How the Greens conquered the countryside
Published in The Spectator on the 14th of July 2024
Nearly a year ago, I wrote about the rise of the Greens in rural constituencies. Now, after standing as the Conservative candidate in Waveney Valley and losing to the Green party’s co-leader – while being savaged by the rural Greens – it is time to revisit the subject.
The last piece I wrote drew both delight and outrage in Green circles. I at once found it quoted on their leaflets in the constituency and was told I would rue the day I penned it. The reason? I acknowledged their hard work while highlighting their rank hypocrisy and, frankly, bananas policies.
The Greens are now a slick and deeply political operation. In hindsight, perhaps even I, and certainly my party, underestimated that. It was foolish to dismiss them all as dreadlocked, backpack carrying, Birkenstock adorned anarchists (although the air was thick with natural deodorant when such types poured out of Diss railway station each Saturday). But their victory in Waveney Valley, and in three other seats, was well organised, hyper-focused and difficult to contend with for the Conservatives in rural seats. We were vastly outspent and outnumbered. The Greens treated all four seats as by-elections and flooded the seat with signs, additional literature and volunteers from around the country.
But, as one journalist put it to me after the count, resources alone doesn’t explain their victory. So what else was behind it – the obviously bleak national picture to one side? The Greens embedded their candidate early, a lesson for us as Conservatives. Tactical voting and the absence of any real Labour or Liberal Democrat campaign also stung us. Reform, of course, was a factor. Still, none of this explains why some in our Conservative rural heartlands turned to the Greens.
Looking at the result in my constituency, despite what the polls predicted, the Labour and Lib Dem vote entirely dissolved. It was also striking how little policy, or manifestos, mattered on the doorstep. The electorate was angry with us Conservatives, and rightly so – nationally we’d let them down. But I did not expect to come across so many Green-Reform waverers – those considering a vote for either of those parties. The two could arguably not be more different. One wants to rejoin the EU the other feels the benefits of Brexit have not been fully realised. One feels immigration is out of control the other advocates for what is essentially open borders. One wants to abolish our nuclear deterrent and the other is committed to it. One supports gender self-ID, the other is agog at it. The list goes on.
The same complete disregard for policy applied to those abandoning us as Conservatives to the Greens. Explaining their bonkers policies on the doorstep was simply met with ‘well they won’t form the government’ or ‘they’ll never be in a position to do it’. Voting for the Greens was seen as a way of punishing us without the ultimate betrayal of voting Labour. There was a broad acknowledgement that, yes, the environment is important and our waterways should be much cleaner, but none agreed with any of the Green policies we mentioned on the doorstep. In fact they were vehemently opposed. Sadly, they were so angry with us as Conservatives that this didn’t matter. Voting Green was seen as a ‘free hit’, a one-off chance to vent that anger in a national election they knew we’d lost and knew the Greens wouldn’t win.
In this there is a real challenge for the Greens. They will claim the victories as support for us all being forced to read Das Kapital by candlelight to save the planet. But while there are some undoubtedly die-hard far-left supporters in Waveney Valley, the vast majority don’t appear to agree with the policies of the party they leant their support to. Plus, while the Greens cleverly picked four target seats in different corners of England, it means they have quite different bases to keep happy. With just four MPs, this may not matter. They can continue to be different parties in different locations. The fact they unpublished their detailed policy pages shortly into the campaign suggests this may be the case. Their calls for us to leave Nato or ration meat and dairy have hurriedly disappeared, while even their key manifesto commitments remained largely absent from election leaflets.
The Green core membership remains hyper-left and a refuge for ex-Momentum supporters. Even Owen Jones is now a fan. Will their members swallow new policies designed not to upset their new seats in rural Herefordshire, Norfolk and Suffolk? With increased profile and, one presumes, a desire to increase on four MPs, comes increased scrutiny. Issues like the worrying anti-Semitism displayed by some of their candidates will likely matter more. Or will voters continue to turn a blind-eye and regard them as harmless?
If there is an immediate silver-lining in my humane butchering at the hands of the tofu-munchers this time out, it’s this: the total lack of enthusiasm for Starmer’s Labour party was easily exploited by the Greens. Voters were offered a high-profile alternative to Starmer that wasn’t Reform and jumped on the alternative. It reflects how skin-deep Starmer’s base is.
The question for Conservatives trying to reclaim territory from the Greens is: are our voters willing to come home? They were, justifiably, angry with us but can someone really go from centrist Conservatism to something akin to Trotskyism? Or do voters really care as little about policy as it seemed on the doorstep? Once they’ve ripped off the Conservative band-aid, will it re-stick?
My belief is that it will. We need to be credible, work hard, fight for farming and countryside once again, behave properly and steadily rebuild faith. But the electrified Green bulldozer must be taken seriously and we must work harder to expose their true beliefs. The more success they have, the easier this may become. The thin mask of credibility will slip as their far-left membership grows restless. Already their opposition to new energy infrastructure in Waveney Valley is making city-dwelling supporters twitchy, which will get worse when the rural Greens oppose large-scale solar farms. Strangely, on both these things I and other Conservatives take the same stance. This may sit well with rural voters but to urban Greens seeking the fastest path to net zero with religious zeal, it will cause outright rebellion. It’s this that will, in time, make their fragile coalition collapse. When rural voters see that the Greens are nothing but an electoral chameleon, whose core ideals are fundamentally opposed to theirs, they will come home.
Yet we as Conservatives must give them a home to come back to, treat this defeat with the humility it deserves, remember our core values and focus on serious policy rather than three-word slogans. Because if there is one other big thing the Greens got right in this campaign, it was making voters feel heard.