Standpoints

Caroline Lucas

‘Glaringly Absent From Burnham’s Speech Was the Climate and Nature Emergency’

‘Andy Burnham is the crowning achievement of Zack Polanski”. In an echo of Thatcher’s famous verdict on Tony Blair, that was just one of the more colourful assessments of the Greens’ impact that were doing the rounds at its Conference. And there was more to it than mere rhetorical flourish.

As the pollster Luke Tryl of More in Common has observed: “Green influence on the political landscape, including Burnham’s Conference speech, has been outsized.” I think that’s true. Labour essentially ditched Keir Starmer because May’s local election saw it lose nearly four times as many voters to the Greens as to Reform UK. That followed the astonishing result in Gorton and Denton, where the Greens won their first parliamentary by-election, pushing Labour into third place.