As leader she has won her battle to transform the Green Party. Now, she is fighting to make history in BrightonBy Michael McCarthy - Independant
Sunday, 25 April 2010
It would be the most radical change of all, in this election in which "change" is the buzzword. It would bring Britain into line with the rest of Europe, at long last. It may be about to happen. Yet it's creeping up on us, hardly noticed in the country at large.
Britain may be about to get its first Green MP. Thirty years after the German Greens, Die Grünen, brought about the biggest real shift in post-war European politics by putting the environment on the political agenda for the first time alongside the economy, health and education, the UK may be about to play catch-up, and let a whiff of radicalism into the corridors of power.
In Brighton Pavilion, the most raffish constituency in that most raffish of seaside resorts, Caroline Lucas, leader of the Green Party of England and Wales, is the bookies' odds-on favourite to be elected to Parliament on 6 May. If she succeeds, she will end the remarkable anomaly by which Britain remains the only major country in Europe which has never had Green MPs in its national legislature.
Yet her election would do far more than that. It would be a breach in the wall of Westminster, through which genuinely alternative policies might flow. Nick Clegg has had formidable success in painting himself as the "alternative" candidate to the two "conventional" parties and their leaders, but, as a glance at their manifesto shows, Caroline Lucas and her party, whether you approve of them or not, are offering the truly radical choice. Compared to the Greens, Nick Clegg's yellow-rosetted Lib Dems are every bit as conventional as the party of red and the party of blue.
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