The Green MP for Brighton Pavilion has demanded that Boris Johnson step down as Prime Minister at once and call a general election.
Caroline Lucas spoke out after Mr Johnson resigned this morning (Thursday 7 July). She said: “Boris Johnson has been forced to resign for being a reckless, untrustworthy, lying, law-breaking rogue Prime Minister with no regard for rule of law or our democratic systems.
“He must not be allowed to stay on for a further three months after resigning – he must leave office right now.
“Victims of sexual misconduct being disregarded. Asylum seekers being shipped off to Rwanda. Millions enduring a cost of living scandal. An entire country repeatedly lied to, as it suffered through a deadly pandemic while this Conservative government, with Boris Johnson at its helm, partied into the night. This was the reality of the Johnson premiership.
“But Johnson was never the sole cause of the rot at Westminster. Nor even his ministers making squalid decisions based on political calculation instead of moral principle. Nor the Tory Party alone and all those just as complicit as the Prime Minister himself, integral to a party which has spent 12 years projecting its internal factional squabbles on to the national stage.
“Now, the country must recover, rebuild and restore. But to do so requires an immediate general election and it needs a commitment from all the opposition parties to transforming our country for good by transforming our politics for good – starting with a pledge to support proportional representation.
“Our politics faces a much deeper crisis – we need a new way forward based on fair votes and redistribution of both wealth and power.
“That’s the foundations of a future in which we tackle the climate emergency and bring new secure jobs, health and wellbeing along with it.
“The challenge today is to see way beyond the end of the psychodrama playing out at Number
10 and the short-term political point scoring.
“If all those who consider themselves progressive do not have the vision to put the country first and renew our politics, we will never win the better future which the country deserves.”
Very Slimey green
So, there is just one Green MP in the entire Parliament, elected by delusional people in the ‘Green Belt’ of Central Brighton, whoever they may be, and she is ‘demanding’ things. I don’t think so. She may well perversely get elected yet again at the next GE by whoever these people are who vote for her, but there is far more to B&H than her patch and it’s clear from repeated comments on this website over a long period that many residents have had more than enough of Greens. I am talking about the council, not the Government shenanigans. Value for council tax (or even vague delivery of very basic services) is what mainly matters to residents, and we’re not getting that. One demanding ‘voice in the wilderness’ in Parliament does not a Green revolution make – and we know from bitter experience in this city how childish many Green Councillors are and how they try to impose their ideology on constituents – as evidenced in the very recent Withdean saga on this website. They don’t listen to constituents, or any residents of the city, they skew consultations and are generally incompetent at everything meaningful to we poor council taxpayers. Since the Greens crawled and slid into ‘power’, because of Labour shooting themselves in both feet via alleged anti-semitism etc (they weren’t much better as a job-lot, but some of them as individuals were reasonable), we have had to endure these Green people/children who seem to think that ‘green’ means weeds everywhere, and who barely deliver any basic services at all, because they have no understanding/knowledge of, or control over, what council employees (many of them not worth even the minimum wage and who just spew out fancy reports – I tried to read an agenda this week for one of the important Green-dominated committees and it ran to about 700 pages plus addenda, so I gave up in despair). The Green experiment has failed abysmally (TWICE) in this city and it is long overdue that they are kicked out until their only ‘voice’ here is well and truly in the wilderness, like Ms Lucas. I have nothing personal against Ms Lucas (and occasionally like her), but that’s where it ends. ‘Delusional zealots’ might be a term that comes to mind about local Greens.
And before all the usual boring Green activists come out of the woodwork to respond to this post with their usual activist mantra, I would like to say that you are wasting your time and finger-power. Local results and delivery are what count to most residents who pay through the nose for non-existent ‘services’ Most of us are probably very concerned with national issues, but that is not the purpose of councillors.
Well said! Thank you so much for articulating so clearly how many of us feel about the Greens. The sooner they get kicked out the better. Maybe then Brighton and Hove can return to being the pleasant places they used to be, and of which we can be proud, instead of the ugly, crime-ridden dump it has become.
fed-up with brighton politics
What a well written article that says it all in a nut shell.
Absolutely correct – the Green Party’s tenure has been disastrous for the city. It doesn’t help that they are also liars and hypocrites . They are only interested in pushing their own agenda. Ordinary residents have had enough.