot that the labor the last labor government did i do get the feeling that contrary to what roy just said about my assessment that you do think that something changed very very fundamentally with brexit and johnson in our politics and therefore in our country and you also think that brexit was very much driven by whatever this english sense of england is can you just sort of unpicking that a bit.

31:10Yeah. So the book, really the starting point for the book was that moment of understanding the results of the EU referendum, the Brexit referendum, and hearing people saying, Remainers in England saying, I don't recognise my country anymore. That made me really angry. I thought, frankly, bloody hell, you should know your country. And if you haven't bothered, if we haven't bothered to understand the levels of anger and frustration in some parts of this country, then that's on us and we should have done. So I was struck by that and I was struck by the fact that the country they were talking about by and large was England, not the UK.

31:49And of course, if you look at the results of the referendum, then every region outside of London within England did vote to leave. So I went out to some of those places and took it upon myself to spend a lot of time with communities seeking to genuinely understand why they had voted to leave and what their aspirations were for their own communities. What I found was, first of all, huge pride and sense of place and love of place. Places like Dudley, for example. I spent a lot of time in Dudley talking to people and they're really proud of its industrial heritage and so forth. But at the same time, they feel as if London could be a million miles away.

32:27It could be on another planet. They don't feel as if they have any say in decisions that get made that affect them. They don't feel they've got any agency. And so then I was just trying to unpack a little bit about what is it about what's happened to England and the massive centralization that we have within England and the way in which so many communities feel as if they don't have a stake in it. And what are the stories about England? Is it the case, as I believe it is, that the left in general has just seeded this ground. We've become so squeamish about talking about England. And therefore, the only people who do talk about England are the exceptionalists, those who are peddling imperial nostalgia and Brexit.

33:08And unless we, on the progressive side, as I like to say, wake up to that and start telling a different story about England, then I do worry that with the rise of the populist right and so on, then the future of of this country could be very grim. And the reason that I focus on England, just to be clear, is that we have no institutions, no political institutions, where the English identity and English decision making can be pursued. You know, in Scotland, you've got the Scottish Parliament, and I would argue Scotland as a result has a stronger sense of its own identity. In Wales, they've got the assembly, they don't have as many powers as they would like, but nonetheless, they have that sense of who they are.

33:48I think it's so interesting that in England, we muddle up England and Britain, you know, daily, hourly. One is meant to stand in for the other. We don't really make the distinction and we don't really celebrate what is good about England. We just kind of squeamishly think, let's not talk about it. What do you mean when you say in the book, the left must learn from the right's ability to forge myths to suit their own ends? What do you mean by that? I basically mean telling different kinds of stories about England. So it was really interesting to give a concrete example. Boris Johnson during the COVID debate, one of Labour MPs, Ben Bradshaw, had asked him about why test and trace was such a disaster because they hadn't put enough resources into it.

34:26And Boris Johnson gives this extraordinary reply, basically saying that it's entirely un-English to be worrying about wearing face masks or it's un-English to be thinking that we have to follow the rules. People in England don't follow the rules. And then he goes off in this whole spiel about how, you know, basically he's not literally talking about how we won the war, but that is the subtext. And so that attitude and that sense of that story of England being exceptionalist, being better than the others, having won the wars and Dunkirk and all of the kind of stereotypes of right-wing England enable that kind of politics and that kind of response.

35:04And so I think it's just really dangerous if we don't have a different story ourselves that we're challenging the dominant story with. I really agree with you just to start with that. But But boy, is it difficult because it's not just in Britain, but in the US and across Europe. The right-wing populists seem to have all the best songs, the best jokes, the most colorful stories. And the progressive left often seems a bit kind of geeky and technocratic and writing policy papers, taking best practice from Sweden. And against that, you've got these sort of larger than life charismatic storytellers.

35:45is there not something structural there which makes it easier for these populists on the right to play those roles and more difficult for the left to do that? I don't know about that. I mean, I'd be interested to know exactly what you mean by that in terms of what it could be structurally, because it feels to me much more that we haven't even tried. I mean, that's the point that I make in the book, that we're so scared about talking about England as if as soon as you do that, then suddenly you're some kind of racist, that we've just ceded the ground. We've not tried. We've not really told other stories about some.

36:15And that's what's the joys of the literature in a sense, because it allows you to have something that is colourful and joyful and something that people can engage with rather than your policy papers from Sweden. But don't you think that Danny Boyle's opening ceremony in 2012, but that was, I felt that came from a period where we had told a much more positive story, not about England, I agree, but about Britain, about the UK. So why do you worry that we should be focusing on England because it's the biggest part of the UK or because it's the most problematic part of the UK? I think it's the most problematic part of the UK in the sense that, I mean, you know, the UK is meant to be a union of consent, isn't it?

36:54And yet the government in Westminster is now actively preventing one of its component nations from having a vote on whether or not it wants to remain part of this body. And that seems to me quite an extraordinary thing. So I think England is a problem because England is imposing its, or at least one element of England, the right-wing part of England is imposing its ideas of how things should be done on Scotland and on Wales and Northern Ireland. I think I focus on England because I think we could have an independent Scotland in 20 years. I think with Ireland, the island of Ireland, I mean, you had just a few weeks ago, didn't you?

37:33The fact that they're talking there now about there being a referendum on reuniting Ireland, if that happens, and if Scotland goes its own way, then I think we need to start thinking about what we're left with. And one of the things I was struck in Rory's book, Rory, when you talk about how in the different departments, David Cameron had given you a rule that you cannot, you're not allowed to prepare for what the impact would be if we lost the e-referendum. Nobody is thinking, as far as I'm aware, of what might happen in England if Scotland achieves its independence, if Ireland goes its own way.

38:03And therefore, we ought to start having a conversation, I think, about what is our view of this union of nations and how do we make it work as well as we can for all of its component parts? Karen, I guess that sort of maybe exposed one of the challenges, which is that under the surface of what you're saying is a story which not everybody in the progressive central left would buy into. And that's one of the problems for getting a single story. It sounds as though you are quite, quite pro-Scottish independence. I mean, the way in which you've characterized what I as a unionist would characterize as we had a referendum very recently, people voted to stay.

38:42There isn't evidence that there's an overwhelming majority for independence, and we're not going to have another referendum and another generation would be the normal position for me and many people in the Labour Party. who are trying to keep the United Kingdom together. You almost talk as though you're slightly looking forward to a day when Scotland achieves its independence. Even that language hints to me that you're somebody who actually isn't very comfortable with the idea of the United Kingdom. I don't think that's true, although you rightly take me up on that verb, which I shall consider.

39:12But what I do think is that it should be up to Scotland. I think Scotland should decide whether or not it wants to remain part of the UK. Scotland did decide, Caroline, and we decided we'd do it once a generation. Otherwise, you end up in the Canadian situation where you have a referendum every three, four years whenever the SNP wants to have a political event. But work that out within Scotland. Don't come running to a government in Westminster to say whether or not you can do that. If there isn't a support for that within Scotland, then I'm sure that the party who is proposing that won't do so well and won't have the right and the power to introduce it.

39:44But what I'm objecting to is one component part of the United Kingdom having a veto on whether another component part has the right to have a referendum on whether or not to leave. But this isn't abnormal, right? This is what Spain would do with Catalonia. This is what the United States would do with Texas. I mean, nations are complicated things. And we went through this with Canada and Quebec. It's not a simple question of here's a component part of the country and it can continually create this deeply destabilizing move again and again. But Texas is not to Washington. And also that the rest of the country doesn't have a say.

40:23I mean, I don't think it is only for Scotland, the question of Scottish independence. I think that's one of the things that makes the United Kingdom different. And this is where I think this question of stories becomes quite complicated. And where I think Alistair's right to say you defining England as separate from Scotland is problematic, because I would argue that actually the rest of the country does have some sort of interest in the question of how nations relate to each other. It isn't purely for Scotland. I guess I would just say that I think the relationship between Texas and Washington is not the same as it is between the four nations that make up the United Kingdom, that Scotland and Wales and Northern Ireland have greater rights and greater self-determination than a state within the United States.

41:06Now, Rory, you two were getting on so well until this issue of the union goes. If I can further provoke the agreeable disagreement by going to page 144 of caroline's book where she's on the theme of who owns england landowners at the heart of these neo-feudal power dynamics is an issue that john claire or oliver goldsmith would have recognized the disproportionate political influence of landowners the whole system is held together by lingering sense of deference towards those born to land wealth and titles the monarchy sits at the top of this pyramid both symbolically and also through the very real power, wealth, and influence that the crown wields.

41:47And you then go on to give some of the figures. You talk about the monarchy's ruthlessness, effective ruthlessness at exploiting its assets. There is a helpful fiction that distinguishes between King Charles's personal estate, such as Balmoral, and the lands and other assets he owns as monarch, which includes the 16 billion pound crown estate. So here I think you two are, I think I'm closer to Caroline on this one, Rory, but I found the chapter on land fascinating. And I hadn't realised actually that Scotland having done such a good job on right to Rome that actually the Blair government and indeed the Attlee government had not quite done what I thought we had.

42:23But just talk us through that about why you think, you call it a new neo-feudal power dynamics, but you're talking basically about a class system. Yes. And one that is made even more visible through the issue around ownership of land. And I think it's been very topical just recently, hasn't it, with the issue of wild camping on Dartmoor, where you've had the person who owns huge swathes of Dartmoor deciding overnight that he no longer wants people to come and wild camp on Dartmoor, even though they've been doing it for generations. So I think that issue about access to nature is massively important.

43:01I think the issue of the way in which landowners stop people having access is deeply problematic. I think with access comes responsibilities. And certainly those of us who are part of the Right to Rome campaign would very much be saying that we recognise that, you know, that you wouldn't be walking through fields of crops or animals and responsibility has to go alongside it as well. But it does feel to me, and I'd be interested, you know, whether maybe Rory thinks differently in Scotland, but it does feel like it's worked pretty well in Scotland. And I don't see why it can't here. Karen, I'm really interested in how all these disagreements connect to the vision of putting forward a sort of patriotic…

43:37It's such a shame because I thought we had so much. You know, I was reading your book and thinking we had so much in common in terms of decentralization and small farmers. Once you get to private education and Oxbridge and the royal family and land ownership, Rory's dad with the key. We have so much in common. But I think one of the things that isn't often, maybe you talked about enough on the left, is there is a very traditional split between the, I guess, the old fashioned patriotic left and a more radical progressive left. And it's true in all European countries. And it's one of the things that's torn left wing parties apart.

44:12And one of the reasons why voters who used to vote for labor type parties have ended up voting for the populist right. And this really came to light in Britain over the issue of Jeremy Corbyn. And I think what Jeremy Corbyn revealed is that there wasn't a single comfortable myth, which was the sort of myth that Ernie Bevan or an Iron Bevan would buy into on the one hand and Jeremy Corbyn on the other. And it's quite revealing, I mean, I think, Caroline, that we agree on so much. But of course, I would say that if you wanted to produce a unifying myth for the nation that will mobilize a lot of people who are traditional Labour voters, actually, the monarchy is part of that.

44:52I mean, overwhelmingly in this country, people support the monarchy. And that's why I'm just going to quickly sort of bring this to light a bit. In August 2015, you write in The Independent about Jeremy Corbyn, I've never felt so optimistic about a potential leader of the Labour Party. For the first time in my memory, the party of Keir, Hardy and Clement Attlee looks likely to be led again by someone who dares to stand up for the radical changes demanded by the challenges we face. I think what that's a reminder of is that in the end, you're further to the left than me and probably further to the left than Alistair, although as he gets older, he gets ever more left wing.

45:30Well, I'm certainly sure that I'm further to the left than you, Rory. I wasn't suggesting that's not the case. And I stand by the article at the time it was written. And, you know, of course, Jeremy Corbyn basically cut and pasted huge swathes of the Green Party manifesto. So, of course, I'm going to be excited by that because suddenly seeing some of our policies being adopted was very exciting. But it's interesting what you say about patriotism. And I think this comes into the debates about metropolitanism as well, isn't it? And some of the debates about, you know, to what extent did people in rural areas feel a kind of an affinity with a Labour Party that felt like it wasn't speaking to them and wasn't talking their language?

46:09And I'm not sure how much of that, to be honest, is to do with the monarchy. And I think I would, of course, you know, in recent years when we've had the queen and then the death of the queen, then people understandably have felt incredibly sorry and sad. And there has been a rise in loyalty to the monarchy. But I would be surprised if that gets maintained. And I'm not sure that people really necessarily want the monarchy to have as much money and as much land that it does. I don't know that they really want to know that, you know, the monarch can be intervening in some of the decisions around tax to try to make sure that they don't have to pay so much tax.

46:46You know, I think when some of this stuff comes to light, then that isn't necessarily a binding narrative that holds the country together. And just while I still have the floor, just to make it clear, and I apologise if I was misleading earlier, I'm not talking about a single myth that's going to somehow replace a right-wing myth. I'm talking about a multitude of stories, but stories that are more resonant, perhaps, than the exceptionalist, imperialist kind of narrative that we're hearing from the populist right. In the book, you don't go much on that theme into the role of the media, in particular the press in Britain.

47:19But I assume that you share our general view that we have a very biased and pretty trivializing media. The media is so fundamental in storytelling, that's what they do. So are you basically saying that the progressive left needs to define its own media landscape as opposed to just having disparate stories to tell? I mean, that's a really good point. And I think in my next version of this book, I shall add in some pages about ownership of the media, because that is massive, isn't it? The fact that so few people have so much control over so much of our media and that they have, you know, a particular view that they then peddle in that way.

47:55And so I would like to see, you know, a new Labour government properly regulating the media and looking at some of those media monopolies and breaking those up. And in the meantime, yes, for sure, let's make sure we've got some more media outlets where different views can be held. And this is also just about like, for example, just now we've got Ofcom, haven't we, looking at GB News and that particular interview that Rishi Sunak did. this kind of foxification if you like of media in this country is deeply worrying and it goes alongside the you know the rollback of the right to protest the rollback of you know some of the laws around the electoral commission the new rules that makes it harder for people to vote I think something really dangerous is happening in our country right now and and because you know we're so used to the myth if you like the story that in England you know we have a great government and the mother of parliaments, things like that wouldn't happen here.

48:47Well, they bloody well would and they are. Karen, I wonder whether there isn't a possibility that maybe your story, your national story, doesn't need to be, maybe I'm pushing too hard, but meet the story of the populist right a little bit more and find a bit more common ground. There's a risk reading through your book that you're talking about a lot of the heroes of the radical left. William Blake and P.S. Plowman come up and John Clare comes up. There's a general sense in which you're resurrecting a very interesting progressive narrative in English literature. Maybe the way to actually win elections and appeal is to blend that with a bit of the better bits of what that monster Boris Johnson does, which is being able to actually rediscover a bit of the sense of humor, be prouder of some of the military and traditional history of Britain and not see these things as opposed to each other, but instead creating a richer, more complex story that all these things are true.

49:48I mean, I really agree with you that it's not narrowly black and white and lots of things can be true at the same time. And I had thought really, particularly in that last chapter, when I tried to pull together what some of the themes are really when you're looking through the book and when you're looking at what can unite us, it's absolutely about standing up for some of those things that I should have thought that many on the right would want to stand up for too, you know, whether that is the independence of the judiciary, which is now under attack, or whether it is exactly the independence of the BBC or universities.

50:21I'll let you carry on. But essentially, I take your point, Rory. And if I haven't done that, that's my failing, not because I don't think it's important. I do think it's important to be trying to make those connections. And I do think many on the conservative side love our country. And they literally, I mean, they love the grass that grows and the trees that grow. They love that country in a very visceral way, which I think some of us on the left could learn from. So I'm not trying to be as binary about it as perhaps you've read and perhaps it comes across as. Just as we come into the end of this, Caroline, can I ask you two questions related to the Labour Party?

50:59First is whether you were ever tempted to see the Labour Party as the vehicle for your politics, and also whether you are in what I define as the Rory Stewart camp, that it now thinks there is no possibility at all that Labour won't form the next government that Keir Starmer is going to be the Prime Minister, and how that makes you feel. I don't think I was ever seriously tempted to join the Labour Party, although there has been many a time when I've thought how nice it would be to have some more honourable friends, and it has been extremely lonely to be the sole MP for the Green Party. So, yeah, in some ways I would love to have been part of that bigger party.

51:35But I think there is an importance on having people on the outside pushing Labour to be braver and bolder and better. And partly that's what I see the role of the Greens as being in the very likely event of Labour forming the next government. I don't think it's 100 % sure, but it's a good 95%, I would think. And so if Labour does become the next government, I just hope that Keir will be bolder than he has been to date. And if we've got some Greens there, so hopefully Sian in Brighton and Carla Denya standing in Bristol, where she's got a really good chance of winning there. Adrian Ramsey and Ellie Chans, two other candidates we're really pushing in North Herefordshire and Suffolk.

52:15If we have a handful of Greens, even just a handful, then I think there's a real role they can play in pushing Keir on things like the 28 billion of investment. The country is crying out for investment. Why is Keir Starmer adopting the framing of the Conservative Party about investment being somehow splashing money up the wall? It is not. It's what the country is crying out for and business is crying out for come to that. Or whether it's on a wealth tax. Why can we not have a conversation about that? Why is Brexit such a word that cannot speak its name? You know, the two-child benefit cap. Why isn't he not moving on things like that?

52:50So I think it is vital to have Greens there to be pushing Labour to be that bolder, better and braver party that it could be. Because without that, I really worry. And I worry as well, actually, it's not good enough simply to say that once he gets in there, he'll change and be more radical. Because A, he needs to be not even radical, actually. Let's just be a little bit more social democratic about it. We need to enthuse people. We need to give people hope. Otherwise, they're not going to vote at all. I don't see much hope coming from Labour right now. And also, he needs a mandate once he gets in there.

53:24And if he hasn't made that much clearer during the election campaign, then he's not going to have the mandate to do the change that needs to happen. Carolyn, very central to his vision is grace. He says his number one objective is for Britain to be the fastest growing economy in the G7. That takes us onto something really important and interesting for the next 20, 30 years, because we've interviewed Kate Roweth on the show, and this question of endless growth, infinite growth with finite resources, presumably central to your philosophy. Tell us a little bit about what you think about growth, and the problems of growth, and the way in which if you were prime minister, you'd be approaching the question of growth.

54:04Let me just reflect for a second on what an an extraordinary objective that is for Keir Starmer to have set himself. How does that resonate with most people that we are the fastest growing country or whatever? I mean, you know, if he'd said, you know, your kids can get a decent education and we're going to transform housing so that everyone's got a roof over their heads, or if he'd talked about some of the fruits of economic prosperity, then perhaps people could get behind him. But the idea that GDP growth is, by and of itself, the objective, that is what I find so problematic. Because just knowing that you've got the fastest GDP doesn't tell you who's benefiting from it.

54:42It doesn't tell you who's getting it. It doesn't tell you how it's been caused. We know that a big pileup on the M5 is fantastic for GDP growth because everyone has to go out and spend money repairing their cars or buying new ones. So, GDP growth as a main indicator of anything very much, I think, is well past its sell-by date. So, let's instead have a wellbeing economy. Let's measure things in terms of wellbeing. And the environmental costs? I mean, where are you in relation to Kate Raworth and the more radical critique, which is that actually, in the end, we've got to stop having growth at all?

55:13I don't think she quite – I was re-listening to her the other day, the great interview that she did with you. And I agree with her. But I don't think – I remember you had this debate about whether she's agnostic about growth or whether she's anti-growth. I think what she's saying is don't make growth the be all and end all of your economic policy. Make well being it. No, she's saying a bit more than that, I think, Caroline. I think she's a bit more radical. She's saying there's planetary boundaries. Well, I certainly agree. She's saying our resources are finite. And if you actually multiply what 2 % growth would be over 20, 30 years, you're rapidly using up the finite resources and you're leaving other places.

55:51So, ultimately, the logic of that has to be that a time comes when you stop growing and you start distributing more to poorer countries. Yeah. The reason I'm sort of pushing back a bit on this idea of stopping growth is that it means it sounds as if everything just gets pickled in aspic tomorrow. Whereas Kate would say, as I would say, that some things need to grow. We need some massive growth in renewable energies, let's say. And if you're going to do that, then absolutely, you need to stop growing in other places. So, I would say no more new roads. And while we're at it, let's not have any new airports.

56:19Thank you very much. But I think the framing of it all in terms of whether or not it's GDP growth doesn't really resonate with ordinary people and doesn't really tell us very much about whether or not the economy is allowing people to have meaningful, thriving lives on a planet that is not being destroyed. And the concern I have right now is, and the one that she has, is, of course, that our economic model right now is trashing the planet and isn't even in the process doing very much for the poorest people either, because the people who are reaping the benefits of the kind of extractive economy that we have are the richest, not the ones who actually need the resource.

56:57So I think it's slightly more complicated than you say, but certainly I would be among those who would say that infinite growth on a planet of finite resources is not possible. And if you need just any more kind of ways of looking at that, we need to decarbonise by 2050 at the absolute latest. By 2050, the global economy is due to be about three times the size that it is now. It is going to be hard enough to decarbonise an economy the size of the current global economy by 2050. The idea we're going to be able to do it with one three times the size, however your heroic assumptions are about how much you can decouple energy use from output, it's not going to happen.

57:36It can't happen. So let's start preparing for it now and have a transition that is fair, that has workers at its heart, that makes sure that the price for that transition is not paid by the poorest people, but rather by those who can afford it. All of those things are the things we should be discussing now. I said right at the start, you won't disappear from public life. So what are you going to do once Parliament's behind you? You'd lose a big platform, don't you? I know. No, I do. I genuinely don't know yet. I want to take some time to think about it. I want to work out how I can spend more time working on the nature issue and on the climate issue that really gets me up in the morning.

58:11Right now, I have to be the front bench spokesperson on everything, and that is deeply exhausting as well as not all that satisfying. So I really want to find a way that I can focus on nature and climate. On a personal level, I've become very interested in end of life work. I'm doing a course actually with a wonderful organization called Living Well, Dying Well in Lewis. And they train people to be what they call end of life doulas. And so I'm halfway through that course and I find that incredibly nourishing. So I want to go on doing that as well. Carolyn, my final question then, and thank you.

58:44I mean, you've been so patient and I'm feeling a bit guilty because I think I was being a bit snippy with my questions. And this is a difficult one. Did you notice the lack of rebuttal?

58:59Exactly. You've done such an important thing symbolically for public life, being the Green Party member of parliament. I mean, you're a really important figure in parliament. You're very important for millions of people looking at you. And it must feel tough stepping down because there must be people who are saying, you've got a massive moral obligation and a duty to keep pushing on because you do have this really important position. How do you deal with that? How do you deal with people's expectations, their projections, their disappointment around your decision? Well, thank you for that. That's a nice way of putting it.

59:32Thank you. I mean, I suppose I get round it or I respond to it by absolutely saying that we need to go on building the Green Party and the green movement and getting more Greens elected in Parliament. And in a sense, there was nothing particularly special about me. I happen to be in the right place at the right time in Brighton to win that seat. But I think what we need is that green voice. And I am totally committed to getting Sean Berry elected in my place in Brighton Pavilion, just as I am with our other target candidates. And I think that will be transformative. You know, I think three or four Green MPs will be a lot more than just three or four times one, if you see what I mean.

1:00:10And I think the way in which we could then work in Parliament and be a real presence will be massively more significant. So I'm really excited about that. And whatever help I can give, I certainly will. But I feel excited about a younger generation coming on and wanting to pick up the baton. Which is exactly how I feel about politics, Rory, as you know. A younger generation has to come along and pick up the baton. Well, Lizzie Caroline, thanks so much for all your time. Thank you. And that was a lovely conversation. and good luck when you're through. Thank you so much. Thanks for having me. Thank you for coming on.

1:00:44Really appreciate it.

1:00:48Alistair, thank you for that. What did you think of Caroline? I thought she was great. I'm sure lots of people will be surprised to hear me saying that. But, well, you know, I think there's a clarity to what she stands for and how she expresses herself. And I really did enjoy her book, by the way. It's a very interesting political book because it's not primarily about politics, but if you're into politics, you'd enjoy it. But she's very, very well read. I mean, if she's read all the books that she quotes from, Rory, she reads as much as you do, I would say. Yeah, more, much more. What do you make of her?

1:01:20I think she's wonderful. I mean, one of the things that I'm struggling against in that interview, and I think that's why I sounded a little bit kind of snippy and argumentative, is that I think she's got such kind of impressive moral intellectual qualities. But I'm sort of trying to scratch away at the question, given how impressive she is and how thoughtful she is, why is the Green Party not sweeping everything before it? And I think the answer is, this is what I was trying to get to, is that it hasn't managed to do what the Green Party did in Germany, which is in the end, people like Joschka Fischer were able to embrace a little bit more the center ground of politics.

1:02:00That's what I'm slightly getting at, which is that under the surface of this incredibly impressive person is the fact that in the end, she is a Corbyn enthusiast. She's very much on the left of the Labour Party. And I think that you could imagine a really rich, successful green environmental agenda that was a bit more centrist. I mean it's true it's true that if we didn't really get a sense from her her own assessment of where she was on the political scale it was interesting when you were reading out that thing she said about Jeremy Corbyn she sort of whispered Soto Voce to me and was quite a long time ago as if to say that's not what I think now but you know but she was still holding the fact she said she stood by it based upon what was happening then because she saw a Labour leader coming along embracing what she saw as the agenda she'd been fighting was you can see where that would be pretty exhilarating for them at the time what i found interesting as well is that both the book and in the interview she's she's much much more she's she's developed into something much much more than an environmental politician and i thought actually her you know obviously she's a green who's trying to beat labor in in brighton but i i think her her assessment of of labor is is one that's worth labor listening to you know she when she says she wants to be bigger braver bolder.

1:03:15I think a lot of people are feeling like that. And I think there is a desire, I think, for such a desire for change. And she's giving expression to a change that probably does feel a bit frightening to some people in the Labour Party. But I actually think for the public, there's a lot of mindage in it. Also, would have liked maybe to understand more, but I think she doesn't want to go into it, why she's stepping down and how she really feels about that. I mean, And she said to me that it was kind of me to frame it in terms of people's expectations and projections and disappointment. But I think she will be getting a lot of that.

1:03:50She means a lot to people. She's a standard bearer for a lot of stuff. And I think there will be many people who are really saying, you can't leave. This is your duty. You've got to stay. And, you know, she sort of didn't quite engage with that because she got on to, I think it's important for young people to come forward and all this kind of stuff. But she didn't really tell us what's happened. And obviously it leaves me with the view that in the end, she just found politics unbelievably unpleasant and parliament unbelievably unpleasant and she's had enough. Well, maybe we should have pressed a bit more of this, but am I putting two and two together and making five when she said it's a very personal decision?

1:04:26And then she talked about her interest in end of life. I wonder if there's something going on family wise that I don't know. I don't know. Right, right, right. There might be something more personal. Yeah. I mean, I think she's a real loss. I was so proud to be in parliament with her. And I think this is part of my problem too. Remember, I'm also having to come to terms with the fact that I also was quite impressed often by Jeremy Corbyn. I've been in trouble on the show from saying, I don't think Corbyn should be fired from the Labour Party. And as you say, you keep teasing me about the fact that I'm saying he has beautiful ears.

1:04:58He only said it once, but you did put in one of the best selling books of the year. So, a lot of people now know that you have a thing about Jeremy Corbyn's ears. So I think I'd also be interested in you pushing back a bit, really, because I think there's parts of you that in another mood, if I said, I'm really kind of excited and entranced by Caroline Lucas and Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn, might say, well, get real, Rory. Because in a way, the New Labour Project was about saying, you can't really win power by just being on that side. Oh, yeah. You've got to reach out to the centre. But she was being very straightforward about it.

1:05:31She doesn't see her role, and she doesn't see the Green Party's current role as being a party of government in our system. She sees it as being part of, on the left, on the progressive left, holding the feet to the fire of the people who can get into power, which I think is a very different role. I think in a different political system, she very much would be a creature of government. I would see her as a sort of a barebock. Perhaps not Joschka Fischer. I think you're right about Joschka Fischer. I think he was a very, very special political talent. And was prepared to compromise and break with his base.

1:06:00Absolutely. In really interesting ways. And it worked for him. I mean, the extraordinary thing is he broke with his base and it didn't destroy the Green Party in Germany. In fact, it really allowed the Green Party in Germany to flourish. Yeah, to grow to what it is now, yeah. Good. Thank you very much. See you soon.