The Green MP makes a direct appeal to Labour supporters ahead of the European elections.
This is the election which wasn’t supposed to happen. It’s also one where a lot of voters are looking for a home. If you don’t want to leave the EU, and are repelled by the populist rants of Nigel Farage, who do you vote for?
We know many of you hate the Tories’ austerity, but you also value freedom of movement and want to remain in EU. If that’s you, Labour isn’t really offering you a home.
Young voters came out strongly for Labour in 2017, but we know you also are also overwhelmingly in favour of staying in the EU. While Labour may reflect your progressive values, Jeremy Corbyn’s ambiguous stance on Europe is letting you down. Who can say what Labour’s policy really is?
Progressive pro-EU voters want certainty and leadership, which is why so many of you are turning to the Green Party in search of a new political home. Our support is surging: since our success at the local elections, at times we have been welcoming a new member every three minutes.
It’s not just Europe which is bringing them. We know many of you, particularly young people, are deeply worried about our survival in the face of the climate crisis and the frightening warnings about disappearing species and mass extinctions. We are the party which demanded urgent action on the climate right from the start. We’ve been leading the way in the European Parliament on environmental protections since 1999. I know, I was one of those MEPs.
If you’ve voted Labour in the past, I understand why you wouldn’t want to support the centrists at ChangeUK who are making almost no impact, or the Lib Dems who supported the Tories’ austerity programme for five years.
That’s why I’m asking you to give your support to the Greens. We have shown we can win, and deliver when we do. Our councillors are making a real difference in their communities across Britain. Our support is growing steadily as we show we’re a rising force in British politics.
No-one wants to abandon a party which they supported in the hope of a better future. But Labour and Jeremy Corbyn are not offering the future you deserve if you want to stay in Europe. We are. The Green Party is offering you a home. Please give us your support.
Caroline Lucas is the Green Party MP for Brighton Pavilion.
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16 Responses to “Caroline Lucas’ open letter to Labour Remainers: “Corbyn is not offering the future you deserve””
Tom Sacold
No thanks. We should be putting real industrial jobs and real socialist policies forward for the British people. Not the nut-cutlet politics of the trendy middle-class snobs.
Patrick Newman
A dishonest article. It is not in the gift of the Greens or even Labour to revoke Article 50. A peoples’ vote is also not in Labour’s gift – there are not the numbers in Parliament so live in hope that the impasse is so fundamental a Peoples’ vote is the only way out for M.P.’s across parties. To pretend there is a simple formula to end Brexit is leading people up the garden path. It would be more productive to campaign to have the referendum annulled on the grounds of the unresolved evidence of corruption and illegality in the Leave campaign. A Peoples’ Vote may make things worse!
Sam Keogh
The Labour party, like the Tory party, is collapsing under the weight of its own contradictions (Where have I heard that before?). Labour is soon going to be history, because their politics is essentially a symptom of capitalism – in order to represent the workers against the bosses, there have to be workers and bosses.
In the future, as it always has been really, had Labour been smart enough to realise it, the dichotomy will be the land-owners versus the dispossessed, and the coming problem for the dispossessed is that their Labour is of no use to the landowners. They are merely people who are surplus to requirements, and this will become more and more true as AI and robots can replace them in the “Labour” market.
A whole new perspective is needed, and it’ll never come from the Labour party, whose roots and culture come from a socialist narrative.
The Green party is the future, which is why I joined it the other week. The Labour party is the past, and has been stultified into irrelevance by becoming part of the posh boy’s club for some decades now.
It’s hilarious how Labour people blither on about how bad the Lib-Dems were for propping up the Tories, considered in the light of the fact that Blair’s Labour government propped up one of the nastiest and most cynical US governments by joining in with their vile and unnecessary war.
Labour are now and have been for some time the Tories’ greatest enablers – keeping fptp like the fools they are, believing that it gives them a sniff of unmerited unique power – and happy to run the risk that the Tories can be gifted the same – total power from less than 40% of the vote, in a system that never allows people to vote for what they really want anyway.
The Labour Party is going to die. If you’re a progressive you only have this to decide – whether to join the Green party now or later.
Might as well make it now.
Patrick Newman
Mr Keogh, I wish I had a pound for every time I have read something like your post I sense you are trying to convince yourself. I am all for a Green-Labour alliance but the former will be the junior player. There is too much strength in the grassroots of Labour to allow it to wither.
Julian Dean
Labour has it’s biggest ever grassroots movement – Momentum – bigger and more successful than Bennism in 1980s. It is overwhelmingly for remain. Yet it can’t shift the very leadership it propelled to power. Meanwhile the outcome on 23rd is likely to be seen as another nail in the coffin for the two party system. And Scotland isn’t coming back. Rather than trying to but Humpty Dumpty back together again isn’t it time to move on? Voting Green on Thursday is part of that. Then we desperately need voting reform for proportional representation. Labour’s warring factions can go their separate ways and we can look forward to progressive coalitions which will allow, indeed force, us to work together. The Green Party are up for this! This is the new politics we need.