The SNP, the most electorally successful party in modern Britain, has a simple solution: independence from the British state. UKIP blamed the EU. Johnson encouraged people to vote politics away, to “get Brexit done”, and leave the market and the old ruling class to get on with it.
However, none of this works for Labour which, over the last century has become deeply embedded in the leather benches of the Palace of Westminster and is only really rooted in working class communities in the sense that it sucks energy out of them – as the people of central Burnley attest.
While the Tories can rely on the power and mythology of the ruling class, Labour depends on its promise to use its mastery of the British state to deliver material benefits to its voters. And that strategy frays as soon as people stop trusting your pledges: using politics to improve lives doesn’t attract support if people have lost faith in the political system.
In a patchwork of places across the country, the Greens have been able to show up, fresh-faced and recently re-energised by the collapse of Corbynism, Brexit and the school climate strikes, and step from outside that system and into this void. Just as the SNP found when they started seriously campaigning in Labour’s former Scottish heartlands 20 years ago, there are communities waiting to be organised.
But there is a risk in all of this.
While radical changes to the power structures that dominate the country may benefit most people, it’s important to understand that there are also conflicts between people’s interests. Those enriched by the current economic system need to be made to pay more tax. Oil executives need to have their businesses shut down. Male power and white privilege need to be challenged, and you can’t break up a heteronormative world without upsetting those who snuggle comfortably under its assumptions.
Avoiding other parties’ pitfalls
Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, the Liberal Democrats built up bases of support across the country, representing the beliefs and interests of an increasingly broad array of different communities. And then, in 2010, they discovered that those communities thought radically different things, and that they had been saying increasingly divergent things to them in order to get elected.
When these contradictions came under the pressure of decisions about real political power, it’s no surprise that the rich and powerful won out. The result was disastrous, both for the party, and the country.
For Greens to avoid this fate, the party needs to embrace these conflicts rather than hiding them away. It needs to understand that pissing off the powerful is part of its job, that there are some suburbs in the stockbroker belt that it can’t honestly represent.
And as well as being honest, embracing conflict is also politically sensible. Too often, Greens are afraid of being attacked by the right wing press and other outriders of the status quo. But in reality, the opposite of being controversial is being ignored: a fate Greens have too often embraced, for fear of a fight.
The Green Party also needs to learn from the mistakes of Labour. It’s too easy, as a party gains power, for it to be inducted into the establishment. Ralph Miliband documented how this happened to early Labour MPs in the 1920s, as they were toured around London clubs by the cleverer members of the ruling class, allowed to represent their voters so long as they played by the rules.
We see a version of this in today’s Labour Party. As the Murdochs and Rothermeres move against Johnson, Starmer seems to think that if he quietly waits in line with a neat haircut and follows all of the rules, then eventually he’ll be allowed to govern. But in reality, that’s rarely how it works. In the British state, the next in line to a Tory prime minister is almost always another Tory.
For England’s Greens to have any hope of actually changing the country, the party needs to be definitive about not wanting to become part of the establishment. Instead, it needs to rip apart the unwritten rulebook whose codes, laws and lores are at the core of why people think the British state is dysfunctional and corrupt; to secure for England – and, probably independently, Wales and Scotland – more genuine democracy. As I’ve argued before, the Greens should campaign to abolish Westminster. The aim is not to become the establishment, but to disband it.
A vision for the future
For Natalie Bennett, former leader of the England and Wales Greens and one of the party’s peers, it’s also important that the party has what she calls a “coherent political philosophy”.
Once you accept the resource constraints of a limited planet, she said: “There’s two obvious ends of the political spectrum.” Either, you believe “there’s enough resources for everyone if we share them out fairly” or, you have “a far-right authoritarian government which says, ‘It’s a difficult, dangerous world and you need a strong man to protect you’”.
The former, she says, is “a vision of hope and empowerment”, the latter, “a greedy philosophy built on fear”. And because her party has what she sees as “a unified vision”, it is less at risk of falling into the same trap as the Lib Dems. She said that for this election, that vision is paramount.
“What’s really clear is that we are in the last zombie days of neoliberalism,” she said. As a result of the pandemic, “people are saying the old answers just don’t work any more… [they are] looking round for something different… for profound change. The nearest historical comparison is the 1970s.”
A Green wave?
In the last few Scottish elections, the Greens have polled relatively well early on, and then suffered from a SNP surge at the end. It’s almost a week to go until polling day, so everything could change. But, if anything, the opposite appears to be happening. As voters make up their minds, it does seem like more are walking the other way along this familiar path.
Pay homage to data wizards across the political spectrum, and they’ll whisper their predictions. And one of this year’s secrets is that the Scottish Green Party is expected to enjoy a significant increase in their tally of MSPs.
In London, polls show that the English Green’s co-leader and mayoral candidate, Siân Berry, is on course for her party’s best ever result, perhaps picking up an extra Assembly seat on the way. Meanwhile, the two polls for West Midlands mayor have put the party on 8% and 5% – hardly a revolution, but a respectable figure for a party which, a decade ago, could expect 1-2% outside a short list of target areas.
This summer, I’ll have been a Green member for 20 years. I’ve lived through more dashed hopes and election night tears than triumphs. And of course, this year could be another one of those. But two things are striking.
The first is that, despite all those setbacks, the steady progress led by senior members such as Chris Williams and Natalie Bennett has meant that the party is incomparably bigger and more impressive than the one that we joined in the 2000s. And the second is that many of the ideas that it promoted then, which were treated as marginal even on the Left, have become popular demands across the country.
In politics, change happens gradually, then all at once; quietly, then bang. For British political journalists obsessed with the gossip of Westminster, the local election successes of England’s fourth party are unlikely to make front page news. But these are the sorts of quiet seeds from which great trees can sprout.