Fossil Fuels: Lobbying

Debate between Caroline Lucas and Jonathan Edwards

Tuesday 30th January 2024 Commons Chamber

[Caroline Lucas]

I thank the hon. Member for her intervention, which reminds me of a powerful thing that the US campaigner Bill McKibben says: delaying is the new denial, and winning slowly is the same as losing. There is a real imperative here to be fast.

[Jonathan Edwards (Carmarthen East and Dinefwr) (Ind)]

I congratulate the hon. Lady on securing this Adjournment debate, and on the strength of her arguments. I echo the points made by the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) about her contribution to this House over the years. It has been a pleasure to serve with her over the last decade and more.

Would the hon. Lady add to her list the need to reduce the overall cost of politics? An article I read recently estimated that spending in the forthcoming general election will dwarf anything that has happened before. The expenditure on social media alone will be greater than for the last official campaign period. Political parties go looking, as they are at the moment, for vast amounts of money to spend on electioneering, but it comes at a cost, because the funders who give them that money then want something in return.

[Caroline Lucas]

I am very grateful to the hon. Gentleman for his intervention and his kind comments. It is always a great pleasure to work with him, and I agree entirely: when it comes to spending on elections, we seem to have an arms race that is out of control, which of course drives the obsession with getting more money to line the war chests that enable parties to fight those elections. A cap on that funding is urgently required, which brings me to the next point I wanted to make.