In last year’s General Election, the Green Party quadrupled its representation in parliament (from one in 2019 to four in 2024, albeit). Caroline Lucas, elected in 2010, was for a long time the party’s only MP. After years of the Green’s representation in Parliament resting solely on Lucas’s shoulders, July 2024 was a turning-point.
“I spoke in the House of Commons five times yesterday, on a range of topics,” Ellie Chowns, the Green MP for Northwest Herefordshire told me when we met on a drab evening at a café in St James’s Park. “We as Greens have got a much stronger voice [in Parliament] speaking day in day out on the issues that really matter,” Chowns said. Alongside her, Adrian Ramsay, the Green MP for Waveney Valley nodded. During our 45-minute interview, we were all variously forced to dodge the pigeons who kept flying dangerously close overhead. Ramsay has been the current co-leader of the party, alongside Carla Denyer, the Green MP for Bristol Central since 2021. But their term is almost up; the party will hold a leadership election later this year. While Denyer has decided not to re-contest, Ramsay, who has been a Green Party politician since 2003 felt he isn’t done yet. He is running once again to be co-leader of the party once again, with Chowns as his co-star.
Chowns and Ramsay’s pitch to Green Party members is simple: a vote for them is a vote for two experienced leaders, who already have a position inside parliament and a proven track-record of winning elections .“We’re the only candidates in this [leadership] election who have won under first-past-the-post,” Ramsay told me, “and we want to build on that success, it is about substance.” He added: “Anyone can say that they want to be popular,” Ramsay said, “we’ve shown how you actually do it.” Chowns agreed: “The only way to change politics is by winning more seats in the system,” she said, “and Adrian and I have shown how to do that. You build the biggest possible coalition of voters.” The pair have received backing for precisely this reason from Green Party Grandees such as Lucas and Baroness Jenny Jones.
This is all no uncertain dig at the pair’s main competition: current deputy leader, Zack Polanski. Shortly after the May local elections, in which the party won an additional 181 councillors, current Polanski, launched a (not so surprise) solo-leadership campaign. His platform of “eco-populism” has exposed a split in the party between the radical left wing (which Chowns and Ramsay indirectly describe as “loudhailer politics”) and those who want to appeal to a wider base, including former Conservative voters.
Ramsay is irked by Polanski’s decision to run. The current co-leader, who wrote the Green Party’s handbook on how to win council elections, has spent most of his political career working out how to turn the party from a fringe group into a force capable of winning Parliamentary elections. The election of an additional three Green MPs last year, was the culmination of this, or so he says.
Polanski’s wants to position the Greens as a left-wing mirror to Nigel Farage and Reform. In fact, when I spoke to him shortly after he launched his leadership bid in May, Polanski said he may even actually “agree” with some of “Nigel Farage’s diagnosis of the problems” . Chowns and Ramsay think this is the wrong approach. “We’ve already demonstrated how ecological ideas can be popular,” Chowns said. She added: “I don’t aspire for the Green Party to ape Reform in any way neither in its content, not its style…We can’t out shout Reform.”
Polanski is a member of the Greater London Assembly, but if he is elected he will sit outside the machinations of Westminster; an arrangement which could cause more trouble than it’s worth.
“There are some major pitfalls that would need to be addressed here,” Ramsay said, “journalists look to what’s happening in parliament to see where each party stands on the issue of the day because parliament is the centre of British political debate.” Having a leader outside of Westminster could become particularly troublesome if there is a disagreement between the party’s leadership and its MPs. In some ways, this has already happened. Polanski has said the UK should withdraw from NATO, a policy which neither Ramsay nor Chowns support. “If on that day you had the leader, who was outside parliament, speaking for the party saying I want to leave NATO and then our foreign affairs spokesperson in Parliament saying that the Green party want to stay there and reform NATO, then who do you look to as giving the Green Party’s position?”
This could get messy. Members of other parties are looking at this race, curious about where it could leave the Green Party (one sympathetic Labour MP told me they thought it would be a “disaster” and would alienate much of the party’s more moderate base). Polanski did not inform Ramsay or Chowns of his intention to run before going public with his campaign. When I ask the pair how things will work if Polanski does win, Ramsay said: “I think that’s for Zack to set out… he’s certainly had no conversations with the MPs about whether that would work or how he would make it work.” As I went to ask my next question, Ramsay shot back, “he’s made no attempt to talk to us about it at all.”
Though Chowns and Ramsay’s campaign may not have landed as loudly as Polanski’s, they have election-winning credentials. As Ramsay said, it took time to build the “broad coalitions” which have pushed the Green Party to where it currently sits. With polling for the leadership election opening in a matter of months, the pair may need to ramp up the volume in order to win the fight; it won’t take much time for that “broad coalition” to be unpicked.
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