Totally wrong. I said Caroline Lucas wouldn’t be addressing our rally last night, and she did. Compass chair Neal Lawson welcomed her in a spirit of “pluralism”. But he was on dangerous ground. Lucas is standing as Green Party parliamentary candidate in Brighton Pavilion, where the Greens have a big following. George Mudie, a local Labour activist, attacked Lucas from the floor over promises of a local coalition to throw ouut the Tory council. “The result is a Conservative administration in Brighton.”
Another unannounced (but more predictable) speaker was communities secretary John Denham, who laid into both Compass (for inviting the Greens) and The Guardian’s Polly Toynbee (for attacking the government). It was a fiery speech to a packed room. But neither he nor other memebers of the government would address the the questino – which the other speakers were happy to answer in the affirmative – of whether a leftward shift would help Labour win the election. I would have asked, but there was no Q&A this year.
