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Your support makes all the difference.Russell Brand has revised his anti-voting stance and called for people living in Brighton to vote for Caroline Lucas of the Green Party.
The politicised comedian, who caused a row in 2013 when he said he did not vote, said Ms Lucas was obviously a “decent” person and worth electing to Parliament.
“People that live in Brighton Pavilion should definitely vote for you,” he told Ms Lucas in an interview on his YouTube channel.
Turning to the camera, he said: “Are you a person that lives in Brighton Pavilion? If you are, you should definitely vote for this person, Caroline Lucas.”
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Ms Lucas was elected as Britain's first Green Party MP in the seat of Brighton Pavilion at the 2010 election and is seeking re-election next week.
The endorsement is an apparently reversal of Mr Brand’s previous position, which he outlined in an interview with the journalist Jeremy Paxman.
Explaining his decision to endorse Ms Lucas, Mr Brand said: “When you meet Caroline Lucas and Natalie Bennett [the leader of the Green Party] you think, ‘these are obviously decent people’.
“It’s like the opposite of what I imagine it’s like to meet David Cameron and what I know it’s like to meet Nigel Farage - people who are working for the unelected interests that control this country.”
“By [the Greens’] own admission with a First Past the Post electoral system you’re never going to have significant Green representation because politics and the election is set up not to represent people’s wishes.
“In most cases it don’t matter if you don’t vote Green. In Brighton Pavilion, evidently, voting Green has real meaning,” he said.
“It’s the system itself that’s problematic. Even when you have decent people with decent ideas, getting those people in a position where they can legislate those ideas, make real change, challenge the interests of the powerful, that’s a real challenging, difficult thing to do due to systemic problems.”
In the interview Ms Lucas and Ms Bennett outlined policies on breaking up media monopolies, reforming the electoral system, and making global institutions more democratic.
“Lots of the reasons that the bankers have power or other unelected people have power is because politicians have given that power away. It’s not some divine right that those people have power,” Ms Lucas said.
The interview was recorded as part of a ‘politics week’ of programmes on Mr Brand’s YouTube channel The Trews.
Mr Brand had previously published an interview with Labour leader Ed Miliband. After learning of the interview’s existence, the prime minister David Cameron referred to Mr Brand as “a joke”.
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