Pair win 86% of vote to take over from Natalie Bennett and vow to combat ‘fear and inequality’ in post-referendum Britain

Caroline Lucas and Jonathan Bartley have been voted in as joint leaders of the Green party, and pledged to take the party’s message into Labour’s former industrial heartlands.

Lucas, the party’s sole MP, and Bartley, its spokesman on work and pensions, won 86% of first-preference votes in the six-candidate race, and become the first leaders of a Westminster party to undertake the role as a job share.

Addressing 1,200 party members gathered in Birmingham on Friday for the start of the Greens’ annual conference, where the result was announced, Lucas promised the pair would fill the void left by Labour over challenging the effects of Brexit, for example over workers’ rights and the status of EU nationals in the UK.

Standing at an adjoining lectern, Bartley declared “the era of two-party politics is over”, and said the big parties could no longer take their voters for granted.

Speaking to the Guardian after the joint speech, they said policies such as a green technology-based industrial strategy and a commitment to tackling inequality and challenging the effects of globalisation could lead them to win more support in traditionally Labour areas, constituencies already being actively pursued by Ukip.

“There’s a risk that Ukip will move into this space,” Lucas said. “And that’s why it’s so important parties like the Greens are out there with a really practical set of measures that can speak to people’s incredible insecurity that was manifest partly in that Brexit result.

“It’s often some of the poorest, most excluded people who have the most to gain from Green policies. That’s the message we want to get across.”

She added: “People do feel hugely insecure. They do feel their voices aren’t being listened to, and that’s a very dangerous state of affairs. We believe we’ve got the policies that will engage those people. We’re committed to getting the Green voice out into communities where perhaps in the past we’ve not been so well known.”

This was all the more the case given Labour’s current divisions amid the leadership battle between Jeremy Corbyn and Owen Smith, said Bartley. “There’s a real need for effective opposition,” he said. “We are unified, we are distinctive. With Labour you’re never quite sure what you’re going to get.”

Under Natalie Bennett, who announced in May she was standing down after four years as leader, the Greens gained more than 1.1m votes but kept only their one seat, Brighton Pavilion, held by Lucas since 2010.

Lucas and Bartley were always the strong favourites in a field also comprising the party’s longest-serving activist, Clive Lord, 80, who was a founder member; David Malone, a film-maker; Martie Warin and David Williams, two local councillors; and Simon Cross, a candidate in the general election.

Bartley said he had approached Lucas with the idea of a job share, in part because he has a son with a disability and did not want a full-time role. The pair argue that such arrangements should become more common as a way to increase diversity in politics.

“It’s about opening up politics and a new way of doing politics,” Bartley said. “It’s time Westminster caught up.”

Nobody can buy the silence of a climate spinning out of control | Caroline Lucas Read more

Lucas, who led the party alone from 2008-12, used the acceptance speech to lambast the legacy of Brexit, describing a political landscape where “trust has been shattered and the truth lies buried”.

“At what point did it become OK to produce posters so dehumanising, so degrading and so despicable that they are compared to 1930s propaganda – even by a Conservative chancellor of the exchequer?” she said, referring to a Brexit campaign billboard created by the Nigel Farage-helmed unofficial leave campaign.

Bartley, a former parliamentary candidate who co-runs Ekklesia, a religious thinktank, aimed some blows at Labour’s internal divisions, as well as those within the Tories who precipitated the EU referendum.

“If we do disagree, we talk about it and resolve the problem. We don’t throw the country’s security and stability away to settle an internal squabble,” he told the 1,200-strong crowd at Birmingham University. “And we don’t throw bricks through one another’s windows,” he added, referring to an attack on the building housing Angela Eagle’s constituency office.

Among the other key subjects at the three-day conference is the idea of a progressive alliance, which would involve local collaboration with other parties to combat Conservative dominance and push for proportional representation.

In June, Bennett wrote to the leaders of Labour, the Liberal Democrats and Plaid Cymru to propose an anti-Brexit alliance in any snap general election. The letter argued that such a plan was the best way to counter the iniquities of the first-past-the-post system, which allowed the current government to be voted in by 24% of the electorate.

Caroline Lucas: Labour has not shut door on progressive alliance Read more

Lucas said last week that Corbyn’s office had indicated it could be open to talks about a cross-party electoral pact.

While the Labour leader has spoken publicly against the idea, Lucas told the Guardian that his staff had “not shut the door” on the idea of talks after the Labour leadership election. “My office got a message from his office saying that they were interested in meeting to discuss it,” she said. “That’s as far as we’ve gone because, of course, we’ve had an election campaign.”

The progressive alliance idea will be discussed at a conference event on Friday featuring Lucas and the Labour MP Lisa Nandy, among others.