SPIRE: School of Politics, International Relations and Philosophy @ Keele University

By Professor Andy Dobson


At 6am on 7th May 2010, something happened that has never happened before in UK parliamentary history – a member of the Green Party was elected to the Westminster parliament. Caroline Lucas, leader of the Green Party and candidate in the Brighton Pavilion constituency, just beat off the challenge of the Labour Party candidate to squeeze into Westminster by a little over 1000 votes. In a first-past-the-post electoral system that notoriously militates against small parties this is quite an achievement – tempered by the realization that overall the Green Party vote actually went down compared to 2005 levels. Lucas’s success is down to a number of factors: her own capacities, some excellent local organizing during the campaign (the Party had 200 volunteers getting the vote out on election day), a local campaign that spoke to some key issues in Brighton, and a strong local base of elected councillors.

I spent the two days previous to election day leafleting houses in the constituency and manning stalls in the town centre. Having stood for Parliament myself and experienced the isolation that small party candidates can feel, it was quite a thing to see Green Party stickers and banners in windows far outnumbering those of other parties. If the election had been on a poster count, Lucas would have won by a street.


Another interesting factor was the palpable sense on the street that the Party is slowly shaking off its ‘single-issue’ reputation. The Green Party has never only been a party of the environment though that’s the impression it has sometimes given (and the media have been happy to go along with this). We took a deliberate decision to put jobs and the economy first in this year’s manifesto, and to put climate change way down the batting order (page 33 if memory serves). A number of media commentators picked up on this change of emphasis, and I hope that the Party keeps banging away at this shift of priorities. (Though it’s not really a shift – more an explicit recognition that economy and environment are two sides of the same coin rather than two separate issues).


So a glass ceiling has been breached. What next? So much still depends on proportional representation. If I had a quid for every time someone’s said to a Green Party candidate, ‘Great that you’re standing! (But I won’t be voting for you because it’s a wasted vote)’, I’d be a wealthy man. So far on the PR front the Libservative coalition doesn’t look too promising. The best we’re going to get is a referendum on the Alternative Vote system, with the majority partner in the coalition campaigning against it. This is not – I think - what people who voted Lib Dem were hoping for.

Absent a proper PR system it’s hard to see the Green Party making big inroads into the Westminster parliament, though there’ll be plenty of work going into the target constituencies of Norwich South and Lewisham in the months and years to come. Green Party success is likely to continue in local elections, where the party now has over a hundred councillors at various levels. And they get re-elected too, which shows that when the party has a chance to put its ideas into action, people like what they see.

So watch this space – and in the meantime, expect to see Caroline Lucas appearing even more regularly on BBC’s Question Time.