“We’re at an urgent, urgent battle for the truth, for the country”
The Green Party’s deputy leader Rachel Millward has said that there is ‘no one else coming’ to stop a Reform government. She made the comments in an interview with Left Foot Forward at the Green Party’s autumn conference in Bournemouth.
In the interview, Millward said she was “worried about Reform being the next government”. Asked specifically whether the prospect of this was likely, she told Left Foot Forward: “Four years is a really long time in politics, so I don’t know – I hope not. But right now, yeah.”
She went on to say: “But that’s what we’re here to stop. That is literally what we’re here to stop. There’s no one else coming to do that. We can’t wait for anybody else – it’s today, it’s from here – we’ve got four years, maybe less […] but we really, really have to do everything we can to stop that spread.
“And that’s obviously that we need to win as many seats as we can in the next general election, but it’s also we need to get this broader movement, this message of hope instead of hate, we need to just expose the lies of Farage – it just couldn’t matter more.”
Millward went on to argue that Reform is proposing a fundamentally different form of government than those we’ve seen before. She told Left Foot Forward: “It is different isn’t it? You have kind of moderate centrist governments and your kind of radical politics can be your home and you can be a member and you feel proud of it. But that is not where we’re at. We’re at an urgent, urgent battle for the truth, for the country and we’ve got to do it. And Labour being as week as they’ve been means it’s on us.”
Elsewhere in the interview, Millward gave her views on what success would look like for the Greens in next May’s elections to councils and mayoralties across England and in the Senedd in Wales. Currently, the Greens hold no seats in the Senedd and there are no directly elected Green mayors.
“We’ll definitely have a couple of people in the Senedd”, after the 2026 elections, Millward said, going on to add: “We may even be holding the balance of power there, and that’s true influence in Wales.” She told Left Foot Forward that in that eventuality, the Greens would be “fighting against inequality, bringing real hope, real change, being serious about net zero – that deep alternative vision.”
In England, Millward talked up the Greens prospects in the mayoral elections taking place next year. This is in keeping with a theme of this year’s conference. Upon entering the venue, attendees are greeted with large pull-up banners displaying the faces and names of Green Party mayoral candidates. A major session in the conference programme is listed as “2026: The year of the Green Mayor”.
Millward herself has recently been selected as the Green Party’s candidate for the Sussex and Brighton Mayor. “I’m now standing as the mayoral candidate for Sussex and Brighton – and we’ve got a shot at that”, she told Left Foot Forward, adding this is: “incredibly excited because you wouldn’t have said that before – that’s because two-party politics is crumbling and the Greens are very strong in Sussex.”
She went on to say that it was a similar story in the Norfolk and Suffolk mayoral election, that “those Combined Authority elections are going to key because they’re kind of umbrella elections for everything that sits underneath, so then we need to be winning a lot more council seats underneath”, and that the Greens are “going for” the Hackney Mayoral election “really strongly”.
Despite the confidence about next year’s elections, some commentators have argued that the new political party being set up by Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana (currently known as ‘Your Party’) could pose a threat to the Greens’ electoral prospects by splitting the vote on the progressive left. Asked whether she thought there ought to be some sort of electoral agreement between the Greens and the new outfit, she told Left Foot Forward: “You just can’t pre-empt those sort of conversations. It’s all about the specifics at the time and you make the best arrangement in that time. Zack [Polanski]’s been really clear that he’ll always work with people who share our values and – again – that will always be strategic and timebound, it’s not a limitless thing.”
Millward went on to say that she wanted to see “all those people” who are currently signing up to ‘Your Party’ could be “joining the Green Party because there’s so much common ground”, arguing that “the Green Party is at the beginning of a completely different chapter in terms of its scale and its reach”.
Chris Jarvis is head of strategy and development at Left Foot Forward
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