This comes from The Morning Star.

Caroline Lucas bristles at being asked to comment on the failure of Green parties in Germany, France and Ireland to live up to the hopes and aspirations of their supporters.

“It’s funny that you ask that of the Greens in a way that I can’t imagine that you would sit here, for instance, talking to a Labour Party person and putting to them what socialist parties may be doing in another country,” she retorts.

However, acknowledging gracefully that Communists in Britain often have to answer for the conduct of fellow Communists elsewhere, she takes the question on.

“There’s an assumption that because certain things have happened with other Green parties that we’re all the same,” says Lucas.

“We’re not all the same and I would argue that our manifesto has always been probably the most radical of all the Green parties.

“It’s not that other Green parties started off with a more radical agenda and then diluted it. Their agenda was never so radical, never so progressive in the first place.”

Nor is she impressed by those who suggest that the Green Party is a single-issue party or concerned only with recycling and animal rights.

Lucas, the Green Party leader who is the front-runner and bookies’ favourite in Brighton Pavilion, insists that the Greens always had policies on the economy, education and health right through to defence and foreign affairs from the start.

She believes that, as the Greens have become more successful in a variety of elections from their breakthrough in 1993, when Lucas herself was returned to Oxfordshire County Council, people will see past incorrect misconceptions.

“As we have had more and more councillors elected, people have been able to see Green policies in action, for example putting motions forward for a living wage not just a minimum wage,” she says.

“In the London Assembly, it was support for a living wage that was the Greens’ price for supporting Ken Livingstone’s budget. We made it a key factor in the assembly.

“Once you get Greens elected, you can see what we do in practice, standing up for the local economy, local people and public services.”

Lucas was a prime mover in the Greens’ change of organisational style, replacing joint principal speakers, one male and one female, with a single leader.

“When I became leader 18 months ago, it was very much a priority of mine to demonstrate that social justice and environmental justice are linked and that we’ve always had a very strong social policy,” she says.

“At a time when the Labour Party has moved away from that agenda, it becomes even more important to people that there is a party out there that does still care about inequality, that will not be saying that we are intensely relaxed about people becoming filthy rich or any other Mandelsonian formulation.”

Lucas’s case will have been strengthened by her contribution to a recent BBC TV Question Time programme. While former Cabinet minister Margaret Beckett squirmed, the Green Party leader was the sole panel member to back unequivocally striking Unite BA cabin crew members.

On the same programme, right-wing pop historian David Starkey whooped triumphantly at his successful outing of Lucas as a socialist as though he’d unmasked a war criminal.

“It’s interesting how socialist has become a dirty word,” Lucas muses.

“I think that it’s incredibly sad that socialist principles – if by that we mean social justice, redistribution and standing up for equality – are seen as outmoded. If stuff like that has gone out of fashion, that’s a very bad sign for our future indeed.”

Some people have criticised the Greens in the past for their perceived refusal to co-operate with others on the left and have speculated that this masks a Liberal Democrat-style opportunism of presenting different political stances to different electorates.

Not so, says Lucas. Not only have the Greens co-operated with Respect in electoral contests but they have also discussed their attitude to other left forces in Britain in, for instance, the big debates which Compass has been in the forefront of organising.

And it is no secret that both Lucas and male former principal speaker Derek Wall have spoken on Morning Star conference platforms.

“In the North West in the Euro elections, Respect not only stood down in favour of the Green list but worked hard to prevent the election of the odious BNP,” she recalls.

“Sadly we just failed, but we have also decided to support Salma Yaqoob in Birmingham because we believe that Salma will make a very good MP.”

On the question of the way ahead, one of the debates at the Compass conferences has centred on the “one big tent” approach, which seeks to get all groups to sign up to it.

The alternative, put forward by the Greens, is what Lucas calls a “campsite of smaller tents.”

“I like that idea of our not having to merge our identity, not having to pretend that we don’t have differences, because we clearly do have some differences, but that doesn’t mean to say that couldn’t work together much more closely and I think we should,” she explains.

Asked about her Labour opponent in Brighton Pavilion, Lucas suggests “with great respect” that Nancy Platts probably ought to be in the Green Party.

“Around 90 per cent of the policies she supports are Green Party policy not Labour Party policy. For example, I was on an education hustings with her where it became apparent that she opposes academies. Greens have been in the forefront of opposing academies.

“She opposes the Iraq war. Greens have been in the forefront of that.

“We’ve just been on an older people’s panel this morning where the issue of Trident came up and she opposes renewing Trident, which is long-standing Green Party policy. Nationalisation of railways? The same.

“There’s a whole list of policies that she supports, but they are not Labour Party policies and, ultimately, that means somebody with good intentions who will not have the freedom to be able to have real influence because they will be whipped by the national party machine.

“And we had a perfect example of that where Nancy and local Labour Party activists were campaigning to keep local post offices open at precisely the same time as Labour MP David Lepper was voting with the government in favour of post office closures.”

Lucas is appalled at the current efforts by the three main parties to compete over the scale of planned public-sector cuts, with Alistair Darling pledging even deeper cuts than Thatcher made.

She is not complacent about the size of the deficit, but she notes that historically we had a hig
her deficit in the past and still managed to create the NHS at the same time.

“We do recognise that some cuts have to be made and our priority list would have Trident at the top of it and ID cards and aircraft carriers and roads all on it, but what we want to be focused on now is jobs,” she says.

“It is madness to be cutting public services, to be cutting jobs at a time when we risk being tipped into a double-dip recession.”

The Greens have proposed a programme for a million new jobs and the idea of a Green new deal to inject a major investment in energy efficiency and renewable energies.

“Those kinds of jobs are not only good for addressing the climate crisis but also would get people back to work very quickly since renewable energies are far more labour-intensive than fossil-fuel energies that they would ultimately replace,” Lucas says.

The contest in Brighton Pavilion is unique in that the Green representative is probably the most experienced and most high-profile of the candidates and the party has consistently led the Tories, with Labour third, in a variety of polls since the last general election.

Lucas feels that she is on the verge of a major breakthrough, suggesting that the election of Britain’s first Green MP would send shock waves through Westminster.

“It would be a real demonstration that the Greens have come of age,” she says.