Recently my home city of Bristol, normally a shade of red or blue when it comes to politics and football, has turned rather green. With the local elections in May seeing them end up two seats shy of a majority on Bristol City Council, and in the general election their co-leader Carla Denyer overturned a substantial Labour majority in Bristol Central to become one of four Green MPs in Parliament. Just to wrap up their victory lap they also finished second in the other four Bristol seats, setting themselves up nicely for the next election.
I should at this point declare an interest. I stood for my home ward of Cotham in the local elections and spent the general election working to re-elect Thangam Debbonaire in Bristol Central. In neither case was I successful. And it was in this spirit that my co-candidate in the local elections, Robert Knowles-Leak, organised a fringe event at Labour conference on “Turning the Rising Green Tide” which, as you can imagine, got quite the reaction from Green activists about how worried Labour were about the Greens. Well, if they aren’t, they should be.
Labour’s electoral coalition is one that is incredibly efficient, trading votes piled up in urban seats for narrow wins across the country, and it clearly paid dividends. As a Labour activist, the fact that Carla Denyer is now my MP is a price worth paying for a Labour government with a landslide majority. But the results in Bristol, Inner London and across some 50-odd seats show that this trade isn’t without electoral pain. With the sheer number of Green second place finishes, it cannot be said that these voters have nowhere else to go. In local elections over the next five years, the Senedd election and at the next general election Labour will fight defensive campaigns. Just as it must see off the Tories, Reform and the Lib Democrats (and in Wales, Plaid Cymru) it must adopt a strategy to turn the Green tide too. Just as moving away from what has become Labour’s core vote won them the country, continuing to ignore it will quickly hollow out its majority.
Quite simply the best way for Labour to do this is to deliver on the pledges it was elected on. As Ecotricity owner Dale Vince said, this Labour government promises to be the greenest in history. There is a lot to be optimistic about. Delivery on policies such as GB Energy and the promise to make Britain a clean energy superpower is a good place to start, but by itself it is not enough. The Greens are no longer a single issue environmental party and we must have a comprehensive strategy to tackle them. While I don’t think a priority for the government should be implementing the Green policy of forcing goldfish owners to get a license for them (page 25 of their manifesto), they would be foolish to ignore the fact that the Greens do have some popular left wing policies that would be easy wins if implemented.
The Greens have set themselves up very nicely to replicate the successes of the Lib Dems in the New Labour years. Already we have seen that they have hoovered up the Lib Dem vote in Labour-facing seats locally and nationally, which is something the Lib Dems seem to have missed when they talk about targeting Labour-held seats like Bermondsey, Manchester Withington and Cambridge. As such, it would not be entirely surprising if the Lib Dems are having similar conversations internally (or in whatever their TSR equivalent is).
I am not for a moment suggesting a unilateral adoption of the Green manifesto as a program for government. If I was, I would join the Greens. The approach for Labour should be two-pronged, and the second part of this is to hold the Greens to account where they are in power.
Since May in Bristol alone, the Greens have done a backroom deal with the Tories to cancel two major home building projects and scrapped short breaks for disabled children. Having spent the entire time under the last government refusing to vote for council budgets containing cuts made necessary by austerity, they have now turned round and, having found no money left in local government, have concluded that cuts have to be made.
Labour must highlight these u-turns and hypocrisy, both on a local and a national level. From Adrian Ramsay’s campaign against pylons in his own constituency, to Carla Denyer condemning Rachel Reeves proposing the same policy on social housing rents that she herself tried to implement when a member of Bristol City Council, there are many examples that should be highlighted. Just as the Lib Dems found there was an electoral limit to being all things to all people in different parts of the country, so should the Greens, and it is encouraging that the likes of Ed Miliband have already been combative enough to challenge them on this.
This also says nothing of the assorted, frankly terrifying ideas found in the depths of the Green policy platform that were hidden away during the election, such as being in favour of population control, “demedicalising childbirth” and reducing the number of C-Sections. We should be highlighting the origins of the Green Party – that four people decided to form the PEOPLE party after reading an article in Playboy arguing for population control, and that in the 1980s one of their principal spokespeople was David Icke. And we should be pointing out that their current Deputy Leader Zack Polanski spent his time before joining the Green Party trying to become a Lib Dem MP and convincing women he could hypnotise them into having bigger breasts.
The decision taken at their recent conference to reverse their long-standing opposition to HS2 should be celebrated, and it shows there are some serious people in the Party, but it does ring hollow when the damage has already been done across the route due to their prior campaigning and that some of their own representatives have already renewed their opposition to the project. Needless to say, their storied opposition to nuclear power also places them similarly at odds with any workable version of net zero ever becoming reality.
Already we have seen in council by-elections a big increase in the share of the Green vote since the general election. Labour has to focus not just on the election in five years’ time, but the local elections in May and beyond where voters unhappy with the government will pull the lever of protest and elect more Greens. Labour might be saved in some places by coming through the middle of the Greens and Lib Dems taking lumps out of each other, but the Greens have an incredible knack of putting on huge increases in vote share out of nowhere.
So yes, some of us are sounding the alarm about the Greens. And if you’re a Labour activist and you aren’t concerned about what’s going to come from them over the next five years then it’s quite simple. You should be.