Adrian Ramsay is contemplating the pros and cons of sharing a job. As co-leader of the Green Party alongside Carla Denyer – who featured in the pages of Spotlight last November – Ramsay is part of one of the most high-profile political pairings in the country. The pros are coming quicker than the cons. “The best thing is that you bring together two sets of career backgrounds, two sets of skills,” he tells me over a video call. “We’re from different parts of the country, which means we can be in two places at once. And it reflects what the modern economy looks like in terms of more collaborative and flexible ways of working.”
And the cons? Ramsay’s quickfire delivery is absent momentarily, replaced by a politician’s pause. Is the biggest annoyance, I suggest, constantly being asked about co-leadership? “Perhaps,” he offers.
Ramsay has led the Green Party jointly since 2021, and became an MP last July at the third attempt. His share of the vote in Waveney Valley – 41.7 per cent in a traditionally Conservative part of the country – was sizeable, reflecting a record-breaking general election result for the Greens; nearly two million votes and four newly minted MPs.
Ramsay, 43, describes himself as “not too tribal”, whether in his politics or in his support of his hometown club Norwich City. The latter is a sensitive subject given his constituency straddles the Norfolk-Suffolk border, much of which is closer to rivals Ipswich Town. He showed a spirit of bipartisanship in his maiden parliamentary speech in July, not only “warmly” congratulating Ipswich on promotion to the Premier League but welcoming Labour’s commitment to renewable energy and the creation of a state-run investment company, Great British Energy.
Tribal or not, Ramsay had an early taste of Westminster rough and tumble when he called for a pause on a project that would see more than 500 pylons passing through his new constituency. He faced direct criticism from Prime Minister Keir Starmer and Energy Secretary Ed Miliband, and during a subsequent media round, he was dubbed “Nimby-in-chief”.
Since the maiden speech, Ramsay’s mood has changed. Asked to mark Labour’s environmental progress out of ten, Ramsay gives it a three. Why so low? He offers, as evidence, plans to expand Heathrow and other airports that would “completely wipe out” the carbon saving benefit of the government’s national clean power plan. “And that’s before you get on to their ambivalence towards the Rosebank oil field that would emit carbon equivalent to that of 28 low-income countries. And then you’ve got carbon capture and storage where they are looking to spend £22bn on projects that would allow new gas-fired power stations to go ahead, offering a fig leaf to fossil fuels.”
When reminded of his initial embrace of GB Energy, he says: “It’s not yet clear what it’s going to deliver. It’s just a brand at the moment.” He would like it to focus on energy reduction and community-owned renewables.
Ramsay is keen to dismiss any notion that he is anti-growth, that he’s a blocker not a builder. It has to be the right kind, he says; building that “meets ordinary people’s needs and ensures we have a liveable planet for the future”. He believes the government must take a more “systemic approach” to planning in order to safeguard food supplies, for example, or to ensure that public transport is not only the greenest option but the cheapest and easiest, too. That’s why he objects to the “nature vs growth” binary; it’s a false dichotomy in his view. Labour, he says, has a “blind approach to any type of growth even if it’s going to wreck the planet, result in more inequality or more air pollution. That can’t be right.”
Last month, the Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch used the launch of her party’s policy renewal programme to tell the “unvarnished truth” about the UK’s climate change policy. “Net zero by 2050 is impossible,” she declared.
Ramsay says her words were “deeply irresponsible”, breaking an essential cross-party consensus that has provided “clear direction not just for politics but for industry, too”.
A party-political consensus, maybe, but perhaps Badenoch is tapping into wider doubts among the electorate. After all, it’s likely that many of the more than four million people who voted for Reform UK last July share their party’s scepticism. “The voters I speak to are concerned about the environment regardless of where they appear on the political spectrum,” Ramsay insists. “Yes, Reform has tried to weaponise the issue, but I don’t think that means everyone who has voted for them entirely agrees with them.”
But what of Badenoch’s extended critique? First, she argued that where a net zero plan does exist, the UK is moving too slowly. She used the example of heat pumps and the aim to fit them in half of UK homes by 2040. That’s 17 million domestic heat pumps. The total installed to date: fewer than 300,000. Ramsay points to higher rates of uptake in France and Ireland to illustrate what is possible but also what’s missing in the UK: the right incentives. “You’ve got to have the long-term platform industry can rely on.”
Second, Badenoch argued that in the pursuit of net zero “we are massively exposing ourselves to countries who don’t share our values”. Here she used the example of solar panels. “Ten years ago, we were heavily dependent on China for all of the key components. Today we’re even more dependent.” Ramsay isn’t entirely unsympathetic. “There is far more that can be produced in the UK… and where we are using international supply chains, we need to minimise the extent to which that relies on particular countries. This is an area where there has been a very free-market approach to date. We could be doing far more to make sure British manufacturing is benefiting from these things.”
Returning to his scepticism of carbon capture and storage (CCS), Ramsay maintains that he is not against technology as a means of helping mitigate climate change, pointing to a pre-parliamentary career working for the Centre for Alternative Technology, a charitable and educational organisation.
He worries, however, that solutions such as CCS provide an excuse for inaction. “I’m very pro the right sorts of technology but it’s got to be applied in the right way,” Ramsay says. “I’m in favour of more research… But at the moment the vast majority of CCS plants that have been developed nationwide have been abandoned because they have not been working. There’s a real risk that it’s a fig leaf for fossil fuels and that it gives false hope.”
He takes a similar view when it comes to sustainable aviation. Asked if there would be any circumstances in which he would countenance airport expansion, Ramsay believes the case has yet to be made. On sustainable aviation fuel, he says, “Yes it should be researched, but it doesn’t exist at the moment, so we can’t rely on it.”
This article first appeared in our Spotlight Energy and Climate Change supplement of 24 April 2025.
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