Green co-deputy leader Rachel Millward addresses Brighton conference

Live coverage from Brighton has shown Rachel Millward, the Green Party's co-deputy leader, addressing the party's annual conference. The conference has been running for several days. Millward, who also leads Wealden Council, used the speech to combine party growth figures with a wide argument about technology, democracy and community.

She opened with local colour, describing Brighton and Sussex as a place of 'heathland and vineyards, enterprise and art, farmers and drag queens', and said it would be a good place for a green mayor. She told delegates that a year earlier she had announced the party had just overtaken the Liberal Democrats with 82,500 members. Since then, she said, membership had nearly tripled. She described the past year as one of hope, with action days, more Green representatives elected, and campaigning on climate inequality, immigration and trans rights.

Millward then turned to technology and power. She said the country could not simply look back at 40 years of neoliberalism, a phrase she linked to Andy Burnham, and instead had to choose a future amid rapid technological and social change. She attacked 'tech bros' and 'oligarchical overlords' who, she said, would lock people into separate digital worlds filled with AI slop and misinformation, and build hyperscale data centres powered by unstable energy and US-made chips. A handful of men, she argued, controlled too much, hoarded wealth, polluted the planet and were now trying to buy democracy. She cited Peter Thiel and Elon Musk as billionaires who wanted to escape the consequences through post-human upgrades or another planet.

She also warned about the loss of civic spaces and the illusion of online connection. The price of a 'connecting cuppa' was now the price of lunch, she said, leaving people in feedback loops that splintered society. She spoke of rising panic and the despair of young people who fear climate wreckage and a fake future. But she urged delegates to take a breath and look around, saying the world of soil, trees, food and physical connection was worth defending, and that 'we have all the power that we need. It's between us.'

The speech included a detailed case study from Crowborough in Wealden, where she said the Home Office had placed hundreds of asylum seekers in an unsuitable military camp without communication or consultation. She said the consequences had been devastating for the community, not because of asylum seekers but because the policy was cruel, performative and expensive and acted like a petri dish for the far right. A normally peaceful town council meeting had become darker, she said, amid hate and fear spread by an organised global far-right movement online. Volunteers had responded by running language classes, art and music sessions and forest walks, building friendships across difference.

Millward closed with a political pitch. She claimed the Greens had helped bring an end to a 'Starmer regime' that was ushering Reform into government, and that the party had taken four times as many votes from Labour at the local elections as Reform did. She said the party was now active in London while Reform was bankrolled by two crypto billionaires, and referred to two men giving what she corrected to 72 million pounds in a single weekend. She also pointed to the Gorton and Denton by-election in February, which she said had changed British political history. Crediting volunteers who delivered leaflets, organised meetings and stood for election, she told the conference: 'the future doesn't write itself. We can write it.'