What Happened to the Green Wave?

Labour has had a dreadful night. But the dog that didn’t bark is the failure of the Greens to match Reform’s dramatic gains, picking up only 25 extra seats so far – less than a tenth of what Farage’s party has achieved. Ross Clark has more in the Spectator.

No amount of Labour spin will disguise the party’s dreadful night, but the hefty losses of seats in English council areas are nothing more than was expected. The bigger story of the night is the failure of the Greens to make any meaningful breakthrough. With 40 councils so far declared – a minority, as most did not count votes overnight and will declare this afternoon – the Greens have made a net gain of just 25 seats, less than a tenth of the gains made by Reform UK. They are running at around 18% of the popular vote, while Reform UK are pushing 30%.

This matters because for months Zack Polanski and the Greens have been promoted (and not just by themselves) as the mirror image of Nigel Farage and Reform UK: they are supposed to be the insurgent party of the Left to balance Reform as the insurgent party of the Right. There has been talk of them entering government as part of a Left-wing coalition after the next election, possibly as the largest party.

Yet today’s results show what a forlorn hope that is for the Greens. A genuine insurgent party would have walked it in Tameside and Wigan, yet it was Reform UK which romped home there at Labour’s expense.

The Greens are only really doing well in student areas. This shouldn’t come as any great surprise, as they have been leading in the polls among 18 to 24 year-olds. Their policies could not be better tuned to stirring student activists: climate change, Palestine, as well as declaring war on billionaires and small-time landlords. Yet their policies, similarly, could not be better calculated to offend Red Wall voters. They want to ban horse-racing and make driving a privilege rather than a right and force motorists to retake a test every five years. Just try selling that to white van man.

For the past few decades the Labour party has succeeded in holding together an often unholy alliance of low paid working people and aggrieved minorities: the broke and the woke. They deftly found the language to win support, for example, from both gay rights activists and socially-conservative Muslims, even though those interests might seem to be diametrically opposed. Polanski’s Greens, by contrast, have no such political skills. They have made a loud noise by appealing only to the woke side of Labour’s fragile coalition. That is no basis to win a General Election.

Worth reading in full.