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Is the Green Party heading for an identity crisis? [1]
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Date: 2023-05
More broadly, as Green thinker and former councillor Sam Coates puts it, “if we’re not critiquing the system that people are getting elected under, if we’re just representing people to the system, where does the transformation come from? In what terms are people in the party engaging with these positions taking them up? Do they just think they are nicer people, or do they understand this is a hostile system? Rather than just managing things better, we need to use whatever levers we can to bring fundamental change to the system. Or else, can we actually deliver the radical change we promise voters, and that the world needs?”
“We should see success of the Greens as part of general disillusion with the Westminster system. If people were happy with the system as it was, we wouldn’t see these upsurges. Greens should resist the temptation to be just another part of the broken party system. The party needs to become a vehicle for the fundamental disillusionment with the way things are.”
Geography
Perhaps the most striking thing about this year’s Green gains is its geography. It’s not surprising to see the party thrive in the centres of university cities like Bristol or Norwich. It wasn’t even very surprising when Greens started winning some of the most impoverished wards in the country, off the back of traditional left-wing messaging and organising. But I don’t think anyone five years ago would have predicted that they would be the biggest group on East Herts Council, or have taken control of large swathes of rural Suffolk.
To understand this phenomenon, we have to look at how Britain is changing. Everywhere I spoke to people involved in Green successes, I asked them about new housing in their wards since the last election. And all of them confirmed new estates had been built, and that their canvass data and sampling from ballot boxes at the counts showed much of their vote had come from the people – often young families moving out of cities – who had moved into them.
“I had fairly detailed sampling data from the count on a box-by-box basis,” says Doug Rouxel, a UCU and Green Party activist who took a longstanding Tory ward in Stafford this year, “so I know that the two [new] estates voted fairly heavily for me, and the gated private estate voted fairly heavily for the Conservative candidate.”
If the Green Party really gained national attention in 2010 when Caroline Lucas was elected, it’s people who were then in their 20s who are now most likely to treat it as a normal part of the political landscape, and a serious option. These people – millennials – are also the generation who were hit hardest by the great recession, and tend to have politics a long way to the left of their parents. Thirteen years since Lucas’s breakthrough, they are in their 30s or early 40s, often starting families and moving out of the big cities – pushed out by price and in search of space, taking their politics with them. Between 2011 and 2021, the population of East Herts – where Greens now lead the council – grew by 9%. The eastern region, where the Greens particularly thrived in these elections, was the fastest growing area of England over the last decade.
Just as parts of the north of England went blue in 2019 partly because most of the young people had left, so parts of the south are going red, yellow or green partly because that’s where they’ve headed.
While this process is nothing new, it was accelerated by the ‘race for space’ during the pandemic, and the rise of working from home. Among previous generations, this habit of people moving out of city centres as they get older has been accompanied by a rightward drift in their politics. Millennials, on the whole, have broken that rule. Anecdotally, many of the Green activists who have helped get new councillors elected in surprising places are 30-somethings who’ve moved from big cities in the last few years.
"Looking at the data after the election, I realised we hadn't really converted Tories. We just turned out everyone else – including lots of new residents,” says Rouxel.
“Had Labour been on their doorstep, they would have voted for them.”
What these people have discovered is a much older phenomenon. For decades, Labour has written off the English countryside as inherently Tory, as though its market towns and mill towns don’t have working class people in them, as though everyone is a landlord yet no one a tenant. In Scotland, the SNP got its foothold in seats like the one where I grew up, in rural Perthshire, by winning over these working class voters Labour had always forgotten. In England, there are some deep cultural reasons why rural areas vote Tory. But there are also just long held assumptions in party HQs which they never bother to question. “People think we’re all middle class out here,” says Stringer. “We’re not.”
The New Statesman has shown that, in seats the Greens took in the recent election, turnout increased by an average 5%. Sometimes, particularly in a local election where turnout is low, particularly when Tory voters aren’t motivated to show up, rallying the anti-Tory opposition, even in deepest blue Suffolk, can get you close to beating them.
And once the party starts to get momentum in these areas, it does seem like it is managing to win over a few former Tory votes too.
Natalie Bennett describes canvassing in Leigh-on-Sea in South Essex, and being invited by an 80-year-old woman into “a lovely groomed living room, overlooking the Thames. Her mother had told her to always vote Tory. But she wasn’t happy with that, and is now voting Green.”
Some people she spoke to, says Bennett, “were voting Tory [in the past] because it was left over from 20th century politics, from a sense of inertia – both class-based and culture-based, if you considered yourself to be a certain sort of person, that’s the way you voted.”
For these people, what they actually think about policies, and how the country ought to be run, is often radically different from how they vote. Forty years of economic chaos means lots of people whose parents thought of themselves as middle-class really aren’t. Often, these people don’t oppose Labour because it’s somehow too left-wing, but because their parents taught them to, like a rival football team. “It’s a culture that’s created by first past the post,” says Bennett. Because their Tory identity was rooted in their area, once lots of their neighbours are voting Green, they are happy to make the switch too.
Give left-wing policies – including policies to the left of Labour – a different name, and show up asking for votes, and it’s possible to shoogle people out of the Tory grip.
Challenges
But there is also a possibility people voted for the party for conservative rather than progressive reasons. If Greens have benefited from young families moving into new-builds in rural areas, it’s often also true that they got themselves into the position to do so by opposing the building of those houses in the first place.
What councillors I spoke to said is that they don’t oppose house building per se, but they do object to entire local communities being designed by vast development corporations. One said that people who live in a new housing estate in his ward call it an ‘Amazon desert’ because there are no shops, cafes or parks, just houses with Amazon packages outside.
Whatever may have motivated Green councillors to oppose development, they will likely have hoovered up votes from people who are simply against new housing. And where Greens have been put into power, they must now choose between building the social homes they say they are in favour of, at the risk of pissing off those voters, or becoming agents of regressive NIMBYism.
This speaks to another risk. Before the recent local elections, the Greens had a clear next Westminster seat: Bristol Central, where party co-leader Carla Denyer is standing. Greens hold a majority of seats across the constituency, and the most seats across the city. To win over urban voters in central Bristol, Denyer needs to project exactly the same image that Caroline Lucas does to win Brighton Pavillion.
With Greens now holding a majority on Mid Suffolk council, the corresponding constituency of Waveney Valley has become another obvious target seat, and here, the other co-leader, Adrian Ramsay (no relation) is standing. But the demographic is very different from that in Bristol Central, and there will be an obvious temptation for the party to water down its more radical messages to try to appeal to former Tories. I understand there are some senior figures in the party pushing such a strategy. James Dennison warns against this instinct.
“Going for Tory seats is not the same as going for Tory voters,” he says. “I think there’s a risk the party is going to confuse themselves a bit now… The biggest strategic mistake that the Greens can make now is to think that they need to go all-in on a conservative message, because that’s not their voting coalition. If they do that, then they’ll just throw away all the progress they’ve made because they’ll be giving out conflicting messages. They’re not going to get many Tories over because the ideological gap is just too much. So that would be a mad move.”
If there is an opportunity for Greens, it comes in the form of Labour’s swing to the right under Starmer and the vast pool of activists and anger looking for a post-Corbyn expression. These people are only just starting to move to the Greens. If they shift in big numbers, we can expect another surge.
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[1] Url:
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/green-party-adam-ramsay-councillors-local-elections-2023/
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