The Green Party needs to ask itself why it exists

This week, the Green Party of England and Wales concluded its 6th leadership contest, with Lambeth councillor Jonathan Bartley and London Assembly member Sian Berry elected as co-leaders. The pair declared during their campaign that the 2018 local elections were the party’s “best set of council results ever” and that Bartley’s co-leadership with Caroline Lucas MP had “succeeded better than we could have imagined”. In this article, I'll review how accurate that statement is.

Much of the debate during the leadership campaign appears to have focused on the competence of potential leaders, with only pro-Brexit candidate Leslie Rowe (who won 5.9% of the vote, making Brexit more popular in the Greens than Blairism in Labour) departing from the mainstream Green policy agenda. Stopping Brexit and climate change appear to be the big priorities for the Green Party leadership forward.

And yet this new leadership team seems to have missed the reality of the Greens’ electoral position. In the past 3 years, the Green Party’s support – which seemed, in 2015, to be set to jump forwards – has in fact gone backwards. In this article I’ll review the Greens’ recent electoral performance and consider what might be causing the party’s recent troubles.

Its net gain of 8 council seats in the 2018 local elections, trumpeted as its “best ever”, was an improvement on 2017 (+1) and 2016 (-3). But it was poor in comparison with 2014 (+18) or 2006 (+20). Neither its percentage of seats won (0.9%) nor its seat gain (+8) were its “best ever”, both being surpassed in previous years - the party gained 20 seats in 2006, and won 1.6% of the seats in 2016. The 2018 election did result in the most Green councillors ever - but given that the party starts from a very low base, every election in which the party gains seats results in the most Green seats ever. When you only have 180 councillors out of 18,829, the only way is up.

Table showing Green results in local elections.

The Greens may have more councillors than they did in May 2015 – but only 6 more. For context, in 2012-15, the party made a net gain of 38 seats. Devolved contests in London (-0.6%) and Wales (-0.4%) saw similarly derisory performances, with the London result being its worst ever. 

Meanwhile, in opinion polls, the Greens have managed to claw their way back to a total of 3%, up from the 2% they polled in the 2017 general election (in which they lost 500,000 votes, dropping from 3.6% to 1.7%). 

10-point moving average of Green Party support in polls since May 2015.

And even that large drop in vote share (losing 47% of their votes) masked a bigger collapse in individual target seats. The 2017 election in Norwich South saw the Green vote share drop by 11 percentage points (a decline of 79%), whilst the top Green target after Brighton Pavillion, Bristol West, saw the party drop by 14 points (a decline of 52%). 

I’ve put a table below to illustrate the worst results. Overall, in 285 of the 441 seats they stood in (65%), the Green Party lost a greater proportion of votes than it did nationally.

All seats where more than 75% of Green voters deserted the party in 2017.

Whilst some Greens would point to the fact that their 2017 national vote share (1.6%) and total vote (512,327) was still higher than at any point prior to 2015, this is largely down to a substantial increase in the number of candidates. 

In 2005, the Greens stood candidates in just 182 of the 533 English & Welsh seats, and recieved 257,758 votes (1.0%). However, their average vote per candidate was 3.2%. In 2017, the Greens stood 461 candidates and recieved 512,327 votes (1.6%) - but their average vote per candidate was lower at 2.1%. 

The big question, of course, is: why has all this happened? In May 2015 this collapse seemed implausible. The Greens were in their strongest position ever, with 63,000 members, 1.1m votes, a seat in Parliament, a close second place in Bristol West (just 5,600 votes behind Labour), 123 saved deposits and a growing niche in British politics as the left-wing alternative to Labour. All but one of these strengths have now been whittled away. The party has lost 24,000 members, lost 500,000 votes, is now 38,000 votes behind Labour in Bristol West, only saved 8 deposits in 2017 and is no longer criticising Labour from the left but has instead pivoted to attacking Labour from the liberal centre over the EU. They retain their sole MP in Brighton Pavillion, but Caroline Lucas is just 1 person who at some point will want to retire. How did the Greens get here?

As most readers would no doubt conclude, the answer is Jeremy Corbyn.

Corbyn became Labour Party leader in 2015, winning on a left-wing, socialist program that appealed to the vast majority of those inclined to vote Green. In the months and years following his victory, the steady trickle of Green members leaving for Labour began to turn into a flood. Green seats up and down the country fell to Labour candidates; in Norwich, once the home of the most successful Green Party in Britain, the party has lost 10 councillors in 3 years, all to Labour. The Green Party has become consumed by the question of how to respond to the reform of a Labour Party most had dismissed as unreformable. A minority of members quit the Greens to join Labour and support the Corbyn leadership, but a majority of members have remained, and have been supplemented by new pro-EU members joining after Brexit.

Total Green Party seats in Norwich 2014-18

The consequence has been a shift to the centre by the Greens, with the European Union becoming the major point of difference between the Greens and the Labour Party – a profound irony considering that the Greens were a soft Eurosceptic party right up until 2016. The party stated as recently as 2013 that the EU has “a huge democratic deficit in its functioning, a serious bias towards the interests of neoliberalism and 'the market'”, and engages in “imposition of dictats from above, such as the austerity that has been forced on the people of many states in south Europe”. Backing an EU referendum in January 2013, on the same day as David Cameron, then-Leader Natalie Bennett declared that the Green Party “believes in democracy and self-determination”, adding, “On important issues like this, voters should be given the opportunity to express a clear view”. 

The party may have come down on the pro-EU side on balance, but prior to 2016 it was no cheerleader for the single market or the EU overall – and there was absolutely no suggestion that it would force voters to vote again if they delivered a response the Green Party didn’t like. Yet despite bemoaning the “endless debate” over EU membership in their 2015 manifesto, they now demand even more debate through a 2^nd referendum.

All of which poses the question – what is the Green Party for? In the past, its objective seemed to be to fight austerity (which the Labour leadership in 2010-15 were not doing) but its response to the election of a left-wing, anti-austerity Labour leader was to strongly oppose him and stand against Labour candidates, making a Tory government more likely. I would suggest, then, that specific policies (such as austerity) are not existential questions for the party, in the way that they were, say, for Left Unity, who dissolved after Corbyn’s election. If the Green Party continues to exist when faced with a major party that has adopted all of its main priorities, then it has to give an ideological justification for that; instead, it has simply embraced the EU, a temporary point of difference that will be irrelevant after March 2019.

Unless the party embraces its original niche of being a purely ecological party (which it will not do, as that would leave it floundering on 1% of the vote), then it will be forced to confront the fact that for as long as the left controls the Labour Party,  the Green Party doesn’t have a purpose. For those who say, in response, that the Greens champion left politics, environmentalism, civil liberties and migrants’ rights, I would say: consider the following points. Labour’s left has moved UK politics further to the left in 3 years than the Greens have in 40 years; Corbyn and McDonnell are two of the most environmentally-conscious MPs in the whole of Parliament; the most pro-migrant and pro-civil liberties MP in the Commons, Diane Abbott, would be Home Secretary under a Corbyn government; and the democratisation of the Labour Party will open up the PLP, and thus the Cabinet, to a wide range of socialists, social liberals and environmentalists from across the British left. Isn’t that far more exciting and important than working to get a handful of Greens onto a district council?

Corbyn’s leadership is a genuine moment of possibility that comes along once in a lifetime. Changing Britain for good is genuinely within our grasp, and that requires all of us on the left to get stuck in and help. This is not a time for the left to fight each other or to split the left vote. And that means there is a serious debate to be had within the Greens about their response to Corbynism and their very purpose as a party.

However, this debate seems to have been ignored in favour of inaccurate assessments of the party’s performance, an uncritical embrace of the EU single market and a return to focusing on the environment. But for as long as the party avoids these tough questions, it will continue to leak support to a Corbyn-led Labour Party – and its leaders may wake up one day to find that their party is (to quote another person who never exercised political power) “irrelevant to the real needs”.

Only time will tell.