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‘It’s time for change’: Green seeds are ready to sprout in local elections
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“In a lot of ways, this is like coming out of a war,” Andrew Cooper, the Green Party candidate for mayor of West Yorkshire, said when I asked him how canvassing was going.

“People are looking around for change. Business as usual would be a failure, and a lot of people recognise that.”

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. But in the UK’s local elections next week, he’s aiming to help his party win local authority seats in every council area in South Yorkshire, including Doncaster, Barnsley and Rotherham, as well as expanding on its already respectable haul in Sheffield.

If they succeed, he predicted: “A certain amount of the ‘red wall’ will become a ‘green wall’.” It’s plausible.

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. That year – the last round of local elections in the UK because 2020’s were delayed to 2021 by lockdown – the party took 265 seats in England, 194 more than the previous election in the same cycle: a 273% increase.

A total of 2,700 people are running as Green Party of England and Wales candidates in this year’s local elections, which makes up 59% of the 5,000 seats up for grabs compared with only 29% in 2019 – and ten times more than the next biggest party, the rebranded front for Faragism, ReformUK.

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. And Green activists from Merseyside to South Tyneside tell me that they are feeling cheerful, as Keir Starmer silences Labour, the Lib Dems disappear, and a generation politicised by austerity, Brexit and climate change hunt for someone to cheer.

For years, the Greens were one of a number of smaller parties, a pebble in a fast-flowing stream of ‘others’. This year, the party is no longer the steadiest of the small parties. It’s the smallest of the big parties.

The navigator

I first met Chris Williams on a bright spring morning outside a cafe in Barcelona in 2005. I had just arrived from Edinburgh as the Scottish representative to the Federation of Young European Greens. He – smiley, gentle, lanky – turned out to be my English counterpart.

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. By understanding, rather than exploiting, the alienation gnawing at British politics.

These days, he is the national election co-ordinator of the Green Party of England and Wales, the calm hand guiding the national effort.

“We’re finding the Labour vote very, very brittle,” he told me. Winning votes from Starmer’s party, is “like putting a knife through butter”.

“The Tory vote is firmer than in 2019,” but, “in ‘red wall’ seats, they still feel that Labour isn’t listening, that Labour don’t get them, that Labour don’t understand you.”

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. “People say they are hurting,” he said, and “the main thing they say is, ‘The Labour Party doesn’t care about me’”.

He is hopeful of Green gains across Scotland and England. 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’. The areas that, were you to believe the media-pundit-complex, are inhabited solely by caricatures of some imagined ‘white working class’ who, the stereotype insists, must despise nothing more than the Green Party.

Strange then that many of these very people appear likely to vote Green next week.

Labour’s failures

“Labour’s organisation on the ground is just embarrassing,” said Williams. Giving the example of the West Midlands mayoral election, where the Labour MP Liam Byrne is standing, he described the party’s campaign materials as “shoddy, embarrassing – the kind of thing that we would all produce when we’re just learning to fight an election”.

He continued: “This stuff just seems so basic, I just don’t understand why Labour can’t get a leaflet which is something you’d want to engage with,” adding: if you “can’t even produce a leaflet that is semi-legible”, then you aren’t going to win.

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. And so instead, the practical job of running local campaigns is, in many places, left to greying councillors with few ideas and no sense of how to communicate them.

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. The average reading age is low and the unemployment rate is around 50%.” He said he was “quietly confident” that the Greens could pick up the larger county council division, which includes this ward, in this year’s Lancashire County Council elections.

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. “We challenge the council to perform the services they are meant to be performing,” he told me. And by listening, he said he has heard how people in his ward feel “taken for granted” by the party they traditionally voted for.

But he also believes that Labour’s failure to listen to voters in places like Burnley means that they have failed to understand the roles played by nationalism and racism in their politics.

[1] Url: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/opendemocracyuk/its-time-for-change-green-seeds-are-ready-to-sprout-in-local-elections/