Caroline Lucas is the leader of the Green Party. She is also an MP for Brighton Pavilion, making her the only elected Green member of parliament. I caught up with her this evening to ask about how her first term in office is going, the Green Party’s response to the government’s cuts and the future for the climate movement.

What has been your experience of working in Parliament as a lone Green MP, as a socialist and as an environmentalist?

I think one of the positive things has been the fact that it has been possible to make alliances across the different groups in parliament. When I was a lone councillor on Oxfordshire County Council I was completely frozen out. Nobody would even second my amendments – they just didn’t want me to be part of the council. I’ve been pleasantly surprised to find that parliament is different. So it has been possible to work with people Jeremy Corbyn MP on nuclear disarmament, in the all-part group on disarmament and people like Paul Flynn on Afghanistan (we’re both co-chairs of the all-party group for the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan), and at the same time on electoral reform to work with Douglas Carswell, a right-wing Tory, who I was able to work with to try to broaden the number of choices on the ballot paper when the referendum happens on AV – we wanted it to include a proper proportional representative system as well as AV.

So on the one hand it has been good to see that it is possible to work together. Another aspect of my experience, however, has been deep shock that the place is so antiquated in the way that it works. Quite a lot of my time so far has been spent looking at ways to speed up reform to make parliament more accountable and efficient.

To what extent is there a Westminster ‘bubble’? How disconnected is the culture within Westminster from the world outside?

It does feel pretty disconnected. Having talked to other members of parliament they assure me that it’s an awful lot better than it used to be, which probably suggests that it used to be absolutely terrible. I think there is a greater awareness now of public opinion and people do look at what they’re doing through the prism of ‘how is this playing outside?’ slightly more than they did. But having said that, it is just so archaic in its practices. For example the whipping system is so humiliating, really, for those MPs who get pushed into the lobbies to vote one way or the other. The fact that the speaker is completely free to decide whose amendments he puts to the vote is just extraordinary. In any other democratic forum you wouldn’t give such powers to a speaker. So it does feel very undemocratic. It feels very much like an old boys’ club, to be honest. That’s the sense that you get. I think it really does need to be dragged into the 21^st century.

You mentioned Jeremy Corbyn earlier. Labour retains many left-wing supporters see their party as the only viable route for the left in Parliamentary politics, especially given its grounding in the trade union movement. Why do you believe that the Green Party provides a better political vehicle for the left?

I’ve got four words in response: the last 13 years. If you think that the Labour Party is delivering the policies that, for example, the unions would want I think you are living in a fantasy land. When I was in the European Parliament for ten years, time and again it was the Greens that championed the union causes when it came to the votes. The Labour Party in the European Parliament was absolutely nowhere when it came to standing up for workers’ rights, for equality issues, and so forth. So I would say to people, look at the Green track record when we’ve been in parliaments and see which way we’ve voted.

Pointing to the last 13 years I would say that there are so many issues now where we need an effective opposition, for example on the role of the market in the NHS – the privatisation, effectively, of the NHS. Who started that? Labour did, with PFI. Who put tuition fees on the agenda and introduced them? The Labour Party did. Who was going to sell off the Royal Mail? Labour. When you see David Cameron going off to the Middle East – for the first few moments when I saw him on TV I thought ‘oh, that’s fantastic, he’s going to Tahrir Square to express solidarity with the protestors’. Well actually he’s off selling arms. But again the Labour Party is not in a very strong position to criticise that, because it’s exactly the kind of policy that Blair was promoting. So I think the experience of the past 13 years of Labour, allied to an analysis of what the Greens do when they get into positions of influence within parliaments, demonstrates that the union cause is far better served by the Greens than it is by the Labour Party.

But you’re right that there are still many left-wing supporters of the Labour Party. There are not so many left-wing Labour members of parliament, but there are some, and I think that’s where you can get areas of common cause. I think it’s really important that Greens work together with people like Jeremy Corbyn, John McDonnell, and so on to pursue this kind of agenda.

To what extent does the Green Party have links with the unions? Is it trying to develop them?

We are absolutely developing much stronger links with unions. We’ve got a trade union group within the Green Party specifically looking at ways of working together with unions on things like the ‘One Million Climate Jobs’ report, which was put together by a number of different unions and with the Campaign Against Climate Change. The Greens were very involved in that. I’m a Vice-President of the PCS group in parliament. So there is still some resistance in some unions – it would be wrong to deny that. But I think increasingly there’s more and more potential for us to work together, particularly when unions see what Greens do when they’re elected. In Brighton, for example, we’ve been on the picket lines with the journalists when they were striking outside the local newspaper, and with the fire service. So I think more and more unions are seeing that when the chips are down the Greens are there in solidarity, and that enables them to have more trust in building relationships with us. We won’t always agree on everything but having a relationship based on honesty and trust is important and I think that’s really developing.

What is the Green Party doing in response to the government’s austerity agenda?

I think the popular grassroots movements against the cuts, like UK Uncut, are absolutely wonderful. They’re fantastic. I’ve talked to people involved in UK Uncut and said that if there’s anything I can do, for instance in parliament, to help promote what they’re doing, let me know. For example, when there was the big protest against tuition fees I interrupted a session of parliament and called for Theresa May, as the Home Secretary, to come and make a statement as to why so many protestors were being kettled outside. So I think looking at ways in which we can support grassroots movements is really important.

On the issue of the cuts, I would say that we are the only party that’s really opposing them. Even the Labour Party is saying that it would have implemented more or less the same quantity of cuts, they would have just done it a little slower. Now, doing it slower is important, I don’t deny that, but their analysis of the problem was much the same: that in the face of a deficit you have to make deep cuts. Our analysis is completely different. We say that you have to look back to what Roosevelt did in the 1930s in the US, when, faced with a recession, he invested in jobs. The New Deal in the US was all about investing in roads and bridges and that sort of thing. I’m not sure we need lots more roads and bridges here, but what we do need is a massive investment in green technologies for the 21^st century. So our analysis is very much that in a time of recession, the best way to tackle the deficit is not to make redundant half a million public sector workers, with a probable knock-on effect of another half a million jobs in the private sector. The way to do it is precisely to invest in jobs, and you can do that, as I say, through something like models that are being proposed by the Greens here in Cambridge – a ‘Green New Deal’, a massive investment in renewable energies, energy efficiency, which wouldn’t only get emissions down but is also one of the fastest job creation schemes you could imagine, would get money back into the economy again. If you throw people out of work you not only have all the social problems associated with that, but you also have the economic costs in terms of lost tax revenue, redundancy pay, increased benefits, and so on.

In the face of “climategate”, the collapse of the Copenhagen process, and the rapidly closing window for decisive action against climate change, what should the strategic priorities of the climate movement be?

I find that quite a hard question to answer. I really do believe that the next 5-10 years are going to be critical in terms of whether we manage to get off the collision course we’re on. There is such an urgency behind this agenda, which none of other political parties seems to see at all. The economic crisis has completely crowded off the agenda anything to do with the climate crisis, which if it isn’t tackled will make the former look small by comparison. We need to galvanise the political will to put in place the policies that we know are needed in order to combat climate change. The frustration is that many of those policies, for example massively investing in energy efficiency so people’s homes are properly insulated, are good in themselves – they’re no regrets policies. They’re going to be sensible for our society, for our economy. So I think the challenge with climate change is not that we don’t know what needs to be done, it’s that we don’t seem to be able to muster the political will to do it in the timeframe that we’ve got.

How we do that is a question that I struggle with all the time. It is important to have people inside parliament making that case very strongly but I also think it’s important to have people outside parliament working in a whole range of different groups – climate camp and the Campaign Against Climate Change, for example – building up the pressure as well. In terms of what’s actually going to trigger change – maybe rising oil prices will do it rather than the climate crisis per se. One problem is that the government has been very clever in saying that ‘we’ll deal with the environment once we’ve dealt with the economic crisis’, making it sound as if you have a choice to make between the two. But the policies I was just discussing around the ‘Green New Deal’ tackle the economic crisis and the environmental crisis at the same time. So I think we really need to stress that point.

What changes do you perceive in government policy towards climate change and the environment since the Coalition took over from Labour?

The last government wasn’t great until the very last minute. Credit where it’s due: the Climate Change Act is useful and that was a Labour Party proposition, so I pay tribute to that, although having said that of course it has completely the wrong targets and timetables associated with it. So far there is no sign at all that this government understands how that needs to be accelerated and improved. The first thing the so-called ‘greenest government ever’ did was to abolish the Sustainable Development Commission which was the very body tasked to measure how green governments are. So they set themselves this ambition and then abolished the body that could have determined whether it was meeting it. We’ve had the stuff on the forests just recently. The government’s flagship policy is called the ‘Green Deal’ that will come before the Commons next month. That’s supposed to be about insulating people’s homes but it’s on a very modest, opt-in basis. It has nothing like the urgency behind it that we need. So at the moment I would say that the government’s policies on climate change are looking pretty grim. One point of light might be the Green Investment Bank – that was a positive policy that was in the coalition agreement. But at the minute there hasn’t been any decision as to whether or not it will be a bank or a fund, and if it’s only a fund then it can’t leverage the kind of capital we would need to make the bank work properly. And of course there’s no guarantee yet beyond an initial £1bn in the fund about how much it’ll be capitalised.

In the wake of the ‘lobbygate’ scandal and quite widespread distrust of the political process, what is your impression of the kinds of interests operating on MPs? Are they in practice accountable chiefly to their constituencies, or are they more sensitive to other interests?

From what I’ve seen I think it’s quite hard for constituents to really track what their MPs are doing. There are websites like TheyWorkForYou which are a stab in the right direction, but it’s fairly blunt and doesn’t really tell you very much about what’s going on. So there are some real concerns about whose interests MPs are really working for. And the safer their seats are the easier it is for them to be swayed by other agendas, which is another argument for a properly proportional system. And indeed an argument for AV – although I wish there was a proper PR system on the ballot paper for the referendum, AV is a step in the right direction and I think people should vote for it.

In the European Parliament the lobbying was very, very explicit and visible. The weight of corporate lobbyists based in Brussels was massive and I saw it very much at first hand. I haven’t seen it in quite the same way at Westminster, but I’m sure it’s going on – they probably just don’t include me in it. My sense certainly is that we need to move much more quickly to a much more transparent system, where, for example, there is a register of lobbyists so that people can at least see in principle who’s talking to who for what. I don’t think the lessons have really been learned from the last few years in this respect.

Jamie Stern-Weiner is a political students at King’s College, Cambridge. He is co-editor of New Left Project and a contributor to Le Monde Diplomatique. He can be found on twitter at @jamiesw