The Crisis of Leadership in the Greens
General Election Manifesto Launch June 2024
And how to solve it.
Greens have a lot to be happy about at the moment, we're on a decade high after quadrupling our MPs in Westminster, we're edging closer to 900 Cllrs and the elusive LGA grouping so we aren't lumped in with the independents.
But now we're asked to look forward. To the postponed Annual Ballot, the official name for the Biannual elections for the Leadership of the Green Party and half of GPEx, the party executive. Now is the inflection point, the moment where we can choose to change the direction of the party for the next election. The possibility for change should be exciting!
I'm going to focus on the Leadership here because honestly I think that's what the Party is lacking, a clear Leadership. One that defines the direction the party is taking, that captures media attention and drives the national conversation, inspires activists and that moves policy and promotes new ideas.
Don't get me wrong, we have people with Leader in their title. We have since 2008.
But, if you will, think back across the Leaders we've had since then, what mark have they left on the Green Party? What changes have they made to policy? Have they championed reforms to the party to help us get better? What has the story of the Leadership of the Party been? I, personally, struggle to see much of a lasting story.
Part of that undoubtedly, is the lack of Comms out of the Green Party. Currently everyone from Lewis Goodall to Owen Jones are suddenly pointing out vocally the fact that the Green Party are terrible at communicating at a national scale. The last 20 years we've proven we can learn to write great leaflets, in are bullet points and out are the walls of text about LHA Budgets.
But that's campaigning for an election. After we're elected it tends to fall apart. What are the big campaigns of Caroline Lucas' tenure as an MP? The lasting one seems to be a Natural History GCSE, not exactly capturing the zeitgeist…
But still, the refrain goes that it's all the media's fault. That “the media should be covering us because we have 800 Cllrs and 4 MPs and that's more than UKIP ever had.” Honestly, after almost 15 years of having an MP you'd think we'd be the ones to change the tune. It's a lazy argument, designed to move the blame from the political party that refuses to play the game onto the media and journalists who exist in a capitalist economy. If the newspaper doesn't sell papers, doesn't garner clicks, it doesn't exist. Dry, equivocating, boring, but ultimately sensible and correct, analyses from Green MPs, doesn't get people excited, it doesn't get people clicking, and that means it isn't in demand. We really need to wrap our collective head around this concept.
Don't kid yourselves into thinking this will be changed anytime soon. If the last year has been anything to go by, the Parliamentary group simply don't think this is a priority the party needs to improve on, or they aren't prepared to push through the necessary changes. GPEx seem to be more interested in commissioning moot legal advice than investing in the capacity of a beleaguered and underfunded Comms team.
Now, this isn't totally in the gift of the Leadership to change. Unlike Labour and Tories, the party isn't an elected dictatorship, Leaders have to Lead, they have to argue and compromise with the rest of GPEx, as is right. But this is the perfect opportunity for a new Leadership to carve out something tangibly new, noticeably different to their predecessors. We are never going to reach a “legitimacy threshold”, where we gain X numbers of elected representatives, and suddenly the media go “oh, we are required to provide so much coverage now”. That isn't on the cards.
Instead, a new Leader should look to social media, and look to the worst person in British politics, Nigel Farage. I know, I too, threw up a bit in my mouth.
But listen to Farage talk about social media, he isn't shy about it, he's done what any successful influencer has, he's got a small team, he produces relatable content consistently, all year round, he has opened up a bit and formed what is known as a parasocial relationship with his audience. It's not complicated, the hardest thing for most content creators is finding a niche, but in the Green Party's case that's already done!
Well, I say that, but there are different ways to sell the same policies. Rent Controls, bike lanes and UBI aren't exclusively a leftwing concern, there are different perspectives to argue from. This is the next thing a new Green Leader needs to find. Simply put, they need a political ideology.
Arguing for rent controls because they work in every other major European capital, there was a report from an NGO recently and a charity and snorrrrree……
Technocracy is boring. It isn't a compelling argument. I don't get any passion or belief, I don't understand the core argument. If you're going to argue for a policy, it needs to be part of a narrative, that narrative will be informed by your political ideology. Nobody cares about Patriotic Millionaires when you're talking about a Wealth tax, they care about tax dodging billionaires paying their fair share, about the rich earning their income from assets not labour, and how we need to rebalance the scales for a fairer tax system.
A new Green Leader needs to turn the party into a populist party. Populism isn't exclusive to rightwing or fascist politics, populism is a method, not an ideology in itself.
It's relatively simple, define a people, your people, our people, and then define an enemy. People, working people, the middle and working classes, the downwardly mobile graduates, people sitting in mouldy rented homes with 2 degrees and a salary that makes them want to chug sertraline. Enemy, landlords taking 60% of their salary so they can take multiple international holidays a year. Billionaires promoting fascism, exploiting labour, suppressing unionism and trying to set records for number of private jets per supervillain.
I know I know “play the ball, not the man”, well I'm sorry reader, the ball is a man. Landlords are, in the UK, individuals, billionaires are individuals. The people running corporations are individuals. A new Green Leader needs to get over the major hang up of all the previous ones, to be successful, you need to piss somebody off, you will not be universally liked. Personally, I don't mind being hated by the billionaires and landlords, I'd rather that than be irrelevant.
Finally, looking inward, the Party you're leading. The Green Party has, to little success, been trying to reform its governance structures for almost 20 years now. It's getting ridiculous. The party as is currently constituted was built for 5000 members, we now stand at roughly 60,000.
Part of the problem is the tension between the 60k people who are members and the small fraction of those that are active members, a smaller fraction of that actually understand and care about the governance structures of the party. The thing is, we all care about the results. It's hypocritical to argue that we should reform the governance structures of the country while we're in national permacrisis but we can't reform the governance structures of the Green Party because it isn't interesting enough.
That's where leadership comes in. A new Green Leader needs to work with the Green Party Regional Council, GPRC, and GPEx, the body that actually has the power to prioritise motions to conference, as well as the membership at large, communicating and lead them in a way never done before, and get through some governance reforms. Currently we campaign for PR, but don't have it in our own Party, GPRC is like the US senate, the South East has the same representation as Wales when the membership is 5 times as much. There is a lot to get on with.
The Leader doesn't have to deal with the minutiae, but they do need to recognise a functional party means a successful party, if the party can't pass policy and deal with disciplinary complaints, if it can't invest in itself, it can't get activists onto the right doorsteps, it can't win MPs.
Those are the first steps to truly taking the fight to Reform UK, Labour and the Tories. It will be tough and it will ask a lot of people who think fighting is submitting a strongly worded letter. But we can't collectively pretend that what we're currently doing is enough, because the polls aren't lying. We're in a knife fight, in the political trenches, we need to wield more than a strongly worded letter, we need a knife of our own.