Deputy leader celebrates Green successes as party conference opens
7 June 2019
The Green Party deputy leader, Amelia Womack, will open the party’s spring conference in Scarborough with a call to build on the electoral and campaign successes of this year, which have seen the number of Green councillors and Green MEPs more than double and membership increase by nearly 15,000 in England and Wales.
Amelia will tell delegates that electoral success is being achieved despite the odds being stacked against smaller parties with a political system that is badly broken, and a hollowed-out, outdated and out-of-touch media.
“Our archaic democracy needs to be revived with a truly proportional system where every vote and every voter matters,” she will say.
“A system where MPs can sit in the party which truly reflects their values and beliefs in a mature parliament with collaboration at its heart.
”For three years that system has tried to handle Brexit… and it has failed embarrassingly.”
Amelia Womack will also say the Green Party remains committed to equality for women on boards of business, in the houses of Parliament and in every aspect of public life.
On climate action, she will accuse the media of ignoring the climate crisis and instead manufacturing a migration crisis. And she will criticise the government and local authorities for continuing to support airports or road building while at the same time declaring a climate emergency. What’s needed instead, she will say, is a complete rebuild of Britain’s economic and political system with a Green New Deal.
“A Green New Deal will not only build green infrastructure, it will empower people and it will put environmental and social justice where they belong – jointly at the heart of our democracy and intertwined.”
“We must be the architects of the future. We will build new structures: ones based on peace, justice and equality. Ones which leave no-one behind. And ones which hold the wellbeing of people and planet at their very core.”