Labour Party members attending their conference in Brighton this weekend will be welcomed by a familiar face.
The Green Party has paid for a digital advert which makes the case that Brighton Pavilion MP Caroline Lucas is the only person offering “real opposition” in parliament.
It will be on display in Queen’s Road, Brighton – the street which many of the 10,000 delegates arriving by train will travel down to reach the conference venues and hotels.
The ad starts with a check list, against a red backdrop, reading: “Saving the NHS, Fighting Austerity, Railways in Public Hands, Scrapping Trident.”
As the screen turns green, the billboard says “Brought to you by the Green Party.”
The final screen displays a photo of Caroline Lucas MP and reads: “Welcome to Brighton – Home of the True Opposition in Parliament. p.s. Labour is down the hill on the right”.
Rob Shepherd, chairman of Brighton and Hove Green Party, said: “We know a lot of Labour members want their party leadership to stand up to austerity and NHS privatisation, and to support progressive policies such as public ownership of the railways.
“We wanted to remind them that there’s an MP already fighting for these causes in Parliament. It would be great to see Labour members using their conference to encourage Ed Miliband to follow Caroline’s lead on standing up for these causes, and bring together a powerful coalition of to reverse the consensus that austerity and privatisation are the only game in town.”
The Green Party’s own autumn conference took place last weekend, also in Brighton.
In her conference speech Caroline Lucas criticised cuts to welfare and local services, and argued that it is the Green Party, rather than Labour, that is offering the real opposition to the Government's agenda of austerity and privatisation.
Dr Lucas is speaking at two events at Labour’s conference – a Compass panel discussion called ‘Labour – an open tribe?’ and an Institute for Public Policy Research event titled ‘The Condition of Britain’.
Her Private Member’s Bill to bring the railways back into public hands is due its second reading next month.
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