Green party

Mike Woodin

Dr Mike Woodin, who has died from cancer at the cruelly young age of 38, was everything a Green politician should be, combining a radical and inspiring vision of how the world could be together with the practical policies to get us there. At a time when our elected representatives are increasingly viewed as cynical and self-serving, his political career was an inspiring reminder that honesty, intelligence and humanity can still thrive at the heart of public life.

Principal Speaker for the Green Party and Leader of the Green Group on Oxford City Council, he made an enormous contribution to the growth and success of green politics at both local and national levels. He brought a new professionalism to the Party and, in his role as Speaker, was one of the most articulate, passionate, and persuasive advocates of its policies.

Born in Hartley, Kent in 1965, he graduated in psychology from Manchester University, achieved his doctorate at Wolfson College, Oxford and then became a don at Balliol College where he lectured and tutored in psychology.

He was elected as Oxford's first Green City Councillor in 1994, and worked tirelessly to make Oxford Green Party one of the most successful in the country. He was instrumental in seeing the Green numbers rise on the city council to reach a total of seven councillors, giving them the balance of power on the Council. He championed the rights of cyclists and pedestrians and, largely as a result of his work and leadership, Oxford now has less city-centre traffic congestion and pollution, 100% door to door recycling, and a commitment to 50% affordable housing in its new city structure plan. Just two weeks ago, he took his place on the city council's new executive board as the Green Party's only representative, giving the Green Group a voice at the heart of the city's government.

One of his enduring legacies will be a greater understanding of how Green politicians can stay true to the vision of green politics in the everyday world of grey politics that they find themselves in. As he put it himself, "the ideal is rarely if ever an option and, as we are discovering in Oxford where we have left the luxury of opposition behind, the art of being successful Greens in power lies in knowing when to settle for what can be achieved rather than holding out for more and failing to get anything." It was an art of which he was a master.

As well as campaigning locally, he was also active on the national and international level, both as Principal Speaker for the Party - a post he held for six of the last eight years - and as a member of the Party's ruling Executive, where his contribution to developing election strategy was critical in the election of the first UK Greens to the European Parliament in 1999.

He was a brilliant communicator, and hugely enjoyed the battle of wits in public debates, and in the media. But he didn't enjoy them for their own sake - for him, they were vital vehicles for the urgent and important task of spreading the message of green politics. His was a hugely inspiring vision of how the world could be - a world "where people can live at peace with themselves, at peace with each other and at peace with the natural world", as he put it. His passionate and eloquent commitment to peace, social justice, and environmental sustainability touched the hearts and changed the minds of many.

He was deeply critical of neo-liberal economics, and the unquestioning pursuit of profit and materialism which come in its wake, and his training in psychology led him to look at the impact of globalisation not only on the economy, but on people's lives and hopes. He spoke passionately about how the over-riding drive for competitiveness feeds through to the individual level, "where it generates endless social comparison and, in turn, resentment. In the classroom, community or workplace, there is always someone brighter, wealthier or more attractive to envy and to blind us to a sense of our own self-worth."

He spent much of the last 18 months working on a book about Green politics and the alternatives to globalisation, which was published earlier this year. He signed off the proofs the day before his diagnosis with cancer in February.

He faced his illness with gut-wrenching honesty, refusing to meet it with denial. At the Party's Spring Conference in March, he spoke with enormous courage and intensity of the enormous hole which cancer had punched in his life, and of his efforts to come to terms with it. His early death has punched a hole in the lives of his family and in all of his many friends.

He leaves a wife, Deborah, herself a former Green city councillor, and two children, aged five and two.

Caroline Lucas MEP

Michael Edward Woodin, Green politician, born November 6 1965; died July 9 2004.

The Mike Woodin Trust, set up to support projects promoting the ecological ideals he so believed in and championed, can be contacted at trust AT greenoxford.com