CAROLINE LUCAS announced today that she will step down as co-leader of the Green Party.
Ms Lucas has shared leadership of the party with Jonathan Bartley since 2016 and previously led it from 2008 to 2012.
The Brighton Pavilion MP said she planned to focus more on her work in Parliament and her constituents, and said she believed she and Mr Bartley had strengthened the party’s “position as a leading force in progressive politics.
“We have not been eclipsed by the rise of Jeremy Corbyn, but instead have used these unique circumstances to push for even more radical change,” she wrote in the Guardian.
But the Green Party of England and Wales received just 512,000 votes in last year’s general election — less than half the 1.1 million it won in 2015.
Now at 115,000 members and in some polls level with Labour in terms of public support, CHRIS JARVIS looks at the factors behind the rapid rise of the Greens, internal and external
Sixty Red-Green seats in a hung parliament could force Labour to choose between the death of centrism or accommodation with the left — but only if enough of us join the Greens by July 31 and support Zack Polanski’s leadership, writes JAMES MEADWAY
From Gaza complicity to welfare cuts chaos, Starmer’s baggage accumulates, and voters will indeed find ‘somewhere else’ to go — to the Greens, nationalists, Lib Dems, Reform UK or a new, working-class left party, writes NICK WRIGHT