Jenny Jones, Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb

Green Party peer and long-time critic of Westminster, the UK’s Clean Air (Human Rights) Bill architect talks to Martin Guttridge-Hewitt about career politicians, inequality as an environmental threat, and her far-reaching legislative proposal.

‘The one thing that makes being appointed [to the House of Lords] bearable is that I can shout across the room at government, and they have to sit politely and listen, however rude I am. And that’s much better than shouting at the TV.’

According to a recent YouGov poll, seven in ten people view UK politicians negatively. Jenny Jones, Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb FSA, can empathise. The Green Party peer, who until 2019 was their only representative in Westminster’s upper chamber, has a well-earned reputation for talking straight and holding few punches when expressing frustrations at the way Britain is managed by Downing Street. Or, in her eyes, mismanaged.

Entering politics in 1988 when she was ‘finally persuaded’ to join the Greens after a lengthy spell fundraising for the cause, her advocacy for environmentalism, sustainability, and localism casts her as one of the leading voices for climate action in Britain. Over the course of her career, she has regularly backed ideas considered radical at the time, which have later been accepted by more mainstream thinkers.

For example, the right for everyone in the country to breathe clean air. As campaigners hope will be protected with the passing of Ella’s Law, a far-reaching piece of legislature that looks to bring the UK in line with World Health Organisation recommended maximum limits on various forms of emissions, including PM2.5 fine particulate matter, nitrogen oxides and carbon dioxide.

Named after Ella Adoo-Kissi-Debrah, the first Briton to have air pollution listed on their death certificate, aged nine, it was introduced to parliament in May 2022 by Baroness Jones. Winning first place in the House of Lords Ballot on private members’ bills, it went on to pass the chamber’s third and final reading in November.

“Ella's Law: I was anxious about getting it through right until the end. Then I suddenly thought: ‘Of course, who is going to stand up and say I want dirty air?'”

‘Way back in 2000, I had just started on the newly formed London Assembly, and someone said: ‘Oh, look, London’s going to break all these EU laws about air pollution, we should do something about this,’ Baroness Jones replies when asked when she first realised how important cleaning up the atmosphere was.

‘We approached Defra quite a few times over the next couple of years. And they always said, this is a non-issue. You don’t have to worry about it, it’s not real.

‘Of course, it fitted with the Green Party agenda. I mean, probably at that time we weren’t thinking about electric cars, but if you improve air quality it automatically improves the environment, reduces traffic, and therefore emissions. These are obviously big things for greens,’ she continues. ‘Really, though, we’ve been talking about similar things for 50 years now. As the Green Party, we just had our 50th anniversary, and in that time, a similar point has always been made… humans are damaging our planet, our precious planet.’

“Both Labour and the Tories like this idea of a silver bullet. And Al Gore said, there’s no such thing as a silver bullet, there’s silver buckshot” haven’t done anything like that yet, and the more pressure we put on them by MPs signing the Early Day Motion and stuff like that, the more likely it is that elements of it will get through,’ she continues, citing Green Party leader, MP Caroline Lucas as vital to ongoing efforts in the Commons.

Ella’s Law – or the Clean Air (Human Rights) Bill – is making good progress and awaiting a second reading in the House of Commons. The proposed legislation essentially creates requirements for any new development to be considered within the context of resulting air pollution and sets much tighter limits on acceptable levels of pollutants. The fact it has so far been received favourably initially came as a surprise.

For Baroness Jones, though, none of this is indicative of a UK political system that works properly for the electorate, or the environment. We ask whether she feels concerned that issues such as air pollution and wider climate crisis require us as a society and country to look at, invest in, and stick to medium and long-term solutions, which do not naturally lend themselves to four-year political cycles. The status quo exists because those who win power often look to undo the work of predecessors as a matter of course, regardless of impact.

‘If you've got principles, you can look at everything that's been done over the past four years, eight years, you know, 20 years, and think: ‘Ah, that was really good. We'll keep that.’ Or: ‘That was really shit, we'll throw that out’,’ says Baroness Jones, who believes the current administration is ‘incapable of seeing any value in anyone else’s ideas’. And that’s not the only problem. ‘Both Labour and the Tories like this idea of a silver bullet. And Al Gore said, there’s no such thing

‘I thought it would get more pushback, because it is so tough and it’s got so many measures for the government,’ Baroness Jones explains. ‘I was anxious about getting it through right until the end. Then I suddenly thought: ‘Of course, who is going to stand up and say I want dirty air?’ Really, there wasn’t much they could do because even with all these new responsibilities, the Bill makes sense. You know, it’s coherent.

‘Normally the most you can hope for with a private member's bill, especially something this big and this tough, is that the government will actually look at it properly, then take elements out and implement those in their own way. They as a silver bullet, there’s silver buckshot, but the problem of climate change is so huge you can’t find one thing to fix it.’

Admitting that ending the use of fossil fuels would be a good place to ‘start fixing it’, Jones is also clear that understanding wider issues contributing to the climate crisis is essential. Stopping the extraction of, and our reliance on, oil, is a large calibre weapon, then. But pushing for a more equal society is also significant. ‘You can't let people fall into poverty, because then they're not worried about saving the planet, they’re panicking about feeding kids and getting their kids shoes. You have to understand that you've got to take everybody with you.’