For many years, Cooper was one of a small number of Green Party councillors in the north of England, a small group across the country, in fact.
In May 2019, the Green Party came second across Burnley, doubling its vote from the previous year and winning in an area that got a lot of media attention in the mid-2000s because of its support for the BNP.
Perhaps more starkly, 2,700 is about the same number of Green members as there were in the UK when I joined the Scottish Greens in 2001.
For years, the Greens were one of a number of smaller parties, a pebble in a fast-flowing stream of ‘others’.
I first met Chris Williams on a bright spring morning outside a cafe in Barcelona in 2005.
For the next decade and a half, when I ran into him, he would usually be studying a street map or a spreadsheet, or weighing out leaflets, or giving a PowerPoint presentation in some dusty church hall: learning, and then teaching fellow activists, how a small party can win elections with almost no media coverage because of, rather than despite, its radical principles.
As well as his role in the party, Williams is a councillor in Solihull in the West Midlands, sitting on 75% of the vote in a ward made up largely of former council-owned tower blocks.
But most of the places he listed – Barnsley, Stockport, Rotherham, Doncaster, Knowsley – are exactly the sorts of ‘red wall’ areas that much of the media insists won’t vote Labour because it’s too ‘woke’.
Speaking to both Labour and Green members across the country, this is a remarkably consistent theme: Labour has dulled the energy of Corbynism, but failed to bring back the slickness of Blairism.
However, Labour’s failures are more than cosmetic, said Andy Fewings, a Green councillor for the Trinity ward in central Burnley, which he describes as “one of the most deprived wards in the country.
Much of his party’s success, he said, has been the result of Labour’s failure to do the hard work of listening to and representing working class people.
Racism is, of course, present throughout British society.
However, he said the BNP “went to people who really are poor and said ‘this isn’t your fault’,” while pointing the blame for their poverty at the local British-Asian community.
“Appeasing the minority’s racism” would have been a mistake, he said.
Kai Taylor, a Green councillor in Knowsley, Merseyside, makes a similar argument.
In Merseyside, the corruption scandals around Boris Johnson intertwine with those involving the Labour-run Liverpool city council to create a sense that both major Westminster parties are at it.
And while many manifestations of this belief are nonsense, the reason the narrative persists is that, ultimately, it is true.
Johnson encouraged people to vote politics away, to “get Brexit done”, and leave the market and the old ruling class to get on with it.
While the Tories can rely on the power and mythology of the ruling class, Labour depends on its promise to use its mastery of the British state to deliver material benefits to its voters.
In a patchwork of places across the country, the Greens have been able to show up, fresh-faced and recently re-energised by the collapse of Corbynism, Brexit and the school climate strikes, and step from outside that system and into this void.
While radical changes to the power structures that dominate the country may benefit most people, it’s important to understand that there are also conflicts between people’s interests.
Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, the Liberal Democrats built up bases of support across the country, representing the beliefs and interests of an increasingly broad array of different communities.
When these contradictions came under the pressure of decisions about real political power, it’s no surprise that the rich and powerful won out.
For Greens to avoid this fate, the party needs to embrace these conflicts rather than hiding them away.
But in reality, the opposite of being controversial is being ignored: a fate Greens have too often embraced, for fear of a fight.
Ralph Miliband documented how this happened to early Labour MPs in the 1920s, as they were toured around London clubs by the cleverer members of the ruling class, allowed to represent their voters so long as they played by the rules.
As the Murdochs and Rothermeres move against Johnson, Starmer seems to think that if he quietly waits in line with a neat haircut and follows all of the rules, then eventually he’ll be allowed to govern.
Instead, it needs to rip apart the unwritten rulebook whose codes, laws and lores are at the core of why people think the British state is dysfunctional and corrupt; to secure for England – and, probably independently, Wales and Scotland – more genuine democracy.
The former, she says, is “a vision of hope and empowerment”, the latter, “a greedy philosophy built on fear”.
As a result of the pandemic, “people are saying the old answers just don’t work any more… looking round for something different…
In the last few Scottish elections, the Greens have polled relatively well early on, and then suffered from a SNP surge at the end.
In London, polls show that the English Green’s co-leader and mayoral candidate, Siân Berry, is on course for her party’s best ever result, perhaps picking up an extra Assembly seat on the way.
The first is that, despite all those setbacks, the steady progress led by senior members such as Chris Williams and Natalie Bennett has meant that the party is incomparably bigger and more impressive than the one that we joined in the 2000s.
For British political journalists obsessed with the gossip of Westminster, the local election successes of England’s fourth party are unlikely to make front page news.