The Green party’s former deputy leader, Adrian Ramsay, has returned to politics to run for the party’s vacant leadership alongside Carla Denyer, a former wind farm engineer and award-winning Green Party councillor.
Denyer, who sits as part of the largest Green Party group in local government on Bristol Council, told the New Statesman that she and Ramsay were “standing on a platform of putting compassion back into politics: compassion for each other, our communities and the natural world”.
[See also: The Greens are on the march. Who should be afraid?]
In a reference to the Green Party’s recent bruising rows over the party’s policy on trans rights, Denyer said that the duo’s pledge to put compassion back into politics “starts with the Green Party itself”, adding “we want to make sure that the party is a welcoming and inclusive place, that makes the most of everyone’s talents, respects lived experience and stands together for human rights and the environment”.
The two candidates have made their record of electoral success a key part of their opening pitch, emphasising their links to recent and historical Green Party victories. Ramsay was deputy leader from 2008 to 2012, the period in which the party gained its first and thus far only MP in the shape of Caroline Lucas in Brighton Pavilion, and overseeing a period in which the Norwich Green Party grew to become the largest group in the country at the time.
Ramsay, who since 2012 has been the CEO of two national environmental charities, said that the recent report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change had spurred him to return to party politics. “Getting more Greens elected into positions of power is our best way of securing change.” The two politicians have made getting a second Green MP elected and their first Green elected in the Senedd their central mission.
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