Rachel Millward’s speech to Green Party conference

Green Party deputy leader Rachel Millward's full speech from Autumn conference at the Brighton Centre, at 10:15am on Saturday 3 October 2026. Check against delivery.  

Good morning conference! And thank you so much Caroline - what an honour! Legend doesn't cover it 

It's so good to be together with all of you wonderful people! Here in this brilliant city, in beautiful Sussex: a place of heathland and vineyards, enterprise and art, farmers and drag queens. Great place for a Green mayor, don't you think? Badges are available on your exit

A year ago I stood before conference and announced that we had, just that morning, overtaken the Lib Dems at eighty two and a half thousand members. It seemed so huge - but we went and tripled it!

It's been an incredible year. Meeting so many of you at action days around the country. Getting more Greens elected. Sharing our message on climate, inequality, immigration and trans rights... 

It's been a year of hope. And it's just the beginning. 

Burnham talks a lot about reversing 40 years of neoliberalism. But we can't just look back. 

We stand on the cusp of unprecedented technological and social change. And we need to get our *heads out the sand*, and choose the future we want. 

We've travelled through colonialism Thatcherism austerity. Stories of separation, division and dominance. And now - the <<tech bros are turbocharging change.

Our new oligarchal overlords would lock us into *separate digital worlds, flooded with AI slop and misinformation. A 24/7 diet of distraction and lies. Hyperscale data centres that guzzle energy to make a mockery of climate progress. Built with next to no scrutiny, filled with inefficient US tech giants' chips. Leaving our infrastructure dependent on a dangerous, unstable power. 

A handful of men control too much for the rest of us. Hoarding the world's wealth, polluting the planet, and now trying to buy our democracy. That future looks so bleak that the likes of Peter Thiel and Elon Musk intend to escape it altogether. To a bunker. To some post-human upgrade. To another planet.

Of course, it suits the billionaires to distract and divide us. 

We've lost our civic spaces. The price of a connecting cuppa is now the price of lunch. And so we stay online, in the illusion of connection. Constantly reinforcing feedback loops. Splintering what was left of society.

And I can feel the rising panic as I say all this. I feel the despair of young people who tell me they are terrified. That they don't want to live in climate wreckage and fake.. everything. 

But wait. Take a breath. Look around you. 

Here we are. 

And we  *love it here*. 

We don't want your post human reality. We want this world. The soil between our toes. The trees that give us shelter and shade. The food we grow with our own hands, that tastes of the ground it came from. 

And - it might seem crazy. But we have all the power we need. It's between us. 

I want to tell a story of hope about a small town called Crowborough. Within Wealden, where I lead the council. Where the Home Office - with no communication, let alone consultation - accommodated hundreds of asylum seekers in an unsuitable military camp.  

What followed has been devastating for that community. Not because of asylum seekers. But because this utterly performative, and expensive, government policy is like a petri dish on which the far right can grow. 

It is hard to describe how it feels, watching it happen before your eyes. What would have been an ordinary, peaceful town council meeting turned into something so much darker. The certainty of hate, the thickening of fear. 

But this did not come from Crowborough. This is an organised, global far right movement, spreading hateful narratives online for money. And it swung through that small town like a wrecking ball. A sudden and constant flow of online abuse, threats, doxxing of anyone who dared to speak compassion. 

And yet in the midst of all that darkness, there are a couple of hundred local people who have courageously stepped forward to be volunteers in the camp. They run language classes, art and music sessions, take walks in the forest. And they love it. Making new friends. Learning new things. Discovering that truly life-enhancing joy of connection across difference. 

That's what happens when we get offline and we come together. When we dare to connect.

The hope lies between us. 

It's our job to keep connecting - to each other - and to people not like us.

It's powerful. 

Remember how we - together - brought an end to a Starmer regime that was frankly ushering Reform into government - jolting Labour out of their slumber by taking 4 times as many votes from them at the local elections than Reform did. 

All of you who've delivered leaflets or organised meetings or stood for election you did that. 

We're doing this right now in London. While Reform is bankrolled by two crypto billionaires, just two men, giving seventy two million pounds in a single weekend - we are out there in our hundreds, on doorsteps, connecting with people. Building community. That is real power. 

We felt the full force of it around 4am that incredible morning in February, when the Gorton and Denton by-election result came through. We had changed British political history 

The future doesn't write itself. We can write it. And this movement, the people in this room, need to pick up the boldest, brightest PERMANENT MARKER pen we can find, and get writing.

I know that if we are going to build this new world, in amongst the wreckage of the old, it will be built on the foundation that is our utter dependence on nature. 

Y'know sometimes, when everything gets too much, I remember why I'm standing here. 

I remember a day when I made a promise at the source of a river. A promise to restore that river to good health. 

That river runs through Wealden - where I co-lead the council. And we've been able to make a start. We're testing the water, we're re-writing policy in our Local Plan, we're investing in replanting and wildlife 

But we see the sewage being pumped into our river by private profit making companies - and we see just how far wrong we've gone. Water - the very stuff of life - uniquely found on this planet in the whole wide universe - the stuff we're made of - it replenishes us, cleans us, connects us and we sold it. And now we pay higher and higher bills which end up adding to some bank's profits in Australia, instead of building the infrastructure we need. 

So Burnham's 10 year plan of gentle threats and vague notions of control is NOT ENOUGH.

Too many of our water companies have *already failed. 

Right here in Sussex, we too often find ourselves driving to pick up bottled water because nothing is coming out of our taps. Not a single major reservoir has been built in this country since the beginning of privatisation 35 years ago.

And so. Today. The Green Party is ANNOUNCING that we would, immediately - not in 10 years. But before Christmas, bring South East Water and Thames Water back into public ownership at no cost to the tax payer. 

We have all the tools we need to make it happen. Forget compensation for shareholders and creditors, these are insolvent companies. 

It's time to take them back. 

So what else could we take back?

Imagine, for a second, that instead of new technology being owned by silicon valley proto-fascists, it was owned by us. AI that serves communities, instead of the billionaires who bu our democracy. 

Imagine if we reignited creativity in our classrooms. Sparking curious minds to keep dreaming up their own destiny. 

How about we rebuild our cultural and civic infrastructure so that there are places, at a low prices, for daily in person connection. 

If entrepreneurs shared their success with the workers who helped make it happen.

Policy was created by and with the communities impacted. 

If nature was given the rights and respect it deserves. 

We MUST dream. And we must keep building the future we want

And we can only do that together - because that power lies between us. 

So - all our incredible new Green councillors, and Mayors - you are our builders. To those of you feeling the thrill of making a difference, and those of you banging your heads against the brick wall of this centralised system: Thank you! Please keep going. We're working in a broken system. But we can pour gold into every crack. Cycle routes, solar panels, green spaces, *new *affordable *homes. When every decision is made in service of communities and nature, you cannot fail to make change.

It's time to weave a different web. A web of REAL HOPE. 

The billionaires are building their exits. Let them. *We *are *staying. 

We are putting down roots. In our communities, on this land. And together, we are going to make this place, this country, this planet, somewhere every one of us can thrive.

HERE is worth fighting for.