I’ve recently been reading a lot about the development of the English working-class movement in the late 18^th and 19^th centuries. Beer seems to have played a big part in it and participants drank prodigiously during meetings. An echo of this tradition survives in the modern Green Party, and I was offered a choice of ginger or peppermint tea on arriving at my first in person meeting since joining a couple of months ago. I’ve been drinking six cups of tea a day since infancy but never peppermint or ginger, though I did once have a bad experience with camomile.  

The party is edging towards a membership of 60 000 in England and Wales, making it a small mass party of a size and electoral impact much greater than any of the left alternatives to Labour documented in the old articles here. It now has four MPs and won 1,931,880 votes for a programme which stands comparison with those of Respect or Corbyn’s Labour. It polled astonishingly well in some constituencies winning 26% in Huddersfield, 24% in Hackney and 14% in Bethnal Green and Stepney, a constituency in which its election expenses totalled £88. Yes, £88.  

People unfamiliar with political organisations tend to assume that they’re all full of determined activists dedicated to imposing their vision of society on everyone else. Would that this were true. 

My assumption was that someone would say a few remarks about the local and national election results which they’d prepared on the bus. One can reasonably say it was that things were more free flowing, unstructured and organic than that. No one tried to do anything as dogmatic as offering an analysis or make suggestions on how to build on a 14% election score won without a campaign in a constituency where the MP shed 30 000 votes and barely saved her seat. More precisely, no one did that till I spoke doing that “to hate evil, to hate untruth, to hate oppression, and, hating them, to strive to overthrow them” thing. 

There is an aversion to what is considered negative campaigning. This is something I take to mean telling lies and backstabbing, fine old Labour Party techniques. The Green definition of it seems to stretch to saying what makes you different from other parties on Gaza, climate change and using anti-Bangladeshi racism to win votes from white racists. The killer instinct necessary to seize state power wasn’t much in evidence. 

Britain’s anti-democratic electoral system delivered Starmer a massive parliamentary majority despite winning almost 500 000 votes fewer than Corbyn’s Labour in the 2019 “worst election result ever”. It’s clear that this haemorrhage was due to Starmer’s support for the IDF and Labour’s shift to the right, with the Greens being the major beneficiary. The party achieved a minor miracle in breaching the previously insurmountable barrier of getting a group of people into parliament and has benefited from a rapid process of fragmentation of the party system.  

I don’t have enough insight to its inner workings to predict if it will develop a more pugnacious attitude to winning votes, seats and influence in the working class, but it’s certainly well placed.