National politics is over for the Green Party – the only way it can fight the climate crisis is to radicalise

The climate column: Even if the next general election produced a government that introduced proportional representation, it would be the mid-2030s before any Green policies produced results

In the middle of climate and ecological catastrophes, the Green Party needs to learn some lessons after a devastating election result for environment campaigners. When asking what its role should be now, the party could look to both the Fridays for Future youth strikes and Extinction Rebellion for inspiration.

Last Thursday, the RSA hosted a debate between Green co-leader Jonathan Bartley and Franziska Brantner, a Green Party Bundestag MP, titled A New Roadmap for Eco Politics? But no such thing was proposed. Brantner rather weirdly used the time to espouse her love of meat and flying and made no references to the depth of the crises facing us. Bartley admitted to being terrified by climate science but offered no political way forward, other than pointing out that, under first-past-the-post, it will be very difficult for the Green Party to make progress nationally in UK politics.

Despite the Greens almost doubling their vote at the general election, they still only won one seat – Brighton Pavilion, held by Caroline Lucas. The Greens are lucky that their one MP is one of the best working representatives in parliament, but it took 865,000 votes for the Green Party to win that single seat, compared with only 26,000 votes to win each SNP seat and 38,000 for each Tory seat. In an analysis by Benali Hamdache, the party is not predicted to win a second parliamentary seat until the election after next at the earliest. In December, the Greens came second in only a tiny number of seats, such as Bristol West and Dulwich and West Norwood, but even there they were still over 35 per cent behind the winning candidate.

Under first-past-the-post, almost the only way for a smaller party to win a parliamentary seat is to slowly win more seats on a local council until such time as the infrastructure is in place to enable you to campaign successfully in a general election. It took the Liberal Democrats almost 50 years of doing this to build to a position where the party shared national power in the 2010 coalition government.

However, the doubling of the Green Party vote in December was ironically also the disastrous by-product of assisting in the defeat of candidates from other pro-climate action parties. In 13 seats, these green voters were the difference between a winning Conservative and the defeated Labour or Liberal Democrat candidates.

It would be unfair to blame the election defeat by the pro-climate action parties (Labour/Lib Dem/SNP/Green), which between them won 50.3 per cent of the vote compared with the combined Tory and Brexit Party vote of 45.6 per cent, solely on the Greens. Despite the billionaire press lauding Boris Johnson’s triumph, it was the Lib Dems who had the best election night, securing the largest swing of 4.2 per cent, compared with 1.1 per cent to the Greens and 1.2 per cent to the Tories. But that swing to the Lib Dems resulted not in extra Lib Dem seats but in a slew of Labour seats falling to the Tories instead.

The Green Party now has to face that it has run out of time to use national electoral politics to address the climate emergency. Even if the next election produced a government that introduced proportional representation, it would be 2030 (at least) before a second Green MP would be elected under it, and the mid-2030s before any Green policies could start producing results.

For too long, the party has wasted time trying to be a green-tinged version of Labour, seeking to capture the political left ground abandoned by Blair but then reclaimed by Corbyn. A number of years ago, at a Resurgence conference, I asked the then Green leader, Natalie Bennett, why her party was not hammering home the depth of urgency dictated by climate science. Her reply shocked me. She said that, if they did, the billionaire media would dismiss them as a lunatic fringe. I looked at her in despair, realising that even the Green Party feared to tell the truth to power.

To be fair to Bartley, he acknowledged at the RSA debate that Extinction Rebellion and Fridays for Future have enabled them to put the climate crisis at the centre of the debate at the general and European elections.

This is the simple lesson for the Green Party. It was non-violent direct action that put climate at the centre of the general election, and which resulted in a majority of votes for the parties that backed climate action. It is time for the Greens to abandon national electoral politics. Their focus now needs to be on raising the urgent alarm, by a wide mobilisation of its members, joining with and energising mass non-violent direct-action groups, such as Fridays for Future and Extinction Rebellion, or in whatever other creative ways they wish.

This does not mean that local, regional or Scottish electoral green politics should be dispensed off too, or that the Greens should not continue to command a space on the national political stage. Indeed, the small number of Green councillors and London Assembly members have been instrumental in the declaration of climate emergencies by local councils of all political hues, across the country. At local level, they can lead practical change, despite their small but growing numbers.

But for the Green Party, national electoral business as usual is now over. It needs to radicalise for the sake of the country, planet and nature. The question is: Will it have the courage and insight to shake itself out of the complacency paralysing the rest of the UK body politic?

Many Green Party members, including co-leader Bartley, have already led the way by assisting Fridays for Future and by being either key leaders, supporters or arrestees at Extinction Rebellion actions. It is now time for the party as a whole to mobilise. Yes they can!

Donnachadh McCarthy is an environmental auditor, campaigner and is the author of ‘The Prostitute State – How Britain’s Democracy was Hijacked’