The Green Party and Reform UK are chasing the same disenchanted voters who do not feel listened to, the party veteran Caroline Lucas has said.
People who feel “let down” by the traditional political parties and institutions and who may believe the answer lies in Nigel Farage’s party are the “people we want to be speaking to”, Lucas said.
Chatting to The i Paper at the Green conference in Bournemouth, Lucas – who is writing her second book, which will be about how to defeat right-ring populism – condemned the anti-migrant policies promoted by Farage and his party.
Newly elected Green leader Zack Polanski was “not backward in terms of the criticism that he levels at the Reform leadership”, she said, referring to his claim that Farage was campaigning on a messaging of “despair”.
However, Lucas added, there was a “wealth of difference between the policies of the leadership of Reform and people who feel so desperate that they just want to give the system a kicking”.
Green Party leader Zack Polanski speaking at the party conference in Bournemouth (Photo: Andrew Matthews/PA)“That is not to say the anti-immigrant rhetoric that comes out of Reform is necessarily shared at all by people voting for them, but they just want to shake the system up,” Lucas said.
“It reminds me a little bit of people who voted for Brexit, not because they had strong views about the EU but because they had strong views about wanting agency back in their local communities. They wanted to feel pride in their communities again and felt there was a system that let them down and people who weren’t listening,” she added.
“Those are absolutely the people we want to be speaking to, because I think our politics is very much community-based. It is about listening and offering hope and a different way of doing politics and that’s what a huge number of people in this country would like to see.”
Lucas, a one-time Green Party leader, spent many years as the party’s only MP (a job she admits she does miss) until she stood down in 2024. It was a year that saw a change in election approach from the Greens.
Party co-leaders at the time – Carla Denyer and Adrian Ramsay – focused on broadening their appeal to win seats that were outside the traditional Green base in urban, left-wing centres – to huge success.
The party returned a record four MPs, including two in former Tory areas of Waveney Valley – where Ramsay won – and North Herefordshire, which elected Green Ellie Chowns.
Lucas chairs a panel at a fringe event, Attacks on Protest, at the Green Party Conference (Photo: Nicola Tree/Getty Images)By contrast, Polanski is promoting his own brand of self-declared “ecopopulism” and focusing on a more radical, media-focused movement to generate a groundswell of support from voters frustrated with the Labour government.
In terms of grassroots support, the strategy appears to be working. The Green Party said its membership figures had outflanked those of the Liberal Democrats, following a recent surge in support.
Deputy leader Rachel Millward told conference that the party’s membership in England and Wales – which reached 83,500 – was higher than that of the Lib Dems. They pointed to the most recent publicly available figure for Lib Dem numbers, of 83,174.
However, is there a risk that Polanski’s more radical messaging risks turning away those rural voters in former Tory seats who backed the Greens for the first time?
Lucas acknowledged the need to ensure the party continued to reach a wide base and did not alienate more moderate voters.
“We are going to need to make a really big effort to ensure our message is reaching everyone across the different constituencies and different parts of the country,” she said.
“But I think what even people like Ellie and Adrian would say is that there is nothing that they did when they won [that] was about watering down the radicalness of the Green message.”
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Another threat to the Greens also lies in wait in the form of the soon-to-be launched left-wing party – centred around former Labour MPs Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana.
Campaigns – including the We Deserve Better group – are pushing for an electoral coalition between the Greens and the so-called Your Party movement.
Lucas hinted this may be something the Greens would do in the future. But she dismissed the suggestion that the party was a serious threat, pointing to a lack of emphasis on environmental policies that she argued were so important to voters.
“Any party that is fit for the 21st century has got to put environment and climate front and centre and I have not yet heard anything from Zarah and Jeremy that suggests that’s what they’re going to do,” she said. “So it feels to me that our offer is different.”
“How we might work with them in the future, I think is still to be decided but I think there is a very big space to the left of Keir Starmer at the moment, so I’m not so worried about that.”
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