How should the Green Party grow?

http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/davehillblog/2015/jul/15/how-should-the-green-party-grow

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London’s Greens held a hustings on Saturday, a pleasantly full gathering in a subterranean seminar room at Birkbeck College in the heart of central London student country. Nearby, in fine sunshine, the Bloomsbury farmer’s market was doing its discerning business and the Socialist Workers Party was fighting “the cuts”. The Greens fit somewhere on the spectrum of metropolitan values captured by the scene, pleased to attract words like “radical” and “alternative”, yet wanting to grow beyond the political niche market they’ve reached in recent years.

This was a big theme among the six people vying to become Green Party candidate for the mayoral election next May and - the realistic key to a Green presence in City Hall - also hoping to be placed at the top of the party’s list for seeking seats on the London Assembly. Each of reckoned they could reach beyond the 5.5% of Londoners who edged them up into third place in the 2012 mayoral race and the 8.5% vote share that retained their two Assembly seats.

How they would love to inflate both numbers to 10% and beyond. Bow-tied Benali Hamdache and dreadlocked Brixtonian Rashid Nix majored on diversity, no doubt mindful of the complexion of the Green activist core. Jonathan Bartley, the contender with the style most like that of a pro politico, said it was vital to “go beyond our comfort zone” and be more than “a protest party”, which for him meant a 32-borough “alternative to austerity”. Sian Berry, who ran for mayor in 2008, finishing fourth, is promising a campaign that will draw on grassroots activism across the capital. Caroline Russell, transport specialist and one-woman opposition to the Labour edifice that is Islington Council, spoke of team work being vital to breaking through. The party’s general election campaign was co-run by Assembly Green group researcher Tom Chance, so he has the advantage of having been round the block.

There’s been a “Green surge” in membership into the region of 12,000. Where, though, will extra votes come from? There was a lot of talk by the candidates of giving people hope, the feeling being that Greens can cheer up and energise a London populace demoralised by the bad stuff inflicted on them by the present and previous national governments; stuff they deem Labour to be making a poor job of opposing and for which Liberal Democrats have taken much of the blame.

Being a ballot box-minded, anti-austerity left alternative seems to have done the Greens some good, especially among the young and higher educated in London’s liberal intelligentsia heartlands. But how much more mileage is in that route for them, given that Labour’s vote share grew in May? Their environmentalism, still a bedrock concern, makes them rivals to the bruised and battered Libs Dems and their small-is-beautiful localism does the same, yet the worst may now have passed for the party of entombed Cleggmania. There is, perhaps, a need for a sharper, more coherent and inclusive vision here if the party is to make deeper inroads with London’s electorate.

The journalists present were generously invited to ask questions. There’d been a lot of anti-developer rhetoric, yet the sobering fact is that deals with property giants produce one third of the intermediate and social rent affordable homes built in the capital, along with street improvements and schools and they will fund the forthcoming extension to the Northern Line in Nine Elms. With public money in shrinking supply, I asked how a Green mayor would make up any resulting difference if he or she declared developers to be their foe.

The answers given were perfectly sound: harder bargains driven, tougher on viability and so on. But they were no different in essence from what Labour’s mayoral pretenders say. Can the Greens be something other in voters’ eyes than a fringe outfit to the left of mainstream Labour with added climate change concerns? Can they make inroads with the capital’s working class voters beyond those engaged in battles over housing? Can they become an enduring rival attraction for Londoners drawn to the individualism and civil libertarianism of the Lib Dems? Can they, in addition, inspire disaffected non-voters on the ground?

Maybe they need to do all those things - and pick the candidates best equipped to succeed. Your constructive comments on all this are, as ever, very welcome.