Carla Denyer: ‘A friend of a friend inspired the dance in Chicken Run 2’

Senior political reporter Craig Munro spoke to four top party leaders for Metro’s 60 Seconds interviews ahead of the General Election on July 4.

You can find our interviews with Keir Starmer of Labour, Rishi Sunak of the Conservatives and Ed Davey of the Liberal Democrats at these links. Nigel Farage of Reform UK declined to take part.

Here is our interview with Green Party co-leader Carla Denyer.

Let’s start off with one of the things that’s interesting about the Green Party in general, which is that you’ve got co-leaders – you and Adrian Ramsay. What’s the logic behind that approach?

In the Green Party, we want politics to be accessible and as inclusive as possible. And so allowing candidates for any role in the party to stand either on their own or as a job share means that the role is accessible to more people. In our case, Adrian has caring responsibilities, and so being able to share the role means that he’s able to do a good job while also doing a good job as a dad.

People can stand as solo candidates for the leadership in other roles if they want to but, in the last few elections, the membership have voted for co-leaders. It’s also good because it means that Adrian and I can each bring our different lived experiences and expertise to the role.

How do you complement each other? What are you two best at and worst at?

Adrian has a background as the CEO of environmental charities, and so he has that experience of running an organisation and how that works, governance and so on. And because they work in renewable energy, he has a good understanding of renewable energy on the domestic end especially, so solar panels on roofs and things like that.

I also have a background in renewable energy, but the larger, more industrial end of the scale. I used to work on the development of onshore and offshore wind farms, and I’ve just stepped down from being a councillor in Bristol for the last nine years, so I’ve got experience from that as well.

We obviously also bring different lived experiences in terms of our gender, and the fact that I live in a in a fairly big city in Bristol, and Adrian lives in East Anglia. But yeah, we find that it works well.

In 2015, there was a pair of women who tried to stand as job share MP candidates. Now, they weren’t allowed, but they actually took the case to the High Court to challenge it on the basis that it would make the role more accessible, because the hours that MPs have to work means that it’s simply not possible to be an MP if you’ve got certain disabilities or perhaps caring responsibilities.

In this case, the two women, one of them had caring responsibilities for a disabled child, the other was disabled herself. But they had so much to offer, so much skills and experience, they would have been fantastic, and so I think that’s a nice example of the Green Party practising what it preaches.

You mentioned you started off as an engineer in your career. What prompted you to go into politics?

I did mechanical engineering at university and about halfway through uni in the summer holiday. Between my 2nd and 3rd year, I had the realisation that climate change, which obviously I’d learned about at school, wasn’t just an issue. It’s the biggest threat facing humanity, and it was clear to me then that I needed to dedicate the rest of my life to tackling it in some way.

At the time, halfway through an engineering degree, I therefore thought the best way to do that is to work in renewable energy, and so that’s what I did. That’s what brought me to Bristol when I graduated in 2009, and I worked in the sector for about six years.

But while I was doing that in my day job and in a lot of my spare time, I was campaigning, getting involved in community organised projects like Bristol Energy Co-operative in Bristol, and writing to my MP, taking part in process and so on, I realised two things – one, the reason that we were not decarbonising fast enough as a country, and we’re still not, wasn’t a technology. The technology is mostly there.

The reason was the lack of political will from those in charge setting the policies. And even though it’s not easy to get Green MPs elected under this unfair voting system, I came to the conclusion that in the long run, it might still be a lot less work than spending the rest of my life writing to MPs from other parties trying to get them to do the right thing on each individual vote.

Instead, my theory of change is to get more Green MPs elected directly into the House of Commons so that we can be the ones leading the change from the inside.

You’ve been based in Bristol for a long time. I’ve got a couple of Bristol-related questions to ask you. Number one, what is the best night out in your constituency?

Well, I really enjoy live music, so I can often be found in one of the many local pubs that have small local gigs on. Recently I was at a gig at the Kingsdown Vaults, which is a little cosy, local pub in the constituency and seeing a blues Americana band that I really like.

And which politician from a different party would you most like to go out with?

I met Liz Saville Roberts [Westminster leader of Plaid Cymru] for the first time at Question Time recently and I thought she was a great laugh. So I reckon I might take her for a night out in Bristol.

And my second Bristol question. What are your feelings on the new Wallace and Gromit film [Vengeance Most Fowl, announced earlier this month]?

I haven’t seen it yet.

It’s coming out in December, they’ve just announced it.

Sorry. I was thinking of the Chicken Run one. I’ve got an anecdote for that.

We’ve got the new Wallace and Gromit film coming out in December from Aardman again. Do you have thoughts and feelings about it?

I’m excited to see it. Aardman is one of the many products of Bristol’s creativity, and I’ve been a fan since I was a small child. So yeah, hopefully, I can carve out some time in my diary as possibly an MP to go see it.

Do you want to give us your Chicken Run anecdote, just for the sake of it?

It was in the local news a lot that Chicken Run was made partly with the help of a local club night organiser who runs this very popular Northern Soul night in Bristol, which has been selling out every time. I haven’t had the honour of meeting her myself yet, but the young woman that organises it is a friend of a friend, and apparently she did the dance routine that the chicken does, and they put the spots on her. So the chicken was doing a little bit of Bristol Northern Soul.

Let’s talk about the General Election campaign that’s happening at the moment. I feel like the environment hasn’t come up as often as it did in maybe 2017, 2019. Is that something that you’ve noticed as well? What would you put that down to?

Yeah, my co-leader Adrian Ramsay has been highlighting since the start of the General Election campaign that climate has not had the prominence that it needs to have, because this must be the climate election. The UK needs to rapidly reduce the carbon emissions involved in our economy over the next five years.

It’ll be the decisions made by the people elected in this election that will decide how well the UK does at that. And voters in Bristol have been saying to me that while they are very clear, they want the Conservatives out of government and it’ll be not a moment too soon, they’re feeling utterly uninspired by what the Labour Party has to offer.

That includes on the climate where they U-turned on their previous flagship £28 billion climate investment pledge, one of the few good policies they had left, to be honest. Voters in places like Bristol Central, where I’m standing, but all over the country are saying that they’re excited about the opportunity to vote Green, many of them for the first time, because they see that the Conservatives are on their way out. They’re toast. We’re going to have a Labour-led government.

So their choice is, do you want Labour to have an unassailable majority that means that they are a bit impervious to criticism? Or do you want a Labour government but with a handful of Green MPs in the Commons as well, who can challenge them to be braver on the areas that they’re currently backsliding?

Do you think it can sometimes help the Green Party to focus on wider pressing world issues like Gaza?

The Green Party has always had a full manifesto on all policy areas, and we’ve always been a party that’s very clear about the importance of the UK taking an active role in international affairs and working towards peace. And so from the start, from October, we’ve been very clear.

We’ve condemned the Hamas attacks. We’ve called for an immediate return of hostages and we’ve called for an immediate and lasting bilateral ceasefire between Israel and Gaza and the free flow of humanitarian aid, food, medicines and so on. We’ve been the only party in England that has been clear on that from the start, and that’s something that a lot of voters have appreciated.

Some of the plans that the Greens have for the coming parliament are quite radical. There’s a total rethink of the way that we look at the economy, a new attitude towards asylum, but you’ve also set your aim at roughly four MPs. Some of the polls say two to three MPs is maybe what’s going to happen. How do you advocate for such radical policies when there are so few of you in the chamber?

Of course, I would love to have a Green government, and I’ll be working towards that for the whole of the rest of my time in the Green Party, but we know that as a small, albeit rapidly growing party, we have to focus our efforts in this election in getting a handful of Green MPs elected.

There are four constituencies where we know we have a good chance. Holding Brighton Pavilion, Caroline Lucas’s old seat where the brilliant Sean Berry, my co-leader predecessor, is standing; my seat at Bristol Central; and then two rural seats, Wavey Valley in East Anglia which is where my co-leader Adrian is standing, and Ellie Chowns, our former Green MEP is standing in north Herefordshire.

So those are the places where we’ve got a very good chance. But we are standing 574 candidates across England and Wales, which is a new record for us. That is the same number as Labour and the Lib Dems and more than the Conservative Party. Everyone will have the opportunity to vote Green, and who knows, maybe we’ll get more than four.

But I’m realistic, I’m not going have the keys to Number 10 at the next General Election. What we can do with a few Green MPs, as we’ve already seen with a fantastic Caroline Lucas, is ask the questions that nobody else is asking. Work cross-party with individual MPs on areas we agree to get policies changed, get amendments through.

Caroline’s done that repeatedly over the last 14 years. She introduced the NHS Reinstatement bill which, while it didn’t pass because of opposition from other parties, it did a brilliant job of making the case for what could be done if politicians are willing to acknowledge that the NHS is in crisis, and it’s in crisis because of political choices made by successive governments.

It needs investment, that was the cornerstone of our health policy launch recently, and the Green Party isn’t afraid to say that it needs substantial investment. And we’re prepared to talk about changes to the tax system that move the onus from those working people on lower incomes to the really super rich billionaires and multimillionaires in order to make it happen.

Can you see these types of policies coming into effect at any point in the near future in the UK?

It depends a lot on the results of the election and also on the willingness to listen and cooperate from the Labour Party. I have to say I haven’t seen a great deal of that so far. The leader’s office in the Labour Party seems to not always be willing to listen to its own MPs, let alone people from other parties. I will always work with people on areas where we agree, but I won’t be afraid to push them to be stronger on areas they disagree.

I’ll give you one example of change that can be achieved by opposition and backbench MPs – the Climate Change Act 2008. It got voted through by the government eventually, but it started life as a Private Members’ Bill. It goes to show that where one or two or a handful of Green MPs or any party can work together and make the case to politicians from other parties, then they can achieve change.

I was the author of the first Climate Emergency Declaration anywhere in Europe, as a councillor on Bristol City Council. I had no idea when that passed in in the autumn of 2018, the impact that would have. But it ended up setting off a tidal wave where almost every single council in the UK has now declared a climate emergency. Many of them have set ambitious new decarbonisation targets off the back of that.

Lots of other organisations, like universities, have as well, plus the Scottish and Welsh governments. So that goes to show that although I would love to have a Green government, even just one or two or a handful of Greens in the room can make all the difference.

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