The Green Party needs to move away from the radical left

Another clichéd but copyright free image from Copilot

My survey of the British political parties moves on to the Green Party. The Greens had their most successful general election by far in July, winning four seats – they have had only one since 2005. And given the fragile nature of British politics, where small percentage shifts can change election results dramatically, the party is at its most influential on political events. Let’s look at them through the traditional SWOT framework, much beloved of professional facilitators.

Strengths

The Greens’ biggest strength is that they have a strong political brand. Everybody thinks they know what the party in general stands for: protection of the environment, sustainability and action against greenhouse gases. As a Liberal Democrat activist, I know this well: my party’s brand is much weaker. In local elections where neither party did much work, the Greens would regularly beat us. The Greens could put out dense, unreadable literature and it didn’t matter. People got the message that the Greens were active locally: they already knew what they were for. The party now regularly beats the Lib Dems in London Assembly elections, fought on proportional representation, where brand is critical, as it is so hard to communicate directly with so many voters. Meanwhile, environmental threats, and especially climate change, are so palpable that the brand has the power to resonate with the public.

A second strength is that the party has built up a bit of a local base of activists in swathes of the country. This has allowed them to succeed in Brighton, win a council in Suffolk, and parliamentary seats in both these places and in Bristol and Herefordshire too. This base seems to have two main sources: rural environmental campaigners (Suffolk and Herefordshire), and metropolitan left-wingers (Brighton and Bristol). All successful political parties are coalitions, so the fact that these groups are quite different is not a bad sign of itself.

Weaknesses

Alas both these strengths have a flip side. The brand is strong, but it also has a negative aspect, which currently restricts the party’s strength. Not everybody is comfortable with their environmentalism, and they can get associated with ideological extremism – which puts a lot of people off.

Likewise, though the party has areas of geographical strength, these are quite localised. It is not a mass movement represented in all of the country. Four seats is a good result for them, but they are along way from dozens of seats – much further than their rival lesser parties – the Lib Dems (who are already there) and Reform UK.

A third weakness is that their culture militates against disciplined, effective organisation. They insist on having two co-leaders, for example. While their strong brand allows them to pick up a proportion of voters easily, organising themselves to run campaigns to do more than this has been a struggle for them – more so than for the Lib Dems who make this transition much more easily.

Opportunities

The party’s biggest opportunity is that the Labour Party lacks challengers to its left, while angering left-inclined supporters. This feels not unlike the Liberal Democrats during the last Labour government (1997 to 2010), a period when they had a high vote share and won over 50 seats in three successive elections. They had a similar mix of rural and metropolitan support. Nowadays the Lib Dems are more focused on challenging the Conservatives than Labour, as they are their rivals in all but a handful of their seats (and the SNP most of the rest).

There is a rural opportunity too. The government has shown it is happy to face down rural opposition to its plans. To be clear, Labour doesn’t dislike rural communities, but it is happy to see a degree of collateral damage in their pursuit housing targets, green infrastructure and rich tax avoiders. This is a more competitive market though: Conservatives, Lib Dems and Reform all have a case to make too. But where the Greens are already strong in rural areas, they have the opportunity to advance further.

Threats

One threat to the Greens is the Lib Dems. The overlap between the parties is striking – in the priority given to the environment, and in generally socially liberal attitudes. Prior to this year’s election, though, they conspired to largely keep out of each other’s way – though there were no formal deals. There was just a mutual understanding that if they fought each other too hard, then the benefit would be to the Tories. But the Lib Dems parliamentary success has given them renewed confidence to challenge the Greens, especially in rural areas (like where I live in Sussex). Where the Lib Dems have established themselves they are generally better organised and better disciplined, and the momentum given to their party by success in July will also give them public credibility. The Greens should be able to handle this easily enough where they are already strong, but expanding this base will be harder. The Greens are probably less threatened in metropolitan areas, though, even where the Lib Dems used to be strong.

Perhaps a bigger threat is the party’s attachment to far-left politics. This is great for picking off disillusioned Labour supporters, but it runs against the political zeitgeist, where younger, ethnic minority and working class voters are increasingly put off by leftwing identity politics. These voters are starting to feel that the left doesn’t really care about the mundane issues of jobs and cost of living. Three areas stand out. The first is leftwing protests over Gaza, which the Greens have been strongly supportive of – actively seeking votes from Muslim communities. A second is the Just Stop Oil protests, which have periodically disrupted traffic or damaged works of art. These are separate from the Green Party, but that might not be so clear to voters. A third is the clash between “gender critical” activists and supporters of trans rights.

This last may not bother ordinary voters so much, but it poses a threat of a different sort. Under an employment tribunal case in 2021 it was established that gender critical views (i.e. people who say that birth is fixed from birth and cannot be re-assigned) are protected under the Equality Act. This is a very dangerous ruling for parties where the prevailing attitude that is gender critical views are not far off in kind to white supremicist ones. The Greens, along with Labour the Lib Dems and the SNP are struggling with this. But the pragmatic streak in each of the other parties makes it easier for them to make adjustments. Not making adjustments exposes parties to legal cases and substantial costs as both the Greens (being fined £90,000 in September) and the Lib Dems (who recently conceded a court case and may attract a similar fine, never mind legal costs) have already found. I don’t know how close the Greens are to making the necessary adjustments, but Trans supporters can be very militant, so this will be a struggle.

Conclusion

Green parties elsewhere in Europe have seen a struggle between “realists” and “fundamentalists”. It is the latter that give these parties so much of their energy and drive, but political advancement, and especially participation in government, requires a more pragmatic approach. Indeed environmental action will only succeed when it becomes quotidian – so widely accepted that people automatically assume that it is in their self-interest. Greens must either become more quotidian themselves or be left on the political margins. Such is the choice facing the Green parties in Britain.

4 thoughts on “The Green Party needs to move away from the radical left”

  1. An interesting statistic in this week’s Economist is that the general election placed the Green’s in second place in 50 constituencies, of which 49 have a Labour MP. As Labour in all likelihood is going to remain less popular than it was in the general election, it strikes me as almost inevitable that the Greens will secure a significant number of these 49 seats when they are next up for election, by capitalising on those who switch from Labour to them, together with switchers from the Lib Dems. On the other hand, is there not a contradiction in the Green’s appeal to many rural seats, in that farmers are first class polluters of rivers through the run off of noxious agricultural chemicals, and first class emitters of greenhouse gasses from cattle and – to a lesser extent – sheep. As this post implies, they are likely in these areas to be up against strong resistance from a currently centrist Lib Dem party. . So the political balance looks unstable in this area of inter-party competition, as elsewhere.

    1. There are many contradictions in the Greens’ rural stance. They probably genuinely want to move farming to something more sustainable – but there is also their opposition to pylons needed to support renewable energy.

    1. Yes that would be an interesting development. In the unlikely event that the party follows my advice that would hasten the move.

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