Elizabeth Oldfield speaks with British politician and former Green Party leader, Caroline Lucas. 19/06/2024

Caroline Lucas, British Politician and former leader of the Green Party is interviewed by host of The Sacred podcast, Elizabeth Oldfield.

In this episode, Caroline talks about the formation of an MP, the challenges of the political system, the role of imagination and spirituality in tackling the climate crisis, and how we can reimagine a different story about England.

Introduction: What does fully aliveness mean to you?

Elizabeth 

Caroline, we’re going to dive straight in with something that hopefully will get us all thinking, although I’m not sure any of us know the definitive answer to it, which is, what does fully aliveness mean to you? 

Caroline Lucas 

I think fully aliveness means being in the moment, paying attention, mindfulness for the want of a better word. I think it’s so easy speaking for myself to hold days at a time without actually remembering that you’re alive, which sounds a very odd thing to say, because obviously, we know we’re alive. But that sense of self consciousness and awareness and that mindfulness, for me, is a key part of it. I think being fully alive also means about being who you have the potential to be and exploring that and every avenue of your life that you are able to do, finding your passion, finding your purpose to me, that’s what being fully alive means. And finally, maybe something about taking risks, and finding joy where you can. You know, whether that’s in a flower coming up between the paving stones of a pavement, or whether it’s in a relationship, or whatever, wherever it is just remembering that we are alive for a very short time. And I know speaking for myself, my greatest regret is being on my deathbed and feeling like, oh, my God, that was not a dress rehearsal. That was it. And there are things that I wish I had done that I have not done. 

Elizabeth 

Yes, thank you. It’s funny, even as you’re talking, I can feel myself settling down, you know, be present to your body. Notice the leaves that I can see outside the window, we just need so many of these little reminders, don’t we? 

Caroline Lucas 

We do. My great guide on that is the poet, Mary Oliver, I just love the way that she makes paying attention into something that is some kind of duty. It’s a responsibility, as well as a pleasure and I think she expresses it so beautifully in her poetry. 

Elizabeth 

Yes, she does. Attention as a moral act and defining of the good life. So, I wonder, this may feel connected, it is for many people but sometimes isn’t. If you are happy to say something about your deep values? Are there some principles that you have really tried to live by? Even though obviously, we all fail at times.

Caroline Lucas 

Yes. I am thinking of my life as a Green politician as well as an individual, and I suppose hopefully, there’s some alignment between the two. But when you first asked me that question, I think of the answer more, actually, in my political life, where it does feel as if the Green Party and as a Green politician, then integrity and honesty seem to be so important that I think maybe one of the reasons that I was attracted to be in politics in the first place was that sense of the importance of speaking truth to power, even if that’s uncomfortable, both for the person speaking it and for the person hearing it. So, there is something about that kind of radical honesty, if you like, that is something that I aspire to. I might not always achieve it, but it feels like it is so important. Even more important today, perhaps, than ever before, at a time when there is so much misinformation out there and there’s so much of a gap that I think people can see between what people say what they do, you know, there is just this massive disjunction. So, something around honesty and integrity, being true to oneself. Linked to that, I hope is an aspiration, at least, around fearlessness. You know, risking being unpopular, even if that’s the price to pay for saying things or for doing things that people might not necessarily approve. And then something about compassion, I was trying to think of compassion of value? I’m not sure if it is. But anyway, whatever it is, I think compassion and empathy and kindness are massively definitely overlooked forces that we that we need more than ever. 

Elizabeth 

Yes. And have you had times where those values seem to pull against each other? Because it feels like sometimes telling the truth and the fearlessness to be honest whilst there’s the kindness and empathy thing. Is it just me who can find there’s a tension there? How has that shown up in your life? 

Caroline Lucas 

Now, I think that’s an incredibly, an incredibly good question. Because sometimes it can seem to be kind can’t it, not to tell the truth? And I think it’s about how you do it. And, again, I’m sorry, I’m reaching for my political experience, rather than my personal experience. But the most obvious way, I suppose that I will address… 

Elizabeth 

No need to apologise, these things are intertwined.

Caroline Lucas 

They are so intertwined. And I think, you know, in my life, one of the moments that I experienced that tension is when you’re talking about the shift that we all need to make to a greener way of life, if you like, and doing that in a way that doesn’t sound like you’re criticising individuals for the choices that they make. And I think there’s a recognition sometimes that’s necessary about the limited choices people have, you know, in terms of being able to make a more environmentally sound choice. Maybe that’s more expensive, maybe it’s more difficult, maybe the option just isn’t there for people. People are struggling just to put food on the table and start banging on to them about a climate crisis could seem the most irrelevant, and frankly, insulting thing to be doing when they’re just worrying about can they get their child said tomorrow? So, I think a lot of it is about how you do it. So I think, to try and answer your question, I think there are ways of reconciling the honesty and the compassion, but it needs attention, and the one doesn’t follow the other automatically. And it is about how you do it. 

Elizabeth 

Yeah. And I see that in you, having been sort of deep in your work in your life. I can hear that tone and that posture of wanting to both be urgent, actually, and of all the sorts of stalwart, lifelong campaigners, I have spent time in the mind of, you seem the least… Maybe we’ll come to this in terms of your formation. But I very rarely hear you sounding contemptuous, and eye rolling, and despairing in a way that I imagine you’ve had to really concentrate on.  

Caroline Lucas 

Yes, I wouldn’t like to promise that I’ve never eye rolled when I sit on the green benches opposite the Prime Minister, I suspect I have. But overall, I do believe that our politics needs more compassion. And indeed, there’s an organisation called Compassion and Politics with which I’m involved. And there is a distinction between having compassion for individuals and being fiercely opposed to some of the policies that their own logic leads them to espouse, I guess. And I think that compassion is important. 

Elizabeth 

Well, let’s try and get a sense of how you became the kind of person with these values and this approach to fully aliveness. Could you tell me a bit about your childhood, and particularly any big ideas that were in there: religious, political, or other? 

Caroline Lucas 

Yeah, I saw on other podcasts you’ve done this as a question that you ask, and I was suddenly struck with horror that, I’m not sure if there were any big ideas in my childhood. I suppose it depends when childhood ends and an adulthood takes over. But I mean, I grew up in a caring but, I don’t want to use word ‘normal’. No family’s ever normal, is it? It’s probably very abnormal. But anyway, I had a very conventional upbringing, with parents who are conservative voters. But political issues were never discussed in the home or around the around the table and books didn’t feature really very much in the in the house at all, apart from a few Reader’s Digest books. And so actually, if I think about what the influences on me were, as a child growing up, it was actually a friendship in particular, that really changed my life. So, when I went to secondary school, I met a friend called Rachel. So, I’m about 11, or 12, at this point, and my friendship with her did change my life because she came from a family that was the diametric opposite of my own, in the sense that the house was not neat and tidy, like my house. It was a total chaos. But it was wonderful, because you couldn’t move for tripping over piles of books, and it was with Rachel that, for example, my love of literature grew. So instead of doing our music practice at school, she will be smuggling in books by Emily Dickinson, and we would conspiratorially sit in the corner of the music practice room and read Emily Dickinson. Or we were supposed to be at some kind of sports day and again, we would both kind of plead illness and then sneak off with Thomas Hardy or something. So, it was my friendship with her that was an eye opening thing into literature and poetry in particular. Her mother was a wonderful character and she decided that what I needed, at age 15, was to go to Paris. And I was certainly up for that. So we went to Paris, the two of us, Rachel and I and her mum. And we were reading a book called Le Grand Meaulnes by Alain–Fournier, which is a beautiful, romantic French novel in our French class. It was about a magical lost domain, and she would know exactly the bridge that the author Alain–Fournier was standing on when he saw the woman that became the muse for the novel, so we would go and relive that. And then we would go and visit the Rodin Museum. And then I remember, sorry, this is a total distraction, it’s not really about big ideas.

Elizabeth

I love it.

Caroline Lucas

It was about the exoticism of coming across La Vache qui rit cheese for the first time, you know, there’s little Dairylea triangles. And it was actually in France, was not Dairylea actually is it, but anyway, La Vache qui rit, like Dairylea but better

Elizabeth

Yeah, the laughing cow! 

Caroline Lucas

I felt very much as if, through that friendship, walls were being knocked down, curtains were being pulled from my eyes. And a whole different way of living in terms of culture and the arts became massively important to me. So, I hope that counts a big idea, but that was the big idea of my childhood, I think. 

Elizabeth 

No, it does. And I love it. I feel like we don’t pay attention to friendships and relationships enough as these deeply formative parts of our lives. That most of the big ideas that come to form us come through relationships, right? They come through someone we trust, they come through testimony. I’ve heard you speak about Rachel before, and I find it so beautiful. Are you still friends? Is she still around? What’s going on with Rachel now?  

Caroline Lucas 

She is still around. And I saw a couple of weeks ago in Cambridge, where she lives. And she’s a writer and she’s been a congregational minister. So, she’s had an extraordinary life. And now, she’s still very, very important to me. 

Flawed political systems and a need for imagination in politics

Elizabeth 

Good. I was worried about that question in case it was pressing on a bruise. And you went to university and were so immersed in literature. You went onto to do a PhD in women’s literature, and you’ve spoken about maybe wanting to be a writer? What is it that was drawing you, what is the thread that keeps pulling you back to the written word?

Caroline Lucas 

I think it’s something about the importance of imagination. And I think perhaps that’s what connects my political life to my sort of literary life, if you like. And certainly, in the book that I’ve just written, the two come together, which felt a really lovely way of bringing together two parts of my life. So, the reason I say imagination is so important, is that I think that you could really make a very strong case to say that the failure of politics right now is a failure of imagination in the broadest, and widest, and deepest sense. By which I mean, there is a stunning lack of empathy in politics right now. If I were to look at immigration policy, just as one example, the way in which people seeking asylum, people who are trying to escape the most horrendous life experiences that they are facing, are somehow branded as hordes of immigrants who are threatening our shores, they are totally dehumanised. And I think that just shows a radical lack of imagination, putting yourself in the shoes of what it must be like to be that person. Or, indeed, the kind of demonization of people who are unable to work for whatever reason, quite often linked to mental health problems or physical health problems. And so, in one sense, when we look at social policy, or even aspects of foreign policy, then then a lack of imagination is there. And certainly, when I look at the area of policy with which I’m most concerned, in other words, the natural world and the climate crisis, then the only way I can possibly make sense of why it is the politicians know what they know, and yet still don’t act, is that they have had a massive, tragic, existential lack of imagination to think about what is this future that we are deliberately constructing and we’ll be handing on to our kids and kids all around the world that is going to make it increasingly impossible, even to live on this precious planet. And that imagination to me feels like it’s what’s lacking in politics and what we find in literature. And if all politicians were forced to read a novel a week, then maybe politics would be in a better state. 

Elizabeth 

That’s really fascinating. And I want to come back to it, because one of the key things I want to talk to you about is the kind of moral language/ moral framing for this wicked problem of the world that we’ve built for ourselves. But I just want to stay a little bit on your political life. And there’s lots we could say there, but there are many good podcasts I can point people to really walk through this extraordinary political career that you’ve had. I really want to ask you about formation of an MP and formation is this word that sort of sounds like a technical word, it’s used a lot by the Jesuits. But it’s basically who we are becoming, and Aristotle talks about the power of habit. And I’ve been writing and thinking a lot about formation as in the things we pay attention to, regularly and repeatedly, and the relationships that we’re in, regularly and repeatedly, change us. And they are who we become, and they shape our imagination, right? Reading novels is formation, it helps build our imagination and our empathy. And as those on the outside of Parliament looking, it’s really quite a strange situation to be putting human beings in, isn’t it, repeatedly? Could you say a little bit because you’ve written about this about the formation of being an MP and the way, if you’re not careful, it will shape you maybe for good, but I imagine also for ill? 

Caroline Lucas 

Yes. Well, that’s a very good question. And it reminds me of something that Margaret Beckett said to me, Margaret Beckett is a veteran Labour MP who has been in parliament for many decades and been in Labour governments in the past. And I remember when I was first, trying to get my head around the way that the parliament worked, and just the many weirdnesses, which I’ll come to in a second. But I do remember how she took me to one side and said, “Don’t worry, you’ll get used to it.” And I thought, oh, my God, that’s the trouble, they’ve all got used to it! This is a very, strange way of making decisions of any kind. And I suppose some of those eye–opening ways of making politics were to do with the fact that half the time people don’t even know what they’re voting on, because basically, the party whips have huge control over their party members. And so, you get whipped, if you’re in one of the bigger parties, to vote one way or another. And so, when a bell goes for the vote, then you basically have eight minutes to get from wherever you are on the parliamentary estate to the chamber. And believe me, sometimes that can mean running very fast to get from where my office is, certainly, to the chamber at eight minutes. And, the whole talk as you’re running to the chamber, is, ‘What are we voting on? Who knows what we’re voting on’, nobody knows. In fact, one of the few people that does know what we’re voting on is me because someone in my office, bless them, has had to spend ages trying to work out what the implications are of an amendment that says something like in paragraph 3.2 change, ‘and’ to ‘or’. And you need to do a bit of work to kind of work out what that actually really means. And so, one of the changes that I tried to introduce very early on when I came to the Westminster parliament, was to request the requirement for anybody putting down an amendment to also include a short 50–word explanatory statement to explain what that purpose of that amendment is. So, anybody looking at it can instantly see what that amendment does. And that was common practice in the European Parliament where I had sat for 10 years before coming to Westminster. And the debate in Parliament about whether or not to include mandatory explanatory statements was so extraordinary, because you had MP after MP, standing up to say, “No, we don’t we don’t need this. We don’t want this.” In other words, people arguing that they shouldn’t be given the right to know what they’re voting on. And so that’s just a tiny snapshot. But essentially, I think that stepping back and thinking about your question more broadly, there is a sense in which the political system is not set up to deliver the best results for ordinary people. It’s set up to keep the dominant party of governments in power.

And another example of that would be, when legislation goes through Parliament, a temporary committee is set up to look at it in depth, to scrutinise it. And you would have thought that you would want experts in the subject around that table inputting into the detail of the development of that policy. And there was a wonderful story that was told by Sarah Wollaston, who people might remember was a Tory MP from Totnes, she was a GP. And one of the reasons she was selected in Totnes by the residents of that town was because they really appreciated her as a local doctor with huge expertise in health. She tells a story about how she asked the Conservative Party whip if she could sit on the committee that have been set up to look at this issue of health and social care. And she was told no she had to go and sit on a committee instead that was going to look at something like double taxation in the Cayman Islands. And when she said, “I don’t know anything about double taxation in the Cayman Islands”, the whip apparently said, “Well, that’s just fine. Because all we need you to do is to put your hand up when we tell you so that we get this legislation through.” So, in other words, the stories I’m trying to tell, are about how the whole system is set up not to achieve the best possible outcome in terms of legislation, but in terms of keeping the dominant government in power. And I think it just tells a story about how dysfunctional our politics is, and how people do get used to it. And therefore, it gets harder really to try to change it. Sorry, that was a very long answer.            

Environmentalism, consumerism, and morality 

Elizabeth 

No, it’s wonderful. And it, it sort of brings me on to this subject that you’ve been doggedly and faithfully working away at for decades around the climate crisis and the nature crisis. And anyone who’s got anywhere close to it, there’s just the sheer sense of, how is it possible that we have not done the things that we have known for a long time that we need to do? And there’s the systems and power analysis around wicked problems. And there’s, you know, what you’ve spoken about in terms of a failure of imagination, and empathy. And I guess I wanted to put to you a kind of thesis I’m working away on that I haven’t landed. But my background is that I want to be bringing theological ideas into the mainstream and say, there’s wisdom here. And I’m trying, which is an ambitious thing to be doing, to offer this concept of sin as not a kind of legal concept that is about punishment and reward, but a relational concept, which is about disconnection from ourselves and the Earth, and each other, and yes the divine, but I think it’s useful, even if you can’t get on board with that. And so, I’m writing about avarice and greed, and this sense of an insatiable desire for comfort and convenience, and frankly consumer crap, that I feel very complicit in and hypocritical in. And which my scriptures are very starkly, clearly warning against the dangers of the love of money, the deceitfulness of wealth, the lie that accumulation will save us. I’ve heard you occasionally say that some of this government’s decisions are wicked and not as a way of pointing fingers at others, frankly, but as a frame to help us realise the seriousness of our own complicity in this. Do we need more robust moral language, again? Is this, in fact, actually a spiritual problem, not just a scientific and technocratic one? That’s what I wanted to chew over with you. 

Caroline Lucas 

No, I think you’ve put it very eloquently very beautifully. And yes, I think this broader sense, it is a spiritual problem. I mean, it is about meaning, isn’t it? And I think increasingly, in our post–consumerist society, people are encouraged to find meaning through consumption. And maybe the traditional ways of being able to find meaning, feel less accessible to people for a whole range of reasons. And therefore, if meaning is about, what you consume rather than who you are, then it’s not surprising that that is driving us into an ever deeper ecological crisis, because we know that there just isn’t enough resource for all of us to continue to try to find meaning in that way. I think there is some hope in the fact that I think an increasing number of people are recognising that, and there does feel actually, among young people in particular, a bit of a push back against, you know, having the latest phone or the latest gadget or whatever. It’s small beginnings, but I think perhaps we’ve got to a point now, in that kind of spiritual crisis that we face, where people are finding meaning and other less consumerist ways and I think there is some hope. 

Elizabeth 

Yes, I think the lie that if you get rich, or hot, or have a load of social media followers, you will be happy. Most of us, we sort of always knew that wasn’t the case, but all the imaginative machinery funnels you in that direction. And I think, I hope there is more of an appetite for just calling bullshit on that… 

Caroline Lucas 

No, I’m sorry. I was just going to talk about the role of advertising. And some friends of mine have just produced a book called Badvertising, which tries to deconstruct somewhat, the whole advertising industry and to give us the tools to recognise how and when we’re being manipulated. And it does feel as if we have this extraordinary industry, which is set up on the premise of trying to persuade us to spend money we don’t have on things we don’t need to make impressions that don’t last on people we don’t even care about. And that was a lovely formulation from Professor Tim Jackson at University of Surrey. But more and more, I think people are beginning to try to unpack that whole industry, which is set up to make us feel bad, essentially. Because it’s only by buying the latest gizmo or gadget, that we are going to, to be able to feel good about ourselves. And of course, that’s just a never–ending spiral of doom once we accept that premise. 

Linking attitudes to death to consumption

Elizabeth 

Yes, there’s so much I want to say about that with you. But I want to honour your time on this very busy day, on the beginning of an election campaign. But you have spoken about standing down at this election, and I think you’ve been really quite inspiring, writing very honestly and beautifully about your reasons. And my ears pricked up when I heard that you were interested in training as a death doula. So, I hope you will forgive me, this is very self–indulgent, but I want to read a very tiny bit of the book I have coming out today, because I think it connects these two things, and I would love to just hear you respond to it. And it’s in a chapter that I wrote about baptism. And then I say, “In his book on what might be beyond climate collapse, environmental writer Dougald Hine, underlines the importance of ritualised encounters with our own death. He argues that industrial society is only possible because of the millennia of dead things that fossil fuels represent, have tried to hide death from us, we think talk of it morbid and tidy the dying away, outsourcing their care mainly to the underpaid and undervalued. And this death phobia, hampers our ability to become grown up. Heinz point is that the loss of these rituals, the community participation in bringing children across the threshold of adulthood via these initiations like baptism, is just one of the many things we have lost in a culture of disconnection. Because when we deny death, we deny limits, think we are above causing effect. To be a grown up, he argues, is to live alert to consequences to know the cost of your living. It’s hard to be a grown up in the world we have made.”

Caroline Lucas

Wow!

Elizabeth

He’s amazing, you should get hold of his book. So, do you feel it? The connection between you’re draw to think deeply and be present in death? 

Caroline Lucas 

Yeah, I’m still just kind of reeling from that really beautiful way of expressing it. And I think there’s so much truth in what you just said, and we could spend days unpacking all of that. But there’s certainly something I think about the way in which we’ve basically hidden away death and it’s the last taboo and we never talk about it, and what that means for the way that we live in all sorts of ways. Partly, it reminds me of your very first question about what being fully alive means, and being fully alive means also being fully alive to the fact of death and living life with death very much in mind. And I’m really interested, I haven’t much thought until you just read it like that, about the link to how our marginalising of the idea of death means that we do live in a way that makes us think we can go on forever. And therefore, you know, that feeds directly into this kind of consumerist culture where we never really think very much about what happens to all the shit that we throw away. But in terms of my own motivation, I guess I am concerned just on a more personal level about how in the West in general and, maybe even in the UK in particular, we do seem to be very bad at dealing with end of life in the sense that you so many people we know would much prefer to die at home surrounded by their loved ones. And yet, we have this enormous stress on making people better at all costs, no matter what kind of quality of life that looks like, and what their own wishes are. And so death becomes so over medicalized, I mean, that’s not to say there aren’t occasions when you’d be very, very grateful for medical intervention towards the end of life, and quite rightly so. But I think a more honest debate about how we approach the end of life, and what we would want at the end of life, would make things so much better for the living and the dying. And the role of ritual in that, I would love to explore with you. One of my favourite books is Francis Weller’s The Wild Edge of Sorrow, in which he makes such a powerful case for the importance of ritual, and I absolutely believe in that. And I think the way that you’ve just described it in terms of that kind of threshold between childhood and adulthood, however you mark that, whether that’s through baptism, or anything else, I think, would be a way of, of connecting. I mean, I loved what you said about a culture of disconnection, it will be a way of connecting the way we live, and the whole premise of limits. And as you say, we bolk against any idea of limits on anything. And, you know, one of the biggest challenges I’ve had in parliament is getting people to recognise that there have to be some kind of limits to growth. I set up an all–party group with the title, Limits to Growth, because we know that if by growth, we mean more of the same extractive economic system that’s led us to all of the environmental problems we have right now, if we think we can do that on a planet of finite resources, we are so misguided. But it’s so difficult I think that’s probably the hardest thing I’ve tried to do in parliament is to get that on the record. Because people will mock it, they will avoid it, they will tell us technologies mean that we don’t even have to confront it. And I think you’re very right to make a parallel between how that manifests itself in a debate about material resources, also has connections in how we live our own lives, thinking that there’s no limit to our own life so we can just go on without really thinking about what that end of life is going to be like.  

Redefining Englishness 

Elizabeth 

Yeah. And again, I just think these questions are so spiritual, right? They’re so much about the moral profundity of our deep values and we’re so nervous of those things that we try and make them technocratic, and that’s tripped us up. I can’t let you go without getting you to say a little bit about this book, Another England, which is this beautiful meditation on the stories and the literature of England as a nation. And I’d love you just to ask, what led you to write this book? And what is the key thing you want people to take from it? 

Caroline Lucas 

Thank you for the opportunity to do that. A lot of people have said, “Why are you only writing about England? Why not the UK as a whole.” And the reason for that is because, I worry about what might happen if Scotland becomes independent, which I think is entirely likely within a generation, the island of Ireland could easily reunite. The Sinn Féin First Minister said she would be anticipating a referendum on that before 2030. Even in Wales, there’s a new movement towards greater independence. And all of those are fine, my only concern is, where does that leave England? Where do we ever think about what kind of England do we want? And it feels to me that those on the on the left, broadly speaking, are pretty squeamish about talking about England because it feels as if the right of the political spectrum have pretty much had a monopoly on defining Englishness. You know, one thinks of the kind of world beating Boris Johnson type rhetoric, you think of English exceptionalism of Imperial nostalgia. And I think there’s a real squeamishness on the left about even talking about England.

But if we if we let that be the case, then I think that’s very dangerous. Because we know that there is a rising tide of populism that is sweeping, not just Europe and America, but certainly here in the UK too. And therefore, telling more compelling stories about a more progressive England, one that we can feel proud of, and that can inspire us to go on trying to make England as best as it possibly can be. That feels even more urgent right now. So, in the book, what I’ve tried to do is to use the lens of literature to remind us of some of the more progressive traditions within England. So, for example, looking at the poetry of John Clare, one of my favourite poets, and how he spoke out so eloquently and strongly against the enclosure of land, land being taken away from the commoners in the 17th 18th and 19th centuries. But he talks so beautifully about that, and just reminds us that human beings are not separate from nature. I think one of the real takeaways from his poetry and, you see it in the syntax of the poems, is that the human being is absolutely part of the natural world. It’s not that, as there is in some poetry, where you’ve got the, the observer, the poet is the observer and, quite often, he is observing the natural world as something other, and different, and over there. In John Clare, the observer and the natural world are totally immersed and entangled. And that feels to me that it’s speaking to something really important right now, where, for example, there’s a wonderful organisation called Lawyers for Nature, who are who are trying right now to change the Oxford English Dictionary definition of nature, which currently does define nature as other, to mean instead that we have a definition that puts human beings and nature as part of the same thing. So those mindsets that we bring to the natural world will influence what kind of country that we’re building going forward. So, taking inspiration from literature, whether it’s John Clare when it comes to our relationship with the natural world, or whether it’s Elizabeth Gaskell, when it comes to the importance of workers having their own rights and standing up for themselves to trade unionism. Just looking at those traditions and thinking that we can tell much more compelling stories of a much more progressive England that we already see if we look backwards and which we can continue to create if we do it deliberately and mindfully, rather than just listening to the stories that that too often get told of England, which tends to be the more aggressive stories, I think.  

Elizabeth 

Yes. And it comes back to this imagination, right, that the stories that we tell and the imagination that we allow to be formed in us changes the choices that we make and the way we show up in the world. Caroline Lucas, I am so grateful for your time today on one of the busiest days of the year for you. I hope we get to talk again at some point, but I’m going to let you go. Thank you so much for talking to me on The Sacred.  

Caroline Lucas 

Well, it’s been a real pleasure and privilege. Thank you so much.

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