YouSaid · the spoken record

Caroline Lucas

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60
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2024-03-11
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2024-03-11
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  1. “To be honest at the time, it genuinely didn't seem like that. I can certainly accept that if one were to look back and understand some of the tensions that were there, and there were certainly tensions about the extent to which it should be women only and who could stay at the different gates because there were lots of different gates with different names and they each had their own politics around them. But actually getting on that bus, I was at university in Exeter, so getting on that bus at five o'clock in the morning from Exeter to go up to that demonstration, that sense of division certainly wasn't there. To the contrary, there was just this marvellous sense of actually getting on the bus and not knowing a single soul. And by the time you got to Greenham, you were all best friends and would do anything for each other because you had that sense of having a shared objective, you had a sense of a shared sort of mission. And that was something really precious, actually. And it's something that I think I probably quite enjoy in other demonstrations and in other kinds of solidarity movements since then.”

    2024-03-11 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 64. Caroline Lucas: Leading the Green Party, leaving politics, and the importance of protest · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “And the contrast between the death on the inside of those fences and the love and solidarity on the outside. And Caroline, were the divisions within the movement, were you conscious that there were sort of greens alongside Trotskyites alongside Stalinists, alongside different types of leftist movement? I mean, was...”

    2024-03-11 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 64. Caroline Lucas: Leading the Green Party, leaving politics, and the importance of protest · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “Were being held, and so there were regular demonstrations there, but more to the point, there was also a permanent women's peace camp there. And so in many ways, I think a lot of the demonstrations that have happened since then on many other issues kind of take some of their inspiration from the kinds of attitudes and approaches that the women took at Greenham. And one of the things in terms of it was interesting you should say, tell me about the colour of it, because that's what I remember, in fact, what I remember is the terrible wire and the razor wire and all of the grayness of the places where the missiles were kept and the fences that were keeping you out. And then what felt like this extraordinary surge of life where people were tying colourful ribbons on those wire fences when they were singing, when they were just really embodying a different set of values around love for want of a better word.”

    2024-03-11 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 64. Caroline Lucas: Leading the Green Party, leaving politics, and the importance of protest · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Sense of your eyes opening where you've got this amazing mother of a friend who is Taking you to the Rodin Museum, who is introducing to the poetry of Jacques Prevert, who is demonstrating where it was on the bridge that Alain Faunier fell in love with the woman who then became the muse in some of his later works. I mean, it was just a door being smashed open in a whole new world being introduced. It was wonderful. Carolyn, again, for listeners of different generations, give us a sense of what Greenham Carlman and CND was all about, particularly for international listeners who don't necessarily know what those things are, and give us a sense of the flavor of it and the color of it and what mid-1980s Britain was like and who were going with you on these buses and what you were trying to do and achieve. So CND, the campaign for nuclear disarmament, had a real kind of burst of life in the mid-80s because we were protesting against the sighting of US nuclear missiles on UK soil. And Greenham Common was the preeminent place where those nuclear weapons were.”

    2024-03-11 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 64. Caroline Lucas: Leading the Green Party, leaving politics, and the importance of protest · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “No, I was rebellious quite young and didn't like rules very much, but I think in a way I was sort of quite late to things like CND, and that was when I was at university that I really got involved with that and was on the buses going up to Greenham Common at some ungodly hours in the morning to take part in those demonstrations and so forth. So it was something that I came to later. But I think what really changed things for me was friendships that I had at school. And there was one particular friend Rachel who changed my life, frankly. I mean, her family was as different from mine as it would be possible to be. I mean, their house was a total tip books everywhere. Her mum, I remember, even when she was cooking us tea, would have Jane Austen or something propped up on one of those book props, you know, that you have in the kitchen usually for a recipe book, but she had Jane Austen there. And she took us on an amazing trip to Paris, which I shall never forget when I was about 15. And just that's...”

    2024-03-11 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 64. Caroline Lucas: Leading the Green Party, leaving politics, and the importance of protest · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “Radical rebellious teenager going on kind of CND demonstrations and breaking with them and coming back with lots of books. I mean, what is that whole story? No, well, that's pretty much it. I have a sister and I have a brother, but they're both quite a bit older than me. So my sister's nine years older, my brother's seven years older. So when I was actually kind of growing up, if you like, most of the time they were away already at university or at secondary school or whatever. So in that respect, it felt in some ways a little bit like being an only child rather than being one of three. And they're very lovely, but we are very different. And yes, I was definitely the one that was always getting into trouble, that's for sure.”

    2024-03-11 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 64. Caroline Lucas: Leading the Green Party, leaving politics, and the importance of protest · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Yeah, I mean, I brought it up once I had understood that there were alternatives to the daily mail that were available. But for most of my younger childhood, it was just there. And Caroline, it often sounds slightly when you talk about it as though it's a sort of Harry Potter lifestyle where your father is kind of cast, as Mr. Dursley. There was a private hedge, I have to admit. Private hedge, exactly. But how many brothers and sisters became relatively, I guess, would you have been seen by your parents as a kind of...”

    2024-03-11 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 64. Caroline Lucas: Leading the Green Party, leaving politics, and the importance of protest · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “I think, no, it wasn't. It was more that it was an economic opportunity when new things were happening. And my dad was quite into new things. So there he was having this heating company. And my mum stayed at home and looked after the kids and kept the house nice. It was a very resolutely unpolitical household. Politics was never discussed, ever.”

    2024-03-11 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 64. Caroline Lucas: Leading the Green Party, leaving politics, and the importance of protest · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “It was just very normal, I suppose, in the sense that my dad was the executive of a small business, a heating company in fact. He had some of the first sale of panels which we had stuck on our house, which I hated because they made such a noise in those days. There was this motor on the side of the wall just where I slept. And so it used to wake me up at 6 o'clock every morning.”

    2024-03-11 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 64. Caroline Lucas: Leading the Green Party, leaving politics, and the importance of protest · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “So was I. Two winning. To win. Till ever all their lives. I never managed to persuade them otherwise. They were reading the Daily Mail up until the end.”

    2024-03-11 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 64. Caroline Lucas: Leading the Green Party, leaving politics, and the importance of protest · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source