‘Can Labour turn the green tide back to red?’

Can Labour turn the green tide back to red?

The Green Party’s victory in Gorton & Denton with Labour being pushed to third place requires us to undertake some serious reflection and change direction ahead of the May elections. It would be easy but foolish to argue this is a one-off. An Electoral Calculus/Daily Telegraph analysis shows that if the result was repeated across the country Labour would drop to just 33 seats and the Greens would increase their MP count 50-fold from 5 to 249. The PM and all but one member of the Cabinet would lose their seats, if repeated in May, Labour will lose swathes of seats to the Greens and cease to be the party of local government. 

Drawing the wrong conclusions from the result must also be avoided. The Party line seems to be that our message is not landing. Yes, we do need to work harder to land our message – that we are on the side of working people and that our policies will deliver results. But is it really just an issue of style? Or is it a problem with our policies and actions in Government? 

As elected politicians in two of our biggest urban areas, Birmingham and London, we believe it is both about the messaging and policies. Our experience on the doorstep is that we have managed to both alienate many left-leaning voters, including environmentalists, as well as a wider diverse group of voters who take not just the environment but other social and global issues seriously. Critically we are ceding the narrative of hope and delivery on the radical change our country so desperately needs to other parties.

READ MORE: ‘The Local Power Plan is launching an ownership revolution’

We have a strong story to tell on the biggest challenge of our generation: climate change. The creation of the Clean Power 2030 Plan; the launch of Great British Energy which will own generation and invest in green supply chains; the Warm Homes Plan which will improve thousands of people’s houses and flats across the country making them warmer and cheaper to heat; the Local Power Plan policy that will enable community and cooperative renewable generation across the country: the UK’s largest ever roll-out of renewables with the latest round of 9GW of renewable power commitments. And this is not just ‘jam tomorrow’ – people’s energy bills will go down from April. 

Yet we are not seeing a political dividend. Why are these commitments not resonating with people who are swinging to the Green Party? Could it be that we are providing a loud and contradictory narrative? Slogans such as “build baby build” used to underline our commitment to growth weaponise attacks on nature and suggest that Labour puts the interests of the developer over climate, and the communities we serve, alienating pro-environment voters as well as organisations representing some 5 million members. When 70 environmental organisations and leading experts write a public letter criticising our approach to nature it would be dangerous to just dismiss them – we need to start hearing and learning from the feedback we are getting from outside the Westminster bubble.

We need to champion a joined up environmental offer combining both climate and nature, as well as reminding voters that we are a progressive socialist party that is capable of reconciling our ambition for growth with the need to reduce inequality and deliver action on climate. 

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Polling has consistently shown that local green spaces, clean air, nature and environmental quality rank highly among voters, including former Labour supporters. For communities, pride in place matters. Clean energy, warmer homes, restored rivers and thriving local nature are not fringe concerns. They are about bills, health, security and fairness between generations. They are popular. They are practical. And they are entirely consistent with economic renewal.

Tangible change delivered by Labour councils, from community gardens to mass tree planting programmes along streets and reviving urban green spaces offer evidence that Labour is delivering climate, health and social value together.

But local narratives need to be backed by a strong set of national policies on the environment. DEFRA and the Welsh Government should champion a ‘2030 National Nature Action Plan’ with bold commitments for nature backed by unlocking greater investment, combining public and private action and funds. Rather than aping Reform’s sloganising and using NIMBY as a term of abuse we could focus on a drive with the public to enhance Nature In My Back Yard to unlock nature restoration in our most deprived urban areas; to mobilise young people to take advantage of the green jobs and opportunities of the future with a roll-out of an environmental apprenticeship programme; and a National Youth Environment Service to restore nature. 

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We need a Labour plan for our green and pleasant land which puts the communities we serve, not corporate interests at its heart, that shows that Labour is the real pro-people, pro-environment party and that together we are capable of driving growth for the common good.

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