Would-be co-leader, standing with Adrian Ramsay, faces ‘eco-populist’
Hi, I’m Andrew Sparrow, picking up again from Nadeem Badshah, and blogging from Hoxton Hall in north London, where chairs are being set up into a handsome auditorium for leadership hustings for the Green party of England and Wales. (The Scottish Green party is a separate entitity.) It is due to start at 6.15pm.
There have been quite a few hustings already, and four more are scheduled, but we have not covered the contest much on the Politics Live blog, and we certainly have not reported from a hustings. So tonight it is going to get full attention for two hours.
The Greens are a smallish party, they normally hold leadership contests every two years, often it ends up as a co-leader job share and, because members have much more control over policy and other matters then they do in other parties, the leader or leaders have surprisingly little power. “The primary purpose of the Green party leader is to provide visionary leadership and direction for the party,” is how the party explains it.
But this contest is attracting more interest than most previous Green party leadership elections have. That is partly because the party is stronger than it has ever been before. It has four MPs at Westminster, more than 800 council seats and it is regularly picking up about 10% support in opinion polls.
