A photo of Green Party campaigners at the party's 2023 local elections launch in Mid Suffolk

I want to write briefly about my experience with the Green Party, and how it’s influenced the way I’ll be voting in the leadership election. 

I joined the party back in 2022 on the advice of my partner – she wisely suggested that since I hated what Labour had become so much, perhaps I should join the Greens instead.

So I did, assuming it was probably an electoral dead-end but one that would at least allow me to campaign on the things I believe in most strongly: the environment, nationalisation of vital infrastructure and the provision of real opportunities for families like the one I’m from.

Little did I know that the party had a plan, outlined in something called ‘Target to Win’ – and very soon I was campaigning as part of that, delivering leaflets across East Herts. 

And then I was drafted in as a candidate myself. I ended up being elected with a fairly big majority in the middle of a Conservative heartland! If someone had predicted a year earlier that this was possible, I’d have told them they were mad.

At one point in that campaign, we were paid a visit by one of our co-leaders, Adrian Ramsay, who talked to us about why the work we were doing mattered, and even helped us deliver leaflets in what is now my ward. He can have had little idea who I was – and to be honest I didn’t know much about him.

But knowing what I know now about Adrian’s role in drawing up the strategy that’s now succeeded in getting 863 councillors elected across England and Wales, and in creating the image we were able to put across of the Green Party as rational, pragmatic people dedicated to the environment, fairness and basic human decency, I realise what a big part he played in enabling me to win that seat.

When I hear people saying this strategy is too slow to produce results, and that changing to a louder, more shouty approach to politics will accelerate our growth, I couldn’t agree less.

The strategy we’ve been using has achieved huge results, and in many areas has done this from what was practically a standing start. What’s more, it’s succeeded in building trust with voters in every area of the country and across every demographic. 

Our ability to draw votes from across the political spectrum has been and will continue to be crucial, and we’ll maintain it not by politics of belligerence but the politics of reason. Such an ability is hard won and easily lost. And as politics has become more and more divisive and confrontational, I believe it’s vitally important that voters can see we’re offering something very different. 

I’m endorsing Ellie and Adrian because I believe their leadership will build on the strengths that have got so many of us elected. They’ve worked so hard to build that positive image of the Greens as a party of environmentalists committed to social justice and rooted in community, and in many ways they embody that image. 

This is what has got Greens into power in councils across the country and into Parliament, where we can hold the government to account and bring Green ideas to the table at the highest level.   

From where I’m sitting, that change has been anything but slow – it’s  happened incredibly fast. In May 2023 we went from having just two councillors on East Herts District Council to 17, making us the largest party. And on Ware Town Council we took nine out of 11 seats. 

Then in 2025 we took both county seats in Ware, turning what had been a true-blue town into a Conservative-free zone.

We campaigned hard, we governed well – and we won. And that’s how we can succeed in beating not just Labour, the Tories and the Lib Dems, but also the far-right charlatans of Reform.

If we follow in the footsteps of Momentum and Corbyn, we will pigeonhole ourselves as a hard-left party of a sort that the public has rejected time and again. No other party can sell radical, progressive policies to such a wide range of voters as we can, but we’ll only continue to do this if keep our distinctive Green identity and stick to the plan – because it’s working faster than you might think.

George Williams is a councillor in East Hertfordshire