Caroline Lucas
Caroline Lucas, former MP for Brighton Pavilion, will be conferred honorary Doctor of Laws at the University of Sussex Winter Graduation on 22 January 2025.
“OId habits die hard. Before you know it, you’re turning on the TV and shouting at BBC’s Question Time.”
Caroline Lucas admits she is finding life after Parliament requires adjustment.
This time last year, she was the UK’s only Green MP, representing the Brighton Pavilion constituency. She held the seat for 14 years, until deciding to step down at last July’s General Election to regain her focus on climate and nature issues.
“I found it more and more difficult to have to spread myself so thinly that I was literally doing everything,” she says. “I had to be the front-bench spokesperson on education, on the economy, on health, on foreign affairs, on defence. It was really hard to give climate and nature the real focus that I felt that I wanted to, given the existential crisis that we face.
“But perhaps I underestimated just how much the adrenaline of being in Parliament kind of runs in your veins.”
It has also come as a delightful surprise to her that the country now has four Green MPs, including Sian Berry, who was elected to Lucas’s former seat.
“I'd hoped that I would have been joined by colleagues in the General Elections of 2017 and in 2019, or even in 2015. By 2024, I was beginning to find it difficult to believe it would ever happen.”
She recalls her own election in 2010 as one of “total elation”.
“The Green party had been trying to get someone elected to Parliament for decades. I joined back in 1986, so I'd been trying quite a long time as well. So when it finally happened, there was a real sense that so many people's work over so many years had finally culminated in us being able to break through the electoral system, which is so skewed against smaller parties, and finally get that first step into Parliament.”
She also felt an overwhelming sense of responsibility. “We'd asked the people of Brighton to put their trust in a new form of politics, and they did so at a time of difficulty, after a time of austerity, when they would have every reason for being concerned about the future.”
"Alchemy"
She puts the success down to “a particular alchemy in the city”, while pointing out there was a strong bedrock of Green representation in the local council and that her Green Party predecessor, Keith Taylor, “had done a brilliant job of building credibility”.
She also reflects on the cultural forces of the city, noting that Brighton’s inhabitants are often seen as pioneers and ground breakers. “They are willing to look outside the box, to think innovatively.”
Lucas cites her constituency work – and the dedication of her team “for getting back to people, for going above and beyond” – as being her greatest achievement as an MP.
But many would argue that it was also her reputation for fearlessly challenging successive governments over every issue, from the Brexit deal to COVID-19 contracts, and being among the most vocal and visible MPs in the House of Commons, that truly made her stand out.
This is reflected in her numerous accolades, including topping the list of BBC Radio Woman's Hour Our Planet Power List of influential activists, educators and campaigners in 2020, while in 2023 she won the Lifetime Achievement Award at the inaugural Political Purpose Awards.
Born in Worcestershire in 1960, Lucas studied English Literature at the University of Exeter – both for a Bachelor’s and a Doctorate – and was already politically active as a student. She joined the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and visited various peace camps, including Greenham Common, before dedicating her life to the Green Party and standing for elections.
In 1999 she was elected as a Member of the European Parliament, representing South East England, and was on various committees, including Trade, Industry, Energy and Research; the Committee on the Environment, Public Health and Consumer Policy; and the Committee on International Trade.
During her years as an MP, she had stints as Leader of her party and has served as Chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Groups on Climate Change and Limits to Growth. She has been a Co-Chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Groups on Fuel Poverty and Energy Efficiency and Democratic Participation, and Deputy Chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Renewable and Sustainable Energy.
An active member of the Remain campaign in the run-up to the Brexit referendum, in November 2024 she was appointed co-president of the European Movement UK, an organisation that aims to rebuild relationships across Europe.
“Ultimately, we would love to see us rejoin,” she says. “But we recognise that it’s not going to happen until there's a settled majority in the country who are in favour of doing that.”
In the meantime, the movement’s campaigns include a call for a youth mobility scheme to enable young UK citizens to live for three years in Europe – and for young Europeans to be able to live in the UK.
“It is shameful that we have taken away opportunity from young people. No way could you ever seriously suggest that this scheme is about reopening wider free movement. It's a time-limited exchange. There’s no reason for the Government to oppose it.”
Change behaviour
She acknowledges that the younger generation in the UK is having a tough time in many ways – from finding rent unaffordable, to the disruptions to their education from the COVID-19 pandemic, to the “terrifying legacy” of the harm that has been done to the environment.
“I want them to know that there are people on their side who are fighting that cause with them and alongside them.”
But she also feels the nation’s youth have a better sense of what really matters in life. “They are often more driven to have good relationships than to have economic success.”
Last year saw the publication of her book Another England: How to Reclaim our National Story, which delves into our literary heritage to explore what it can teach us about current issues.
She points out the difference that novelists such as Charles Dickens and Elizabeth Gaskell made in Victorian times, when their focus on urban poverty had a very direct impact on mobilizing people to demand improvements to public health.
When applied to climate issues, she acknowledges that what really needs to change is behaviour, which is not always driven by an ever-increasing focus on facts and figures.
“People who work in the arts are precisely the people who know how to bring about a cultural transformation and normalizing climate behaviour,” she says.
“I'm not suggesting that that one artistic intervention is going to change the world overnight. But I do think it's about the kind of context and culture in which we operate. And I think it can have an important role to play that we haven't really fully understood yet.”
For many years, she has been campaigning to bring in a new GCSE in Natural History, which had almost been approved before the new Government came into power.
“It’s on pause, which is very frustrating,” she says. “To me, the joy of the [Natural History] GCSE is that it's less about the systems of nature, and more about its individual elements – the plants and insects and animals that you can really engage with and feel at home with. We want young people to get soil under their fingernails and really feel that they get to know and love the natural world. We have lost so much of that.”
Lucas admits that immersing herself in nature had been hindered by spending 80 hours or more per week on parliamentary matters, but that one of her new year’s resolutions is to get more involved with her own garden.
She is also currently training to be an end-of-life doula (a non-medical assistant during a person’s dying stages).
Having recently lost both her parents, she says: “Working on the existential issues of climate and nature also remind you about what matters. The privilege of being alongside people towards the end of life, also, in a much more visceral way, reminds you of how precious life is.”