Sustainability in September: The Green Party pledges to hold the new government to account, but to what extent are they a real force in British politics?

As a follow-up to their best-ever election performance in July, this weekend saw the Green Party come together for their annual conference in Manchester as they pledged to ‘hold the new government to account’ on issues such as the environment, welfare and public services. Speaking to members, Green Party co-leader Adrian Ramsay pledged to challenge Labour where it was ‘off track’ and falling short of delivering ‘positive, inspiring change’.  

​With nearly two million votes in July’s general election, the party saw its MP representation quadruple to four, winning beyond the Brighton Pavilion seat previously held by former leader Caroline Lucas with gains in Bristol Central, North Herefordshire and Waveney Valley. Though the government’s majority and Parliamentary arithmetic mean that the four MPs cannot to hold up any formal legislation, they can nevertheless provide the occasional headache for Labour and seek to cause a stir on those wedge issues on the environment, social justice and foreign policy as the SNP did in the previous Parliament.   

​In truth, the party has been as big a beneficiary of Labour’s return to the centre as any of the UK’s political parties. The political dynamics of the last four years have meant that the Greens have picked up many of those former Labour Party members likely to have been disaffected by Starmer’s leadership and stance on things such as public ownership, Gaza, and defence. Meanwhile, high profile U-turns such as Labour’s £28bn green investment pledge has also in their eyes, allowed the Green Party to reaffirm its stance as the only party that is truly committed to net zero.  

​Now, whether this is entirely the case remains to be seen. One of the long-standing criticisms levelled at the Greens by Labour has been the lack of the real links with the broader trade union movement and working-class communities that Labour had historically represented. Without those firm roots and concrete links with the trade union movement, it is always going to be difficult for the Greens to credibly make the case, at least from an institutional point of view, that it is the voice of working people in the United Kingdom. And while work is being undertaken to improve the class consciousness of the Green Party membership, Labour don’t need to worry about any unions reaffiliating any time soon.  

​With the new government’s doggedness to implement planning reform, this also exposes another potential weakness of the greens – that of their NIMBY (‘not in my back yard’) approach to building things. Ramsay himself was accused of indulging this NIMBY tendency when it came to new pylons in his constituency – something which Energy Secretary Ed Miliband was all too keen to point out in Parliament.  

​This natural contradiction – between wanting Britain to reach its net zero obligations and deliver modern public services, while simultaneously being seen to oppose many of the on-the-ground decisions which enable its delivery – is something which the Green Party will need to overcome if it is to continue its ascendancy into the next election. If not, the party may well struggle to make the gains it wishes to over the coming years.  

​The Green Party will however have been looking over at Europe and the performance in recent of years of European green parties as the model to follow if they are to continue to grow as a serious political force. Though the Greens had suffered setbacks in the latest round of European Parliamentary elections, the experience in recent years of greens working as junior coalition partners will provide a framework for the type of role the Green Party could play over here.  

While the obvious stumbling block to this remains the UK’s electoral system in first past the post, expect the Greens to continue pushing for electoral reform and looking to use this as another wedge issue with which to peel away discontented Labour supporters.   

Are we headed for a Green Party government in the not-too-distant future? No. But with a centre-left government now in power, expect the Green Party to be a source of challenges for Labour on social justice and environmental issues in the years to come.​