The Green Party exists and has done for a while
IT was almost 20 years ago, at my first local election count, when I found myself interviewing the chap who'd helped get the Greens their first elected councillor in the West Midlands. Chris Williams, now the party's national head of elections, has just done in a Westminster seat what the Solihull branch managed in the late noughties - snatching a previous Labour stronghold. The party's surprise success in North Solihull came at a time when the area's council estates were seen to be flirting with the far-right. While the Labour Party had managed to claw back Chelmsley Wood from the BNP (who bagged a win in 2007) it was the Greens who, a few years later, had turned a white working class ward into the party's safest seat in the UK. The early gains in the sort of deprived neighbourhoods that are, nationally, now seen as ripe for Reform were soon matched by successes in traditionally Tory suburbs, albeit the party was mostly soaking up votes and personnel from the then ...