The Daily Telegraph - Saturday
Why the Green Party opened the door to the radical Left
After the organisation found itself at the centre of a storm over Gaza, insiders fear that broadening its electoral base – in a bid to take on Labour – could backfire.
On the face of it, Andrew Mellen, a farmer in Suffolk, and Mothin Ali, an accountant and Islamic teacher from Leeds, don’t have a great deal in common.
But following the local election on May 2, both are now Green Party councillors.
In campaign videos Mellen can be seen holding a lamb, collecting litter from the roadside and joking about how the people of Suffolk have “really got a taste for their Greens”. During his victory speech, by contrast, Ali shouted: “We will not be silenced. We will raise the voice of Gaza. We will raise the voice of Palestine.
Allahu Akbar!”
Both of which were a far cry from the stump speeches of the Green candidate for mayor of London, Zoë Garbett, her fringe dyed shocking pink, in which she proclaimed that she wanted to make London “a more transinclusive city” ... with a “trans commission with trans Londoners to make sure their rights are at the heart of everything we do”.
The fact that the Green Party of England and Wales, the perennial underdog of British politics for more than half a century, is fielding such different candidates with such apparently different agendas can be seen in two lights.
On the one hand, it suggests they are no longer a single-issue party and are developing a broad enough coalition of supporters to become an electoral force. On the other hand, it raises questions about what the party stands for, and whether it has been hijacked by those for whom a far-Left agenda is more important than the environmental fate of the planet.
The Greens gained 74 seats at the local elections, the fifth in a row in which the party has increased its number of elected councillors across the country, taking the grand total to 812 (out of approximately 17,000 in England, or almost 5 per cent). Having seized control of Mid Suffolk council last year, the Greens have now become the biggest party on the Bristol City and Hastings borough councils (falling just short of an overall majority in both cases).
The UK’s first-past-the-post system is not kind to smaller parties. They have to build up their strength in different parts of the country, sometimes with different strategies. The evidence of the local elections suggests this is becoming the case, with some worrying implications for both the two main parties.
But such tactics can come at a cost.
Some Green Party insiders are concerned about the intense media focus on new councillors like Ali, who since being elected has become the centre of an anti-Semitism row and has apologised “for the upset caused” by his remarks.
They worry this will give the impression that the party has been commandeered by candidates with a radical Leftist agenda – an agenda that could turn off potential voters from other points on the political spectrum and for whom the environment is the primary concern.
“On the one hand you have the sort-of Cameroonian-conservationist-Remainers, who are very recent additions to the Green coalition,” says James Dennison, a political scientist at the University of East Anglia and one of the leading experts on the Green Party. “And on the other you have the far-Left voters they’ve regained since Jeremy Corbyn was ousted as leader of the Labour Party and added to because of Starmer’s stance on the war in Gaza. That’s quite a hard balance to strike, especially when we get to a national campaign.”
Radical socialist aims
Green Party members have long faced the accusation that they are merely “watermelons” and that their ecological credentials provide a useful cover for radical socialist aims. It’s undoubtedly true that the policies propounded by those at the front and centre of the climate debate – increased regulation, curbs on fossil fuel exploration and wealth taxes – tend to sit more comfortably with those on the Left.
As recently as 2015 the Green Party called for zero economic growth.
Events beyond England have helped fuel this view of the Greens. Take the participation this week of Greta Thunberg, poster child of climate activists, in the Stop Israel demonstration in Malmo ahead of Israeli singer Eden Golan’s performance at Eurovision.
Most notable, however, is the powersharing agreement that Nicola Sturgeon announced in Scotland with the Greens in August 2021, only for her party to become caught up by her new partner’s obsessions with net zero and trans rights.
Having used North Sea riches as one of the main pillars of the case for Scottish independence, Sturgeon said soon after getting into bed with the Greens that it was “fundamentally wrong” for her country to continue exploring and extracting oil and gas. The then first minister then pushed the infamous Gender Recognition Reform (Scotland) Bill, which would have introduced a self-identification system for people wanting to change sex. The political fortunes of both her and her party soon slumped catastrophically.
There have been hints of similar tension in the Green Party of England and Wales. In 2022 Sheffield Central Green Party candidate Alison Teal was suspended from the party after colleagues claimed her social media posts were transphobic. This included praising an article that criticised Eddie Izzard’s use of a women’s lavatory at a Labour Party fundraising event. Earlier this year,
Teal tweeted: “@TheGreenParty don’t seem to understand sex matters. Being shunned for holding scientific opinions is surreal & distressing.”
As recently as December, the Green Party cut official ties with Green Party Women, one of its largest groups, with members claiming they were “disaffiliated” because of their promotion of “gender-critical views” (a party spokesman said the suspension was for procedural reasons).
“The question of trans issues is a big issue for the Green Party and hasn’t been dealt with well,” says Sir Jonathon Porritt, an environmentalist and veteran Green Party member. “It’s pretty clear that the Scottish Green Party’s stance on this alienated huge numbers of SNP MSPs and led to the Scottish government’s current difficulties. It’s something we really need to get a grip of, especially in the wake of the Cass Review
[on gender identity services for children in the NHS].”
Pub beginnings
Indeed, for much of its history the Green
Party has been a repository of protest votes, a rattlebag of wacky policies and a magnet for weirdos. David Icke, the conspiracy theorist who claims to be the son of God and that the world is run by reptiles, was briefly the party’s national spokesman in the early 1990s.
The party can trace its origins back to an article in Playboy in the 1970s, which included an interview in which the US biologist Paul Ehrlich issued dire warnings about the dangers of overpopulation. Discussing the tidings of doom in a Warwickshire pub, four friends decided to form a new political movement and the People Party was born. Two years later it changed its name to the Ecology Party before finally becoming the Green Party in 1985.
Originally the party was focused on curbing population growth and championed free sterilisation. It has since moved on from birth control but has expressed scepticism about Nato and argued the UK does not need a standing army.
Despite some of its nuttier policies, the party has enjoyed several episodic surges of support down the years. When climate change and the ozone layer dominated public debate in the late 1980s, the Greens won 15 per cent of the vote at the European elections.
Interestingly, the Green Party was campaigning for an EU referendum as recently as the 2015 general election. Indeed, Nigel Farage voted for the Green Party in 1989 because of what he called their “sensible” and Eurosceptic policies.
Caroline Lucas was elected as the first Green MP to Westminster in May 2010 and the party also enjoyed a huge membership surge in 2015 when she was originally excluded from the televised leadership debates in the run up to that year’s general election. At one point the party’s membership surpassed that of Ukip and the Liberal Democrats.
Porritt says the Green Party used to attract people who were more interested in protesting than actually wielding power. Not anymore. “That’s something that has definitely changed,” he says, “primarily because of growing successes at the local level.” As recently as 2015, it had fewer than 100 councillors across England and Wales.
The eightfold increase in the subsequent decade has shown it is possible for Greens to get elected and make an impact – at least at local level.
“[We’re] still to prove that at the national level (beyond the one-person powerhouse of Caroline Lucas),” Porritt adds. “But if the party ends up with two, three or even four MPs, then I think the impact on membership will be very significant.”
Dennison agrees, especially if the Tories are ousted, as the polls currently suggest they will be, and subsequently lurch to the Right in opposition. A Labour government will occupy the centre ground but this could open up space for the Greens on the Left.
Change of tactics
Porritt says that while out campaigning he has noticed particular support for the party’s “distinctive policies” on housing and tax. He says the two main parties appear “scared out of their minds to raise the issue of wealth inequality” but the vast majority of the population is alive to an inherent unfairness: “It’s a big, big pitch.”
There are signs the Green Party is learning how to box clever. In the past, it hoped to win a second Westminster seat by trying to push its share of the national vote high enough. That never happened. The Greens won almost 840,000 votes at the 2019 election but only managed to send one MP to Westminster.
They have therefore changed tactics and focused on specific constituencies.
The Greens have, for example, been active in Mid Suffolk for the best part of 20 years.
The trajectory mirrors that of the Liberal Democrats, which spent much of the 1980s and 1990s building up its base of councillors until it had the local power bases and campaigning muscle to launch an assault on Westminster.
As well as doing well in Bristol and Suffolk at the local elections, the Greens added councillors in Hertfordshire, Babergh, Folkestone and Hythe and the Forest of Dean. They also picked up their first council seats in Newcastle, Sefton and Redditch.
Over the past four of five years the two main parties have been so focused on the so-called “red wall” constituencies in the Midlands and Northern England that historically supported the Labour Party but voted Conservative in the 2019 election. The Liberal Democrats have concentrated on winning “blue wall” seats in Southern England.
But there’s a lot more to the UK than those two regions. The Greens have presented themselves as an option in some of the places that have fallen through the cracks and don’t get a lot of media and political attention. Porritt describes such constituencies as effectively “rotten boroughs”.
“The most exciting thing for the Green Party about the local elections is that their voter coalition appears to be expanding,” says Dennison. The party did well in a city like Bristol, where Labour would expect to do well. But it is also making inroads into small towns and rural areas like Suffolk and Herefordshire, which are traditional
Tory areas.
“We always think in terms of Left and Right because that makes it easier to analyse what’s going on but the reality is a lot more nuanced than that,” says Dennison. “While the Greens have been a party of the Left for a long time, there’s another side of environmentalism, which you might call conservationism, and is a lot closer to conservatism, which isn’t so different from what David Cameron was tapping into.”
In Herefordshire, for example, a key issue for the Greens is the ecological damage that has been wreaked on the River Wye.
“And that’s really where it’s no longer about Left or Right but about who has destroyed our river and what are we going to do about it,” says Dennison.
In Suffolk that means appealing to those who are slightly cynically labelled eco-Nimbys: those who are using environmentalism as a way to justify opposition to large new housing developments. “The Greens would say that’s absolutely not true. But it’s a bit irresistible if you’re willing in a place like Mid Suffolk to not do that a bit.”
Like all Westminster parties, the Greens must have the ability to present themselves in different ways in different places. A Tory candidate in London will be quite different to one campaigning in rural Yorkshire.
The same is true of the Greens.
Tapping disillusionment
But the party is also hoping to capitalise on widespread disillusionment with the two main parties. “Lots of people are looking for a positive alternative,” says Adrian Ramsay, one of the Green Party’s co-leaders. “I knock on doors in the [Suffolk] constituency in which I’m standing and people say they haven’t been visited by a politician in 25 years.”
The party has focused its campaigns on topics it hopes can bridge the political divide, such as increasing the availability of affordable housing, restoring public services and defending the natural environment.
“That’s a message that resonates across the board,” says Ramsay. “It doesn’t matter if you can’t see a dentist in Bristol or you can’t see a dentist in East Anglia, you still have a sore tooth.”
Historically the Greens have had an issue with the two main parties embracing environmental causes. It happened in the 1990s when the environment first became a mainstream political issue and again when both parties were pushing for net zero. The Green Party found it had to get itself heard when David Cameron was hugging huskies and replacing the Tory party’s torch icon with an oak tree.
But more recently the two parties have been rolling back their greener policies.
Last September, Rishi Sunak pushed back a ban on the sale of new petrol and diesel cars from 2030 until 2035 (although the prime minister said he was “absolutely unequivocal” about sticking to the commitment to reach net zero carbon emissions by 2050). In February, Keir Starmer executed a similar about-turn when he ditched Labour’s £28billion-a-year green investment plan, designed to reach climate targets and create new jobs.
It is likely, therefore, that those voters for whom the environment is a primary consideration will be looking once more at the Greens in the run up to the general election. The party is aiming to field candidates in every seat in England and Wales, the first time it will have done so.
However, the Greens have their sights firmly set on four constituencies in particular. They will firstly be looking to retain Brighton Pavilion, the party’s only Westminster seat, which is held by former leader Caroline Lucas, who is stepping down, and will be fought by Sian Berry, the party’s former candidate for mayor of London. Ellie Chowns, a former
MEP and current head of the Greens on Herefordshire Council, is standing in
North Herefordshire.
The party’s current co-leaders Carla Denyer and Adrian Ramsay are respectively standing in Bristol West (which will become Bristol Central) and the new constituency of
Waveney Valley on the border between Suffolk and Norfolk.
Bristol West has been the Green Party’s targeted second Westminster seat for at least 10 or 15 years. But, following the local elections, the party now holds all 14 of the council seats in the new constituency, giving its footsoldiers visibility, credibility and renewed hope of capturing the seat from Thangam Debbonaire, the shadow secretary of state for digital, culture, media and sport.
The party has also historically done well in York and one or two Manchester seats.
A full slate of Green candidates stood across Manchester’s 32 wards in the local election, with the party winning all three council seats in Woodhouse Park in the south of the city, finishing in second place in just under half of all wards, and garnering a record 17.9 per cent of the vote.
Pollsters say it will be hard to take on
Labour in Manchester in the general election but the Greens will be hoping they can capitalise on the high number of students and Muslim voters to establish themselves as the second biggest political force in the city.
“I think Labour will fight really hard in the seats the Greens have targeted,” says Dennison. “They really won’t want that to become a story because it will add credence to the narrative that Starmer is drifting too far Rightward and betraying the party’s traditional base.”
Speaking after the local election results, Denyer said the Greens had picked up Labour voters who were disappointed by Starmer’s about-turn on green investment, opposition to nationalising public services and stance on the war in Gaza.
Gaza ceasefire
The Greens called for a ceasefire in the Israel-Hamas conflict months before Labour, which originally demanded an “enduring cessation of fighting”. Ellie Reeves, Labour’s deputy national campaign coordinator, has admitted her party has “a great deal of work to do to rebuild trust with Muslim communities”.
The Labour Party certainly seems to be spooked by the rising popularity of the Greens. A few days ago it put out a list of all the environmental projects that Green councillors have rejected across the country. Of course, councils reject all kinds of projects all the time, usually because they’re not very good.
Nevertheless, it’s interesting that Labour is taking the time and effort to question the eco-credentials of the Green Party. Dennison expects Labour to come up with a big environmental offer and a foreign policy offer in the next few weeks, suggesting the Greens are starting to shape the political agenda.
“We’re not there to just shave a few votes off another party,” says Ramsay. “We’ve already shown we can be a serious force.”