In September, 200 Green Party members gathered at the Mechanics Institute in Manchester, the birthplace of the TUC, to launch a new network for the left of the party called Greens Organise. An open letter circulated in the week before Conference set out an overarching political goal: a popular movement that can “mobilise millions of frustrated voters who have lost faith in the political system entirely”, and for the Green Party to become “the principal electoral voice” of that movement.

The letter drew familiar battle lines – to build a “broad mandate for an internationalist, anti-capitalist, and ecologically transformative agenda”; an expanded political strategy for the party, rejecting the electoral assimilation of Green parties in Europe; and strengthened links with labour and social movements to mobilise a diverse working class. All – it’s fair to say – easier said than done. Since then, the challenge has been to develop a more practical and strategically specific programme out of a letter whose founding signatories were already heavily committing time towards the party and political activity generally.

The group’s activity has been divided into six tasks, which form the six working groups opened to volunteers at the launch event. First, to organise internally: at the very least so the left of the party would talk more to itself beyond small cliques and friendship groups, but ideally so it can act strategically, cohering on common terms for conferences and membership votes¹. This group is developing internal governance structures which will be put to a vote of Greens Organise members in the new year. Second, to democratise: while the party broadly has the structures it needs, levels of participation, competition and diversity in internal elections is weak, giving older and middle class members a disproportionate role. Third, to educate: the party’s single issue profile has left the membership ideologically thin; political education will spread much-needed class consciousness while clarifying internal debates. Fourth, to communicate: modelling a bolder image of the party, less deferent to legacy media and unshackled from an outdated view of what political credibility looks like (summarised recently on Novara). Fifth, to build: strengthening links and porousness with the workplace and community organising efforts that are a precondition to meaningful electoral success. And sixth, to create a party culture that eschews oppression while creating spaces we ‘actually want to be in’. All in all, Greens Organise offers a consolidation for ecosocialists’ strength in the party and a safe landing for newcomers (of the 200 or so who have joined these working groups, a third are brand new to the party).

With one eye on the unsettled strategic debates that – despite their successes – plagued Momentum and The World Transformed, and grateful to the open conversations about a new party and party-ism that have been organised at Pelican House and in the journal Prometheus, the rest of this article attempts to take on the main questions that have been put to Greens Organise since founding. As the group is in the process of establishing democratic structures, these are only my own views, albeit informed by conversations with many others involved.

Why the Green Party?

The basics here are regularly repeated – 6 parliamentarians, over 800 Councillors, 60,000 members and 2 million votes this year – the Greens are the only party on the left that has broken through the British electoral system. The party polls strongest among those who are most keen on change and least satisfied with democracy, and has already gained significantly from Labour’s core vulnerability to renters, young people and Asian voters². Its central offers of a wealth tax, investment in public services and environmental protection speak to popular concerns that cut across demography and geography. Notwithstanding the party’s considerable weaknesses, it is the site of a very large well of national recognition, goodwill and hope. It is internally democratic, and not – in my experience – completely horrible to campaign for, which is a boon.

Can Greens speak to middle England?

Only those not paying attention can write this off as a purely urban, graduate affair. The groups of Green Councillors in towns like South Tyneside (a group of eleven), Knowsley (seven), the Wirral (fourteen), Ashford (nine), Hastings (twelve) and Peterborough (five) would query that for a start. These are small numbers, but each represents a local relationship with a non-self-selecting audience; a basis of political trust in towns where trust is thin on the ground after decades of neglect from the main parties. Collectively they offer a challenge to the idea that there is something inherent about the Greens that stymies their appeal in places vulnerable to Reform³. Part of the task of Greens Organise is to strengthen that appeal, but that does not mean starting from scratch.

Meanwhile, Green-run councils in Lancaster, Stroud, Mid Suffolk and East Hertfordshire – never mind the two Green rural MPs – would have something to say about Joe Todd’s suggestion in Prometheus that “it’s unlikely that they’ll consistently win outside of urban centres anytime soon”. The ‘Tories on bikes’ stereotype of who Greens appeal to in these places is easy to conjure up, and is surely adopted by some liberal Greens to align with their own preferences for a certain type of Radio 4 credibility. But it fails to account for the pockets of deprivation and breadth of political exhaustion that exists across the British countryside, as well as the ‘new conservationism’ that needs a radical outlet. When I canvassed in a housing estate in the small market town of Diss earlier this year for the Green co-leader Adrian Ramsay, it was the most disaffected and anti-politics set of responses I’d experienced in a decade of door-knocking. Adrian, hardly a rousing character, flipped the Tory safe seat comfortably, on a turnout of almost 70%; it is possible that a more aggressive anti-system narrative (with the voices to match) could reach much further into rural England and Wales.

What is the theory of change?

The ambition of the Greens Organise project then, is not just to help the party win 30 or so urban seats at the next election. A powerful left message is still the obvious route to achieving that, given the profile of the seats where Greens came second in 2024; Greens Organise success might, in that narrower scenario, at least elect a cohort of socialists that avoids the complete folding of the party into the political wing of the sustainability class (the dense network of philanthropically-funded, environmentally conscious professionals also known as the ‘green blob’). But no – the level of ambition is much greater than that. The temporality of the climate crisis and rise of the far right leaves Green socialists unwilling to play the long game, while the polycrisis and electoral volatility of the current moment mean anything is possible in 2029. This is why, as the open letter states, “the only answer is a coordinated left movement from the ground up”.

Greens Organise’s job then is to ensure the Green Party plays its role in developing that mass movement, treating local and national elections alike as part of the class struggle electoral strategy described by Callum F in Prometheus. That means softening the boundary between electoral politics and community and workplace organising, with activists, candidates and spokespeople active across both⁴. It means the Greens being a reliable voice of the left, bolder and more consistent in providing political cover on wedge issues (such as Gaza), resisting the pressure to conform to ‘state loyalty’ as described in Archie Woodrow’s contribution. It means taking risks with comms to drive the national agenda rather than hiding from it (note how the MP for Clacton dominates headlines from Mar-a-Lago and launches a regional event series that has already pushed Reform membership beyond 150,000, past the Conservatives, all while Green MPs get to grips with casework and parliamentary procedure). It means cultivating voices that might sit entirely outside electoral politics now, but could become leaders by 2029. And finally, it will require a willingness to work with whoever can reach voters with a programme similar to the Greens’ in areas of the country where the Greens remain weak in the coming years.

Should the left ‘flop into the Greens’?

The binary set up by Ash Sarkar at a recent Pelican House event, therefore – to set up a new organisation or ‘flop into the Greens’ – is false. The Green Party remains an electoralist vehicle in its current form, so simply subsuming into it is not much use. Leftists can use the national and regional network offered by Greens Organise to shape the party from within – an influx of political experience and organising capacity into volunteer roles would supercharge the party’s functioning across the board. But equally, as long as there is not yet a popular mandate for the programme offered by independents, Greens or any other left electoral project, there is always a role for more organisation of the disorganised left – locally and nationally. Whatever form that takes at this point, from regroupment of the party-ist left still uninterested in the Greens to the base-and-culture-building Joe Todd proposes, and whatever it looks like by 2029 (New Popular Front-style alliance or otherwise), the critical factor is simply that the project accounts sufficiently for the presence and continued growth of the Greens⁵.

Would Greens stand down for independents?

Green Party Conference voted in 2023 to stand in every seat in England and Wales at the last general election, a rare decision to allow the national party to overrule local party autonomy. This vote of the membership has to be contextualised while it is critiqued. Many Greens have spent over a decade facing calls from Labourists – in unison with the party’s right – to disappear at whim, and it is the left’s gain that this was successfully resisted. The completely botched ‘Unite to Remain’ pact with Liberal Democrats in 2019 also revealed the slipperiness of strategically vague progressive alliances, leaving many members more sectarian as a result.

Given the electoral realignment since, however, it is unlikely that any similar motion will pass in future. Green MPs and local parties are already working with independents, such as in Hackney, where a non-aggression deal helped elect a Green Councillor. The priority for now should be engagement and building the mandate for a minimum programme country-wide (i.e. beyond urban strongholds); electoral calculus can follow. A trickier consideration is the walking dead that is the SCG and the soft left of the PLP. As Ansell Eade has pointed out, an unintended consequence of Greens’ success in the coming years would be to strengthen this rump and perhaps return it to a position where it could challenge for the post-Starmer leadership. A dividing line may be needed to decisively discount Labour’s right.

Reclinism, not declinism

Greens Organise will shape the Green Party from within, paving the way for more alignment with the wider (largely disorganised) left. The existing mainstream platform that is so difficult to attain under Britain’s political and media ecosystem could yet be merged with a truly popular Green narrative that hasn’t been fully articulated – even though the seeds of it are visible. Contra the globalism of both Labour and Reform (personified in their relationships with Larry Fink and Elon Musk), Greens privilege community. Contra growthism, offering only acceleration as the way out of disruption, Greens offer a way to say ‘no’ – the rallying cry of “Stop, you’re killing us!” Combining this with colloquial visions of the good life, public luxury and free time (as Mélenchon says, “to do nothing, if we like”) opens the door to a latent set of post-capitalist desires: reclinism over declinism. In other words, the synthesis of liberation and solidarity that was promised in the 1970s – when Green parties were founded – but which neoliberalism destroyed.

Leftists who join the party will be welcomed not only by Greens Organise, given the organising experience and class politics they can bring to bear on the parts of the party that are crying out for it, but also by many local party members who wouldn’t recognise the pages of Tribune never mind Prometheus. Doorknockers are doorknockers after all – unlike Labour there are no real organised factions, and volunteers are the lifeblood of the party’s success such that new and effective ones are generally swooned over, whatever their possible ideology. In May’s local elections, Greens will be fighting for anti-system votes in county councils like Kent, where an influx of activist support – even if that is on loan – will help steer the national narrative of protest away from Reform and towards the challenge from Labour’s left. Partyists who remain unconvinced should at least keep one eye on the local relationships with Greens that might be helpful down the line, even if those involve constructive political pressure.

In sum, there is no shortage of tasks to get the party organised for.

References

1. This itself is not a new idea – a group called Green Left was formed in 2006 (with Sian Berry among its founding signatories), but offered little more than a holding pen in recent years. ↩︎
2. Research by More in Common shows that of its seven segments of British society, the three giving most support to the Greens were ‘Progressive Activists’ (20%), ‘Civic Pragmatists’ (10%) and ‘Disengaged Battlers’ (10%). These groups are the least satisfied with democracy, the most likely to desire change, concerned about systemic inequality but less likely to blame immigrants. Collectively they make up around a third of the UK population and in 2024 Labour was 20-30pp ahead in each, leaving space for Greens to target with an anti-incumbency message in the coming years. (‘Established Liberals’ on the other hand – who tend to trust the government, lean economically to the right and believe austerity was necessary – are subject to much closer competition from the three main parties, with the Greens on only 6%.) FocalData, using different analysis and groupings, reaches a similar conclusion in finding that the pool of ‘Green curious’ voters currently extends to 40% of the population. FocalData also found the Green vote to have gained +8 percentage points among Asian voters at the last General Election, +6 among renters and +10 among 18-24 year-olds. ↩︎
3. Not all but some of that presence outside graduate cities translated into General Election support. Birkenhead, South Shields and Huddersfield are more deprived and have lower rates of higher education than average, and yet Greens polled above 15% in 2024. ↩︎
4.  The Green Party Trade Union group, which I chair, exists to strengthen the relationship between unions and the party, and helped make the workers’ rights section of the 2024 manifesto the party’s strongest yet. ↩︎
5. Corbyn failed to do this, as Jeremy Gilbert has argued. Early and explicit cooperation with the Greens – with investment in public services, workers’ rights and climate action at the fore – would have, paradoxically, freed up Corbyn to strike a more authentic position against Remain, helping to clarify Brexit as a second order issue. ↩︎