This started out as a reaction to Stephen Bush’s election day Morning Call. Then I started hearing horror stories about our knocking up operation in Bristol West (TL;DR most of the people who told canvassers they would definitely vote Green, actually voted Labour). Then it became apparent that YouGov’s seat by seat prediction model was basically Mystic Meg, and I went to bed knowing that we had been routed in Bristol West.

Fast forward to Friday, and the Green voteshare had halved nationally (though Caroline Lucas increased her majority to take a 52% voteshare in Brighton Pavilion, possibly securing that constituency as the Green Party’s first safe seat). So I have built on my previous notes to better represent the full mish mash of thoughts and feelings I’m left with now that the Bristol West dream is so convincingly shattered.

If you’re musing on the future of the Green Party in Corbynite era, then maybe this will help give shape to some of your own thoughts.

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Morning Call: The Loser Now, Will Be Later To Win?

(Firstly, bonus points to Stephen for good use of a Dylan lyric!)

And then, ouch:

“The story of the contest was of four failures and a success. The failed campaigns: the Greens, Ukip, the Liberal Democrats, and Theresa May’s. The success: for Jeremy Corbyn. The Greens thought – and full disclosure, so did I – that the greater exposure that the short campaign and the debates would give to Caroline Lucas would see them soar in the polls. Instead, that the only message that has got out from that party is the “progressive alliance” means that the only time most people have heard from the Greens is when they’ve been telling people they’d probably be better off voting for someone else, a remarkable failure given the almost non-existent presence of climate change in either of the big two’s manifestos.”

Serious Green soul searching will be needed if we come out of this election with still just the one MP. I think it’s too early to call the Green campaign a failure, because Stephen is judging it by the wrong criteria. The aim wasn’t to soar in the polls which, as we know, don’t translate into seats. I think we need to judge the Green campaign on what (in my view) it was trying to achieve:

– a formal Progressive Alliance (failed)

– informal Progressive Alliances in the form of local electoral pacts (partial success)

– positioning Greens as Labour’s critical friend (on balance, I think success)

– increasing Green representation in Parliament (tbc!)

The problem with national voteshare is that it doesn’t tell you anything about how that voteshare is distributed. 1% may look pretty pathetic, but what the percentage point says is that the public would like the Greens to have 6.5 MPs (ie, 1% of 650 seats). Voteshare isn’t (primarily) what counts; seats are what counts. The caveat here being that voteshare counts in so far as the raw number of votes affects how much Short money Parliamentary Parties receive.

In short, if Greens return 2 MPs, then doubling our representation in Parliament is more than worth a dip in the polls, even if that means a drop in Short money.

But (and this should be a massive, 78pt bolded Times New Roman but), if we come out of the election having dropped in voteshare AND not increasing our representation in Parliament, we need to stop and ask ourselves what our Party is actually for.

If, when push comes to shove, we are saying to the electorate, “you can’t risk voting for us when there’s the threat of a Tory Government, we’d rather you vote for Labour”, then we are a pressure group, not a Party. And if the Tories emerge with a small majority, and we discover that had Green votes in key marginals gone to Labour then Corbyn could have been Prime Minister (albeit in a Hung Parliament scenario) then we will be hoist on our own petard by the fact that we used the risk of that eventuality our central argument for forming a Progressive Alliance.

Now, if what we want to do with the Party is influence the Labour Party, then we could enter into a conversation about a Co-Operative Party type arrangement (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Co-operative_Party) that allows people to stand under the description Labour and Green Party. It can then fall to Greens to ensure that candidates with strong green credentials are put forward, and that pressure is applied internally to shape policy and so on.

That may sound like heresy, but we just spent an election campaign standing aside and telling people to vote Labour in order to keep the Tories out. If the aim of our Party is to put climate change at the heart of Government policy, then it may be time to consider that the most effective way to do that could be by helping Corbyn re-align the left, and joining forces with Labour.

Which comes first, Party or Planet?

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Back to now…

I know the above makes it sound like I am advocating an attempt to join Labour en masse, and there is certainly a big part of me that feels that pull. However, that is not my final conclusion; at this point, I simply don’t have a final conclusion, just a painful process of reflection and wound licking. The important question is:

What is the point of the Green Party?

I don’t mean that bitterly or ironically. I ask it in the same way I ask my therapy clients to consider the point of what they are doing; it’s about raison d’etre and having primary objectives around which all other priorities and action can be meaningfully arranged.

This is healthy in the wake of an existentially impactful event. And it is entirely valid to conclude that the point of the Party at this time is to address the environmental emergency of climate change through political means. And it is entirely valid to conclude that the most effective way to do that in the Corbynite era is to stop trying to beat ’em, and join ’em, Co-Op style.

But there are other paths to consider too:

Target Councils and Mayors, not constituencies (Brighton Pavilion excepted)

Our pushing of the Progressive Alliance has bought us a lot of goodwill among Corbynites who have voted Labour to support Corbyn. These are people who could well be convinced to “reward” the Greens with a vote at the local level, where we are able to pitch ourselves as Labour’s critical friend. That’s not stretching things either, we can argue convincingly that where Labour are under electoral threat from the Greens, they pay more attention to environmental issues, and are forced to tack left.

It is entirely feasible for Bristol Greens to start positioning ourselves as the natural successors to Marvin Rees’ administration. Probably not in 2020, but arguably by 2024; and that can only happen if we invest in winning a lot of seats in 2020, which means starting to develop the Party across the city from as soon as possible, preferably yesterday.

In short, instead of planning a full throated national election campaign at the next General Election, what if we identified a target list of Councils we want to control, and put resources into developing local Parties, and funding proper local campaigns?

This would also help us address “the Brighton question”, whereby our opponents derail us with “look what the Greens did in Brighton!”. The best way to remedy that reputational blow is to demonstrate that we’re learning from it.

And that means preparing local Parties for the possibility of local Administration, as well as equipping Councillors with an effective rebuttal list detailing the many and varied failings of Labour Councils up and down the country.

Rebuild the centre ground in Tory territory

With hindsight, it should be clear that targeting a sitting Labour MP backfired massively in Bristol West. In particular, the “why elect just another Labour MP” line was a mistake. Say what you want about Thangam Debbonaire, but she is not just another Labour MP. She is a woman of colour who has come out the other side of cancer via chemo, with enough tenacity to take part in the attempted coup against Corbyn, return to the front bench as whip, then defy Corbyn again (and, amusingly, herself) by voting against triggering Article 50 and getting away with it. All whilst chairing the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Refugees (of which Caroline Lucas was a Vice-Chair).

The point being that going up against a Labour MP was always going to be difficult, but was made especially so by Thangam Debbonaire actually being a skilled and apparently indefatigable politician.

But there is another approach the Greens can take, and that is to venture into the kind of Tory territory that Labour can’t touch.

I’ll need to expand this idea in another post, but in my opinion the collapse of the centre ground represents a rejection not of any and all possible political centres, but of the particular kind of political centre that found its apotheosis in Blairism. In short, I differentiate between a triangulated centre, and a grounded centre.

The triangulated centre is the simple end result of political triangulation. In simple terms, you take your position, and you take your opponent’s position, then you say (in a very reasonable sounding voice) “here is the midway point between these two positions, clearly this is a sensible compromise”. It’s a clever tactic, because it can easily take the wind out of your opponent’s sails.

The problem with the triangulated centre is that, used excessively over a long period of time, it results in the political Establishment grounding itself in a political consensus that is increasingly far removed from, and unable to communicate with, the actual political views of every day people.

Hence why the political Establishment can scream hysterically about rail nationalisation being the height of communism, whilst polling consistently demonstrates that most people would quite like a nationalised rail service thank you very much.

When I talk about the grounded centre, I mean constructing a politics that is rooted in what actual people say they support, and doing the hard work of negotiating an agreed coalition of common interests among those competing views.

Now, this isn’t something Corbyn has done. The particular left wing programme he offers is a popular tonic after 7 years of unrelenting austerity, and much of it can actually be considered centre ground considering the policies people say they support. Crucially, Corbyn is a relentless campaigner, and much of his success in the election is the demonstrable fruit of putting significant effort into building a movement.

We must learn from this, and I think we can.

Because the Green Party’s unique selling point is environmentalism, it may be possible for us to take on a unique role in traditionally Tory voting rural areas. These are places where the Tory voting identity makes switching to Labour impossible, but where the Green Party could make significant headway by focusing more on our deep Green policies.

These are places vulnerable to flooding that will now be places willing to listen to the risks of climate change and how they can be mitigated. Many rural areas are now vulnerable to fracking by a Tory Government, and whilst fox hunting might enjoy the support of the rural rich, the rural poor are no friends of the hunt.

But in order to do that, we would need to stop competing with Labour on the left, and instead turn our attention to constructing a new centre ground. Not by triangulating, but by working at a community level to construct a grounded centre. Which does mean competing with the Lib Dems, who consider themselves the natural centre ground Party. But I think our environmentalism actually gives us the edge here, as the centrism of the Lib Dems is still largely triangulated.

If the grounded centre is the area of politics where most people agree, then ever since the Paris Agreement, the need to tackle climate change can be held up as the grounded centre policy of choice.

In other words, small g green issues are where most people already agree. Whether rich or poor, most people agree that air pollution must be dealt with, and that climate change is an urgent existential threat.

And we don’t need to reinvent our Party to lay claim to that centre ground, we just need to be willing to put the effort into building it.

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So, lots of food for thought there, and I don’t know what’s for the best for us as a Party.

All I know is that we need to talk about it, and half a million voters still want us to.

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Photo credit: featured image is “thinker” by Fredrik Rubensson.