If a week is a long time in politics, as the saying goes, then three and a half years is an eternity. That’s the amount of water that’s gone under the bridge since Neil sat down with Carla Denyer, then a Clifton Down councillor who had just assumed joint leadership of the Green Party.
Back in October 2021 – before Russia invaded Ukraine, and with the Covid pandemic not yet fizzled out – the national Labour Party was still in the process of its rightward shift under Keir Starmer. In Bristol, meanwhile, the Labour mayor Marvin Rees – remember him? – was gaining some notoriety for his tone in the council chamber towards both political opponents and members of the public. Both offered opportunities for a Green Party keen to expand – and to erase lazy stereotypes of it catering exclusively to the earnest white middle classes.
Since then of course, Carla has gone on to take the Bristol Central parliamentary seat on a huge swing from Thangam Debonnaire, and her party has seized leadership of the council, under the committee system that replaced the mayoral model in 2024. But the political landscape the Greens were sizing up in 2021 has shifted beyond recognition, with Nigel Farage’s Reform Party for the moment decisively moving towards being the newcomer likely to knock the two main parties off their perches.
It’s an timely then to pull out this vintage episode of Bristol Unpacked from our back pockets, while we line up the new series due to start in April, and reflect on the issues discussed.
Where next for the kinder and more consensual brand of local politics advocated for by Carla Denyer and others who backed the abolition of the Bristol Mayor? And with four long years until another general election, and far-right populism on the march on both sides of the Atlantic, can the Greens and their “common-sense” approach to tackling the climate crisis recapture the political spotlight?
Bristol Unpacked will be returning with new episodes in just a few weeks, so stay tuned, and in the meantime enjoy this classic conversation from the vaults.
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