You’d have thought this would have been the cause of great celebration in the ranks of Labour supporters. The Lib Dems managed to win a safe Conservative seat by getting the backing of Plaid Cymru and the Greens who together have previously recorded significantly more votes than the margin of victory. A first past the post system was beaten by an alliance of parties who don’t like the first past the post system. As a result, an arrogant and deeply dishonest Prime Minister has been significantly weakened.
Instead of celebrating a lot of Labour Party folk became quite angry. It turned out that they were more threatened by the prospect of an alliance of progressives than they were excited by the prospect of the Conservatives losing their majority. Many of them turned their anger on the Greens and accused us of selling out by allying with the Liberal Democrats.
The politics of the Liberal Democrats are, of course, very different to those of the Greens. We learned that in 2010 when they entered Cameron’s coalition government and voted to increase tuition fees by £6,000 days after chiselling into stone the promise that they would abolish them. Lib Dems have different views about the urgency of the climate and plastics crisis, about the speed of moving away from fossil fuel dependency, about nuclear energy, about nuclear weapons and about austerity and the appropriate targets for it.
That doesn’t mean that there are no issues on which Greens and Lib Dems agree. For example, both parties opposed the Iraq war that the then Labour PM helped to launch and both parties have been consistently opposed to Brexit whilst Labour have dithered. Nor does it mean that members of both parties can’t get on well with each other and form constructive campaigning partnerships or alliances on local councils. Mature grown up political organisations need to get a lot better at working across party lines to achieve the things that they do agree about. I’d also go a lot further than that and argue that members of political parties should always be ready to admit that their own party doesn’t always get everything right and those we disagree with don’t get everything wrong. Tribalism doesn’t tend to produce intelligent critical thinking just inappropriate blind loyalty.
A bit of genuine two way give and take collaboration is a good thing. What is not a good thing is one way gestures that leave one party feeling like it gives up a lot but gets nothing back. If the LibDems want to win more elections like the ones at Richmond and at Brecon and Radnorshire then it is really important that the parties that stood aside for them hear quickly and clearly exactly when and where the pay back has been arranged to happen. So far there have been nice words. The commitments must come and come quickly. If anyone in the LibDems thinks that a vague promise to not to stand against Caroline Lucas and the leader of Plaid at the next election is an adequate payback for collaboration that will win the Lib Dems well over 20 new seats then they simply haven’t understood what fair and reasonable give and take looks like.
I say this because the Greens are well used to being offered opportunities to gracefully stand aside to help out. What is a lot rarer is being offered anything in reverse. Co-operation can be a good thing. Being a mug rarely is.
Last week I got messages from Labour supporters saying “why don’t the Greens stand aside for Labour?” and “why are you collaborating with a party from the austerity coalition?”. My answer has been very simple. What exactly are you offering back to the Green Party? If you want our help then we also want yours.
Instead of offering to work together the policy of the Labour party has always been very simple. In the days immediately before an election they will put huge pressure on Green Party candidates, on Green Party members and on voters to get behind the Labour candidate in marginal wards in order to “Keep out the Tories”. What the Labour party has never yet done is to offer any kind of payback in return for doing so. Labour wants the Green Party to pack up and go away. Labour policy is to stand in every seat at the next General Election. Absolutely nothing has ever been given back to any local Green Party that decided not to stand in 2017 to help Corbyn. Labour’s Head Office continues to threaten to discipline any local party that openly does a deal to stand aside even at a local election where it might mean taking control of the local council. Many local Labour parties quietly and effectively do collaborate with the Greens but any deals can’t be made public and are taken against the express policy of the national party. How is any other party supposed to collaborate if that remains the situation? I would love to work in a genuine collaborative pact with the Labour Party. I see no sign whatsoever that one is on offer.
If the Green Party listened to every call for it to stand aside to help another party then it would quickly disappear. Talk to a Conservative about green issues and they will tell you how concerned they are about the environment. But without green activism they would have authorised fracking for gas across much of the country by now. Talk to a Labour Party member about the environment and they will also make excellent noises about recognising the importance of the issue. Until there is a clash between the interests of a trade union and the environment. Talk to LibDems and they will tell you the environment is safe in their hands. Yet it wasn’t only four years ago when they were in coalition government.
The UK needs a proudly independent party standing up for environmental issues as its number one priority. At both elections where I stood for Parliament not a single other candidate mentioned environmental issues in their introductory speeches at hustings. I led on the issue and made sure it was firmly on the agenda.
When the Green Party records very few votes at elections the conclusion that the professional spin doctors from the two major parties draws is that the public don’t really care about the issue and so they don’t need to do anything much about it. As soon as the Greens do well in elections and start taking a lot of votes the issue rapidly moves up the agenda and things start to happen. After May when the Greens won a couple of hundred council seats and then outvoted both Labour and the Conservatives in MEP elections in most parts of the country it was astonishing how suddenly environmental issues became dear to the hearts of other parties.
Every vote for a Green Party candidate regardless of whether they win is a vote that prioritises the environment and helps to protect it. Given the importance and the urgency of the climate crisis we face if there wasn’t a party focusing primarily on this issue then now would be a really important time to invent one.
So the Green Party must not go away. It must carry on fighting its corner. Doing that flexibly in co-operation with others is fine, particularly if it gives us 5 to 10 Green MPs to work even remotely as effectively as Caroline Lucas. Other parties taking the Greens for mugs and asking us to nicely stand aside everywhere so they can win isn’t fine. Collaboration means two way give and take.
The lesson from Brecon is simple. If we want to beat Bozo Johnson we would be wise to work together. And if we want to work together we must all be genuinely prepared to give as well as to take.