After a short campaign, and the first election since 2012 with no incumbent and no clear favourite, Adrian Ramsay and Carla Denyer are the new co-leaders of the Green party of England and Wales, and they take the helm with the wind in their party’s sails.
The new leaders focused their pitch on Denyer’s position as candidate for the top target seat of Bristol West, and ex-deputy Ramsay’s long experience of winning elections for the party. Tamsin Omond and current deputy leader Amelia Womack ran an impressive, energetic campaign – but Denyer and Ramsay, whose campaign was backed by Caroline Lucas, won by a close margin. Reassuringly for many Greens, the candidate who was at the centre of a row over trans right, Shahrar Ali, got just over 20% of the vote in the first round, and will surely now end his near-consistent presence in leadership contests as his vote share slipped.
This win for Denyer and Ramsay comes at an extremely opportune moment for their party. Not only are they riding high in the polls – just this week overtaking the Liberal Democrats as the UK’s third party – but the Greens have a record number of councillors spread across England and Wales. As the outgoing and widely respected leader, Siân Berry, says, she leaves the party on a “solid upward path”.
The political context is favourable too. The Labour party leadership is trying to shed its leftwing image, but, as journalist Stephen Bush has pointed out, that means potentially losing a serious political constituency. Labour may talk a good game on climate investment, but its economically illiterate allusions to treating the nation’s budget like a “household” is unlikely to wash with the large chunk of the electorate who have emerged from the pandemic wanting higher spending, more generous benefits and public ownership. And that’s before we even begin to speak about Labour’s pledge to continue deportation flights if it enters government, or its refusal to seriously rethink the UK’s failing drug policies. Compare the ideas and energy I saw coming out of the World Transformed festival this week with the shadow cabinet speeches, and you can see the political waters in which the Greens should be swimming.
As fires rage across the world, and homes and businesses are flooded in the UK, it’s no surprise that we see consistently high levels of concern about the climate crisis. The government and the Labour party are taking fairly serious steps forward on the issue, but by focusing on it they only reinforce its importance, and drive many voters toward the only party seen as putting it first – the Greens.
Of course success is far from guaranteed. Unlike in Scotland, where the Greens have entered government for the first time, or Germany where the party recorded record results last weekend, we do not have anything approaching a fair voting system for Westminster elections. The Greens can ride higher than ever in the polls, double their councillor numbers and still end up with Caroline Lucas trudging back to parliament as the only Green MP. The new leaders ran on a ticket of winning Bristol West, and their legacy will be judged on whether Denyer follows in Lucas’s footsteps. That is a tall order. In 2019, the Greens lost the seat to Labour by a 37-point margin, albeit with a much-improved vote share.
But despite what the Greens might think, success shouldn’t just be measured in seats. For the wider progressive movement, it’s crucial that they continue to be a credible part of the public debate. The Greens’ role is to keep open the window of political possibility – riding outside the political mainstream and dragging the debate to the left. They must walk the fine line between continuing to inspire social movements and being seen as credible enough to represent people in the council chamber and in parliament. When they last seriously “surged”, under Natalie Bennett, the party collapsed after a series of extremely difficult media interviews. That kind of meltdown must be avoided.
Dragging our politics to the left is no insignificant task when the scale of our challenges are huge. The entire economy must be weaned off fossil fuels, and fast. The extraordinarily cruel social security system needs complete overhaul. And the extraordinarily hostile narrative and policy framework on migration needs binning.
Denyer and Ramsay were in some ways the “safe bet” for the party, but their pledge to “transform society to create a brighter future for all” is a bold one. Arguably their first challenge is to show they can channel the insurgency of Corbynism, the Climate Strikers and Kill the Bill protesters. If they can carry that energy into television studios and on to the doorstep, they can show the public that something very different from the moribund status quo is possible. This might just be the moment the Greens have been waiting for.
• Matthew Butcher worked for Green party politicians, including Caroline Lucas, for five years. He now works for the non-party aligned New Economy Organisers Network
