← Back to Parliament Matters episode page

This transcript is automatically generated. There are consequently minor errors and the text is not formatted according to our style guide. If you wish to reference or cite the transcript please first check against the audio version. Timestamps are provided for ease of reference.

Intro: [00:00:00] You are listening to Parliament Matters, a Hansard Society production supported by the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust. Learn more at hansardsociety.org.uk/pm

Ruth Fox: Welcome to Parliament Matters, the podcast about the institution at the heart of our democracy, Parliament itself. I'm Ruth Fox.

Mark D'Arcy: And I'm Mark D'Arcy. And in this special episode, we are talking to the Westminster leader of the Green Party, its contingent of four MPs in the House of Commons, Ellie Chowns. And Ellie, first of all, thanks very much indeed for talking to us. You are both the Westminster leader of the Greens, the foreign affairs spokesperson, the social care spokesperson, the housing, communities, and local government spokesperson, the business and trade spokesperson, the defence spokesperson, and the education spokesperson. Do you get much sleep?

Ellie Chowns: Indeed, we are all like that, with only four MPs and 25 or so portfolios, we are all doing half a dozen. [00:01:00] We obviously have to pick and choose, but I always think, compared to Caroline Lucas, who was a single Green MP covering absolutely everything, we've got it easy, right? But I'm looking forward to the day when we've got more than one Green MP per portfolio, hopefully soon.

Mark D'Arcy: And Caroline Lucas was a bit of a phenomenon in Westminster in her many years, since 2010, right up to 2024. And she, as you say, had to cover all the bases. And I know she would've loved to have had another MP beside her in the Chamber of the House of Commons. Were you surprised to find that you had an all singing, all dancing contingent of four MPs when you got here after the last election?

Ellie Chowns: In a way, no, because we targeted four seats and we won those four seats, so we were really determined and we achieved it, which was fantastic. But you can't take anything for granted in politics. So, on the day of the election, I was on absolute tenterhooks. I had absolutely no clue whether I would've won my seat or we would've got all four. So it was absolutely delightful to win all four and, yes, to be part [00:02:00] of a little group. I'd love to be a much bigger group, but I think we really are able to support each other and work together as a team. And I'm really aware that's something that Caroline didn't have. Obviously my kind of comparator is working previously as a local councillor in a bigger group of councillors, and of course as a Green MEP, where I was part of a group of 75, which is a whole different ball game. But yeah, I'm really glad we've got four.

Ruth Fox: One of the things that is an issue when you first arrive in Parliament is it is a huge learning curve. What sort of things would've helped you in those early weeks and months in the job?

Ellie Chowns: Honestly, some really practical things. An office with a telephone line, it literally took me until November to get a phone line installed in my office. Utterly extra endless chasing of BT and so forth. People, staff who knew how to deal with casework, because the minute you get elected, your inbox explodes with all of the people who've got cases under the [00:03:00] previous MP, all of the people who didn't feel that the previous MP dealt with their cases decently and want to bring them up again, all of the people who've been hugely hopeful because you've just been elected. So there's an absolute tsunami of incoming correspondence.

And then as a new MP you are trying to learn the ropes here in Parliament, trying to recruit staff, set up an office, deal with the incoming correspondence, and inevitably, I think it's the same for absolutely everybody, backlogs build up and then you're carrying that around with you and struggling to deal with that in the early days and weeks.

So the fact that there's no transition period. You are: right, you are in, the next day. It's actually not the steep learning curve of learning how Parliament works, getting the hang of speaking and learning about procedure. For me, it was the practical learning curve of just getting things set up so that you could serve your constituents well. Office, telephone line, staff, system for dealing with correspondence. That was [00:04:00] the hardest bit actually.

Ruth Fox: And when you walked through that door into Westminster that first time back in July 2024, what did you think?

Ellie Chowns: Do you know what, I had an ITV camera crew with me that day and they were literally walking me along the riverside, filming the building and saying, how do you feel when you see it, and obviously wanted me to say, oh, terribly in awe and terribly excited. And I did feel very in awe and excited. Also, I think to some extent I lack a little bit of imagination. People have said since, is it how you thought it would be? And I really am not sure how I thought it would be. I just throw myself into whatever, and then - I do still walk along the river and look at this building and think, wow, what an incredible place to be working.

This building is designed to make people feel intimidated and in awe, especially people like me, women, people who went to a comprehensive school, and I really resist that. Occasionally, I clock the fact that I'm walking through these huge marble staircases [00:05:00] and pillars and statues and huge paintings everywhere. And it doesn't do a great deal for me, to be perfectly honest. The thing that's much more sort of present in my feelings about the place are my feelings about how it works, how it operates, how power is used, and how the mechanisms do or don't help us to do our job. Which, as, an Opposition MP, my job is to hold Government to account, right?

So anything that kind of restricts the ability of non-government MPs to hold the Government to account, anything that restricts our speaking time, that is unfair in say the allocation of select committee seats, that sort of thing really frustrates me. I made a speech very shortly after being elected to this place, it was a debate about modernisation. I had some views already about modernisation. I have even more views about modernisation now. There are so many things that could and should be done to make this place work more efficiently. Yes, I'm really aware of the history of the place, [00:06:00] the responsibility of the place. I'm hugely aware of the privilege of being in this role. I'm hugely excited about it. I genuinely really enjoy it, and there are so many frustrations about the way that I would like the place to work better so that we could have better governance overall.

Ruth Fox: Well, let's talk about those then. And when you first got in, you did make a speech, as you say, about modernisation and you said we should have a hemicycle chamber, not the current arrangement. We should have electronic voting. What is bobbing up and down in your seat all the time about to catch the Speaker's eye? Those were some of the things you'd highlighted then. Do you still think those things should go.

Ellie Chowns: I do, really, honestly, I do. The bobbing, it's very good for the thighs, but it's so frustrating. Honestly. I was in the budget debate , five hour debate, something like that. I did get in, I was the penultimate Opposition speaker. There [00:07:00] were several Lib Dems who had been bobbing up and down, literally every few minutes, four, five solid hours, and they still didn't get selected. So the whole system of bobbing, the whole system of not having any form of call list. Yes. Electronic voting, again, the other day, I mean it happens pretty much every week, multiple times, walking around in very slow circles. What's hilarious is we do electronically vote because we tap our passes on a reader that logs us as voting, but then we have to queue for 10 minutes to get through the doors while somebody physically counts us through. And it's just so long-winded. It's so frustrating. It's so inefficient. I once calculated that four votes takes about an hour. That costs, in terms of just MPs' time, about 30 grand. You could employ a nurse for that. I know it doesn't quite work that easily, but it's just such a waste of time. I would rather be doing stuff that more directly serves my constituents than queing [00:08:00] to go through corridors endlessly. And yes, of course, if we got rid of the lobbies, you'd have more than twice as much floor space, and you could have a chamber where everybody had a seat.

Mark D'Arcy: Luxury. But now you and your Green colleagues are sitting in a small enclave towards the back of the Opposition benches.

Ellie Chowns: In the middle, in the middle.

Mark D'Arcy: But you're one of a number of quite small groupings of MPs on the Opposition benches, and that means that you don't really get that much of a look in on the action in the chamber.

Ellie Chowns: Yes and no, to be honest, Mark, if one of us is there for a ministerial statement or an urgent question or whatever, we will basic, basically always get a look in. So there will always be a Green voice heard in pretty much any debate where we try to speak and we try to cover as many bases as possible.

Mark D'Arcy: But you will be some way down the pecking order, you know, you'll be behind the Tories, you'll be behind the Liberal Democrats, you may well be behind the Reform Party. Possibly some of the others might get in ahead of you, so you're some way down.

Ellie Chowns: Oh, absolutely. And I could [00:09:00] talk for England on the ways that I would like our parliamentary procedures to be reformed, and maybe we'll have a chance to do that, but so on the one hand, we do get a chance to speak. On the other hand, as you very well know, our whole mechanism of government, our Parliament, is organised in such a way that power is basically tied up. It's incredibly dominated by the governing party and the official Opposition in terms of how parliamentary time is allocated in terms of control over all of the levers of how Parliament operates. So yes, it's deeply frustrating in many ways. I tend to be a kind of glass half full kind of person. I look on the bright side. I am really glad that we are there. I think it's really important our voices are heard there and I think we punch above our weight in many ways on some key issues. So I think we play a really important role, but I would love there to be far more than four of us. And of course, if we had a fair and proportional electoral system, we would already have dozens. And with how we are polling at the moment the sky's the limit right, at the next [00:10:00] election.

Ruth Fox: We'll come on to that, but what kind of support do you have then? You've four MPs. But what's in the background that's helping you do all this work?

Ellie Chowns: An amazing team of people. Politics is a team game. It really is. Winning an election is a team game. I had 400 volunteers helping me to win my seat in North Herefordshire. And here in Parliament we've got several people who work across the group of four of us. Several of them we were really lucky to inherit from people who'd worked for Caroline previously. And so that degree of expertise and experience, people who really know how the procedures work, that huge amount of advice has been so valuable.

I ran an all party group here in Parliament 25 years ago. That was my kind of sole parliamentary experience. So to have people who really know how things work has been super, super useful. And then we've each got our own teams here in Westminster and of course in the constituency. So what people see as an MP, standing up in Parliament speaking about issues that matter, writing letters to ministers and so forth, and doing all of the things [00:11:00] in the constituency behind that, there is always a huge team of people supporting the work and helping the MP hopefully to be as effective as possible.

Mark D'Arcy: Of course, all four Green MPs were newcomers this time. Does Caroline Lucas, who's the only previous Green MP, still have some kind of role, is she available if you want to ask her a question about how something's done or what something might mean?

Ellie Chowns: Oh, absolutely. Yeah, she's available. I know that I can ring her up if I've ever got any questions. We are on various WhatsApp groups together, we hear from each other and had a number of conversations this past year. At the same time, we don't really need to ring her up and bother her about day-to-day things because we've got the infrastructure of the staff team that are there to support and advise us with all of those day-to-day things.

Mark D'Arcy: How do the other parties now look at you? We talked a little bit about Caroline Lucas, your predecessor as a Green MP. She was seen, I think, as a one-off, someone who wasn't a particular danger to the other parties in the sense that the Greens weren't really very close anywhere [00:12:00] else when she was an MP and she was almost the must have adjunct to any all party initiative, sign up Caroline Lucas, you can tick the box of saying you've got an extra party on board for whatever it is you're putting down a motion on. These days though, you are a threat. The Green Party was tweeting happily the other day about how many Labour Cabinet ministers it thought it might defeat at the next election, according to some poll or other. So presumably you are not seen quite so indulgently now.

Ellie Chowns: To be honest, I'm probably not the best person to ask about that. You need to ask the other parties how they view us. I can only answer that personally. We work really closely across party with lots and lots of people, and that is something that the sort of bear pit pantomime of PMQs, that is what most people see of Parliament, it really doesn't communicate the fact that behind the scenes in all sorts of arenas, all party groups, select committees and so forth, there's lots and lots of really constructive work, and there are loads of people here with whom I fundamentally disagree on lots of things, but I like them as people, and I find lots of common ground with them on other [00:13:00] things too.

In terms of the kind of broader recognition of the Greens as a growing force, absolutely you'd have to have been living under a rock for the last few months not to have observed our transformational growth, in membership, and of course in public polling, the figures just go up and up and up, and that's absolutely fantastic.

From my perspective, finally, the Green Party's getting the attention it deserves, really cutting through. And so looking forward to that translating into more seats at local elections, Senedd elections, and of course the next general election too. And yes, inevitably parties are going to be seeing us as a threat. I'd like everybody to sit around a table having a nice cup of tea and a grownup conversation.

Mark D'Arcy: But you are getting pot shots taken at you now in a way that Caroline Lucas very seldom faced when she was alone in Parliament.

Ellie Chowns: Yes, and I had to correct something Keir Starmer said that was incorrect the other day, with a point of order. And it's frustrating. I really dislike the sort of politics that's about taking chunks out of other people's [00:14:00] personalities and misrepresenting policies and so forth. Inevitably politics is about, literally the meaning of it is, contestation over ideas. But I think it is absolutely possible to do that and necessary to do that in a way that does focus on the ideas, try and get to grips with them rather than caricature or get excessively personal.

So that's the type of politics that I personally really, really shy away from. And occasionally, I suppose there has to be a little bit of rough and tumble with politics, but I would like us to focus on debating the fundamental ideas to focus on debating the merits of taxing wealth more fairly, or taking stronger action to address UK complicity in the genocide in Gaza, or not putting those who are most vulnerable in society, people on benefits and so forth, not scapegoating them for the problems that we face. And I think that there is huge amounts of common ground. Obviously Labour's feeling a little bit threatened by the Green [00:15:00] Party at the moment because so many people are so disillusioned with Labour. Really understandably. And so those people are hugely welcome now in the Green Party and hopefully that will also help to swing the pendulum a bit more towards the progressive ideas that we all share.

Mark D'Arcy: Hugely welcome in the Green Party, would that include Labour MPs who decided that they wanted to switch colours?

Ellie Chowns: Oh, this, is a defection question, right? The very straightforward answer is we have a defection protocol and decisions aren't made by me or by anybody in particular. There's a process to go through. I'm actually not really focused on that because we can work really constructively with people in the Labour Party. For example, Labour MPs who've got huge amounts of values in common with us.

We can be from different sides of the chamber making the same arguments. so for me it's not so much about getting more numbers into the Green group, but making sure that the grouping of people in society as a whole who are advocating for those Green affair policies is growing all the time and [00:16:00] challenging Reform.

Ruth Fox: One of the distinctive features of the Green Party, of course, is that your party leader is outside Parliament. And Zack Polanski, since his election, he's got very good communication skills. He's been part of the increase in the poll ratings and the attention that the party has been able to garner. How does that work? In terms of the parliamentarians here at Westminster and him outside, does he ring you up or take part in your parliamentary meetings and say, come on guys, I want us to focus on X this week. What's the kind of relationship like in practical terms?

Ellie Chowns: It's really good, really positive, really smooth, to be honest. We have two meetings that we have each week with representation from the MP group and the leadership and various other kind of senior leadership. So there's WhatsApp, everybody's on WhatsApp all the time. So, there's a lot of interaction. Yeah. You were saying Zack has been part of that kind of huge, actually I would say Zack has been absolutely integral central to that growth. Huge kudos to him. He's done an [00:17:00] absolutely brilliant job, both during the leadership campaign and then since getting elected as leader, really transforming the level of cut-through that the Green Party's getting, really bringing people on board, and it's just hugely positive to see. And we see at all levels in every local party, large numbers of new people joining and all dead keen to get out campaigning, which is what it's all about.

Mark D'Arcy: That's very complimentary stuff about the man you were running against for the party leadership.

Ellie Chowns: I like Zack. I've got loads of time for Zack and he's done an absolutely brilliant job. Yes, I ran for leadership. I accept the results of the election. I'm a democrat and he won an overwhelming majority. And talking about not being able to predict, I don't think any of us would've predicted what has happened and hasn't it been fantastic, he's done a brilliant job of leading the party over the last few months, and Rachel and Mothin as well, and I'm really looking forward to what the coming years bring.

Mark D'Arcy: And presumably [00:18:00] the aim is to get him into Parliament either at the next election or at a convenient by-election that pops up in the right place beforehand.

Ellie Chowns: I'd love to see him in Parliament.

Ruth Fox: How do you decide things in terms of how you're going to vote on things like legislation then here at Westminster? So, vote by vote, you've gotta make some quite difficult decisions, and sometimes it'll be plainly obvious how you're going to vote, and sometimes it'll be more of a grey area. Do you decide that within your parliamentary group, do you have liaison with Zack Polanski about it? How does that work?

Ellie Chowns: We decided within the parliamentary group, we couldn't possibly be liaising with people outside about how we're going to vote on individual things, really. Although in fairness, for example, there were votes on employment stuff . So we were chatting with our trade union reps on our governance body about one or two of those. So we are not whipped as a group, which is quite a distinctive thing. We do have a Whip technically, which is Siân, Siân Berry, and that's for communication purposes. The whips from different parties meet to talk about the business that's coming up. So that all [00:19:00] works very well. The way that votes work on particular votes, particular bills, so for each bill, one of us within the group of four is the lead MP for that. Generally speaking it depends on which portfolio we are leading on. But for example, I lead on MHCLG.

Ruth Fox: So it's Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government.

Ellie Chowns: That's right, yes, exactly. But actually Siân led on the English Devolution Bill, so there's always one of the four of us that is the lead MP on a particular piece of legislation. And sometimes we will have been on the committee. So for that one, Siân sat on the committee. Planning and Infrastructure, I sat on the committee. Renters' Rights, Carla sat on the committee. And so in that case, that individual MP has really a good grasp of the amendments, all of the discussions that have been going on.

And then we have a member of staff who kind of liaises with the Speaker's Office to find out which amendments are coming up for votes, and with whips in other groups to find out what's being pushed and so forth. And then that person and the lead [00:20:00] MP between them consider the amendments and come up with voting advice.

Whether we individually vote in line with that voting advice or might make a decision slightly differently is up to each of us. And sometimes the four of us will be chatting in a corridor during the votes about an upcoming vote and thinking actually, bearing this in mind, perhaps we might be reconsidering. So generally speaking, we vote along very much the same lines, but on some things there have been differences and I think that's really positive. People really appreciate it as well.

Mark D'Arcy: I can see some heavy metal old whip from one of the other parties looking askance at that though, and saying, hang on a minute, it's all very cuddly, but, when two of you vote one way and two of you vote another way, after a while, that begins to percolate and you look like a shower, and that's why other parties have party discipline. This is going to be a risk for you if you're moving into the big leagues in the way you hope. Then people are going to start looking at how the Green MPs vote, and if they're constantly breaking in different [00:21:00] directions or even occasionally breaking in different directions, that's going to be seized on as a chink in your armour.

Ellie Chowns: I mean, this speaks to the whole thing of politics being very black and white, whereas actually so much in life is real shades of grey. And perhaps we need to be a bit more comfortable living with that. We are not constantly voting in different directions. If we were, we really wouldn't be able to hang together as a party. It's a tiny percentage, maybe one percentage of those, I've never actually counted it, where there might be some slight difference of opinion, maybe even less than that.

I can see that if you were in a situation where your party's specific number of votes was making the difference between whether a piece of legislation would go through or not, and it was a kind of earth shatteringly important thing that went through, that's when that party discipline is hugely important.

Now, at some point in the future, we might possibly be in a situation like that, but most of the time we really aren't. And that's why it's so weird to see things like Labour getting elected with this thumping [00:22:00] great majority, and then withdrawing the whip from seven of its MPs for voting for something that they were personally hugely committed to, they were committed to as a party, and they've now actually implemented, it's really quite extraordinary. So there's a spectrum in between that kind of huge, heavy handedness that we've seen from Labour, and not just on child benefit cap, but also on people being rebels on PIP and on planning actually. So that's one end of the kind of whipping spectrum. And then the other end would be where you just couldn't trust anybody to vote in a consistent way at all. We are nowhere near that end of the spectrum at all. We are held together by shared values, but I think that independence of mind is really crucial and that's actually central to how our political system should work. You do not leave your conscience and your brain cells at the door. When you get elected as an MP, you know you should not be just heading through a lobby because somebody more senior than you in the party has said that. You should be to the very best of your ability thinking through the [00:23:00] implications of the stuff that you are voting on. And yeah, I think my experience is that voters really, welcome that, they like the fact that we are independent minded. And on the point about do you have to hold, in order to be part of a functional government, would you have to have really, hard line whipping. Again, I think that's not the sort of politics that I believe in or that I want to see. Serving in the European Parliament group of 75, we had voting guidance, but people did vote differently on some issues and it wasn't, it really wasn't the end of the world, not least because you are trying in every part of that type of system to form a solid coalition across a range of ideological and party lines around what will hopefully be the best way forward for the collective.

That's the sort of politics that I want to move towards. So it's a type of politics where there is paradoxically more focus on finding the common ground and the C word, compromise, [00:24:00] and at the same time more space for independent mindedness and independent thinking and fundamentally conscience too.

Mark D'Arcy: Well, let's talk a little bit about coalition politics. As anyone who takes a look at the current opinion polls and then wonders what would happen if you ran them through a first past the post voting system at the next general election basically throws their hands up in the air and says anything could happen. And it is entirely possible that after the next general election the Greens might be in government or perhaps sustaining a government of other parties which, just for want of a better word, would see themselves as vaguely on the left. How would the Greens approach a moment like that? I've heard Zack Polanski say in interviews that he wouldn't be prepared to support a government led by Keir Starmer, for example. That's quite a hard line demand to slap down on the table in coalition negotiations right there.

Ellie Chowns: Yeah, my hard lines I think would be about serious climate action and proportional representation basically, rather than about particular individuals. I love the way that kind of politics is - I kind of [00:25:00] love and I don't love the way that so much of politics is speculation about three, four years in the future. And if you looked back at any three or four year period in the last 15 years, certainly you would never have predicted from the start of it what was happening at the end of that three year period. So just maybe it's the thing I was saying earlier about my slight lack of imagination or I, just, yeah, I don't get terribly excited about speculation. At the same time, the kind of the long term thrust of politics moving towards fairer voting, fairer elections, fairer politics overall, absolutely. I feel really very, very clear about that vision. Moving towards a place where the Greens are playing a key role in Government. Absolutely. I totally see that happening in my lifetime. I'd love to see that happening after the next general election and, based on the current trajectory of the last few months, we are on the way there. Of course, look back a year, and you wouldn't have said that the Greens were on the way there, and so nobody should make any bets about anything [00:26:00] really. For me, being involved in Green politics for the last 10 years, it's just been getting more and more and more and more positive, and that action, that involvement in politics is what generates for me hope that things can continue to change for the better in the future. So I feel very, very confident about that and I feel really confident that a UK government with stronger Green voices in it will absolutely be a better government. And so I can't wait for that day. And getting more Greens elected is a key step on the path to that, and that's something that I'm really passionate about being involved in, alongside serving as an MP, over the next few years, helping to grow that cohort of future generations of Green MPs.

Ruth Fox: And where would reform of Parliament sit in all of this then, in terms of an agenda for reform and looking ahead to what the party might be demanding in coalition negotiations or might be seeking in terms of chairing committees in the next parliament, if you've got the numbers or making your voice heard more powerfully on these [00:27:00] issues? So parliamentary reform is about improving the governance agenda as well. You've said that you find quite a lot of the way Westminster works difficult, it's inefficient. So changing that, it seems to me, is fundamental to improving the governance of the country, and particularly things, areas like legislation, the way we do legislation. What sort of ideas have you got for that?

Ellie Chowns: Oh my goodness. Where do we start? You've obviously got a long track record of campaigning for those reforms, which I hugely appreciate. You mentioned select committees. We've got one seat on a select committee, Environmental Audit Committee, which is fantastic and that's a bit of a legacy of Caroline having previously been on that too. When I was, again, first elected and full of beans and idealism in those early weeks about how things should really be fair, even according to the unfairness of our electoral system that gives us four MPs, if you worked out the numbers, leaving aside all the MPs who are part of Government and front bench spokespeople, I calculated we should be [00:28:00] due three select committee seats. But no, we've only got one. That's it. But to be honest, you know that argument about should we have one or three select committee seats, that's not going to transform British politics. It's not going to transform our ability to hold Government to account, and select committees are actually a good mechanism for holding Parliament to account. So that seems to have been a sort of reform that slipped in a couple of decades ago without anybody really being quite clear that it was going to be quite so interesting.

The fundamental change that needs to happen is the move to a proportional voting system. And so I don't, I mean, I do in a way have a wishlist. We submitted to the Modernisation Committee a wishlist of things that we would like to see changed. I gave evidence to the Procedure Committee quite recently on call lists. But actually the fundamental principle of fairness, it has to be central to our politics. And I think that the multiple ways in which politics is not fair is part of the reason for the erosion of political trust and the sort of susceptibility of large chunks of the [00:29:00] population to either completely switching off from politics or to cursing everybody and saying, you're all as bad as the other.

Mark D'Arcy: And Westminster does fairness according to numbers in the chamber. You'd presumably like Westminster to do fairness according to ratings in the opinion polls, but those can change as well.

Ellie Chowns: I don't think Westminster even does fairness according to numbers in the chamber. But the fundamental fairness is that I think everybody's vote should count equally. So proportional representation, a proportional voting system, not a panacea for everything, not a silver bullet, but it would fundamentally change the way that politics works because it would mean that everybody's voice, everybody's vote, counted equally. It would change the arithmetic within the chamber. I think it would change the character of our politics. It would shift us more towards coalition building, which would in turn shift us to a more long-term approach to thinking about politics. It would take us away from policy being made on the basis of what will attract marginal voters in a few marginal constituencies that the next general election do, closer towards what is it that the country needs in the next 10, [00:30:00] 20, 30 years time. Now, I think that is the fundamental change that will really make a difference. But there are, in my view, unfairnesses, even within the existing system as it stands. So we have, you were saying in Westminster, time is allocated according to numbers in the chamber, and the Speakers do an amazing job of managing this. Heavens, I wouldn't want their job. It's just absolutely impossible. But you have this system where, of course, people who speak early, speak long. People who get on the list late, get their time constricted. Seven minutes, 6, 5, 4, 3, down to two sometimes. So there's an unfairness there. For Labour back benches of course, because they've got twice as many people on their side of the house, it's twice as hard for them to get a word in edgeways. So the unfairnesses work in different directions, and I would like Labour back benches to be more powerful because I think they could play a role in holding their Government to account too. So I think there are multiple kind of procedural ways, about how the House of Commons [00:31:00] works, that could be made fairer, that could ensure more equal distribution of speaking time. Opportunities we do now have, opportunities to get on bill committees, which I really welcome and that's been a mechanism that I think we as a group of four have used effectively in the last 18 months. That wasn't, as I understand it, really open to small parties in previous parliaments. So that is an improvement, but it's a bit random which committees you get on to. So there are many things that could be changed procedurally about how Parliament works. That could make things a bit fairer.

But the fundamental unfairness is that we have four MPs when, at the time of that election, I think we had 7% in the opinion polls, something like that. Of course now we are on what, 17% in the opinion polls. We are not getting 17% of the parliamentary time as a result of that. We're not getting 17% of the media airtime as a result of that. But if we shift to a proportional voting [00:32:00] system, then we will have a much fairer distribution of power between MPs and I think that will make our governance work better.

Ruth Fox: What about the future of the building here at Westminster? So there's this longstanding question about restoration and renewal of the Palace of Westminster, which is basically stalled. There's work going on, on a sort of patch and mend basis. There's work preparing for potential major restoration. Huge questions about the costs of works that are needed. What's your party's view on, is this a functioning building for a national legislature? Do we need to be thinking much more radically about an alternative location?

Ellie Chowns: Do you know, I'm going to have to answer this personally because I don't think we do have party policy specifically on the Palace of Westminster. I probably ought to look that up, but it is a matter of interest to me. Some years ago my answer would've been, oh, flipping heck, turn it into a museum and build a nice modern building [00:33:00] somewhere central in the country like Birmingham and just do that.

And what I hadn't realised until I actually came to work here is there were 650 MPs and we spent half our time in our constituency. So it's no skin off our noses where it is in the country that we've got to travel to really. And yes, from that point of view, it should just be geographically as central as possible. But there's 10,000 people who work here on the estate, huge numbers of people, and they've all got children in local schools and partners in local jobs and homes and all the rest of it. So it would be an entire town basically of people that you would be thinking about physically moving.

When I learned that, I reconsidered and recognised the value of having it here in London. In terms of the actual building? Yes. Never mind the mice and the rats and things, the, seriously, mice in the tea room, rats on my walk to and from the office very frequently. But actually it's, not so much about the wildlife, it's about things like my very first visitor here was a wheelchair [00:34:00] user, and as a result of her visiting, I learned that only 13% of the estate is accessible. That's extraordinarily bad. It's appalling, and the building's on, I think, five floors, but actually there's all of these extra little bits of extensions and things such that there's 55 different floor levels, it's quite extraordinary.

So I've been on the tour of all of the kind of the underside of it all. Absolutely fascinating. Really recognise the need for those works. Having water pipes leaking above huge amounts of electrics is not a great idea. So I get the point about the need for restoration and renewal. My kind of gut feeling is something like that is just, shunt us all off to a neighbouring building wholesale and just get on and do everything quickly because it sounds like working around us, I went to a briefing about this. I think they said it was going to take literally decades, 70 years or something if they just worked around business as usual, even if they decant us all, I gather it'll take quite a number of years and a [00:35:00] painful, painful amount of money. Of course, as a proponent of getting rid of unelected legislators, you could certainly turn the House of Lords into a museum and perhaps the visitor fees for that could pay for some of the modernisation of the Commons side of things, unless of course we have a proportional second chamber and there's certainly good arguments for a second scrutiny chamber.

So nothing is simple, it clearly needs doing, and it feels like one of those things that we collectively need to bite the bullet at the same time. I presume that one of the reasons why nobody's been brave enough to do that is because it's going to cost painful amounts of money and at a time where the country is constantly being told there's no money for all of these really important things, whether it's winter fuel allowance for people shivering in their homes or home insulation or youth services or anything like that, to spend lots of money on doing up what is a very fancy building would be a really difficult case to make to the general public.

Mark D'Arcy: Is the Green Party, now you are at least threatening to break into the big [00:36:00] leagues, going to have to harden up a bit on things like, we've already talked about whipping, on things like policy? Your leader, Zack Polanski, was duffed up a bit by Rory Stewart and Alastair Campbell on their podcast when he went on and expanded his economic ideas. Is the party going to have to work a bit to try and make sure it's got battle tested election-ready policies come 2028-2029?

Ellie Chowns: Yes, absolutely. Any party has to make sure that it's got really, really good policy. I would argue that we do have really good policy. And we have had, the past X number of elections, fully costed manifestos, very, very well thought through.

I would challenge you to put up our manifesto against, say, a Reform manifesto and say which of those was the best thought through and most realistic and deliverable. Absolutely, our policy has been in a really good place and there is much more work to do of course, as we get more members. As we get more funding in, as we get more scrutiny, that's a key focus and we, are always expanding our capacity on the [00:37:00] policy development side of things.

It's interesting how somebody like Nigel Farage for example, Nigel Farage is why I got involved in politics in the first place. I just couldn't bear the direction that he was taking the country. Somebody like that seems to kind of waft through politics, not having to nail down anything policy-wise, not ever having to be accountable for completely unfundable, and completely clearly counterproductive for anybody with half a brain cell, policy proposals, and somehow seems to walk through without their feet touching the ground on that. So I think that there is a clear inequality in the amount of scrutiny that is given to people from different parties. I would argue that the most important bit of political media scrutiny that's needed is on Reform's policies, and at the same time, yeah, we are going to be constantly working on strengthening ours too.

Ruth Fox: You mentioned Reform. They are also a small party. They get, perhaps because of Nigel Farage, outsize media coverage. But in terms of Parliament itself, they've got many of the same challenges that the Green Party's got because [00:38:00] of their numbers. So in terms of the kinds of reforms you're talking about, in terms of the long term, if you were to be able to get electoral reform, there's potentially some shared areas of interest there. So are there any practicalities around working with Reform MPs? Are they amongst the MPs that you liaise with and engage with in terms of the areas of common interest?

Ellie Chowns: I'll be perfectly honest, no. I think the only potential area of common interest is in electoral reform, and as far as I understand it, Nigel Farage has gone very cold on that idea suddenly because he thinks that he can win a majority on the basis of a minority of votes under first past the post. So that just goes to show how much that position was rooted in principle. No, I think, aside from the fact of sitting on the benches behind us and having a small number of MPs, there is very, very, little similarity between us and Reform, not least in the amount of effort that we put into representing our constituents, being in the chamber, contributing in Parliament, serving our [00:39:00] constituents back in the constituency. Yeah, I'm afraid I'm a real believer in finding common ground, but I find it very hard to find any form of common ground whatsoever with Reform's leaders. Some Reform voters, you meet people on the streets who say that they are tempted to vote Reform essentially because they're just so frustrated. They feel the Government isn't serving them. They feel they've had a lack of opportunity, and there's absolutely aspects of what the Green Party offers that can appeal to people who might otherwise be tempted to vote Reform. But overall, I think Reform's influence as a party on British political discourse has been extremely negative.

Mark D'Arcy: Well, let's pick that up for a moment, because Reform has been ahead in the polls for really quite a long time now. There's a very good chance if that continues, that they could be in serious contention to be Government at the next election, and it might take tactical voting between parties on, broadly speaking, the Left, to stop them from doing that. Now you are all in [00:40:00] favour of people voting Green, you're a Green MP, of course, you want people to vote Green. Would you, in a seat where the Greens don't really have a chance, be prepared to say, vote for another party to stop the Faragistas?

Ellie Chowns: Tactical voting is really problematic and really tricky. Looking back at kind of electoral arithmetic over the last number of elections, the reality is there's only a small number of seats. I think the previous one, it was something like 40 maximum where tactical voting could have made a difference if, for example, everybody progressive had all voted for one particular candidate.

But of course, you can't assume that everybody who would otherwise vote Green is going to vote X, or everybody who would otherwise vote Labour will vote Y. So I think it's that second guessing of the electorate is really problematic. And so, back to the point about proportional representation. If we are talking about casting forward three years, then where I would like to be is I would like us to have proportional representation. I'd like us to have an electoral system for the many, not the few.

Mark D'Arcy: But the next election is not going to be fought on proportional representation, is it?

Ellie Chowns: It could be. It could be is my [00:41:00] point. We've got an Elections Bill coming up. Wouldn't it be brilliant if that brought forward proportional representation for general election seats?

Mark D'Arcy: You are going to have a try, obviously.

Ellie Chowns: Obviously, never let it be said I'm not a trier.

Mark D'Arcy: As a flock of pigs fly majestically past the window here, I just cannot see it yet.

Ellie Chowns: But you know what, Mark, this whole thing about pigs might fly. That's what people said about women getting the vote or the abolition of the slave trade or whatever before it happened.

We are this huge outlier as a country, still stuck in the mud on proportional representation for Westminster elections. The argument has even been conceded on other sorts of elections. It's just so frustrating. Like I've said, it's not going to in and of itself totally transform our politics. Of course, other countries that have proportional systems have challenges. I'm not denying that at all, but I do think that we are really stuck in the past. There's a huge opportunity for modernisation, both of the way that Westminster works, and for modernisation of our political [00:42:00] system. If only we all collectively could have the courage of our convictions on this. We've got a Parliament with so many new MPs.

Of course we are all thoroughly institutionalised by now, 18 months in, but there is perhaps just this little chink of opportunity. The All Party Parliamentary Group on Fair Elections. I'm an officer of that. It's the biggest all party group in Parliament at the moment. Proportional representation is one of the three core things that it is campaigning for.

There is a strong cross party consensus on this, and of course the Labour Government, let's look at both the intrinsic moral argument and the instrumental argument. On the intrinsic side of things, Labour, supposedly a party for the many, not the few, a party where the vast majority of the membership want proportional representation, and a really huge chunk of the MPs want proportional representation. It is the leadership that is standing in the way of that. How can you claim to be a party that stands for fairness broadly, and not support the idea of one person, one vote? And then the instrumental argument. [00:43:00] Labour has not over the past 60 years or whatever, it's had less than its fair share, if you like, of time in power because first past the post really hasn't benefited it now it's won a huge majority under first past the post. And what has it done? It has, in my view, squandered the public genuine hope and appetite for change. It's really lost that. And as a result on current polling, it is going to be absolutely decimated at the next election. Now, if it has an interest in retaining a strong representation of Labour MPs, not just at the next general election, but going forward, why would it not bite the bullet on proportional representation? Because that would guarantee at least a really strong chunk of Labour MPs and much more of an opportunity to be a part of running government for a higher proportion of the time than it's managed in the past 60 years or so.

Ruth Fox: Looking ahead to the next election already, it's hard to [00:44:00] believe this cycle is ongoing.

Ellie Chowns: We said we shouldn't do this.

Ruth Fox: But parties are beginning to select their candidates. So one of the things I was interested in, in your experience, since you became an MP, quite a number of people after past elections have said that they felt an attitudinal change from people in their constituency as soon as they got elected and had those letters, MP, after their name, that they were seen as somehow different. I wondered if that was your experience.

No.

Ellie Chowns: No. No, I haven't had that experience. People are generally speaking almost entirely absolutely lovely in the constituency. It's really nice. People greet me, people recognise me more. I mean, literally, a carload of teenagers greeted me in the Tesco's car park the other week. It was quite extraordinary. I don't feel that kind of sense of, oh, you're remote or whatever. I've lived in my constituency 23 years or something. My [00:45:00] kids went to local schools. I spent years and years on the sidelines of football pitches and rugby pitches and things like that. I feel really, really rooted in my community.

It's a huge constituency as well. It's kind of an hour's drive west to east and north to south. So of course, I don't know everybody everywhere, but people, my poor constituents, they've had umpteen leaflets with my face on it, through their doorstep over the past couple of years, and I feel that they know what I stand for and perhaps it does help being an MP for a small party. There's a kind of recognition of kind of the principles that drive me there, what it is that I'm trying to do locally. I'm really focused on trying to do a great job in the constituency representing people. So yeah, I've not felt any kind of negative feedback or anything like that. No.

Ruth Fox: That's interesting because after the 2010 general election, the sort of the new group of MPs that came in after the expenses scandal, I think a lot of them arrived at Westminster as a fresh broom and thought that they were going to be seen differently to the previous [00:46:00] generation of MPs, and found that actually they were despised quite quickly by the public. Mark, you'll remember the Conservative MP who'd been a GP. Sarah?

Mark D'Arcy: Wollaston.

Ruth Fox: Sarah Wollaston, who'd been a GP in her constituency and said as soon as she swapped GP for MP, she was perceived quite differently and treated quite differently.

Ellie Chowns: Oh, that's interesting that is. Perhaps to do with the parties that people represent. I really don't feel despised. You get emails from people who say they disagree with everything that you stand for, but far more from people who are really pleased with what I'm doing and supportive of that.

Yeah, I think it is probably partly from being a Green MP and being known as having independent views and being seen as somebody who is absolutely trying to bring some fresh ideas and some change to our political system. So I remember reading Rory Stewart's book about being an MP, and [00:47:00] occasionally people in the constituency talk to me about that and say, oh, is it that awful? And I have to say, I think probably quite a bit of that experience was the party that he was in rather than the actual job itself. I really love the job, actually really enjoy it.

Mark D'Arcy: We were talking a little bit earlier about tactical voting. In previous elections there have been elections where other parties, the Greens and the Liberal Democrats particularly, have not stood against each other, have at least not trodden on each other's electoral toes. In the absence of a PR system at the next election, is that something that's on the agenda for you? Might it be that there's a bit of non-aggression pact going on between you and certain other people? Maybe the Lib Dems, maybe your party, maybe certain Labour MPs who you like the cut of their jib?

Ellie Chowns: Honestly, no. As we were saying before, it's years still until the next general election, so who knows there, but there was a Unite to Remain, I think it was called - was that it? - the Alliance? - some while ago, and that was a very particular set of circumstances. But fundamentally, if Labour [00:48:00] doesn't play ball, then there's no game, essentially.

So I really don't think that's a, it's not a huge focus. What is the huge focus, talking about kind of planning for the next general election, we have really ambitious plans. We have shown that we know how to win general election seats. Now, Caroline Lucas was not a fluke, she wasn't a one-off. We've learned the lessons that we've developed over many years, winning at local council levels and now at Westminster constituency levels, and we plan to apply them much, much, more widely. So I spent a weekend a couple of weeks ago with a very large number of potential target candidates for the Green Party, and we've also got a huge programme of supporting target constituencies because we are, yeah, super ambitious about translating that kind of hope in the country, that real need and desire for genuine change and that huge kind of wave of enthusiasm and support. People joining in with the Greens, we are really, really determined to translate that into [00:49:00] seats. And this programme of target seat development and candidate development is something that was already in place and starting, before we've had this new surge over recent months, so levels of ambition are being scaled up accordingly. It's very exciting

Ruth Fox: And does preparing potentially this new cadre of parliamentarians for life in Parliament form part of the plans?

Ellie Chowns: Yes. I did a Q and A for two or three hours one evening about just what's it really like, and answering all sorts of questions, people asking questions about, I've got young kids, how doable is it genuinely? Or how do you deal with kind of people giving you loads of aggro on social media and putting your head above the parapet? To stand for election at any level, local or national, is a huge deal and the reality is that you cannot please all the people all the time. And there are a lot of mechanisms for what is often a very very tiny number of people, but there are mechanisms by which [00:50:00] they can make people's lives very miserable. And that is a real problem. We've just had, the Speakers' Conference looking at the realities of this. Women in particular are really subject to this, people from ethnic minority backgrounds, people with disability, anyone who isn't a white male, and there's plenty of white males who also get abused too. So it is a challenging thing to do. I didn't set out to stand for election. I got into it because I just got more and more passionate about, we can't leave politics for the people that are currently doing it, and I still feel that I want the next generation to come on and have that passion about changing how things are done now.

I think all of us, we can't abdicate that responsibility or hope that somebody else is going to do it at the same time. We shouldn't beat ourselves up. If it's just not, if it's not your thing to put your head above the parapet and stand for election, absolutely fine. There's plenty that you can do behind the scenes to support people and to be an ally.

So there's a role in politics for absolutely everybody, and we are still, a hundred years on from women getting the vote, we are still, nowhere close to [00:51:00] 50% female representation in Parliament, still less in local authorities. So there's a long way to go to get true representation and I feel really passionate about just being part of that.

Mark D'Arcy: Is there a sense now that the media is now starting to be a lot more aggressive towards the Greens? Once upon a time it was the Greens, how cuddly, how nice or sweet, they like flowers. Are you now getting into the position where people are thinking, these guys could be players in the next Parliament, let's be (a) a bit more aggressive to towards them, and (b) probe them a lot more about what they actually stand for?

Ellie Chowns: I haven't personally felt aggression. I do much less media than Zack. That's probably a question that you'd need to ask Zack. To be honest, I can't keep up with all of his appearances. I don't even try to, so he's had loads and loads, but as far as I can tell, it is really positive coverage. There'll always be people who are spiky and it's the role of the media to ask difficult questions and to challenge people and put them on the spot. When you put your head above the parapet, that is absolutely what you sign up for.

But I, [00:52:00] haven't - I suppose just my own sort of personal journey of gradually getting more coverage over the years, I haven't felt it's got harder or spicier or more critical. We are just being taken more seriously.

Mark D'Arcy: I just wondered if it had gone from the patronising to the prosecutorial really.

Ellie Chowns: I honestly can't say, in terms of media. I don't feel that personally that there's been that trajectory. Definitely when I first got elected as a local councillor some years ago, there was quite a lot of patronisingness among a certain kind of cohort of generally older male Conservative councillors, and yes, there's a bit more spikiness in the chamber now.

For example, I mean exhibit A, Rachel Reeves, in her Budget speech, took time out of presenting her vision of what the country was about, to have a go at Zack. It was quite extraordinary. If anything shows you how anxious they are.

Mark D'Arcy: We pointed [00:53:00] it out on the podcast at the time, right? Yes.

Ellie Chowns: I pointed it out on live TV several times that afternoon as well. Exactly that. Really quite extraordinary. I don't know what she thought that was going to try to achieve other than to just draw attention to the fact that she clearly sees the Greens as a threat. In a way, bring it on, right? If this is the price of more public support, more being taken seriously, fantastic.

But like I said at the beginning, let's let the focus be on debate about the merits of policies. Let's not anyone descend into caricature or personal attacks.

Mark D'Arcy: And one of the distinctive features of the Green Party is, the clue's in the name, it's a party very much focused on environmental issues. And there's quite a consensus out there that people broadly agree with a lot of the things you say without necessarily feeling that they want to leap into action to do things to, for example, combat global warming. It's easy to nod along with your speeches. The concrete [00:54:00] action that comes along is rather rarer.

Ellie Chowns: Yeah, I think the fundamental point that concern about the natural environment, concern about the climate crisis and concern about the biodiversity crisis, they are concerns that are shared by a huge majority of the population. These are fundamental British values, to care about wildlife and to care about a liveable planet for future generations. But following on, delivering the policy, actually moving from that kind of broad concern to the practicalities of, right, how are we going to, for example, ensure the transition to clean energy, ensure the transition to clean vehicles, EVs, ensure that we are producing food in a way that is compatible with caring for nature at the same time as producing good quantities of good quality food locally and providing good livelihoods for farmers.

There's a lot of detail that has to be worked out here. What's frustrating to me is there are some parts of the political spectrum that [00:55:00] clearly try very deliberately to undermine this and weaponise these kind of attacks on net zero and so forth. For example, saying that fuel bills is all about net zero, absolute rubbish, the proportion of policy costs has been the same since the year dot, essentially. Obviously it's Putin's invasion of Ukraine, and it's a distraction technique. When that distraction technique is sold with huge amounts of money put into it and misinformation, then that does become very dangerous. I think our role as Green MPs in Parliament is really, really important in continually making the case for the interlinkages between a thriving environment, and sustainable economy, and social justice and wellbeing. Those three things are fundamental to Green politics. They're completely interlinked. Often it is the environmental aspect that gets dropped off the end, often because of timeframes. As we've talked about, the idea that politics is just about winning over swing [00:56:00] voters at the next election doesn't enable politics as a whole to think in generational terms, which is what we need to do.

So again, the sooner we get to a politics that enables us collectively to think longer term, the more integral I think ecological thinking will become to the way that we do it. I was at the National Emergency Briefing the other day that was held just next door in Central Hall and the evidence in front of our faces of the climate crisis and the biodiversity crisis is absolutely incontrovertible. We need politicians who have courage to in place the policies to make that transition, which will absolutely benefit all of us in the long term. And so the Greens have this hugely important role in pressing the government to put their money where their mouth is on these things.

Mark D'Arcy: How many people in other parties are going along with you on this? How many people in other parties are pushing alongside you with this question?

Ellie Chowns: I think [00:57:00] that there's a huge amount of cross party consensus. This is where things like all party parliamentary groups can be really useful, important and effective. So there are all party groups on climate and environment and so forth. So there are many people, particularly within Labour and the Lib Dems, who share our very urgent concern about climate and nature. But we need a government that is prepared to put its money where its mouth is.

And what we have is, we do have some ministers, absolutely. Ed Miliband, credit where it's due, big investment in transition to clean energy supply. That's really important. Deeply frustrating that the focus is all only on supply and not on demand. We need to be talking much more about energy efficiency. We need to be investing in home insulation. We need to make sure that all of our new build homes are much higher standards, so we need to be moving on all fronts at the same time. And there are not enough people in Government who are making this a top priority.

Mark D'Arcy: Well thanks to Ellie Chowns for [00:58:00] joining us on the pod.

Ruth Fox: It's going to be interesting, Mark, to see how the party fares . As she said, there are some big electoral tests coming up, and maybe some big policy ones as well because, the higher the rise in the polls, the more scrutiny they're going to come under. Meanwhile, do you want to update listeners, Mark, on what's coming up?

Mark D'Arcy: Normal parliamentary podding will resume on Friday 16 January, and if you're in the spirit, perhaps you might like to give us a five star rating on your podcast app to help us grow the Parliament Matters audience. It helps the other potential listeners out there find us. But if it's not a five star rating, perhaps don't bother.

Ruth Fox: See you soon.

Mark D'Arcy: Bye bye, for now.

Outro: Parliament Matters is produced by the Hansard Society and supported by the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust. For more information, visit hansardsociety.org.uk/pm or find us on social media at @HansardSociety.

← Back to Parliament Matters episode page