Back in the 1980s, David Icke was a spokesman for the Green Party. Though his public statements about alternative medicine and mysticism embarrassed his fellow party members, leading to his resignation in 1991 just prior to his announcement that he was a son of the Godhead, it's fair to say that the reputation for eccentricity in the public mind was not limited to just him. The Greens have always been an amalgam of different traditions, not to mention people pursuing obscure hobby-horses. Conservation has often looked like conservatism, hence the presence of aristocratic scions like Jonathan Porritt in the party's ranks, while the close relationship of envrionmental damage and poverty has encouraged what political scientists like to refer to as "leftwing economics". At the margins you will find both xenophobic nativists and hunt saboteurs. This variety also extends to the practice of politics. For example, the earlier incarnations as PEOPLE (sic) and The Ecology Party highlight the contrasting atttractions of anti-establishment populism and a more academic and scientifically-grounded approach to public persuasion.
Since the 1990s, and the fragmentation between the Scottish Greens, the Green Party Nortthern Ireland and the Green Party of England and Wales, the GPEW specifically has tended to opportunistically reflect the shifts in the party landscape at Westminster. In policy terms it has moved less towards the left, as is popularly supposed, than to the centre, for example in dumping its earlier euroscepticism and becoming pro-EU, which reflected its relative success in elections to the EU Parliament. Its embrace of social justice is largely rhetorical as practical actions, such as housebuilding, risk conflicting with its ethos of growth scepticism. Local councils under Green control have not been noted for their radicalism. When the party has gone out on a limb, as with the proposal for a basic income, it has often come a cropper as these contradictions have emerged. The fundamental problem is that you can only reconcile a more equitable distribution of resources in society with a minimal growth, sustainable economy if you commit to the expropriation of wealth, and that would necessitate a significant expansion of the state's power, which runs against the party's libertarian instincts.
Of the longstanding political parties, the Greens have had the most volatile membership and electoral support since the millennium. There was an influx of former Labour supporters in response to the Iraq War, but then an outflow of more conservative supporters to the Liberal Democrats in 2010. After getting 1% in the 2005 and 2010 general elections, its vote almost quadrupled to 3.8% in 2015. This was partly due to the return of voters disllusioned by the Lib Dems, but also to the influx of left-leaning voters disillusioned with Labour, as was evidenced in 2017 when the Green's vote share more than halved to 1.6% as Labour under Corbyn energised the left. The subsequent victory of the right of the Labour Party has seen many leftwing members decamp to the Greens and supporters switch allegiance. At the 2019 general election Green support was 2.6%. In 2024 it jumped to 6.4%. Since then, the party has been at around 10% in opinion polls. Clearly the composition of its support has changed along with the quantum over the last two decades and all the pointers suggest this is largely down to attracting people who identify left on both the social and economic dimensions.
The recent leadership contest, which Zac Polanski won with 85% of the vote, suggests the party is going to move towards a distinctive left populism, but perhaps the real significance of the result is that it highlighted the tension between the managerial class of MPs, PPCs and party staffers and a more radically-inclined membership, something that will be familiar to former Labour Party members. With the long-trailed Corbyn-Sultana vehicle now looking like it has lost its wheels before ever taking to the road, and with Polanski's undoubted talents for publicity, there's every chance that the Greens will start to post support levels in the mid-teens, at which point they will be level with the Liberal Democrats and may even be breathing down the necks of Labour and the Conservatives if those two continue to shed support. Though the prospect of the Greens entering government as part of an anti-Reform coalition cannot be ruled out, they are unlikely to find themselves in such a position so long the UK has a first-past-the-post electoral system and so long as their support is geographically diffuse.
The evidence from other countries with more proportional voting systems is that green parties are quickly co-opted by the cartel of established parties, sacrificing radicalism for respectability. This leads to tension between those advocating pragmatism and those insisting on principle, or "realos" and "fundis" as they are styled in Germany. The GPEW is unlikely to face that problem in an acute form due to the constraints of the electoral system, but there is clearly a difference between the parliamentary elite and the wider membership in terms both of ideology and praxis. With a party leader outside Parliament, it is likely that the Greens will lean more towards activism and protest in the coming years, which will accentuate this difference. It will also reinforce the impression of the Greens as the locus of the extra-parliamentary left, particularly if the Corbyn-Sultana fallout leads to splintering. While Corbyn remains a formidable figure, he is 76. In reality, the Your Party proposal always looked unstable given the evident gulf between not only Sultana and the "boy's club" of Gaza independents but between those wanting a party based on mass membership democracy and those more comfortable with the "organising committee" approach of Labour tradition.
From the perspective of the Labour Party, the old claim that the left have nowhere else to go is already redundant, but this won't persuade the party leadership to shift leftwards to win those voters back. If there is one principle that defines the current regime, and explains the alliance between Blairite modernisers and the old Labourist right, it is a visceral hatred of the left. The idea that if Starmer could be replaced by Andy Burnham there would be a reorientation is simply deluded. The vibes might be better, and the "King of the North" might scrap the two-child benefits cap and various other unpopular policies, but there will be no return to full-throated socialism. In other words, there will continue to be a large space to the left of Labour and electoral gravity will inescapbly drag the Greens there. The strategic question for the GPEW is whether it can broaden its voter base beyond the young and educated and make inroads among working class voters in urban areas, which would mark a significant change of direction after focusing on rural seats. This in turn is bound up with the possible fortunes of Reform UK.
The liberal panic over the prospect of a government led by Nigel Farage is ill-founded. While you can win a majority in the Commons on the sort of vote share Reform has seen in recent opinion polls, as Labour proved only last year, this requires three things: a solid core of safe seats, which Labour have in the cities; an opposition that is split nationally, allowing you to pick up lots of seats on a third of the vote; and an unpopular government that has alienated many of its supporters leading them to abstain on the big day. Reform lack any real heartlands (seaside towns are literally too marginal to play this role) and their core support is found mostly in traditional Tory constituencies, not in the fabled Red Wall. They are very good at undermining the Conservative vote, because they are mostly Tories, but there is little evidence that they can have a similarly destructive impact on Labour's support. If people are turning away from Labour, it isn't because they've suddenly discovered that they like Farage, it's because of the Labour government's record in office and the unapologetic rightwing tendencies of the faction that controls the party apparatus.
If the Greens continue their upward ascent until the next general election, Labour could find itself suffering from the factors that kyboshed the Tories in 2024: its vote eroded by both desertion on the left and abstention. This won't put Nigel Farage into Number 10 for the simple reason that the vote on the right will still be split. The Conservative Party isn't about to pack up and retire to the country and Farage isn't about to give up his earnings potential by agreeing to a merger. An electoral pact is an existential impossibility for the Conservatives, so the nationwide split must remain. The nightmare scenario for liberal commentators is a fragmented parliament, which is ironically what they have long hoped for with their support for rootless centrist parties like the original SDP and more recently the farce of Change UK. If that does transpire, it will be because the electorate splits not only on the right and in the centrre but also on the left, which means Labour losing out to the Greens. Corbyn and the left independents may well hang onto their seats, but there seems little likelihood of them increasing their number of MPs if the Greens present themselves as the only viable nationwide left offering, which is surely what they have to do.
In some respects the UK now appears to be facing what France experienced in 2022, and which was reinforced by Emmanuel Macron's ill-advised decision to force another Legislative Assembly election in 2024. The real liberal nightmare is not a Reform government but the Greens, or perhaps a left-Green alliance a la NUPES/NFP, winning lots of hitherto safe Labour seats in the cities. Keir Starmer lacks Emmanuel Macron's constitutional power to ignore the Commons in order to prop up the centre, but that just makes me suspect that he might be the most likely leader of a reconfiguration of the cartel. He isn't a career politician and has shown little respect for the traditions of parliamentary government, let alone Labour history. And as the proscription of Palestine Action shows, he remains fundamentally a creature of the security state. Liberals still appalled at Boris Johnson's arsing around over the prorogation of Parliament are, as usual, oblivious to the real danger. What form this reconfiguraion would take is hard to predict, but if the parallels with Macron hold true, don't be surprised if a national government, including Labour, the Tories and the Lib Dems, emerges. It's happened before, after all, and the centenary is fast approaching.