What the Greens think they are doing

A response to left commentators' criticism of the Green Party's performance

My Monday doom-scrolling was proceeding as normal - Labour being nasty to the vulnerable, Greens taking principled positions on the many ills facing the world, far-right poison fed into my timeline by Musk’s algorithm - you know, the usual, when I alighted on this:

Now, I expect ill-informed hot takes on the Greens from most of the media spectrum, and I don’t usually get too bothered by them. But here were two left commentators, who I follow and respect, with what seemed to me to be equivalently ill-informed critiques of the Green Party. I’d have thought that they’d know enough about how UK politics works to see what it takes for a small party to win elections in the absence of media and super-rich backers, but apparently not. And they are not alone - this seems to be a surprisingly common confusion across many left commentators (e.g. James Schneider) as well as among many non-Greens on the left. I responded at the time with a Twitter thread (here), but subsequently felt it warranted a fuller response. I want to demonstrate why the Greens are actually doing very well given the constraints they face, debunk the criticisms they get from the broader left, and finish by looking at what it will take for them to do even better.

The not-level playing field

One vote, two parties, no choice?

Let’s start with a reminder of the political context. The UK’s First-Past-the-Post (FPTP) political system is designed to create a duopoly, with major barriers to entry for third parties. Historically, it’s been very effective - post-WW2 we’ve almost always had majority (usually Tory) governments elected on a minority of the vote, with just a couple of coalitions where the junior party has been disproportionately weak. Labour winning 63% of the seats on 34% of the vote in the 2024 General Election was particularly egregious, but not unprecedented. Local councils have also historically been elected using FPTP, resulting in absurd examples like Lewisham in 2022, where Labour got 55% of the vote but a clean sweep of the council.

The exceptions to FPTP have been recently created/reformed polities, where the clearly undemocratic nature of FPTP meant that forms of Proportional Representation has been implemented - notably for the London Assembly, the Scottish Parliament, the Welsh Senned and the Northern Ireland Parliament (and for councils in Scotland and Northern Ireland) - and these have lowered the barriers to entry for third parties in the associated elections.

For multiple reasons, the FPTP duopoly has started to collapse (a good subject for a later article), but that is a very recent development - between 1945 and 2001, the combined vote share of the big two parties averaged 83% and never dropped below 70%. Even in 2005-2019, the average was still 71%, leaving 2024’s 57% as the outlier over the last century. Tellingly, only over the last c. decade has any party consistently to the right of the Tories (UKIP and its successors) or the left of Labour (the Greens) ever succeeded at all electorally, and even then only at the margins.

I can’t hear you (if I don’t let you speak)

The UK’s traditional media environment is obviously highly skewed towards the right, and Labour is renowned for running scared in the face of the Murdoch press. But at least Labour is mentioned in the traditional media, even if often negatively - you could go weeks or months without hearing anything at all about the Greens in most of the mainstream press.

The BBC is not much better, e.g. as observed by Zack Polanski (Green Party’s deputy leader and London Assembly Member) last month:

Ludicrous catching up on #politicslondon.

Conversation between a Labour deputy mayor, a labour MP and a Tory about growth. I've been elected in London for 4 years now & have never been in the studio.

The conversation is so absurdly narrow.

Independent research backs up the effective right-wing (or at least small “c” conservative) bias in the BBC, e.g. this analysis of Question Time guests which found that the political guests disproportionately favoured the larger parties.

Having been close to both the 2021 and 2025 London Mayor and Assembly election campaigns, I have seen first-hand that the only time the traditional media gives the Greens anything like fair coverage is when it is forced to through legislative requirements.

The algorithm is not your friend

So let’s look at social media. Once claimed to be the great leveller, where people could escape the agenda of traditional media, we have instead found that most platforms now at best marginalise, and in many cases actively discriminate against, political messaging and/or left-wing voices. I've overseen the London Green Party’s social media for much of the period from 2016 to now, and in that time we’ve seen Twitter become a cesspool that many have given up on (yet is still important) and which now needs payment to get any kind of algorithmic traction. Facebook now actively discriminates against (left-wing) politics. BlueSky is new and good, but still small.

Money

National-scale politics is an expensive business. And the Greens operate on a shoestring, relying on membership dues and small donations. To put this into perspective, for the 2024 General Election campaign, Labour took in over 60 times what the Greens did in donations. This disparity in resources massively impacts what the Greens can achieve.

People

The Green parties across the UK currently have approaching 70k members. While this is broadly in line with the 2015 all-time high, it is the lowest of the major parties. Reform has, recently exploded to it claims 220k+ members.

Political Strategy and Success

Third parties in UK politics have historically had two basic choices of political strategy:

1. Grind out enough wins at council level, to build enough localised strength to get the critical mass needed to win constituencies (this has been the LibDem model, ultimately achieving a place in the 2010-15 coalition government). A variant of this is to have an inherently regional political appeal (i.e. SNP, Plaid Cymru, the various Northern Ireland parties - and often their FPTP success was enhanced by success under a Proportional Representation election).

2. Couple a high degree of media presence with enough of an electoral impact to at least threaten to prevent one of the big two parties from getting elected, pushing that party to neutralise you through copying your policies (this has been the Reform (and its predecessors) model right the way through to getting and winning the Brexit referendum).

The most successful non-Labour left party ever

So what option did the Greens select, and what did they achieve?

In the absence of high-level, sustained media access, strategy 2 was always off the table. But until 2017-18, strategy 1 was also not comprehensively pursued. The first big breakthrough was the local application of strategy 1 to win Brighton Pavilion in the 2010 General Election, and then not only retaining it in 2015 but extending our majority (it was Caroline Lucas’s resolute, principled and perceptive voice that led me to join the Greens back in 2013). But through to 2018, the failure to comprehensively pursue strategy 1 meant we had only slowly got to c. 1% of all principal authority councillors, and with no real chance of winning a second MP.

Then things changed. A group of dedicated, locally successful Greens had captured their methodology in the (now totemic) Target to Win (TTW) manual. And then in c. 2017-18, the national party made the fateful decision to invest what money it had to build a small (staff) field team to train and support local parties in implementing TTW. We then ruthlessly identified failing councillors (primarily but not exclusively Tories) and proceeded to put in the hard yards of doorknocking, leafleting and casework, winning over communities to our hard-working and dedicated candidates. The results speak for themselves - over the next 5 election cycles (2019-2024), we more than quadrupled our number of councillors.

We then had the critical mass to run an exceptional General Election campaign, heading off the risk of losing our only MP (this was a real fear in Spring 2024 given the vagaries of FPTP) and instead becoming with 4 MPs the most successful non-Labour, UK-wide left party in the modern era.

Commentators’ conclusion: 0/10 must do better

Given all these constraints, you’d think that left commentators would be impressed by what the Greens have achieved. But no, it’s not good enough. With the Tories still lost, Labour seemingly intent on extinguishing the last vestiges of remaining hope for change, and Reform riding high in the opinion polls, there is consternation on the left, and a seeming wish to blame the Greens for not having opinion poll ratings that mirror Reform’s. As Reform both shares with the Greens the role of an alternative party, but is the inverse of the Greens in being populist, top-down, well-funded, with easy access to the media, but lacking (as yet) an effective field operation. So I’m going to use Ash Sarkar’s specific criticisms from the opening Tweet to structure the look at the supposed failings of the Greens, and look at how that compares with the supposed success of Reform.

Policy vs Populism

Ash: “Much of the Green Party membership, and a lot of its senior figures, are instinctively un-populist. They like policy and finicking too much!”

The world is a complex place - a global civilisation more interlinked than ever, nested within the global ecosystem. Pretending this is not the case, that there are panaceas we could just implement if we weren’t so squeamish about nature or human rights or something, that we aren’t facing limits to growth and an accelerating polycrisis, would be both dishonest and ultimately, when exposed, would rightly destroy our credibility.

Reform and their fellow travellers can promise whatever they like because they’ve no intention of delivering any of it - look at the campaign vs. reality of Brexit, or the campaign vs. reality of Trump, for proof of that.

So sure, our messaging could be sharper (and probably would be if we had money to invest in it), but we shouldn’t lie about the reality of the ever-worsening situation we face. Let’s aim to be more populist where we can (e.g. I’d like us to go much harder on extreme wealth as being unsustainable, dangerous to society, and that it must be fully redistributed), but we must always be underpinned by principles and science.

Leaders and Leadership

Ash: “Two leaders nobody's heard of are much, much worse than having one.”

I voted for Adrian and Carla as by far the best leader candidates in the last leadership election. And they delivered, both by getting elected as MPs and by leading the Greens to our best-ever results. I also like the leadership model, with 1/2 leaders and 2/1 deputy leaders (totalling 3 roles). I feel this gives our leadership balance and encourages mutual support and collegiate thinking - all qualities sadly lacking from the leadership of other parties.

But let’s look at the criticisms that our leaders aren’t sufficiently dynamic or populist etc. Do people think Green members had some amazing option available in the leadership election that we just didn’t vote for? That we can magic up the perfect leader next time? I’m grateful to all those who have committed themselves over the years to the hard slog of trying to get the Green message out to voters in the face of all the constraints set out above.

I hope and believe we will have a good leadership election this year. But I also believe that the Green model is bottom-up, grassroots leadership, whereby we all lead as we each can, whether that be in our communities and/or on social media.

I can’t do Question Time, I’m washing my hair

Ash: “On the doorstep, many voters perceive them as solely an environmental party. They need to work much harder to get a broader economic message to cut through!”

I’ve listened to focus groups’ perceptions of the Greens, and it is true that, without any other information, people default to thinking of the Greens as solely an environmental party - that is baked in. So in practice, most of our messaging over the last c. 5 years has focused on the social justice aspects of Green policy. As Ash notes, the challenge then is getting the message across. Ironically, the most effective way for Greens to achieve this on the doorstep, precisely because we can have one-to-one conversations with voters, and we can define our messaging in our leaflets - but this is a very time-intensive way to achieve this.

Turning to the traditional media, do people really think we get daily calls from TV channels and the newspapers, seeking Greens to provide quotes or spokespeople, and that we then go “nah, can’t be bothered”? Trust me, Greens know the value of media attention and take every bit offered. The fundamental problem is that the media falls over themselves to report Reform, but just does not seek the views of the Greens - Reform are pushing on an open door, while we are facing one that is closed, locked and bolted, with a sign on it saying “No Cold Callers” (that’s a little canvassing joke for you all).

So the argument then is that we don’t do enough to entice the media to listen to us. But I’d contend that even that isn’t really true - among the main parties, you cannot get more radical than the Greens’ policies (although, as mentioned earlier, this is not necessarily the same as being populist), but the media is just not interested. The Greens have talked about a wealth tax for years, but it is only when a non-Green (Gary Stevenson) gets invited onto Question Time that the media starts to listen (and all kudos to Gary for doing that). Or from the start of the year, here’s another example of the media’s differential treatment of the Greens vs Reform.

Looking at the nominally more radical left press such as Novara Media, Turn Left, Politics Joe etc., we can see that they also only infrequently feature the Greens. Reform representatives are a fixture on GB News, in the Daily Mail, yet in the part of the media that should be most sympathetic to the Greens, they get what feels like…nothing.

Winning actual elections

Ash: “They're structured to go slow. Their elections handbook says candidates (even at the local level) should spend years leafleting a constituency before standing. That's bad for achieving smash-n-grab breakthroughs. “

There is literally no such thing as a “smash-n-grab breakthrough”, especially in the absence of media coverage and vast amounts of money. Anyone who has spent any significant amount time trying to win FPTP elections knows that it takes a vast amount of time and effort to persuade enough people in a particular ward/constituency that you are committed and credible, such that you can boot out an incumbent from one (usually) one of the default political parties. Green progress since 2018 has only been through applying that disciplined focus on grassroots campaigning on the doorstep. It was precisely the lack of “spend[ing] years leafleting a constituency” that condemned us to rarely winning (in the pre-2018 years, those that did were running local variants of TTW). And let’s be honest - that’s why every electorally successful party has its equivalent of TTW.

So now to the acid tests of a political party - voting intention, which has slowly but steadily risen since the 2024 General Election, and election results.

So for me, it’s very telling that for a party with supposedly more than twice the support of the Greens, the lack of effective field organising by Reform (and its predecessors) exposes how media and money alone are insufficient to actually win large numbers of FPTP elections.

Commentator, critique thyself!

I hope I’ve evidenced that the Greens are doing really well given the minimal media coverage and money available to them, the size of their membership, and the difficulties of winning under FPTP.

I hope that left commentators will start to look at the Greens through that lens in future, and while of course continuing to critique them, make that critique realistic and constructive. If they properly analysed what the Greens realistically should be doing to get more (active) members, positive media coverage, money and ultimately electoral success, then that would be truly beneficial commentary for the Greens and hence for the left more generally.

And next time they turn their attention to the Greens, I’d urge them to reach out to the Greens, bring us into the conversation rather than just firing questions into the social media void.

I think commentators should also consider critiquing why the wider left isn’t rallying around the Greens. They should explore the case for the left weighing the scales a bit more in their favour through persuading the left to commit what time and money it can to the party.

Where next for the Greens (and Reform)

Across the country, Greens are campaigning for the May 2025 council elections, aiming to continue their amazing run of winning ever more councillors - and I’m looking forward to seeing some great results on 01-May.

Beyond that, the party does need to step up. Having been London Region Coordinator for 6 years between 2016 and 2024, including for the 2021 and 2024 London Mayor and Assembly elections, and having led the drafting of the strategy for London for 2025-29, I am clear on what we need to do for the next London and Westminster elections. I’ve already written about some of the recent issues with London Green Party, but I believe things are starting to improve. I’m also aiming to do a more thorough review of what I think the Greens need to do nationally, so look out for that soon.

Finally, I want to highlight that Reform is moving quickly towards a political strategy based on winning elections outright. Its field operations are nascent but are clearly improving in both breadth and competency. If Reform adds effective field organising to its existing money, media access and membership numbers (and doesn’t implode under the weight of Farage’s ego), it will be very hard to beat.

As the traditional parties are likely to be weak and discredited in the 2029 General Election, the opportunity for a challenger party is the greatest it’s been in over a century. If we don’t want Reform to be the only challenger party, then we must put our doubts and differences aside and actively work together to make sure the Greens can step up into that role.