‘The future of British politics is cooperation’: Jonathan Bartley on the Green Party, activism, and the importance of finding common ground

Jonathan Bartley lacks the standard political veneer that is typical in party leaders. I spoke to the ex-leader of the Green Party ahead of May’s local elections, and he is candid about his last-minute campaign. But what he may lack in professional polish, he compensates for in relatability. For this reason, I find it difficult not to nod along to the arguments he puts to me throughout our early morning chat. 

Bartley was co-leader of the Green Party of England and Wales, from 2016 to 2021, alongside Caroline Lucas and later Siân Berry. However, ‘politician’ wasn’t always his intended career path. “I fell into it”, he tells me. 

He landed a place studying Social Policy at the London School of Economics (LSE) which he confesses he did “more to keep [his] dad happy”, than anything else. Looking down the list of universities, Bartley recalls that, when seeing LSE, he thought, “I’ve heard of that!” and decided to apply. He admits that, despite hating school and initially wanting to pursue a career as a drummer, he “came to love” his degree, following it through to a political internship, working on a cross-party basis. “I didn’t really have a political ideology”, he says. 

Recalling how he ended up at the Green Party, Bartley chuckles: “My route was not the environment.” Instead, “the big turning point for me was having a child who was disabled”. He describes his son, Samuel, now 23, as having “opened up a whole world to me that I hadn’t seen before”. Trying to enrol him at the family’s local school was a “battle”, he tells me: “I got no help from my local councillors.” He joined the Green Party as a result, feeling they were the only party that genuinely “got inclusion”. 

“Up until a few years ago I would’ve thought we’re all making progress in all these different areas of human rights: trans rights, women’s rights, rights for people in the global South, migrant rights, disabled rights.” However, “in the last few years, with the rise of populism on the Right, there’s been a real pushback against that”. “It actually frightens me, it really does, and the Green Party is the only party that, for me, is offering hope against that backlash.” 

While not considering himself a religious man, Bartley cites the teachings of Jesus as influencing his politics on inclusion. He takes Jesus’ emphasis on equality, helping the most disadvantaged, and challenging power as being “groundbreaking for his time”. However, Christianity since the era of Constantine’s annexation of the religion, he argues, has instead become an “oppressive alliance” of “Christianity and empire, Christianity in government, Christianity in state, which has trampled over people’s rights and taken from those who have nothing and given it to the rich”. Having written two books on the topic of religion’s role in public life and politics, he feels the breaking down of Christian norms, and the promotion of the secular state has partially reversed this. But the historical role of the Church does provide an explanation, Bartley says, for “why we’re seeing a move back by the oppressive populist right to this idea of the Christian country, because it is oppressive”.

This is part of the politics of fragmentation he describes as so dangerous. “We are in an absolutely conflict-ridden society, where politics has been ripping friendships, families, communities apart”. To him, Brexit provided the perfect storm for fragmented politics to thrive, with Leave and Remain factions resulting in ruptures in local communities, demonstrating the need “to find a way to disagree well but also not demonise one another”. It is clear that conflict resolution and common ground is central to Bartley’s political ideology, and for this reason he has reservations about whether left-wing populism is a perfect antidote to right-wing populism.

He doesn’t view the Greens as having become more left-wing under Polanski, though, compared to under his own leadership. “So many journalists get this wrong”, he says, exasperated. Green Party policy is voted on by the membership rather than party leader, the idea that the party leader shifts the party to a different – or more left-wing – set of policies “is just nonsense, it’s just wrong”.

Bartley seems to regret the Greens’ unsuccessful attempt to work with Labour in either 2017 or 2019 under Jeremy Corbyn, who he says he has “huge respect” for. In reference to a wealth tax, Bartley stresses that Corbyn was “talking about all the stuff Zack [Polanski] is now talking about”. This is part of the reason why the party was unable to find a loyal demographic during his own time as leader he tells me: “We were talking about it but no one was listening, because of course you’re going to listen to Jeremy.

“When we did speak, we were only heard when we talked on the anti-fracking stuff, renewable energy, the Green New Deal”, Bartley explains. To him, therefore, what’s changed is not party policy but “the space to be able to say it, and I think Zack is saying it very well indeed”.

On his own time as leader, Bartley tells me that he spent a long time building up the systems, strategies, and infrastructure of the party. The need for this came after a surge in popularity it saw – albeit on a smaller scale than today – under the leadership of Natalie Bennet from 2012 to 2016, during a time when Labour was what Bartley describes as more right-wing. 

It wasn’t all smooth sailing, though. “One big regret was that I didn’t push what I believed was right more, internally in the party. So often I had a gut feeling about something but I listened to other people and let other people run with their views rather than my own, and that’s important in a democratic party, but the decisions were later proved to be wrong and I wish I’d have gone with my gut.” He cites setting up a party podcast, and having more populist messaging, to widen the Greens’ appeal, as examples of what he should have done.

There were successes however. The adaptation of their “target to win strategy” saw the Greens make gains at the local level, something that has continued during May’s elections. Oxford has proved to be a microcosm of conciliary success for the Greens, with Oxford University graduate Alfie Davis becoming the Green councillor for Hollywell, and boasting the third highest Green vote share in the country with 68% of the ward’s votes. 

Bartley is now a councillor himself, after a hiatus from politics since stepping down from party leadership in 2021, after coming third in the election for the Clapham Town ward, in the London constituency of Lambeth. 

On the subject of the next general election, Bartley appears cautiously optimistic about the Greens’ prospects. “You have to have that council base in order to win Parliamentary seats”, he explains. “Everyone kind of just expects the great MP candidate to arise and everyone will vote for them, and that’s not how it works.” But, “if you get that infrastructure in place…we then have a huge activist base on which to build and to win parliamentary seats”. He is, though, positive there will always be a need for the Green Party in British politics, in a “fragmented system” where the political right is gaining significant traction.

However, Bartley doesn’t have grand designs for the national party himself, saying he very much believes in letting Polanski “get on with it”. More frankly, he laughs: “I don’t think he needs my support.”

One of Bartley’s issues with the current Labour leadership is the sheer lack of authority. While he is reluctant to cite politicians he doesn’t particularly like – namely Tony Blair and Margaret Thatcher – as prime examples of commanding leadership, he admits that “they had authority just in who they were”. And Starmer? Not so much. Bartley puts this down to a lack of going out to “win the argument”, alongside “gaining this huge great parliamentary majority off a very small vote compared to what Corbyn was getting”. This frustration, Bartley says, is shared by many others: “So many people in the Labour Party that I’ve spoken to feel that he had this massive great majority and he’s doing nothing with it!”

Bartley visited Oxford in 2023 to speak at the Oxford Union, where he made a case for the proposition: ‘This House Has No Confidence in His Majesty’s Government’. He compared the then current Conservative government to ‘dead parrots’, in reference to the famous Monty Python sketch in which John Cleese attempts to sell a parrot that is clearly deceased. While Bartley remains convinced that the Tories are “a relic of a bygone time”, he puts to me that Labour are not quite dead for good: “I don’t think Labour are going to go away.” 

“The future in British politics, whether we like it or not, is cooperation…We need to find the people in the other parties that we can do business with.” This is a mindset Bartley has developed over his years in politics: “The older I get, the less and less tribal I am about my politics. I think tribalism is so destructive…it destroys truth, it doesn’t let us hear one another. When you are talking to other people, you want to convert them to your cause. If you just demonise them and say ‘well you’re Labour, I’ll forget about you’, you never convert anyone, you never convince, you never gain political ground. So it’s a very short-sighted political approach to take.”

It is clear that Bartley is steadfast in his opinions, and, from this, easy to deduce why he is in support of the Greens and Your Party’s closer working relationship.  “I’ve always felt that where there is common cause, we should work together.” Oxford politics societies are, too, open to cross-party cooperation, take joint events between Oxford Labour Club, Oxford Students Liberal Association, and Oxford University Liberal Association for instance. While student politics may not be influencing serious policy change, Bartley’s call for cross-party collaboration doesn’t seem to be falling on deaf ears. 

This seems to go hand in hand with the ex-leader’s position on electoral reform, with Bartley in favour of any proportional system, but specifically the single transferable vote where voters express a ranked preference of political candidates to choose representatives. Something that “lets people vote for what they want, rather than against what they don’t want has got to be the way forward.” 

The potential for proportional representation to aid Reform doesn’t deter Bartley. “Democracy is democracy, I think what we’ve seen particularly in local councils when reform got all those local councillors…people see what they really are like.” He stresses that “the alternative is if you don’t give people what they vote for: anger, frustration, violence, hatred. Democracy is about avoiding violence”.

Reflecting on his work as co-leader, he cites the Greens’ 2019 deal with the Lib Dems and Plaid Cymru as one of his proudest moments. At the 2019 general election, the parties agreed to each stand down in more than 60 total seats to avoid splitting the pro-EU vote. “It was very simple, we found four areas of common ground that we would agree to, and then we decided to stand down for one another in a certain amount of seats for a common cause.” 

Here, Bartley strikes me with an attitude of political optimism: “That shows it can be done, and the Lib Dems are a different party, we don’t agree with a lot of what they stand for, they don’t agree with a lot of what we stand for, but we could find common ground to work together where it existed.”

 Another one of his proudest moments was getting arrested while taking part in an Extinction Rebellion protest, and getting dragged away by police. “With activism, I think you’ve got to walk the talk.” In a similar vein: “I still am proud every time I get attacked for standing up to migrant rights…that’s the stuff that just bounces off. I think if I’m getting abuse about asylum seekers, that I want to let them all in, I wear that as a badge of honour.” 

“I can’t stand people that say they don’t have regrets!” Bartley exclaims. On his own, Bartley is more introspective, confessing to feeling most hurt when he feels he’s let his own party members or colleagues down. While he also reasons that he may have also missed out on certain experiences to do Question Time and analogous news shows: “I’m proud that I always pushed for Caroline and Siân to do more [press], because we needed more women’s voices out there and they didn’t want another middle-class, male, white guy.” Recalling a particularly vivid memory about the details of these press rehearsals: “One time I played Boris Johnson when Caroline was rehearsing!”

Looking forward, Bartley’s personal hopes lie in helping new local councillors thrive in roles they may not have had previous experience in. “They’re quite young and they haven’t done the job before, and they will need support and they will need allies…because it is so tough being a councillor”, Bartley says. While he may be taking more of a backseat in terms of the Greens’ national campaign, this is still clearly a party he is devoutly dedicated to. 

This attitude defines Bartley’s approach to politics. He talks candidly about British society, and it may be the time he has spent away from the limelight that allows him to discuss his ideal political system in this way. From this, it’s clear he’s much less interested in the histrionics of Westminster, and more with the important minutiae of local politics. To him, this is the way to make real change to life for the average Briton.