Caroline Lucas says she is leaving parliament to devote more time to fighting ‘accelerating’ threats to planet – UK politics live

Green party’s former leader and only MP to stand down after saying she ‘struggled’ to spend enough time campaigning on climate crisis

Good morning. Tony Benn famously said, when he stood down as an MP, that he was leaving the House of Commons so that he would have “more time to devote to politics”. This morning Caroline Lucas, Britain’s first Green party MP, has in effect announced she is doing the same. More than 50 MPs have said they are standing down at the next election, but Lucas is one of the most significant figures on the list. Lucas’s election, as MP for Brighton Pavilion, was a major boost to the Green party (which she has twice led) and to the environemntal cause generally.

In an open letter to her constituents, she highlights some of the progress made on green, and other, issues over the past 13 years. Explaining her decision to stand down, she says:

The intensity of these constituency commitments, together with the particular responsibilities of being my party’s sole MP, mean that, ironically, I’ve not been able to focus as much as I would like on the existential challenges that drive me – the nature and climate emergencies. I have always been a different kind of politician – as those who witnessed my arrest, court case and acquittal over peaceful protest at the fracking site in Balcombe nearly ten years ago will recall. And the truth is, as these threats to our precious planet become ever more urgent, I have struggled to spend the time I want on these accelerating crises. I have therefore decided not to stand again as your MP at the next election.

The reason I came into politics was to change things. Thirteen years ago it’s inconceivable that parliament would have declared a climate emergency. And I’ve put issues like a universal basic income and a legal right to access nature on the political agenda; secured the first parliamentary debate in a generation on drug law reform; and thanks to my work in parliament, a natural history GCSE will soon be on the syllabus. I have said the previously unsayable, only to see it become part of the mainstream, on coal, on the myth that endless economic growth makes us happier, on a green new deal.