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In May 2019, the Green Party shocked the political world. After decades of gaining only a dozen or so councillors in each round of local elections (the most being +20 in 2006) the party won an astounding 265 council seats in a single night – a gain of 194 seats. This was, by any metric, their best result in a local election ever.
A burst of success followed. Within a month, the party had leaped up to an average of 8% in polls, their highest percentage in a monthly poll average in over 30 years. In the unexpected 2019 European elections, the party won 12% of the vote (+5pts) and 7 seats (+4). The pro-Remain Greens seemed to be benefitting enormously from the chaos surrounding Brexit.
Yet in the 2019 general election, the Greens’ forward progress was halted. The party increased their share of the vote, but only by 1pt, winning just 2.7% of the vote, less than in 2015. Despite forming a “Unite to Remain” alliance with the Lib Dems, in which the two parties stood aside for each other in dozens of seats, the Greens made virtually no progress in their target seats. The closest that the party came to victory outside of Brighton Pavillion was finishing 37pts behind Labour in Bristol West, and in the Isle of Wight (once a major target seat) the party finished third behind Labour once again.
In this article, I’ll discuss the rise and fall of the Greens in 2019, and ask whether the party has a future now that Brexit is complete.
Note: this article focuses solely on the Green Party of England and Wales, as the Scottish Green Party is an independent political party.
Part 1: Embracing Europe, 2016-17
It seems to have become common sense now to associate the Green Party with Remain; the Greens and Europe now go together like bacon and eggs, tea and biscuits, or the Lib Dems and Conservatives. But that wasn’t always the case.
Before the 2016 EU referendum, the Green Party was a vocal advocate for holding a public vote on Britain’s membership of the EU. This was often accompanied by criticism of the European Union and the Single Market. In the party’s 2015 election manifesto, it said:
"we prioritise local self-reliance rather than the EU’s unsustainable economics of free trade and growth. We would not adopt the Euro, which cannot work properly without much deeper political integration, and this would be contrary to our policy of subsidiarity.
"We support the proposal to have an in–out referendum so that the British people can have their say. This is because much has changed since the UK joined the Common Market in 1974. Endless debate on membership is a diversion from more important matters"
Yet just two years later, the Greens had shifted position on the question of Europe, and were demanding yet more endless debate on membership of the EU. In their 2017 manifesto, the party called for a second referendum on Britain’s membership of the EU, despite voters having voted to Leave just 11 months previously.
Part 2: Decline, 2017-18
Initially, the Greens’ swing to the centre did not seem to bear fruit. The party collapsed in the 2017 general election, winning over 5% of the vote in just six constituencies (down from 125 in 2015). The party lost over 500,000 votes in just two years, falling from 3.6% to 1.6%. In Bristol West, which the party had nearly won in 2015, the Greens finished 53pts behind Labour MP Thangam Debbonaire, and in Norwich South (once a major target seat) the party dropped to just 3% of the vote. Overall, the Green Party’s average vote per candidate in 2017 was 2.1%, less than in the 2001 and 2005 general elections.
In local elections, the party’s results in 2017 and 2018 were also disappointing. In the May 2017 local elections, the party made a net gain of just 1 seat; in the 2018 elections they made a net gain of just 8 seats
Going into 2019, the Greens were not in a good position. They were not rising above 4% in monthly poll averages, their councillor numbers were unspectacular and the Labour Party was consistently polling at around 40%. All of that was about to change.
Part 3: Success, January-June 2019
As Brexit began to dominate the political agenda in a way that it simply hadn’t done before, the Greens’ support for a second referendum began to finally bear fruit. As the chart below shows, from January-June the Greens’ poll ratings soared – from an average of 3% in January the party rose to 8% by June, their highest vote share in a monthly average of polls since July 1989.
As the party’s poll ratings soared, election results began to reflect this. As stated in the introduction to this article, the Greens won 265 councillors in May 2019 (+194) – their best result, by an enormous margin, that the party has ever achieved. It is interesting to note that these local elections were held using first-past-the-post, the same electoral system as elections to the UK Parliament.
One month later, Britain voted in unexpected European elections, and the Greens performed exceptionally well. Their popular vote total of 1.9 million votes (12%) was second only to their 1989 result, and overall (as they won no seats in 1989) their 2019 result was their best ever result. The party’s share of seats rose from 4% (2014) to 10% (2019).
As June 2019 ended, the Greens had nearly defeated Labour in a UK-wide election (finishing just 2pts behind them in the popular vote); they were firmly established as England’s fourth party in terms of council seats; and they were polling 8% of the vote, with Labour on 22% (the smallest polling gap between the two leftist parties in British history).
But in retrospect, June 2019 was a temporary blip. Within months, the Greens had collapsed back to being a minor party once again.
Part 4: Decline, July-December 2019
After surging from 3% to 8% in just a few months, the Greens’ share of the vote in polls collapsed again in the months after June. By the time that Britain voted in December, the Greens’ average monthly poll total had fallen back to 3% once again.
The Green Party’s over-reliance upon Remain voters, in the end, turned out to be more of a weakness than a strength. Having built up a respectable share of the vote amongst Remainers – 11% by June 2019, just 3pts behind the Conservatives – the Greens’ share of the vote amongst Remainers declined rapidly until the party was polling less with Remainers (3%) than in January. Indeed, its share of the vote amongst Remainers was almost the same as its share of the vote with Leavers (2%).
Having spent three years appealing primarily to a group of voters who had shown themselves willing to switch back and forth between parties in an instant, the party found itself losing voters to Labour and the Lib Dems just as quickly as they had gained them.
All of this preceded a general election result which, once again, was disappointing for the Green Party.
Part 5: Failure
In the 2019 general election, the Greens failed to make any significant gains. They once again won Brighton Pavillion with an increased majority, and increased their share of the popular vote from 1.6% to 2.7%. But on a constituency level, the party is no closer to winning more seats in Parliament than it was in 2015.
Following the 2015 election result, the party had five clear target seats aside in addition to Brighton Pavillion:
In all of these seats, the party won over 10% of the popular vote and finished within 30pts of the winning party. Bristol West was the main target seat (the party lost by 9pts), but Norwich South saw the 3rd-highest Green vote in the entire country (13.9%), closely following by the Isle of Wight (13.4%). Norwich South also had a significant number of Green councillors at the time, with Greens holding 14 of the 29 council seats (48%) in the constituency.
Yet in 2019, despite their successes in the local and European elections, these once-promising target seats proved to be very disappointing for the Greens. The party’s vote share declined from 2015-19 in four of them and rose by just 1.9pts in the Isle of Wight, whilst in Bath the party didn’t even stand in 2019. In Norwich South, the party’s vote share declined from 14% in 2015 to 5% in 2019, and in Bristol West the party lost by a 37pt margin.
Although the party did make gains in other seats, none of them look to be promising target seats. Outside of Brighton Pavillion, the party won over 10% in four seats, but it finished within 40pts of the winner in just one (Bristol West).
The Greens’ targeting strategy proved to be a complete failure. The party fielded a high-profile candidate in Stroud in the form of then-MEP Molly Scott-Cato, and focused a lot of their time and energy on trying to win the seat. Co-Leader Caroline Lucas visited the seat to campaign for Scott-Cato, whilst Scott-Cato argued that “Labour support has collapsed” in Stroud. Scott-Cato was also part of the “Unite to Remain” alliance.
Yet on December 12th, Scott-Cato finished in a dismal third place, winning just 7.5% of the vote, which actually represented a decline of 0.5pts from the combined Green/Lib Dem vote in 2015 (8%). Despite arguing that Labour support had collapsed in Stroud, Scott-Cato received 22,788 fewer votes than the 2nd-placed Labour candidate.
Conclusion: what is the Green Party for?
In an article written in September 2018, I posed the following 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…Nearly two years later, we still don’t have an answer to this question. With the issue of Brexit now settled for a generation, there is no longer any significant difference between the Green Party’s political priorities and the Labour manifesto of 2019.
“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”
In September 2020 the Greens will hold a leadership election. For those of on the left who want a unified, effective left, we can only hope that the party takes this opportunity to look seriously at the failures of 2017 and 2019 and actually start to formulate a plan to work with the Labour Party instead of against it.
If, despite the election of a pro-EU Labour Leader who supports a Green New Deal, the Greens continue to strongly oppose Labour, one is simply drawn to ask the obvious questions: aside from being anti-Brexit, anti-Labour and anti-Corbyn, what is the Green Party’s reason for existing? Who does it represent? What is its ultimate goal? What sort of election result, in a broad sense, would constitute a victory for the Green Party?
These are questions that only the Green Party can answer. But for the sake of those of us who want a unified left to win in 2024, we can only hope that they figure out some answers soon.
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