On paper, the Green Party should be doing better in the big, bad capital than anywhere else in this land. Look at the demographics: London contains a higher proportion of young, well-educated, middle-class professionals than the rest of the country, and they are the sorts of people who vote Green. Yet the party is polling no higher in London than it is nationally. What’s more, YouGov has found support for the Greens in the capital to have fallen this year, from 8% at the end of January, to 5% at the end of February, to just 4% at the end of March. Is spring turning chilly for London’s Greens?
Tom Chance, joint chair of the party’s London campaign (and also a candidate in Lewisham West and Penge), responds with a longer term view. He compares the Greens’ position now with where they stood in 2010, when it picked up less than 1% of the general election vote in the capital. Two years later, Jenny Jones came third behind Boris Johnson and Ken Livingstone in the London mayoral race, collecting nearly 99,000 first preference votes (including mine) and pushing Brian Paddick of the beleaguered Liberal Democrats into fourth. Her vote share was 5.5% and the party did well in elections to the London Assembly, held on the same day. Eleven of the 25 assembly members, the “Londonwide” ones, are chosen through a form of proportional representation and the Greens retained their two seats (one of them held by Jones) with 8.5% of the vote, again topping the Lib Dems. Given a fairer electoral system, reasons Chance, Londoners are freer to vote with their Green hearts.
Since then, he says, party membership in London has risen from around 2,000 to 11,000. Last year, the Greens’ Jean Lambert retained her London seat in the European parliament with 8.9% of the vote and the number of Green borough councillors doubled from two to four. Small potatoes, but perhaps the point is that they’re bedding in. YouGov’s analyst thinks 2015 is a consolidation election for the Greens: they won’t win any London seats, but they’re getting more experience and exposure. Chance does not disagree, but adds that this campaign will also strengthen their platform for next year’s London mayoral and Assembly contests.
Fair dos, but even so shouldn’t the Green portion of the polling pie be a little larger in London, with its ample quantities of bike-riding, leaf-eating, degree-holding, idealistic young things? They’ve slipped back behind the Lib Dems and also trail Ukip. Chance, like YouGov, thinks the usual squeeze on small parties might explain the recent fall to the wrong side of 5% as the two biggest parties have inched up a point or two (though the variations in the Green score fall within the normal statistical margin of error). But a particular London factor is, he points out, that Labour in is more radical in the capital than elsewhere, meaning fewer voters deserting to his party. Plus, there’s the formidable Labour “ground war” operation to contend with. The Greens might be getting stronger on the streets, but the Reds are still the big guns on the left.
Chance acknowledges too that some Green-leaning electors in very tight marginal London seats, such as Hampstead and Kilburn or Battersea, might opt for Red in order to see off the Blues. On the other hand, he’s confident that in areas of the capital where the Green machine is strongest, such as Hackney (where the party launched its manifesto on Tuesday) Islington, Camden (where Natalie Bennett is a candidate), Lewisham and Lambeth they can keep Labour on its toes and again out do the Lib Dems, rivals for environmentalist sympathies and still down on their luck. “Vote for the party you believe in,” urges Chance. “As we’ve shown on the Assembly, the more votes we get, the more influence we can have, whoever is in power.”
