This post is reserved for new and infrequent commenters. “Infrequent” is defined as having post less than five comments in the last month.
Yesterday, a poll showed the Green party ahead of the Liberal Democrats by two points. Last week, figures showed that the Green party overtook the LibDems (and UKIP) in terms of membership numbers.
There’s also talk of a (Cameron-supported) appearance of the Greens in the election leadership debates. Opposition to that has allowed the two leading Green women to appear in a poster with the line: “What are you afraid of boys?”
So, should we be panicking? Will we lose seats to the Greens in the election? Could some of our MPs defect to them?
Well, no, no and no are my answers.
It is difficult to think of a seat which the Greens could win, to add to their current seat of Brighton Pavilion. But in some constituencies they may pick up votes sufficiently in our target seats to wreck our chances of winning. Cardiff Central, Bristol West and Manchester Withington have been listed as places where that might happen.
We’ve taken a lot of criticism of our work in coalition. One thing I haven’t heard is much criticism of our work on the environment and climate change. Yes, there have been grumblings about decisions on nuclear power. But generally, our two Secretaries of State for Energy and Climate Change have done great work. (See here and here for starters.)
I don’t wish to be rude to the Green Party, but there’s not a flying bat’s chance of them doing anything approaching such governmental work in the forseeable future.
* Paul Walter is a Liberal Democrat activist and member of the Liberal Democrat Voice team. He blogs at Liberal Burblings.
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31 Comments
I fully support the Greens being in the debates. The won a seat at the last election, which UKIP have not done and it seems right to allow the full spectrum to be represented.
The other reason I think the Greens should be in the debates is because lots of people think of them as a nice fluffy party. We should welcome the opportunity to give them some more exposure so people know what they are actually voting for – a pretty authoritarian, socialist party. To be clear I have absolutely no problem with that, and I’m sure there are some people who have voted for us in the past who would prefer that, but at least people should know and not live under some illusion that they are a harmless, “nice to the environment” party.
The reality is that the Green Party has not one jot of economic credibility. Their”anti-austerity” let’s ignore the reality nonsense would lead any UK Government into the hands of the IMF, rocketing interest rates, mass unemployment and chaos.
Also (and I hope this doesn’t make me fall foul of the “infrequent rule” 🙂 ) there are some ideas that they are proposing that deserve some airtime and debate, despite having quite a different ideology to what everyone thinks they do. For example I’d much rather talk about a universal citizen’s income and land value tax, than have a debate dominated by immigration thanks to UKIP.
We’re in danger only if the Green Party understand the reasons for their ‘surge’ and how to utilise it. The Green Party, imo, do well out of the anti-establishment vote, as we used to historically. If you can tap into an anti-establishment feeling in your local campaign, the Green Party won’t get any votes. But if you can’t . . .
Hurrah! Another article where loyal voters and members are not allowed to comment because they have dared to express an oppinion in the past; how very liberal!
Rather ironic that the Lib Dems are probably going to be able to weather the storm from the Greens by relying on FPTP; still what are principles to those in government?
I’ve seen how the local Green activists work in my area, and they are not very good campaigners. I doubt they will win any seats.
Paul Walter is right to say that the Greens will have, at most, one MP in the next Parliament. This level of representation will provide insufficient leverage to secure any significant legislative change whether in coalition or a confidence-and-supply arrangement.
The difficulty with using this fact to attack the Greens is that the same was true of our own party for much of our recent history (and may soon be again, according to the pessimists among some LDV regulars). We dared to dream. The Greens are entitled to dream too.
Nor will it be very helpful to point out that a lot of their support consists of protest voters. As our own experience has demonstrated, protest votes often only become evident as such when “the going gets tough”.
Instead, we should criticise their policies in the same way that we would those of any other political opponent. The Greens are at their most vulnerable on the economy. But also, again as Paul Walter suggests, on the environment. There is an opportunity to contrast the socialist environmentalism of the Greens with the liberal environmentalism of the Lib Dems.
One more thing. In an earlier comment I said that, for the foreseeable future, the Lib Dems will not govern except in coalition. The same is true (in spades) for the Green Party, and it seems to me that so far they have not been willing to address the implications of this. The Lib Dems are well-placed to explain such political realities to the voters.
Paul, I think that you may be understating the threat.
You make the very common mistake of seeing the Green Party solely through the environmental policy prism, as if they are a single-issue party. That’s understandable – the name doesn’t help! However, the Greens are increasingly pushing the fact that they have far more policies than just environmental ones, and many of them would be entirely familiar and welcome to the pre-2010 Liberal Democrat member/voter. I was a LibDem member, activist, even one-time candidate from the 1980s through to 2011. After a spell in the political wilderness (I joined Labour for a couple of years), I now find that the Greens offer by far the best fit with my positions on economic and social policy, so I am one of their new members. It has nothing to do with the environmental policies which, as you note, the LibDems retain a reasonable record on. It has far more to do with the fact that the Greens offer an alternative to the Thatcherite status-quo which is now supported enthusiastically by the Cleggite LibDems. I’m not the only one in this position, and increasingly the Greens are managing to register – particularly with young voters – that they have policies other than environmental ones.
The second point is whether it is right to say that “there’s not a flying bat’s chance of them doing anything approaching such governmental work in the forseeable future”. I think that’s (a) a bit rich coming from my old party, for whom this was a refrain often thrown in their face by the arrogant red-blue duopoly; but more importantly (b) while I agree that it’s hard to see a Green win outside of Brighton under the FPTP system, I think there’s a greater likelihood of Caroline Lucas working alongside Labour in Government after the next election than there is of any rump of LibDems. Probably best not to be too complacent.
I disagree with the analysis here.
While the environment might be the Green Party’s key theme, that doesn’t necessarily reflect their appeal.
I think their success has been more to promise something different to the disenfranchised left wing voter. They said that Labour and the Lib Dems have let you down, UKIP are fascists and claim that their policies are the radical ones that you wish your own party was pushing. (and they do have a fair number of good policies to back up that last point)
I don’t think they’re a huge danger to us in the short term, in the run up to the 2015 elections, as FPTP will meter out the same cruel punishment that it’s traditionally done to us. That said, we’ve seriously trashed our image over the last four and a half years and most liberal minded people I now meet aren’t minded to vote for us, even though they share our values and believe in what we ought to stand for.
If we fail to turn that around then these liberal-minded voters will eventually find a new home.
Paul, they might spoil some results for us (and Labour paradoxically) but they are a threat to us. I think they could gain Bristol West in the future, and possibly finish second in LD-held Norwich South this year (in front of us!!)
Beyond that? No idea.
Actually I agreed with you for once Paul. Although on the face of it – many of the Green members and voters are ex-Lib Dems who like me are hacked off. The Green surge is a second front which is damaging Labour. The Last Ashcroft Poll saw the Lib Dems Rise 1% and the Greens 3% at the expense of the Conservatives and UKIP, which is to be welcomed as a direction of travel. The Green surge is more damaging to vain Labour hopes of a majority and we should welcome the Greens and SNP into the ITV debate as it will hurt Labour and the Conservatives. When you analyse the effect on Lib Dem seats, a Green surge takes votes away from Labour and helps our incumbency factor. Combined with the SNP and UKIP effect on Labour seats it is Ed Miliband who must fear the squeeze more than us. Perversely this is Good News in multi-party politics. Ashcrofts poll shows that the Greens are now the biggest recipients of 2010 Lib Dems, getting 15% of our 2010 Lib Dems compared to 13% for Labour. This is the best news of all, since protesting ex-Lib Dems will do less damage voting Green than Labour. It also shows the continuing fall of Ed Miliband in the eyes of 2010 Lib Dem voters.
Yes the Lib Dems should be panicking. I was a Lib Dem member last election.
Now I have joined the Green Party.
The reason is the Lib Dems supported fracking.
Fracking was not in the either the Lib Dem manifesto or the Tory one 2010. They could have vetoed it. Fracking is daft and the country does not want it.
Lib Dems, rethink your policy or lose even more support.
Eventually the Greens will become an effective force for alternative politics but that day has not come. The time to panic will be when the lights go out and petrol is so expensive it is measured by the millilitre. If by that time we haven’t developed a renewable energy based economy in a free market, then we will have little choice but to endure an authoritarian Socialist Green Government. Then it will be time to panic.
Chris Stallard
“Hurrah! Another article where loyal voters and members are not allowed to comment because they have dared to express an oppinion in the past; how very liberal!”
The editorial team of this website have a right in a liberal democracy to make editorial decisions. We received feedback from readers that new and infrequent commenters have been feeling “drowned out” by very frequent commenters who dominate discussions on threads. After thorough debate, we have therefore decided to devote one out of 40 of our posts per week to new and infrequent commenters, and we are doing that only with subjects which have already been thoroughly debated. The Green party surge has already had three posts with many comments on it this week alone. So frequent commenters have already had several chances to have their say on the Green party and this is for infrequent and new commenters, to give them a chance on their own. That feels pretty liberal to me.
No – we shouldn’t be panicking – it rarely helps.
We should not be panicking, we should be advertising our achievements and policies which make us #BritainsGreenestParty
Also, there are tory-facing seats we currently hold where the growth in the Green Party vote, which I think is unrelated to environmental issues as it’s a final destination for the protest vote who have discovered why UKIP is an establishment party in disguise, will adversely affect the outcome of the election, even if they get nowhere near winning the seat.
If it weren’t for the huge vested financial self-interests controlling our politics, with the impact of issues like peak oil and climate change the natural main parties of the 21st century are surely the Greens and the Lib Dems, with a protest party like UKIP scooping up the “sod them all” votes.
The environmental thread of things has been well-covered above; what I think we’re crying out for as Lib Dems is calling the Greens out on their astronomically illiberal raft of policies elsewhere. Only government-approved advertising to be permitted, the BBC forced to show approved “educational” programmes during prime time, the country to be kept “in a permanent state of zero or negative growth” (i.e. permanent recession), all independent schools to be forced to pay full income tax (including the ones for disabled and vulnerable children, then), hugely increased funding for “alternative” medicine, aggressive “public education” and economic measures advancing Green principles, all gifts above a certain (unspecified) value to be taxed, the list goes on. Many of the underlying aims are sympathetic, but their policies as they are are among the most draconian and illiberal of any vaguely major party in the UK at present, in many areas abolishing freedom of choice and in others even making inroads against freedom of thought. The Lib Dems should be hammering them on this at every opportunity.
The Green Party are very poorly organised and that is already causing them problems. Even if they do well in terms of vote share in this election, it seems unlikely they will be able to capitalise on that “surge” and do well in future. Some of the wildly unrealistic targets they have set will not help as failing to meet them will leave activists and members dispirited when they fall well short of reaching them.
The local Green PPC in Cambridge is a good example. He’s been making disablist and transphobic comments for the last 48 hours and doesn’t seem to realise he’s digging himself a deeper hole – it’s the sort of thing that runs very badly with the student vote, which they’re going to need if they stand a chance of making it into 4th place ahead of UKIP.
And this is a Green target seat with an A-List candidate.
A big increase in Green Party vote is the only thing that could give us a majority Tory government after the next election. The biggest danger they pose is tactical unwind in Tory facing Labour and Lib Dem marginals. It will be interesting to see how many potential Green Party voters realise this before polling day and whether they care.
There is no cause for panic but some of the rosy-spectacles being worn by others is very worrying. We may well be #Britainsgreenestparty but not many people realise that. We have lost many activists to the Greens, and will lose many voters, unless we get our message out on green issues. It has been somewhat lacking from the leadership since 2010, despite fantastic work by our ministers and policy makers.
I attended yesterday’s ERS event at which Nathalie Bennett was speaking. What she said on constitutional reform has been said by us, and a lot better, for many many years. Get her on the TV debates – she is very woolly on detail and funding especially.
The Lib Dems really shouldn’t blame Manchester Withington on the Green Party. Last summer, a poll showed Labour 56%, Lib Dem 22% and Greens 10%. Even if the Greens didnt stand in this election at all, Lib Dems collapse here (particularly in Chorlton, Old Moat and Burnage) is so complete that Labour would still win.
@Zoe O’connell.
Do you have the evidence to back up your claims of “dis ableist & transphobic comments” from the Green Party in Cambridge. To make such a claim believable, I would have thought it incumbent upon you to provide the evidence to back it up.
Having recently left the Green Party and joined the Lib dems I can say that the Green Party may be a threat this election but longer term I don’t think we will see a mainstream Green Party. When I was a member it took my local party SIX months to produce a ward newsletter and this was in an advanced area with a Green group on the council and some electoral success. In most other areas the Greens aren’t organised at all, so yes they will take votes off Labour and Lib Dems but no I think it will be a flash in the pan
As another ex Green Party member this fact along with the above comment demonstrates that not all of the membership traffic has been in one direction. I am a former Green local councillor and was the party’s candidate at the Bradford West By-Election in 2012.
The comments about lack of organisation are fair ones. The cumbersome structures of the Executive (GPEX) and Regional Council (GPRC) make decision making awkward and sometimes arbitrary and make our federal structure look positively streamlined by comparison. Although local activity will improve with the surge in membership there is at the core of the party probably less than 100 activists with the expertise to run a serious national campaign. At my By-Election in Bradford we had zero input from national HQ, not even an e-mail or a phone call and had to go chasing after the then leader Caroline Lucas on a visit she made to Leeds during our campaign to get a photo op. She wouldn’t change her schedule to include a visit to a seat 10 miles down the road where the party was fighting a by-election.
As for expectations the last time I spoke to Natalie Bennett (last Summer) she said their only objective in 2015 was to retain Brighton Pavilion and I have not seen anything since to suggest that they have the manpower to make inroads anywhere else. I would add the proviso that if the party did seriously get its act together in Bristol West with a ‘wall to wall’ campaign for the next 4 months then I think we could be in trouble there. This seat is definitely No.2 on the Green target list and in an ‘Armaggedon scenario’ for the party in May there is an outside chance it could fall although it is strongly my opinion that not only will that not happen but that we will win over 30 seats including at least one gain (Watford).
Longer term it is impossible to predict what will happen to the Greens. If they are involved in supporting any type of government then they will suffer the same fate as their colleagues in the Republic of Ireland and end up getting wiped off the political map, probably to be replaced by some genuine far left alternative as has happened there.
If they remain in opposition then a lot will depend on whether we are still in government or not. If we are then it will be easier for them but if we are regrouping under a new leader then all bets are off. I cannot at the moment accurately predict what the political landscape will look like in one months time let alone another five years and so I think it is futile to predict at the moment. It is easy to look on in hindsight and say that the rise of UKIP was entirely predictable as the natural party of protest after the Lib Dems went into coalition but look back at web posts in 2010 and try and find me anyone anywhere who was predicting that outcome.
As any good football manager would tell you, let’s just concentrate on our own game and leave the other parties to worry about theirs.
After the performance of their leader on tke Sunday Politics programme i would say no .Their economic policies were torn to shreds .The more exposure they get .The more votes they will lose.
Also, it is worth considering that while the Green share of the vote may increase, it probably won’t result in them gaining additionally seats. It may threaten to undermine majorities, if votes are taken from the Party who currently hold the seat but with UKIP on the right doing the same, but perhaps to a greater degree, it is hard to see just what effect this may have on the outcome of any given seat let alone the overall result of the General Election. Whatever happens it is going to be an interesting election…
“UKIP is an establishment party in disguise”
You need to get with the programme. The latest establishment line (and YOU are part of the establishment) is that UKIP are a bunch of nutters, out of control and about to implode. We’ll see about that at the election. 🙂
I’ll put your comment right: UKIP is an ANTI establishment insurgency.
You’re welcome!
Simon, while I would agree with the statement that the Liberal Democrats now in government do constitute an “establishment party,” that doesn’t make all Liberal Democrats “part of the establishment,” any more than Nigel Farage’s immense wealth makes you rich. In fact what a lot of Liberal Democrats object to is precisely the coziness of some party leaders with the establishment, which suggests that, whatever the MPs do, there’s still a powerful anti-establishment vein running through the Party.
Just as Liberal Democrats ask, every day, whether the Party deserves their support, and demand changes that will make it more the sort of party that does deserve their support, so too you ought to be asking, every day, whether UKIP is really the sort of party that’s capable of delivering or even standing for the kind of change that you want.
@ David1
Where do you get the notion that Farage is immensely rich? He isn’t, in fact one his best lines in a recent Question Time, when attacked by the oleaginously hirsute hypocrite Russell Brand was to point mockingly at him and remark, “he attacks me for being wealthy and yet I’m not the richest person on this panel!”
He would be a good deal richer if he had remained a city trader rather than going into politics (as would many politicians in fairness) even though the establishment parties now attempt to peddle this line in an attempt to erode the attraction of UKIP to the working class. A forlorn attempt, by the way, because Farage for all his Public School background speaks to the working class in a way that Cameron, Miliband and Clegg can only dream of.
Go into a working class pub and talk politics. I am guessing not many Lib Dems do that, that is one of the reasons you STILL don’t understand or get UKIP. You are out of touch, in your own little middle class, self righteous establishment bubble.
The change I want is to get us out of Europe and reclaim our national sovereignty. And to wake the establishment parties up to their failure on unlimited immigration, and change the taboo and consensus on that issue.. I think that is going quite well so far, don’t you?
@David Howell – The comments by the local Green PPC and subsequent apology have been covered in the national press: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/celebritynews/11372643/Searching-for-the-correct-phrase-can-go-so-very-wrong.html http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/green-party-leader-natalie-bennett-apologises-for-rupert-reads-disappointing-comments-about-trans-people-10007618.html