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 decimated Liberal Democrats.

Perhaps the high watermark came almost a decade ago, when the Greens captured Castle Bromwich from the Conservatives. It was an area which, as Williams told me, had voted blue since the days when the suburb was mostly farmland.

At the time the Greens were firmly established as official opposition and, having won support in wildly different areas of the borough, supporters no long saw leading the council as an impossibility. Yet the party's progress stalled and then reversed, not helped by fallings out and defections. An early sign of trouble was the departure of their first group leader, who rather bizarrely signed on with the ultra-eurosceptic SDP. Elsewhere a former mixed martial artist turned councillor, once an outside contender for the national leadership, went independent.

Perhaps more challenging was the fact that the party's success stemmed from a laser focus on individual areas, where armies of activists were able to engage and persuade. But there were simply not the resources to do that everywhere; where the Greens turned their attention to getting the vote out they often achieved stunning victories, elsewhere they barely troubled the ballot papers.

Of course there are limits as to how much you can extrapolate the experiences of one local council to a national landscape, particularly one wildly changed in just a few years. But the Solihull story does offer some insights into a party that has until now been largely overlooked by the national press.

First, the Greens have an established playbook for winning over disillusioned voters without pandering to fears about immigrants or trans people. Williams actually wrote a guide on how his party should engage with BNP voters. The document eventually leaked and was swiftly denounced by a Tory MP as evidence the Greens were "pandering to racism". Given the trajectory of the British right since, the criticism seems rather incredible.

Second, the Greens have experience building electoral coalitions that defy stereotypes about their support base ("middle class vegans" was the label even one local councillor abhorred). Defeated Reform candidate Matt Goodwin somewhat bizarrely blamed his downfall on an unlikely alliance of Islamists and woke progressives. From that it is harder to tell whether he is angrier at Muslim accused of telling women how to vote, or the liberals who objected to him opining on when women should give birth. His crude caricatures aside, the Greens are certainly more than capable of drawing backing from often disparate voters. My parents' caravan, in rural Herefordshire, in fact sits in a seat they won in 2024. Unlike Castle Brom the area remains mostly farmland and is not renowned for its veganism.

Third. The Greens are not a single issue outfit. While they pushed for stronger environmental policy in the council chamber, much of their Solihull success was built engaging with local concerns about housing, anti social behaviour and affordability. As one activist put it to me, you wouldn't get a fair hearing about climate change heralding the end of the world among people worrying about seeing themselves to the end of the week.

Finally, however, there must come the note of caution. Solihull was rightly held up as a Green success story. Former leader and now Brighton MP Sian Berry spoke of the council in glowing terms when I interviewed her at a moment the local group was at the peak of its powers. But on a day when some will now speak about prospective PM Polanski, it remains an uncomfortable truth that Solihull's Tory majority was never seriously threatened. And even had the Greens' growth continued, a traffic light coalition between progressive parties would likely have been needed to outgun the Conservatives. 

Nonetheless on a day of competing political narratives, the Greens must get their dues for a dramatic win.

Yes Reform have twice in scarcely six months been decisively beaten by tactical voting on the left (the margin in Manchester was even greater than in Caerphilly). Farage's decision to field a bloke on the record as believing non-whites can never truly be English now looks horrifically hubristic in a constituency where half the population are ethnic minorities.

And yes Labour has tested to destruction the idea it can court Reform-curious voters without massively alienating formerly loyal supporters. The problem with rigging MP selections to shut out socialists and cheering the exodus of left-leaning members, is that eventually the left in the country hit back. Surely Starmer must now change course or make way for someone who is less blind to the insanity of the strategy to date.

But a moment for the Greens, who rather like Reform have enjoyed record polling and a dramatic increase in members, but with barely a fraction of the news coverage. 15 or so years ago I was the only journo to attend the party's local election launch and press interest has scarcely improved. Will that change now, with the Greens having overtaken Reform in Parliament in terms of number of MPs actually elected on the party's ticket (half of Reform won as Tories)? Doubtful. In fact one only has to recall the Corbyn years to imagine how disinterest may give way to hysterical hostility. 

For more serious commentators there is a chance to dwell on often repeated lines about silent majorities and left behind communities. Countless op-eds about Gorton and Denton conjured up images of a jaded, often overlooked public. And yet by two to one the electorate rejected the nativist bile of Reform. Goodwin will doubtless retreat back to his GB News studio, already evoking Trumpian suggestions that dodgy dealings denied his victory. Political upsets are only ever legitimate when they go the right (wing) way.

In reality the real insurgency centred instead on a woman plumber who campaigned on a pro-migrant, pro-net zero, anti MAGA platform. Not quite in the script is it?