The Greens have experienced a bruising election night, with the success oftheir sole MP, Caroline Lucas, massively increasing her majority offset by a big dip in their overall vote more or less everywhere else.
Lucas, the party’s co-leader, cemented her position in the Brighton Pavilion, a seat she first took in 2010, by almost doubling her majority to nearly 15,000, with 52% of the overall vote.
However, amid a wider squeeze on smaller parties, the Greens took just over 500,000 votes in all, hugely down on the more than 1.1m in 2015.
While the party had realistically expected to only keep its one seat, ambitions to run close in a series of other target constituencies came to nothing.
In the Isle of Wight, where the Greens had talked up their chances of an upset, their candidate, local teacher Vix Lowthion, came third, as did Green MEP Molly Scott Cato in Bristol West.
Jonathan Bartley, Lucas’s co-leader, hailed the Brighton Pavilion vote as “an amazing result” and said the Greens had been successful in raising otherwise-neglected issues during the election campaign, for example climate change and the idea of a universal basic income.
Hope has won over fear. We're proud of the role we've played in this election and it is all thanks to you 💚 pic.twitter.com/TjCFlqxqOC
— Green Party (@TheGreenParty) June 9, 2017
Bartley said the Greens could also take credit for the losses inflicted on the Conservatives due to the party’s decision to stand aside in a series of seats in the hope this could help Labour or Liberal Democrat candidates gain votes.
The party had touted the idea of the so-called progressive alliance as a way of ousting Theresa May, and even though the Greens saw almost nothing in the way of reciprocal deals to help its candidates, Bartley said the idea had been a success.
“We are on the right side of history,” he said. “We’ve seen the bigger picture – we anticpated what was going to happen, and some local parties made some really brave decisions to stand down in about 24 marginal seats, not fielidng candidates.
“And we’ve seen many of these seats changing hands. We’ve made a big difference to this election result.”
