in most polls. so why the disconnect? well, my guest today has devoted her career to green politics. caroline lucas is the party's only westminster mp, but she has decided to quit. is that because putting the planet first is never going to be a pathway to power? caroline lucas, welcome to hardtalk. thank you. now, you are the green politician who has enjoyed the closest proximity to power in british national politics as an elected mp over the last, what, 13 years or so,

and now you've decided to walk away. why? because i want, ironically, to spend more time really focusing on climate and the environment. and right now, as the sole mp for my party, i have to be the expert on absolutely everything. i am the front bench spokesperson on everything. and that means that when you add that to two days a week constituency work easily, looking at everything from people's visas to their housing problems, important though those are, they are massively time—consuming at a time when i'm now at the point in my life when i really want to focus on climate and nature. two huge areas, i know, but at the minute i'm getting pulled in 100 different directions, so i've decided not to stand at the next election. i'm very hopeful that an excellent green candidate, sian berry, will take overfrom me in brighton. we've got some other target seats in bristol central and suffolk as well, waveney valley. so we're hopeful of getting more greens at the next election. but right now, this is a personal decision on my behalf to say

i want to find a different way of focusing more exclusively on climate and nature. a different way, and you say you've been pulled in so many different directions as a constituency mp. does that mean you have maybe even a sense of regret that you might have wasted 13 years sitting in a parliament where the pressures were enormous and you couldn't actually get much done on the issues you cared about most? no, i don't. i don't regret it. i think it's been incredibly important to have a green voice in parliament, a green voice in every single debate, saying, "where's the nature perspective on this? why aren't you thinking about climate?", whether we're talking about education or whether we're talking about the economy. so i think that voice is more important than ever. and if i genuinely thought that by my standing down, that would mean there would be no green voices in parliament, i might well have thought twice about it, but we have some fantastic people in the party who are willing to take up that mantle, and i hope that gives me the space then to look at other ways, as i say, that i can pursue that agenda.

do you believe that defeat is now what we are facing? do you sense that you've engaged in arguments and essentially lost them ? i think they're still all to play for. i mean, i'm not a pollyanna about this. i can see the grim statistics as easily as anyone else. and certainly, time is running out. but having said that, it's not too late. and every single ton of carbon matters, every single fraction of a degree matters. and therefore, there is still all to play for, to try, for example, to get the government, either this one or the next one, to listen to the science, to leave new fossil fuels in the ground where they belong, to get them to invest in the obvious stuff, that really obvious stuff like the street by street local authority—led home insulation schemes that will get people's emissions down, it will get their fuel bills down, it will create hundreds of thousands of jobs. i think one of the most frustrating things, frankly, is that the changes that we need in order to tackle the climate and nature emergencies are by and large ones that are going to improve our lives anyway. and so i think that pushing

governments to really rise to this moment and recognise, as you said in your introduction, that a hell of a lot of people really care about this stuff — it's not a vote loser, it's a vote winner if theyjust get it right. well, i didn't quite say that in my introduction. what i said was, there was an apparent mismatch between the generalised feeling many people have that the climate matters and that something needs to be done, but then when it comes to the voting booth and how they actually prioritise issues when it comes to choosing who to vote for, the climate doesn't appear to be even the number two, three or four priority. now, you are very quick to blame governments. in essence, shouldn't you actually be blaming all of us, the public, for not prioritising the issue that you feel has to be number one? no. i think what i would blame, if anything, would be the electoral system that means that so many people in so many places around this country can't actually vote for what they want. you know, the first general election after the one where i was elected, so 2015, over a million people voted green and they did that under

a first past the post system, knowing, actually, that, you know, it's pretty unlikely that that vote was going to translate into mps. but you had a million people then who wanted to have a green voice in parliament and they're being denied that by an archaic and undemocratic electoral system that is designed to shut out new entrants. and so what we need to do is to have a system that allows that concern that i passionately believe that many people have, a majority of people have, to actually translate in the ballot box so that we then see more greens elected, because a million votes ought not to just lead to one green mp. in other systems, that would have led to 20 mps, 30 mps, and that would have been a transformation. there's no doubt that's true, and we'll talk about the way in which green parties and green movements in other parts of europe which have proportional representation systems have managed to find much more power and influence than you and your party have in the united kingdom. but before we get there, would it not be wise for you, in terms of practical politics, to accept that during your tenure as an mp, the glass hasn't

been entirely empty? it's actually, in many ways, been at least half—full, and things have moved quite a long way. we have a british government that is committed to net—zero by 2050. the energy transition is well under way. the proportion of renewables now in the uk energy mix is something that was unimaginable even 15 years ago. why don't you stress the positives more? i'm very happy to stress the positives. i'd go further and take some credit alongside my green party colleagues for actually pushing the other parties, whether we're actually in parliament or whether we're in local authorities, to go further and faster. and i think greens have been instrumental alongside many others, of course, in making those changes happen. so yes, we were a parliament that has declared the first climate emergency and i'm very proud that that happened very shortly after i brought greta thunberg over to parliament and she spoke to lots of the other party leaders and then we had that motion to declare that climate emergency. you're right that on renewables, the economic case is

making its own case, to be honest. you don't really need the ministers. what you need is to just look at where the economy is at. but the bottom line is, and this is the really important thing, that it doesn't really matter from the climate perspective how much good stuff we do, how many renewables we're investing in, if at the same time, we continue to do the bad stuff. if we continue, as this government is doing, giving the green light to 100 new oil and gas licences in the north sea, then that is going to create so many new emissions that it doesn't matter how much extra renewables you've got. what the climate is going to care about is the impact of that oil and gas, and that is absolutely unforgivable. right, but in many different ways, we are talking here about a gradual transition, aren't we, rather than falling off a cliff? you can argue that commissioning new oil and gas exploration is a very bad thing and it will unfold, therefore, over many years. but again, coming back to the british public and their desires, they do not want to be told that overnight, for example, they have to trash their oil or their gas boiler or trash their somewhat

polluting petrol or diesel car. but nobody is saying that, are they? absolutely nobody is saying that. evenjust stop 0il isn't saying that. what we're talking about is new oil and gas. if that goes ahead, that locks us into dependence on fossil fuels for the next few decades at exactly the time when fossil fuels are so expensive. actually, what would help people, what people want is the financial support to make that transition so that over time, yes, they can go away from oil and gas, not least because it's so expensive. we know that renewables are cheaper. we know that energy efficiency is cheaper. the energy you don't need to use is the cheapest of all. interestingly... that is why the government is, i think, just so guilty for not actually moving in that direction. but interestingly, your sister party in germany, a party which as i've alluded to, already has a good deal more power and influence than you have in the united kingdom, they've taken some pretty pragmatic and hard decisions, for example, to support the opening of a new lignite coal mine in germany precisely because they are so concerned about germany's overreliance on russian—sourced oil and gas that they believe for a short time,

the right thing to do is to swallow it and accept a new coal mine. that's pragmatism. they're still greens, but theyjust happen to be pragmatic. i mean, we could get into the details of that decision. it's not one that personally, i would support, but i guess what the german greens would say would be that if they'd actually had a majority in that parliament, they would have been able to move much more quickly... and they are pragmatists. they want to exercise what power and influence they can. but in a sense, it's kind of irrelevant to what the situation is here in the uk because we don't need to be opening new coal mines in the uk. fortunately, now we're not doing that for electricity. but the government has given the green light to the cumbrian coal mine for steel, against a lot of advice because increasingly, green steel is being seen as a replacement to steel that depends on coal. but the bottom line is, here in the uk, that we have an opportunity to really go hard for renewables and energy efficiency.

and yet what did we see just last week? we saw the government failing to get any new offshore wind onto the grid because at that auction, they didn't listen to the experts who were telling them they needed to increase the strike price, in other words, increase the price that offshore wind would have cost. 0n onshore wind, we've seen the moratorium still more or less in place. a few tweaks were made to it a few weeks ago, but essentially, you're still going to have to jump through far more hoops to be able to put onshore wind in place in the uk than practically any other infrastructure. just one more question, if i may, less about government policy, more about the public mind. an election, a by—election recently in a suburban part of west london, where it seemed the public as a whole decided they didn't like new restrictions on older vehicles, which were going to be punitively treated if they entered central london because they were too polluting. and the voters in that particular election seemed to rebel against that kind of action, albeit it was clearly designed to clean the air of london, even

clean the air of their own streets. but they decided they didn't want to pay the cost. are you out of touch with people's discomfort with paying an immediate personal cost? i think there's been a lot of misinterpretation of that election result. it was very unlikely that labour was ever going to win that particular constituency of uxbridge. so the fact that they didn't, they got pretty close to it but they didn't win, i think is being massively overinterpreted. the bottom line is that of course people need financial support to make the transition, in that case away from more polluting vehicles to cleaner ones. and everybody looking at that scenario would tell you that the government was trying to punish sadiq khan, really, and not putting enough money into the scrappage scheme and into the support to enable people to make that transition. of course, lots of people would love to do the green thing, but right now, for as long as it's the more expensive thing to do — and it doesn't need to be and with energy, as i've just

explained, it's not — when you're talking about changing one vehicle to another, it can be. then we need to put the finance in place to help that transition happen. and for as long as you don't, and then you throw your hands up and say, "oh, well, they didn't want it anyway," i think that'sjust a complete misreading. well, you've introduced money and the realities of politics and money, and is not the truth that your programme for government, obviously it was theoretical because you were a one—woman show in parliament, but your programme for reforming the country was so grandiose, so ambitious, involved notjust spending billions and billions on a speeded—up energy transition and decarbonisation, but it also involved other plans, for example, for a universal basic income for everybody across the board in the country, which your own sums suggested would cost, what, £75 billion, best part of $100 billion a year? how could you expect people to take that sort of spending seriously? well, it's interesting that

you should identify the basic income as one of the policies to pick out, because actually, right across the world, more and more countries are experimenting with different forms of basic income scheme because they recognise it's a way of guaranteeing people some basic security and then enabling them to take more part—timejobs. it can actually be good for the economy as well as definitely being good for people's wellbeing. you ask, how do you pay for it and you're quite right — everything comes down to political choices. one of the choices i think the government could be making, for example, would be to stop fossilfuel subsidies. that gives you practically £10 billion overnight. they could introduce some kind of a wealth tax, and there are various different versions of a wealth tax but certainly one of them that's been experimented with the university of greenwich, who've done the figures on that, could give you up to £70 billion, a 1% wealth tax on people with 3 million and above, and it ratchets up above that. so those are political choices, stephen, and that's the point. it's fascinating because the fundamental choice, the deepest choice of all that

you seem to have made is to tell the people of the united kingdom... of course, you represent england and wales, but similar arguments are made by the scottish green party as well... ..to tell the people that they have to accept living in a poorer country where prosperity is deprioritised. you talk about getting away from a fetizize...fetishisation, i should say, of gdp, of national income, of actually accepting that gdp should fall and therefore sort of national output should fall. do you really want to live in a poorer country? no, i don't. and that's not what we're saying. and if it were what we were saying, then it'd be very surprising, for example, that the scottish greens, who you just mentioned, are actually in a coalition government with the scottish national party. so that is not what we're saying. when we talk about the fetishisation, which is hard to say, of gross domestic product, what we're simply saying is, why don't we focus on increasing people's wellbeing? why don't we have that as the overall and overarching objective of government, rather than chasing more and more gdp?

as if that figure on its own told us anything very much about the distribution of who is benefiting from that economic activity. what we want to do is to make sure that people do benefit from it. and right now, the distributional impacts of growth are simply not factored into anything that gdp tells you. so put wellbeing first, put basic services first. we're absolutely not expecting people, not wanting people to live in a world that is less prosperous. it's about redefining prosperity right now. we've got people who can't afford to put food on the table. we've got people who are increasingly homeless. we've got a cost of living crisis. we've got so many crises right now that to suggest that the current model is working, i think is beyond credible. it's striking to me that you were actually very supportive ofjeremy corbyn�*s, i think he would say absolutely socialist, very left of centre economic programme. jeremy corbyn, of course, was relatively short—lived as labour party leader, but that's where you are. in economic policy terms, you are

an out—and—out leftist, right? i don't think that left and right are particularly helpful titles, but if you want to use them, yes, we're certainly closer to a kind of economy that wants to make sure that we're providing a fair allocation of resources, and that does make sure that some of the poorest people can get a decent way of living. and in fact, jeremy corbyn came to our manifesto and cut and pasted quite a bit out of it, for example, things like putting public services back into public hands, rail, for example. that is hugely popular with the public. the water companies that are ripping us all off, putting loads of sewage into the rivers, people want those companies in public ownership. i get that perspective. itjust seems ironic to me that actually you're at the moment, your strongest bedrock support seems to be in the shire counties, rural parts of england, where for example in mid suffolk, you've just taken control of a local council and there, it seems your councillors

are running on a small—c conservative ticket, which is really about nature conservation, avoiding new housing developments, even in some cases of green local councillors opposing new solar and wind renewable energy developments because... that was one. well, no, actually, it's more than one. we've got a case in suffolk, we've got a case in hastings in the south of england where green councillors do not want to see, for example, new solarfarms being built. well, i don't know the details. maybe it was on extremely valuable agricultural land, i don't know. but what i do know is that in a sense, what you've just said belies the point that you were trying to box us into left or right. the whole point is, and we used to say this all the time, that the green party isn't left or right. it's out in front. once you try to define a new political ideology by old labels, you find that it doesn't work, which is exactly why, as you say, in suffolk, we are doing really well. and that's not because we've silenced one part of our manifesto. 0ur manifesto is big,

and there is plenty of stuff front and centre about looking after nature and about making sure that our water is clean. but we would then make that link between, for example, trying to stop water companies pumping their sewage into our rivers day in, day out, and looking at, well, where does the power lie with the water companies? well, actually, it often relies with shareholders in other countries. if we had it back into public hands, we would have a betterjob of having cleaner water. that is an argument that is increasingly popular on the doorstep, whether you're in suffolk or whether you're in the middle of brighton or wherever. just a quick thought beyond our shores of what you might have learned from europe. i talked about the green movements that have much more power than you've ever experienced, partly because of proportional representation, as you've said, but also because they've taken different decisions. they've been more pragmatic. just a couple of examples. in finland, the green party decided to embrace nuclear power, and that clearly is something which the finnish people are ready to do as well. others in the green movement

in germany have talked about the need to rethink the nuclear issue, to rethink other issues like genetically modified foods, biological engineering, to embrace technology. are you ready to bust some taboos and rethink your positions on those issues? well, if the evidence suggests that's what we should do, of course i would look at the evidence. but you mentioned nuclear as an example. here in the uk, nuclear is massively expensive, it is massively slow and it is massively over budget. and we've got a government that has made a decarbonisation of power target of 2035. any new nuclear power stations coming on stream now are going to take, well, if you gave the green light to them now, it would take ten or 15 years to get them on stream, even if you were lucky. so that's not going to help you with your decarbonisation target. if you had me up against a wall and said, look, you've either got runaway climate change or nuclear power, then obviously the answer is, nuclear power is the lesser of those two evils.

but that's not the option here. nuclear is a massive distraction. it is costly, it is slow. and that's before you even get to all of the environmental questions about what you do with the waste. we don't need to go there in this country, so let us not. let us absolutely give clear signals to investors that we're serious about demand management. we're serious about interconnectors, storage, energy efficiency, wave. there's so many things we could be doing that are cheaper and faster. why would you go for nuclear in that situation? before we end, i want to get a little personal, if i may. ijust wonder, as you contemplate leaving westminster politics, whether you have concluded that that playing that political game is actually not the best way to achieve radical reform of this country. do you feel disillusioned by the political system that you've been a part of? i mean, ifeel hugely disappointed by it, but i haven't concluded that that means that we shouldn't be standing to try to get greens elected to that parliament. to the contrary, because unless you've got your hands

on the levers of power, you can't change things. but weigh it up, for example, with perhaps the different kind of influence, direct action, of course. i mean, in your life, you've been arrested several times. you know, you've pushed the boundaries of the law. and you see today groups likejust stop oil and the way that they are disrupting life in order to make a point. yeah. is that where you're heading now? i don't think so, particularly. but to be honest, i'm not quite sure what's going to happen next. and i think none of us actually know how quick change is going to happen. if we did know that, many of us would have made different choices perhaps already. you need, certainly, numbers of people in parliaments, in governments to change things, but you also need the pressure from outside. you also need public opinion on side and what that particular constellation of those different forces is going to be that's going to get us there, we none of us know. and so as long as we've got people in all of those places,

i'm really delighted. we have a strong climate movement pushing from the outside of parliament. we certainly also need elected greens on the inside of parliament and good greens in other parties too, who are pushing that agenda as well. and as i say, exactly what the constellation will be that will bring about the change fast enough, we don't know. but i think right now, we have to just do everything and try our very best because the clock is ticking. and you don't condemn those who, for example, glue themselves to roads and stop other people going about their business, sometimes very important business like getting to a hospital or a funeral? i don't condemn them. i personally find it much easier to think that the public understand it... would you do it in the future? i mean, now that you're leaving westminster, could that be the direction you go in? it may be one of the things that i do, but what i would say is that for my own personal way of thinking about direct action, i find it much easier to link the action to the particular thing that you're trying to stop. so when i took action against fracking, i was outside

a site in balcombe in sussex, where they were going to try to open a fracking site. i personally find it easier to make that link, to explain to the public so people understand why you're there, than perhaps i would glueing myself to a motorway. but i'm not going to condemn people because we don't yet know, as i said, what it is that's going to bring about the change fast enough. and i think we have to ask ourselves, what is driving people to take that action? and when you meet the people that are doing that, you know, we're often tempted to have a stereotype in our minds about who they are, but they're quite often professionals or they're retired people, or they're very young people who are absolutely terrified of the future that we're creating. and the fact that they are driven to take that kind of action, i think should be taken as an indictment on the political system that's failing all of us. caroline lucas, we have to end there, but thank you very much forjoining me on hardtalk. thank you.

hello, there. wednesday was a wet and a windy day starting off across northwest wales, capel curig, where we had gusts of wind of 70 miles an hour. it was here where we also saw some very heavy rain. over the space of 36 hours, 133 millimetres fell — a good chunk of the september average. and so far this month, we've actually had 226 millimetres of rain, so it has already been a wetter september than average. and, of course, there's more of septemberjust around the corner. the same area of low pressure that brought all of us wet and windy weather conditions stays to the north of the uk over the next couple of days, and certainly windy at the moment with rain in scotland. another rain band slowly pulling away from east anglia and southeast england.

what follows essentially for england and wales is a day of sunny spells and showers. however, that low pressure will continue to bring strong winds to scotland and to northern ireland. and, in fact, it's notjust windy — this band of rain will push its way southwards, so the rain does return to the central lowlands and to northern ireland after a sunny start. for england and wales, those showers really get going into the afternoon, and i think across parts of wales and south west england, some of the showers will merge together to give some really intense downpours. it could be pretty prolonged, as well. temperatures quite close to average, really — about 15 to 19 degrees celsius. 0n into friday, it's the same story. the low pressure is still there for northern scotland. these strong northwesterly winds bringing frequent showers to the north and western side of the uk, but into the afternoon there'll be showers popping up in the east, as well. some of them could be heavy — again, with the odd rumble of thunder — and the temperatures not really changing too much, about 15 to 18 degrees celsius. feeling cool in the north, given those strong winds. now, heading into saturday, another change — we'll get a ridge of high pressure building in ahead of this next weather system. what all this means is that

saturday, actually, is going to be an ok day. 0k, there'll be a few showers for northern scotland, but most of us will have a fine and sunny morning. make the most of that because cloud will tend to build in, and certainly into the afternoon we'll start to see some rain arriving in northern ireland, and perhaps fringe into western scotland, but that is towards the end of the day and, overall, saturday's looking 0k. by sunday, well, the low pressure in the atlantic just nudges a bit closer, we've got another band of rain moving into the west, and so it does turn quite windy and increasingly unsettled with rain and showers around, and that's probably going to stay with us, as well, into the early part of next week.

welcome to newsday, reporting live from singapore, i'm arunoday mukharji. lets get you the headlines. a ban on the sale of new petrol and diesel cars in the uk is delayed until 2035 as prime minister rishi sunak shifts his approach on green policies. ukrainian president vlodomyr zelensky tells the un security council that russia should be stripped of its veto power. and king charles begins a three—day state visit to france including a state dinner in versailles. live from our studio in singapore —

this is bbc news. it's newsday. welcome to the programme. starting with the big story in the uk. prime minister rishi sunak has announced a major shift on efforts to tackle the climate crisis — saying he wants a pragmatic approach which eases the burden on british people. among measures he's announced: a ban on the sale of petrol and diesel cars will be introduced in 2035 instead of 2030. the scrapping of gas boilers, to be replaced by heat pumps will also be delayed until 2035. but he says he remains commited to reaching net zero by 2050 —

meaning the uk would no longer add to the total amount