Caroline Lucas says she is leaving parliament to devote more time to fighting ‘accelerating’ threats to planet – UK politics live | UK news

And here are the best extracts from Caroline Lucas’s interview on the Today programme:

The thing that really motivates me, what really drives me, is action around the climate and nature emergencies.

Over the course of my lifetime alone, populations and some of our most important wildlife have plummeted by over half. The climate crisis is accelerating, warnings we will crash through that 1.5 degree climate threshold within the next five years. So these are really massive issues.

And because I have to be the front bench spokesperson on everything for my party, I’m pulling so many directions, from benefits to Brexit, and it just means that I can’t give the time that I personally want to those big issues around climate and nature.

I think there is a role for physical direct action and as you as you say – I always have done and I’ve done it myself.

And when Nick Robinson put it to her that groups like Just Stop Oil were doing more to “energise” young people over the climate crisis than Green party politicians, Lucas replied:

I think it’s a combination of both, to be honest.

I think people who are taking peaceful, direct action, whether or not I agree with every single tactic, they have certainly accelerated the focus on this issue, mobilised huge numbers of people.

But I think you also need people only on the inside of politics too. I just remember those words from António Guterres, the UN secretary general where he said the truly dangerous radicals are not people who are protesting in the streets, it’s governments who aren’t facing up to the size of the emergency that we face and are still, for example in the case of our own government, licencing more oil and gas. That is what is truly dangerous and radical, not people who are quite understandably driven to take action on the streets because they are seeing that we are careering towards a cliff edge.

• She said Rishi Sunak’s government was more “dangerous and radical” than the Just Stop Oil protesters because of its energy policies. (See quote in the paragraph above.) Yesterday Sunak described Just Stop Oil activists as “eco-zealots” who were “essentially leading us into an energy surrender”.

• She said she wanted to help the Green party get more people elected. Its performance in the local elections was its best ever, she said, and she said the Greens are now the largest party on 10 councils, and in administration in more than 30.

Good morning. Tony Benn famously said, when he stood down as an MP, that he was leaving the House of Commons so that he would have “more time to devote to politics”. This morning Caroline Lucas, Britain’s first Green party MP, has in effect announced she is doing the same. More than 50 MPs have said they are standing down at the next election, but Lucas is one of the most significant figures on the list. Lucas’s election, as MP for Brighton Pavilion, was a major boost to the Green party (which she has twice led) and to the environemntal cause generally.

In an open letter to her constituents, she highlights some of the progress made on green, and other, issues over the past 13 years. Explaining her decision to stand down, she says:

The intensity of these constituency commitments, together with the particular responsibilities of being my party’s sole MP, mean that, ironically, I’ve not been able to focus as much as I would like on the existential challenges that drive me – the nature and climate emergencies. I have always been a different kind of politician – as those who witnessed my arrest, court case and acquittal over peaceful protest at the fracking site in Balcombe nearly ten years ago will recall. And the truth is, as these threats to our precious planet become ever more urgent, I have struggled to spend the time I want on these accelerating crises. I have therefore decided not to stand again as your MP at the next election.

The reason I came into politics was to change things. Thirteen years ago it’s inconceivable that parliament would have declared a climate emergency. And I’ve put issues like a universal basic income and a legal right to access nature on the political agenda; secured the first parliamentary debate in a generation on drug law reform; and thanks to my work in parliament, a natural history GCSE will soon be on the syllabus. I have said the previously unsayable, only to see it become part of the mainstream, on coal, on the myth that endless economic growth makes us happier, on a green new deal.

My determination to trying to make change is stronger than ever. I look forward to having the time to explore ever more imaginative and creative ways of helping to make a liveable future a reality. Watch this space!

Here is Matthew Weaver’s story about Lucas’s announcement.

Lucas has just been on the Today programme, where Nick Robinson also suggested she was acting like Tony Benn and Lucas said she was “very happy” with the comparison. I will post some highlights from the interview shortly.

Here is the agenda for the day.

Morning: Keir Starmer and Ed Miliband, the shadow secretary for climate change and net zero, visit British Steel in North Lincolnshire.

11.30am: Downing Street holds a lobby briefing.

12.40pm (UK time): Rishi Sunak is due to speak to broadcasters before he attends a business roundable with US CEOs in Washington. At 4pm he meets Joe Biden in the White House, and at 6.45pm they are due to hold a press conference.

Afternoon: Peers debate Commons amendments to the strikes (minimum service levels) bill.

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