Green Party Co-Leader Excited By Early Election Results
3 May 2019, 04:38
Green Party co-leader Sian Berry was very excited over the performance of her party in the local elections.
Sian Berry was very pleased with some of the early results of the local elections, telling Iain Dale the party was "surprising everyone".
"These are not areas you'd think we'd win, would you?" she said.
"In theory, these were tough elections for us.
"Seats we were defending, we were defending about half our council seats, these are the ones we won in 2015 when we were on a big surge at the time.
"You'd think that we'd be having a very tough time but actually, what's happening around the country is we gained all those members, they started getting stuck in campaigning in local areas and now we're ready to win in lots of towns and cities that we didn't have councillors before."
"We're not a majoritarian type of party," she said.
"We're trying to win that representation on the council where even one Green makes an enormous difference to the agenda of the council.
"We can put forward motions that other people wouldn't be interested in, we can keep pestering on things like not charging council tax to care-leavers, paying your apprentices a living-wage, those kind of things that councils don't notice, Greens are in there making that call.
"It was no accident that Bristol council was the first council to pass a motion declaring a climate emergency, because there are Greens there who will put that on the agenda before anyone else."
Watch above.
