Could the Greens become a force in British politics? 

The Green Party of England and Wales has a colourful history. Its co-founder, Tony Whittaker, a solicitor and former Tory councillor from Coventry, claimed to have been inspired by an interview in Playboy magazine with Paul Ehrlich, a biologist and population alarmist. Ahead of the October 1974 election, the budding party’s “manifesto for survival” suggested that the ideal family size was “one or a maximum of two children” and proposed “freely available” sterilisation to help Britain shrink its population. It won a grand total of 2,000 votes.

Fifty years on, the party has changed its policies and raised its profile. In local elections on May 2nd it gained 74 council seats, bringing its tally to 812 councillors in England and Wales. It is polling at a lofty 6% share of the vote nationally. At a general election later this year the Greens will be held back by Britain’s first-past-the-post electoral system. They won almost 840,000 votes at the last election in 2019 and ended up with just one seat; they will do well to double their seat count this time round. But other parties, from UKIP to Reform UK, have had an impact on the right wing of British politics that did not depend on having seats in Westminster. The Greens may end up having a similarly outsize effect on disaffected voters on the left.

The party has long struggled to make itself heard. Mr Whittaker and his fellow travellers created what became the first Green party in Europe (they initially called it PEOPLE and then the Ecology party, before agreeing on the current name). It did not win a seat in the House of Commons until 2010, by which time sister parties in Germany and Belgium had long since wielded actual power. Caroline Lucas, the party’s lone MP, claims it has shaped Britain’s progress in cutting carbon emissions. Yet the policies of successive Tory and Labour governments bear little in the way of Green fingerprints.

It has a history of attracting weirdos and ascetics. In the early 1990s the party’s spokesman was David Icke, a conspiracy theorist with strange views on lizards. As recently as 2015 its proposals included banning banks from issuing electronic credit, legalising membership of al-Qaeda and zero economic growth. For a long time the Greens attracted people who “weren’t interested in power”, says Sir Jonathon Porrit, an environmentalist and party luminary. The party’s constitution, in turn, has given those members a strong grip over policy and made it hard to ditch shibboleths. Mercifully, it no longer talks about birth control. But even as war rages in Europe it remains sceptical of NATO and of the need for a “standing army”.

The wave of local victories in England and Wales suggests its fortunes are on the up. As recently as 2015 the Greens had fewer than 100 councillors; that has climbed eightfold. In 2023 they took full control of a council (mid-Suffolk) for the first time; this month they fell just short of doing the same in Bristol. Carla Denyer, the party’s co-leader (who is standing for Bristol Central at the next general election), says it “absolutely” wants to serve in government, as Greens have in Scotland and Ireland. She has updated the party’s stance: it no longer opposes growth, though it questions GDP as a measure; NATO should be reformed but Britain should not leave.

A national campaign will raise tougher questions about the party’s coherence, however. Its recent success in rural areas has come from appealing to disgruntled Tories with an earthy blend of local issues and eco-NIMBYism. Andrew Mellen, a local farmer, won in mid-Suffolk by talking about litter, bin collections, housing and sound finances. He has opposed solar farms; Greens elsewhere have similarly found reasons for opposing green energy.

In more urban areas the party is appealing to younger voters by emphasising environmental and social issues. The local elections offer some hope that Greens can win over Muslim voters and youthful leftists unhappy with Labour’s position on the war in Gaza. But young voters in Bristol may still notice that it has opposed plans for a metro and queried the need for house-building. Such inconsistencies will not help the Greens to win races in a general election, although the shape-shifting does mean they can take votes from Tories, the Liberal Democrats and Labour.

The bigger question is whether the party can carve out a bigger role in the next parliament. If and when a Labour government is forced to take tough choices, some on the left will be tempted by the Greens’ talk of wealth taxes and a universal basic income. The co-chair of Momentum, a pressure group associated with Jeremy Corbyn, a hard-left former Labour leader, quit after the local elections to campaign for the Greens and other independents.

Small parties on the right have shown that simply threatening to peel off voters can be enough to shape policy. John McTernan, a political strategist close to Labour, reckons that the Greens are already a “serious force” and that splits between progressive parties will set the new contours of British electoral politics. As the party turns 50, it may not have completely grown up. But it could finally be about to wield real influence. ■