The Green Party is still celebrating. After 14 years with just one MP at Westminster, it now has four, after a hard-fought win against Labour in Bristol Central, and two wins against the Tories in North Herefordshire and Waveney Valley, whilst easily retaining Brighton Pavilion.
By any historical precedent, this is a transformative moment. Until now, the party has had to rely on Caroline Lucas as its sole MP, supported by two extremely hardworking peers in the House of Lords – Jenny Jones and Natalie Bennett.
The party enjoyed an earlier breakthrough in the 1989 European Parliament election when it won 15 per cent of the vote. But people always voted differently in European elections than in general elections – and that breakthrough fizzled out rapidly.
But managing expectations will still be important. Four out of 650 MPs is a tiny number, which makes it all the more galling to realise that it would have been 42 in a fair electoral system, based on the Greens’ overall share of the total number of votes cast – nearly 7 per cent.
Reform UK has even greater cause to bemoan the UK’s unfair electoral system – with its five MPs from twice as many votes as the Greens. And the media have been all over this particular outcome since then.
So what would it mean for the new Green Party to be as “noisy” as Reform over the next few years?
The answer to that may be surprising: to be equally “populist” in the way it appeals to voters, doubling down on those manifesto commitments which already have significant public support but which were largely overlooked or even ignored during this election.
This was particularly frustrating for young and first-time voters. With the dynamic support of the Green New Deal Rising campaign, thousands of young people got behind the Green Party’s candidates – and Jeremy Corbyn!
(If the Labour Government sticks to its pledge to reduce the age of voting to 16, this will become a crucial factor in future elections).
Way back in 1979, I was responsible for drafting the Green Party’s general election manifesto. This was dismissed at the time as “utopian” and “totally detached from reality”.
However, by the time of the UN Earth Summit in 1992, many of that manifesto’s “big ideas” had been taken on board in different ways by the mainstream parties.
Predictably, the Green Party’s manifesto for this election was dismissed by many on exactly the same grounds.
If I had to pick out three priorities from the 2024 manifesto which I can guarantee will be completely mainstream by 2029 (things are moving a bit faster now than they were 45 years ago!), it would be these:
First and foremost, the climate emergency. Green Party candidates all around the country rightly complained of a “conspiracy of silence” on climate and the natural environment (apart from the scandal of our rivers running with sewage) throughout the election.
Nothing unusual there, apart from the fact that the past year has witnessed an acceleration in climate extremes and impacts that has left even the more staid climate scientists looking on in disbelief.
It’s clear that we are already on “the highway to climate hell”, to quote António Guterres, the UN Secretary General. The situation can only get worse, with climate disasters becoming more extreme, more costly, and more devastating to the lives of more and more people every year.
The Labour Government’s current position on the climate emergency is embarrassingly inadequate – in a predictably calculating way, as part and parcel of its derisked strategy to keep the UK’s right-wing media at bay. This meant that Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves ended up with less to offer UK voters in this election than Boris Johnson did with his boosterish 10-point plan back in 2020.
So, all eyes now on the knowledgeable and totally committed Ed Miliband (the new Secretary of State for Energy and Net Zero), and the degree to which he can keep Starmer and Reeves focused on the green economy as the principal driver of the growth they so desperately crave. To be fair, they’ve made a reasonable start on that front with the instant change to planning rules to permit onshore wind farms.
Second, keeping 2029 in our sights, the Green Party’s uncompromising commitment to “fair taxation” (wealth taxes by any other name) stood out very strongly in the election. After 14 years of the Tories systematically favouring the rich and punishing the poor, Labour’s inability even to utter the word “redistribution” spoke volumes.
Together with the Lib Dems (muted, muddled and minimalist though its policies are in this area), the Greens have now opened up the space for a serious debate about taxation.
Thee party put forward a number of specific tax reforms that it claims would raise somewhere between £50bn and £70bn a year for the Treasury (the absolute minimum needed to start repairing our broken public services), including a new 1 per cent wealth tax on those “with broader shoulders” (with assets of more than £10m) and a 2 per cent tax on those with assets of more than £1bn.
With its huge majority, facing a massive list of challenges that have to be sorted, Labour cannot go on ignoring the fairness challenge. Voters have indeed given Starmer a mandate, but without much enthusiasm, and vague prospects of levelling-up through future growth just won’t cut it.
Lastly, the Green Party will now be able to make an even more powerful case for wholesale democratic renewal, starting with the glaringly obvious need for a fairer electoral system based on some kind of proportionality.
Reform has the strongest case here, however uncomfortable that may be for both the Lib Dems and the Greens – but they both need to put this improbable gift horse to the best possible use.
Nigel Farage has already made it clear that he’s going to be banging this drum much more noisily than the Lib Dems have ever managed to do.
Again, just as with the climate and fair taxation, Starmer will have no choice but to move in this direction. The Labour Party is already strongly in favour, as are the majority of trade unions. Before he became leader, he himself recognised the inevitability of the UK finally having to bite this bullet.
But whatever happens, it isn’t going to happen quickly. The Green Party will need to build on its two million vote with the same forensic focus as it brought to its four target seats in this election.
It came second in a further 39 constituencies, and is no doubt already working out what it will take to convert as many of those as possible into winnable seats.
This is a party that has come of age, notwithstanding one of the harshest electoral systems facing all small parties in the UK. But the way it overcame those barriers bodes well for the future – no fizzling out here!
Sir Jonathon Porritt is an environmentalist, writer, long-term advocate of the Green Party and former director of Friends of the Earth