‘We can’t beat the Greens treating them like a naughty Labour faction’

For a long time, the Green Party was the party of Caroline Lucas and a scattering of councillors.

They were slowly building: 2024 was a breakthrough year for them, with 4 MPs in the commons and eyes on more gains at both local and national levels. Significant arguments can be had – and indeed have been had, in the pages of this very publication – about whether losing votes to Reform is a bigger problem for Labour than losing votes to the Greens and the Liberal Democrats.

I’m not at present interested in attempting to prosecute either side of that argument.

Whatever your view, however, the fact remains that Labour are losing support to the Liberal Democrats and to the party I want to discuss today, the Green Party, and that this is a problem.

Labour needs a change in attitude

The Greens are currently polling at 10% to Labour’s 22%; they are winning council by-elections in Labour safe seats (taking, for example, Herne Hill and Loughborough Junction ward in south London earlier this month). If trends continue they are on track to make more gains – as in south London, at the expense of Labour.

There is a whole suite of things the party needs to do to address this issue, but I might suggest that a first step, one that requires an outlay of resource only in emotional terms, could be a change of attitude.

READ MORE: ‘Progressivism or bust: Why Blue Labour is the wrong answer to Reform surge’

At Progressive Britain conference earlier this month, I was struck by the frequency with which speakers slipped into discussing the Green Party in internal Labour terms.

Brent councillor and 2024 Labour parliamentary candidate Shama Tatler discussed an “ex-Momentum type Green Party”; former NEC member Alice Perry discussed how people she had seen booted from Labour after going through disciplinary procedures were welcomed in the Green Party.

The Green Party is not the left of the Labour party

It’s a view of the Greens – as dumping ground-cum-getaway car for undesirable former Labour members – I’ve heard expressed before, by among others now Labour peer Mike Katz at party conference last year.

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This viewpoint is a bad starting point for anyone trying to solve the problem of losing votes to the Greens, a problem Tatler, Perry, Katz and all of us who want to see Labour succeed should be trying to solve. The key thing here is that the Green Party is not the left of the Labour Party. It is a different party and beating it is an electoral, not a factional, concern.

I am sure that there are former Momentum members in the Green Party, and indeed people who were expelled from Labour. The latter should be of concern to the Green Party, but for Labour members is not particularly relevant to the problem at hand.

The Labour Party rulebook will be irrelevant when they beat you at a council by election. Even if the people who you were fighting at the 2018 CLP AGM are all Greens now, the circumstances – for them, for you, for the country – have changed. In 2018 Reform didn’t exist, and the undecided voters you’re trying to win over don’t even know what a CLP is.

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