A poster reading "Vote Green Party" on the back of a chair

“The Greens are now steady, on about 10% – a figure that would surely rocket upwards if they improved their dire PR skills.” John Harris, The Guardian, 13 July, 2025.

John Harris is being overly harsh, but he does have a point. Comms is a serious task for any political party. It’s why Margaret Thatcher had a bruiser like Bernard Ingham as her press secretary and Tony Blair worked closely with the redoubtable Alastair Campbell.

I joined the Green Party back in the late 80s and started my career in journalism, communications and PR shortly after. I’ve worked as a political reporter for the BBC, as a foreign correspondent and as a communications professional with a range of NGOs and businesses. While our comms has improved significantly since 2019, watching from both sides of the fence, I’ve long been frustrated that we’ve punched below our weight. There’s still plenty of room to raise our game.

So here are three areas in which I’d like to see us improve our communications; vision, framing and messaging framework.

Firstly, there’s the vision thing – We need to communicate a picture of a green future that people, and not just ‘people like us’, can see themselves as part of. It’s a future where all of us, not just billionaires, have a say. It’s a future where we all get opportunities to realise our dreams, our potential, to be valued, to live with dignity.

But that future hasn’t just got to be sustainable, better, fairer and healthier, it also has to be full of joy and fun. To misquote Emma Goldman; “If I can’t dance I don’t want to be in your revolution.”

Greens need to remember that leadership is about support not lecturing. It’s about getting people to a place where they want to go and this also means ensuring there’s space for the things that others value.

Let me give you an example; many people get pleasure from steam trains, classic cars, seeing Spitfires at air shows. If a green vision allows none of these then, in the minds of millions of people, we stand for sucking the joy out of their future.

Remember the 80/20 principle – 20% of the task takes 80% of the effort. I’m not a classic car fan but they’re only about 1% of 36 million cars on our roads. Around one-in-eight are off the road while others disproportionately live in the garage and only come out for the odd sunny weekend in summer.

So let’s not sweat the small stuff. With transport and many other things, we will move the needle most dramatically by speeding the transition to greener alternatives by focusing on making the transition for the 99% easier and cheaper rather than by picking fights at the margins. Let’s remember that throughout our communications.

Secondly framing matters. Another example; the wealth tax. You’d be amazed how many people will a) see it as punishing entrepreneurialism and b) think it’ll affect them when it absolutely won’t. Remember this from the 2019 election? Careful messaging is vital to challenge this sort of misunderstanding.

So when we talk about a wealth tax we need to frame it in terms that people will sympathise with.

Made £50 million? This is about giving back to the country that gave you that opportunity so that the next generation have that opportunity too. This is so we get the doctors and surgeons of the future, the people who may be saving your life in twenty years’ time. It’s so we give new would-be innovators and entrepreneurs a chance to create the jobs and products and services people will need two decades hence. It’s so we build new generations trained in the skills our country will need to make life better…

You get my drift? It reframes it as a contrast between being selfish and unpatriotic and giving back as a matter of duty. It’s framing designed to cut through beyond those who are naturally inclined towards public spiritedness. After all in 1991 the top 1% had about £1 in £6 of our national wealth, now that’s more like £1 in £4. It’s not like the super-rich will feel the pinch.

This approach to framing can be applied to most areas of Green thinking. The billionaire media will always present anything that challenges the wealth and power of the 0.1% as an attack on all. Our framing needs to create a consistent counter-narrative that’s it’s about our duty to ensure that ‘no one is left behind’.

Which leads me to my final point about developing a messaging framework. By this I mean that we need to establish two or three overarching themes that everything we say connects with.

I’m concerned our messaging in general risks being too diffuse. If we talk about everything without linking it back very strongly to key themes, we risk many voters, especially the millions who pay little attention of politics, misinterpreting what we stand for. We need people to know that we care about more than trees and hedgehogs (though I definitely care about both).

We’ve already incorporated the notion of fairness into our messages but we could unpack them better so that they land more effectively with undecided voters.

I’ve also used the ‘no one left behind’ example to illustrate how an inclusive message can be focused on any group in danger of being left behind, whether that be people in economically marginal areas or minoritised groups such as queer people, women in the workplace, cultural groups and so on. Whenever we’re accused of talking about one group or another to the exclusion of others we can bring the discussion back to the inclusive overarching message.

I see External Comms as about listening carefully to members’ concerns and priorities and working with our comms team to ensure these messages resonate as widely as possible. Producing a compelling vision, framing and frameworks are challenging but having done this for many organisations I believe I can do the same for the Greens.

Jonathan Kent is a candidate in the 2025 Green Party Executive elections. He is standing for the position of external communications coordinator.

Image credit: Jon Craig – Creative Commons