Stopping the ‘rising Green tide’: Labour’s analysis
At the recent Labour conference in Liverpool, LabourList organised a ‘completely packed’ fringe event (a quarter of the seats were visibly empty, and this self-reassuring rhetoric became something of a theme throughout this discussion, but let’s go with it), where several Labour luminaries came together to discuss how the party should respond to what they described as ‘the rising Green tide’
First to speak was Robert Knowles-Leak, who worked on the Bristol Central general election campaign for Thangam Debonnaire, which lost to the Greens. His recall from the campaign can be summed up as a mixture of surprise at the scale of the swing, and the assumption that that swing was largely down to the Greens using unscrupulous (“populist”) tactics. His view was the Greens “pushed a narrative that was not in good faith”
“Their line was that you can have a Green MP and have a Labour landslide too.”
But, isn’t that exactly what did happen?
He felt it was a contradiction to claim that “Your Green MP can then influence that Labour landslide”. And yet here was the Labour conference discussing how the Green successes should impact their actions over the next few years. His very presence at this session, while claiming the Greens would have no influence on Labour from this point on, seemed to be a much greater contradiction
His grumble that the Greens’ “Promise of radical action on issues that they were never going to be in a position to deliver” is an odd criticism during an election campaign. Surely that is what the campaign and election are for? To allow the public to signal which policies and ideas they would like to see implemented? Obviously, the idea of a Green government after this election would have seemed fanciful, but was he suggesting in that case that the party should put forward no policy ideas at all?
He makes stronger claims that the Green Party actively lied about some things including Labour voting against a ceasefire in Gaza. But Labour MPs were whipped to do just that, though with a sizeable rebellion resulting. Starmer argued forcefully against the ceasefire motion at the time, though Labour pushed through a rather mealy-mouthed call for a conditional ceasefire a few months later.
He also expressed consternation that the Greens had claimed Labour “had plans to privatise the NHS. As a Labour member I was a bit surprised about that because I hadn’t heard any of those!” Obviously elections generate a fair bit of political rhetoric, but there is no secrecy around Labour’s plans to extend the use of private companies to run and deliver NHS services. He could argue that that doesn’t amount to privatisation, but others could just as easily argue that it does. Hardly a ‘lie’ as he claimed.
He stated that it was another lie to claim that if Debbonaire failed to get elected, she would probably be made a peer. “And obviously that didn’t happen”. Losing Labour front benchers are almost always given a seat in the House of Lords eventually. The fact that it hasn’t happened within 3 months hardly suggests that that notion is wrong, let alone a lie.
He also objected to the use of Green New Deal Rising to add an extra front to the Green campaign, but this is entirely within the rules and something Labour-supporting groups have done elsewhere. He suggested they behaved in a way that was not fair or legitimate (i.e. fly-posting stickers on lamp-posts), but I have no way of verifying that and, in any case, that is something to be levelled at GND Rising and not the Green Party: It’s not something we do or would ordinarily condone.
He suggests that their focus should now be on “combating these populist tactics, and not just from the Greens”
He then hands over to Dale Vince, the CEO of Ecotricity and someone who campaigned for Labour in at least three of the four Green Party target seats. One of them was not even a Labour target, so clearly his tactic was simply to drive an anti-Green Party narrative as far as he could.
He conceded that in those seats there was a noticeable scepticism from voters that Labour would deliver on Green policies, “For me that stood out”. He suggested that this scepticism was reinforced by Labour’s u-turn on its £28bn per year green investment pledge several months before the election. He made an interesting point that the response to the ‘rising Green tide’ “should be for us [Labour] to see ourselves as that rising Green tide”. Without acknowledging it, Vince’s comment highlights the fact that Labour are not viewed in that way now. While Ed Miliband seems to be making good progress at expanding renewable energy, the reality is that the wide sweep of investment and reform needed to bring about net zero and move significantly towards a sustainable society and economy are not even on Labour’s agenda.
“We need to deliver on Green policies so that by the time of the next election we can remove that scepticism about whether Labour are serious about the Green economy”. Good luck with that. Prioritising carbon capture schemes above things like insulation, public transport improvements, rewilding or active travel has demonstrate that Labour’s offering on Net Zero is slow, partial and heavily tilted towards wealthy vested interests.
“The Greens… will lose vote share at the next election… the real challenge for Labour is to make a real difference between now and the next election.” This felt like wishful thinking. It’s early days but early opinion polls and local by-elections suggest the Green vote is holding up well, while it is Labour’s support that is rapidly falling.
Vince has clearly decided that trying to influence Labour from within is a better strategy than pressuring it from outside, and his analysis is an attempt to provide momentum to those efforts. We will see how successful he is in the next few years, but his analysis seems rather naive, to say the least.
Up next was Tom Renhard, the leader of the Labour Group on Bristol City Council. He bemoaned that the Greens in opposition take shots at Labour but “find it’s not so easy running a council” when they do win. This is probably fair, but true of all political parties. Lobbing bricks from opposition is much easier than delivering in administration, but Labour are as guilty of that as anybody.
He acknowledged the gradual rise of the Greens in Bristol over recent years. This would be an important observation if he also realised that this gradual rise is out of necessity. The Green Party has limited resources and receives very little national coverage (even now), and so our only path to power is the long, slow slog that on-the-ground campaigning offers. Labour has a sense that the Greens are seeping into the foundation and walls of its support, but seems to lack an understanding of why this takeover has been slow motion and ground-up, and not a sudden popular wave pushing them out of the way.
He points out (and Bristol Labour are now clearly of the view) that “the Greens are now really struggling in power”, although the examples he gives seem rather trivial and/or expected: “we could see a cemetery expanded..,” and “they’ve pushed through a number of cuts”.
He does make one telling comment in relation to the new committee system that has now replaced the office of Mayor: “they want us to all be in it together… but [our view] is that they should just get on with it”. Labour have clearly decided that there is nothing to be gained from being associated with Council decisions from now on, which explains their unwillingness to take on committee positions when they were offered in the immediate post-election cross-party discussions.
But beyond that, he doesn’t say anything you couldn’t glean from Wikipedia or news stories from the Bristol Post. He gave the impression that, in fact, Bristol Labour have done no real analysis of their defeat and are now set on waiting it out in opposition until the pendulum swings back their way in the future.
That’s not necessarily a bad strategy, but with a Labour government that will grow increasingly unpopular over the next 4–5 years (partly because that’s just what happens to parties in power, but also because their overall agenda for government is mostly thin gruel, served cold), he might have a longer wait than he realises.
He made some vague suggestions like “having hard working Councillors” or “not starting our campaign just a few months before the election.”, but these seemed more like punctuation points to help close off his speech, rather than anything that could meaningfully inform future strategy.
Next up was Brighton & Hove Council Leader, Bella Sankey, who could reasonably claim to have been part of the most successful recent Labour election campaign to push back the Greens. Labour secured a majority win in the city’s 2023 local election, with the Greens falling back from 19 to 7 Cllrs.
Her analysis, however, was more about shoring up both her and Labour’s narrative than it was a useful analysis of the election campaign, or the broader political landscape in Brighton & Hove or beyond.
We know that Labour’s public narrative about Brighton & Hove is that (in words from her ill-tempered post election tweet) “the Greens were an unmitigated disaster” and a majority Labour administration was needed to steady the ship.
But it’s surprising that their internal narrative is not more honest. This might be because Sankey needs that narrative to hold to bolster her own status and position within the party, or because they haven’t actually undertaken that honest analysis internally.
She repeats the narrative early on “The Greens really had lost control of the city… they allowed rubbish to pile up.” This is, of course, the Daily Mail/Telegraph/Argus/ Conservative/Labour line that has been repeated so many times that it has become the de facto ‘truth’.
The reality is that it was Labour that had lost control; their administration imploded (again) in 2020, leaving the Green group of Cllrs to step into the breach, facing a massive budgetary shortfall in the middle of a national lockdown. One wonders whether Labour supporters who bemoan the state of Brighton & Hove, ever ask why, when Labour has won the last 3 local elections, has that led to such a terrible outcome?
There are serious structural problems with the city’s rubbish and recycling collection service, which I don’t have time to set out fully here, but brutal austerity cuts (Cityclean’s budget has halved since 2010) and toxic working practices driven by an almost psychotic GMB Union leadership locally (who said privately to the Green Deputy leader in 2020, “we will destroy this Green administration”) and protected by the Labour and Conservative majority on the Council, has left the service under-invested in and un-modernised for the last 25 years. The Green minority administration lacked the votes, the time or the funding to tackle this, but nonetheless we were blamed for it (welcome to being in power).
As Sankey was making these comments, the rubbish was actually piling up in the city she now runs, and has been for months. There is now a whole Twitter/X thread on her inability to improve rubbish collection, despite her majority; and a recent audit of council services showed that missed bin collections have actually increased, and recycling rates decreased, since Labour took over in May 2023. She is underperforming what she called a ‘disaster’ and ‘lost control’.
And not just in rubbish and recycling collection. Her administration has been responsible for fewer affordable homes being delivered, an increase in rough sleeping, an increase in carbon emissions from the council, fewer and increasingly delayed bus services, a fall in the number of people cycling and a seeming inability to engage with voters in an open or constructive way (decisions are often announced before the council meetings to decide them, or consultations to influence them, have even taken place)
There’s no acknowledgement of any of that in this session.
But this is just context for political geeks. Voters don’t care about the detail and it doesn’t really decide election outcomes.
There were some outright fictions in her analysis. “The Greens have never taken a single seat from a Conservative in Brighton & Hove.” We have taken 7 seats from the Conservatives over the years.
But she did understand that the Greens have had considerable success in attracting Labour’s “traditional vote”.
Her analysis was mostly the kind of platitudes you’d hear from any uninformed political activist. She cited “taking on the Greens on the ground” as a reason for their success, but this is a fantasy she has created to prop up her favoured narrative. Labour in Brighton & Hove hardly function on the ground. They rarely put out leaflets and when they do they’re often generic, glossy and devoid of much local detail. They rarely knock on doors outside of election campaigns. And, despite their larger numbers, the local activist presence is very small. Many of their ward parties barely function at all and they had serious problems even recruiting candidates to stand in the election (hence their acceptance of some very poor and perhaps even ineligible candidates).
She also bemoans no overall control administrations: “policy only by the lowest common denominator”. Labour really doesn’t know how to cooperate with others in politics. It is an exclusive tribal machine, or it is nothing. In her analysis, it is this lack of majority control that is the root cause of the city’s problems. Not losing 25% of its budget in real terms since 2010. Not a deliberate government agenda to strip councils of their powers. The source of our problems is, apparently, politicians having to compromise and work with each other.
She complains that there were “no decisions and bad decisions being made”. No mention that 90% of the decisions the minority Green administration took were supported by her elected Labour colleagues (she only appeared in the chamber after a by-election a few months before the full election)
She does make some important observations about how the Green Party is often good at local campaigning and engaging with community groups on the ground, but “that doesn’t give you the tools needed to take over the running of the City” (her words). This is something we Greens need to take on board. The Green minority administration in the city from 2020–2023 was made up of (in my view) some exceptional people who performed a minor miracle in keeping the show on the road, while also achieving some impressive results like:
- halving rough sleeping,
- being one of the few councils to expand council housing stock,
- winning major new active travel and regeneration investment funding
- spending more per person on parks and green spaces than any other council in the country.
But the reality is that we, as a party, do lack the resources to run a major administration, especially when we have the entire political and media establishment attacking us. We rely on a small number of Cllrs to stretch themselves so thin that they eventually snap. Then we criticise them for not doing everything perfectly. We need to get much better at supporting elected Greens, both with our words and our resources.
She went on to make an hilarious freudian slip in her description of Labour’s campaign. “We ran a campaign to unite the right and de… I mean unite the left and defeat the right.” She was right the first time. Labour took on a very reactionary position, opposing all ‘Green’ investment like bike lanes and the planned LTN and ULEZ (‘Green vanity projects’ as they called them) and going heavily for the pro-car, anti-bike Tory vote. This was very successful electorally. Only about ⅓ of Labour’s vote increase in Brighton & Hove was a result of people switching from the Greens. About half of it came from the Tories. Partly because that was happening nationally anyway, but also because Labour made a very obvious pitch for it. One of their leaflets was virtually all blue, just in case the verbal case they were making was too subtle.
This was a key problem for the Greens in this election. We faced a ‘perfect storm’ in terms of opposition. Labour were seen as the opposition to the current Council and all its shortcomings, and also to the national government and its increasingly obvious failings. Nowhere else in the country did the Greens face that challenge, and that is the real reason our result in the city was the worst in the country, on an otherwise very successful election night.
If Labour got one thing right, it was the marrying of those two narratives (national and local) into a single voting choice. Weirdly, Sankey doesn’t even mention that. Our own post-election research with voters revealed that where we did see Greens shift to Labour, it was mainly for national reasons, though I accept that Labour’s messaging successfully connected those reasons to local grievances. This is something we should learn when we take on Labour in the future
Those Green Cllrs in administration now facing traditional Conservative opponents might find themselves in this exact situation, if the Tories ever get their act together sufficiently to become an effective electoral force again. Already, we have lost a seat in our one majority council, Mid Suffolk, just a few months after gaining it, and the Tories becoming the joint (local and national) opposition vote. We need to be very aware of this tactic in the future.
She carefully fails to mention that the Labour campaign in Brighton & Hove was entirely run and funded by the national party. Local Labour staffers were even blocked from accessing their canvassing databases to prevent any local ‘interference’ in the election (as an aside, one of these clearly disgruntled local Labour staffers said to me, of his national Labour colleagues, “These are terrible people. They’re worse than the Tories”).
The sheer scale of Labour’s campaign, including 5 publications delivered in the last 10 days, and multiple high-profile visits from virtually their entire front bench team, along with very favourable local and national press coverage (much of it from a local journalist who later took a job with LabourList), steam-rollered over the Green ground campaign. But the local Labour party had virtually no involvement in it, other than appearing in photos,doing some of the door-knocking and holding up banners.
It’s interesting that there is no admission of any of this in Labour’s internal conversation about that election. Sankey has clearly decided that it doesn’t suit her narrative, in which she and the local Labour team defeated the Greens single-handled and through hard work and their own smarts. Or maybe she is genuinely oblivious to it, given the lack of local Labour input into the campaign.
Perhaps more importantly, she also omits the more recent election results in the city which saw a significant swing from Labour to the Greens in the general election, and the loss of a local council seat to the Greens in a by-election. She makes a bold claim about reducing the Green majority in Pavilion, but despite a massive national effort (it was Starmer’s first stop on the formal election campaign), Labour managed to achieve a lower vote than their paper candidate did in 2017. The reality is that Brighton & Hove Labour has probably already lost the advantage it gained in opposition locally, and its response has been to lean into its reactionary, anti-Green positions. Its recent announcement on reducing car parking charges, is a clear signal of where her administration is heading politically.
I don’t have any transcript for the final speaker at this event, Paul Mason, but the one quote tweeted by LabourList probably says it all.
“We need to stop being outraged that there are other forms of progressive politics. Having stopped being outraged what we then need to do is to work out that we still have the right to defeat them.”
Paul Mason’s rallying call for Labour activists to unite to defeat progressives might seem nonsensical (and even highlight why progressives need to defeat Labour!), but I suspect it was the one comment of the session that revealed the real Labour instinct in this situation.
As shared in another Labour fringe meeting, it’s not the Tories or Reform who are likely to draw Labour voters away, but the LibDems and the Greens. If Labour wants to hold on to its voter base, it does need to reduce the appeal of those two parties (plus SNP/Plaid). We will see Labour devote considerable time, effort and resources to attacking those parties, while continuing to pander to Reform/Conservative voters.
But how will it try to do that? What is their tactic to stem the advance of the Greens?
The overall consensus of this Labour meeting seemed to be: Where the Greens won, it was by being unreasonable and tricking people. Where Labour won, it was because they worked super hard and because they are simply better at running things.
Having this as an external narrative is understandable, but I was very surprised that it seems to be their internal analysis also.
It suggests that, in fact, there is very little analysis going on within Labour right now about how and why they will lose votes to the Greens over the next few years. Do they have any idea what is about to hit them?
We in the Green Party do. We’ve spent years talking to huge numbers of soft Labour voters who would happily vote Green if the circumstances were right, and if that vote would send a clear message to those in power. Since 2010, the circumstances have not been right, with Labour positioned as the main opposition to an increasingly awful Tory government.
But now, with this Labour government, those political circumstances are moving our way, and Starmer’s arrogant, cloth-eared government is begging to be sent that message.
The results in Parliamentary seats we targeted in 2024 were clear evidence that when people feel it is safe to do so, they will vote Green in very large numbers in order to send a message to the big two parties.
But Labour members and elected representatives won’t understand that movement when it happens. This fringe event demonstrates that they are clinging to an external narrative, and finding petty excuses, rather than acknowledging what is actually happening on the ground. They are in the process of losing potentially millions of votes in their heartlands to the Green Party, and they genuinely think they can stop that by launching personal attacks on the Greens or by starting their election campaigns a little earlier.
Starmer’s Labour are a political void, and as more people realise that they will look around for better ways to make their voice heard. If the Green Party can get in front of enough people to make that case, we will do to Labour at the ballot box in England something they have never experienced before and will not see coming.
Our challenge at this point is to make sure we are organised and ready to get in front of those people and deliver the right message.
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Martin Farley is a former elections coordinator for Brighton & Hove Green Party.
