The Green party campaign launch took place this morning in Bristol and lasted precisely 15 minutes. I’m not saying that going to Bristol for 15 minutes was the least green thing I’ve done all year, but it may make the top 10. I’m very sorry. I didn’t even manage to plant a question as offset.
Anyway, the launch featured some of the things you might expect – knitted green rosettes, a lot of jolly good points about sewage – and some you mightn’t. All the many ”vote Green” signs were plastic (maybe they don’t count as single-use) while the lecterns lit up (energy-efficient bulbs, perhaps).
Incidentally, you need two lecterns at all Green events because the party has joint leaders – Carla Denyer and Adrian Ramsay. This is the third time they’ve had a woman and a man co-leading. The Greens are much like the breakfast TV sofa in that respect, although I don’t think they secretly loathe each other like they do in the various morning studio snakepits. Or indeed the various other political parties.
In fact, everyone here seemed to get on very well (I even watched their rehearsal), though it must be said they all appeared to be from one wing of what euphemism demands we style as the Greens’ “broad church”. Denyer finished the stereo-leader speech by declaring their main priorities were “the NHS, housing, climate and nature, public services, and the quality of our water.” Confusingly, three minutes later we were filing out and activists were being given great boxes of campaign material to distribute: all containing a leaflet emblazoned with the Palestinian flag and the words: “An important letter to Bristol on Gaza.”
Another one for this election’s Launch v Reality files. No one’s saying that the less you know about the Greens, the more attractive they are … but knowing more than 50% of the things about the Greens can lead swiftly to the Steve Carell grimace gif. I like knowing they want to renationalise the water industry; I don’t want to know that in practice they seem to oppose a slew of housing developments and solar farms in their council areas. I’m very up for knowing that they won’t ditch climate crisis targets; I’m not crazy about the fact they’ve just suspended a former London Assembly member and two-time London mayoral candidate for comments lamenting some of his party’s renunciation of the Cass review of gender identity services for children and young people.
But everyone’s got their Green party don’t-want-to-knows. A poll this week found the Greens had overtaken the Conservatives among the under-50s, who probably don’t want to find out the thing about the houses and the solar farms. Greens, please tell me more about the nationalisation of Royal Mail! But would you mind pretending you didn’t just say the thing about disbanding the entire British army and getting people to sign up to a “home defence force” (a 2015 classic, there).
In fairness, the party has a difficult coalition to hold together, ranging from traditional eco types, disaffected members of the hard left, disaffected members of the medium left, people who can’t face the Lib Dems, generic protesters who feel their pet issue is not sufficiently foregrounded by the other parties, and that large but underacknowledged demographic – people who think they possibly voted Green at some point in one of the 257 elections between 2015 and 2019 but can’t quite remember when, and in some cases why, now. But look, all welcome. If there was a poem on the pedestal of the Green party, it would probably contain the line “Give me your muddled asses”.
Fortunately, all the bear traps were avoided here today simply by not saying a lot of The Things. The launch was opened by Caroline Lucas, the outgoing Brighton Pavilion MP who is so well liked even among her party’s detractors that it’s fair to say you could safely know 100% of the things about her. (She is leaving to give service of a different kind, providing care as an end-of-life doula.)
And we did learn about the party’s strategy: the Greens are going to “push the next government for bold action”, “push Labour to be bolder and braver” and generally push irresistibly. How were they going to do this? By returning “at least four MPs”. OK. Clearly this would be their best result yet – but the roadmap did feel slightly like those three-point-plan memes that say something like 1. Get four MPs. 2. ? 3. Backseat-drive a huge-majority government. Maybe we’ll hear more about point 2 when the manifesto drops. That said, the thing about a manifesto launch for the smaller parties is that it offers people the chance to find out more about who they really are. In which case, you could argue it’s the most dangerous day in the calendar for them.
