A photo of Green Party campaigners in Bristol

“Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it” (George Santayana)

My first ever Green Party meeting was nearly 25 years ago, in February 2001. I’d had a leaflet through the door from the local Green Party in Camden, and thought I’d go along and see what a meeting was like. One item on the agenda was a recent Council by-election; we’d stood and manged around 30 votes. (It was so long ago I can’t find an internet archived version of the actual result.) I was both shocked and puzzled; as a life-long Green (or its predecessor equivalents) voter myself, how come more people weren’t actually voting Green? Despite it, I decided to join the Party then, partly thinking ‘I’m sure we can do better than that!’

Fast forward to four minutes past five in the morning of Friday 5th July last year, and the Returning Officer announces that Ellie Chowns had been elected to Parliament as the Green MP for North Herefordshire with 21,736 votes. What a moment! I made a recording of the declaration on my phone and occasionally play it when I need to cheer myself up.

Between those two events, I’ve taken part in a lot of elections. That’s a lot of leaflets delivered, doors knocked, campaigns run, expenses returns completed, trainings attended and so on – and a lot of thought given to how we could do better. 

Campaigning for the Green Party in the years before 2010 was a real slog. Without the discipline of ‘target to win’ there was little effective coordination between local parties, no field team, and a lot of reinventing the wheel. Our campaigns, leaflets and messaging were both dispersed and unfocused. 

Politically, we positioned ourselves firmly as the radical alternative to the Blair/Brown Labour Government.  This was a big part of our identity; we felt good about ourselves knowing we had the best policies – as we still do. However, our successes were few and far between, and usually arose when we managed to attract a cohort of disaffected Labour voters around a polarising local issue. Membership of the Association of Green Councillors was in double figures, eventually creeping over the 100 mark towards the end of the decade.

In Camden, we made some slow progress, winning two Council seats in 2006 and then a by-election in 2007 to get us up to three Greens on Camden Council. In 2010, the local elections were held on the same day as the General Election, and most of that hard-won ground was lost in just one day as the Party suffered a net loss of councillors. If I didn’t know before, that was the moment that confirmed to me we had to change our campaign style  (though others were undoubtedly quicker to realise this). That change has been both significant, and as the results clearly show, very effective. 

The first important element was to stop moaning about the things we could not change – however much we wanted to – and just accept them. Elections are first past the post. We are never going to get large-scale, sympathetic media coverage. We don’t have the resources of people or cash to campaign everywhere. Crucially, few voters actually care about policy-specifics but make their choices on values.

With these parameters in mind, how should we campaign? First, we had to choose our targets carefully, and then focus on those targets to the exclusion of almost all else. Second, we needed to find warm, empathetic candidates who communicate community values and can convince voters they will work hard (‘It’s us or them; we’re better than them’). Third, we had to use narratives that were about that service to the community, and making tangible improvements in whatever the local context is – not trying to pursue a theoretical agenda. These may sound obvious now – but they didn’t then!

The national party now supports this approach effectively. The field teams help to coordinate things. There is a lot of sharing of ‘best practice’ between campaigns and training at conference and elsewhere. We have learned from experience and from repetition how to execute effective ‘target to win’ campaigns – the leafleting, marked registers, the door-knocking, the action days, the polling day operation etc – so much so that we now have over 860 Green Councillors. The results speak for themselves. 

One other key ingredient has been focusing on a Green agenda – combining effectively the inseparable messages of living more lightly on the planet, and the need for social justice to allow us to do so. We’ve been able to translate this into local terms, campaigning for things that are visible signs of this programme, whether that’s on housing, jobs, health, education, transport or the physical environment; things that really do resonate locally.

This approach can, in theory, work almost anywhere and does not have to be seen as a restriction on ambition. Go back a few years to the start of 2020 just before lockdown; the ‘Get Brexit Done’ election at the end of 2019 has just resulted in a landslide for Boris Johnson’s Conservatives. You are told the Greens will win four seats at the next election and asked to pick which they will be. Is there anybody (outside of the few dreamers in North Herefordshire) who would honestly have picked North Herefordshire as one of them? It was a seat that had just been won by a Conservative with 63% of the vote and with the Greens back in fourth place with less than 10%. Could it be your constituency next?

It’s difficult, painstaking and at times very frustrating work. But it is work that works, and can have wide appeal. I wish there was a short cut, and we could suddenly find ourselves with the sort of coverage that Reform get – but I don’t see that happening. Instead, I fear that by trying to compete from a much more political base, hoping for something – anything – transformative, we will lose sight of these hard-learned lessons about how to get wide-enough appeal to win elections. 

As activists, we are by definition not typical, and engage differently with politics to the vast majority of voters. We need to avoid being seduced by our own prejudices, and focus on what we have learned from the ballot box. I don’t want to return to the wilderness years of the 2000s with electoral success of any sort rare. If we want to press forward, let’s learn these lessons of history – so we don’t repeat them. 

Image credit: Matthew Philip Long – Creative Commons