Green Party co-leader Jonathan Bartley has pledged a ‘revolution from the bottom up’ through a Green Recovery plan.
Speaking at the socially-distanced launch of the Green’s local election campaign in London’s Battersea Park, Bartley asserted that ‘we need a transformation across every single sector of the economy’ in a way that will ‘share the prosperity around’.
In contrast, the Conservatives, says Bartley, are spending £12 billion on fossil fuel subsidies and airport expansion and are not ‘dealing with the climate as an emergency’. Below the surface, the climate policies of both the Conservatives and Labour are not ‘truly green’.
Bartley believes elections on 6 May could offer some ‘real breakthroughs’ for the party in areas such as Sheffield, Burnley and Bristol, building on the gains in 2019 where Greens more than doubled their number of councillors (362, across 122 councils) and enjoyed their best ever local election result. ‘We’ve shown that we can get elected; we’re now playing a part in running 17 local councils.’
At the launch, the party also put its support behind a full inquiry into the Government handling of the coronavirus crisis in order to ‘learn the lessons’. It was ‘scandalous’, stressed Bartley, that ‘the Government has been responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of people through its inaction’.
In the current climate, voters, says Bartley, should now see the Greens as ‘the obvious choice’.