Peter Franklin: Time for a Conservative fight back against the Green Party

Peter Franklin is an Associate Editor of UnHerd.

Last week we lost another two local by-elections (both to Reform). But this was balanced by two pieces of good news.

Firstly, there was our win in Stranraer and the Rhins, which is on Dumfries and Galloway Council. Scottish local government elections use the Single Transferable Vote system — and transferred votes from the SNP candidate helped the Conservatives beat off a strong challenge from Reform. I don’t like any form of PR, but the result does support the argument that a significant number of people who normally vote for a Left-of-centre party might vote for us to stop Reform.

Yet more evidence for that proposition comes in research from More in Common. They’ve been asking voters which party they’re most inclined to vote against. This is one poll where you don’t want to come first — but Labour does with 38 per cent. Next most hated is Reform on 26 per cent and then, trailing in third, the Conservatives on just 8 per cent. Compared to June this year, the Labour level of anti-support is fifteen points up, Reform’s seven points up and ours two points down.

Of course, that’s a mixed blessing — because these numbers reflect our diminished status. Yet they also underline the benefit that could come our way from tactical voting. We’re much less hated than Reform among Labour, Lib Dem and Green voters and barely hated at all among Reform voters (or, at least, they hate Labour a whole lot more).

The other piece of good news from last week’s locals was a Conservative gain on Trafford Council. Located in Graham Brady’s old constituency, Hale is not the sort of ward we should have lost in the first place — but winning it back with almost half the vote is a cause for hope. What’s more, it wasn’t taken back from the beleaguered Labour Party, but from the surging Greens.

In 2021 and 2023, I alerted ConHome readers to the growing threat from the Green Party of England and Wales. I felt equally vindicated and appalled. when, in last year’s general election, we lost two Westminster seats to Green candidates.

It could get worse. In 2024, the Green share of the vote was 6.7 per cent (including the separate Green parties in Scotland and Northern Ireland). Today, the polls put it somewhere between 12 and 18 per cent. Looking further ahead, there’s the clear Green lead among younger voters to worry about.

In other words, the Greens are getting close to the tipping point at which they could take further Conservative-held seats (plus some that we held before 2024). However, would be to assume that the Green advance is more or less uniform in all parts of the country. Fortunately, there’s reason to believe that Labour strongholds will bear the brunt.

Zack Polanski’s political strategy is two-fold. Firstly, to shift his party even further to the Left. And, secondly, to challenge the public perception of the Greens as a single issue party. It’s not that he’s renounced their peculiar brand of impractical environmentalism, it’s just that you’re much more likely to hear Polanski banging on about billionaires than carbon emissions.

Clearly, it’s working for him. Green poll ratings have turned sharply upwards since he became leader — a period in which Labour ratings have turned sharply downwards. It doesn’t take a professor of psephology to work out what’s going on. The Green surge is a realignment of the Left.

But while the Greens have more to gain than lose from their repositioning, the gains they previously made in the English shires are now vulnerable to a Conservative fight back — if, that is, we’re smart enough to take advantage.

One of the reasons why the GPEW was able to profit from Tory unpopularity is that they dressed themselves up in small-c conservative garb. Do you want a better quality-of-life for you and your community? Then why not vote for the party that’s got the word ‘green’ in its name? They might as well have called themselves the Nice Party of England and Wales.

The connection between the full-on nuttiness of the Green manifesto and what it would mean for the lifestyles of the Waitrose class was never made. And, no wonder, because as a minor party with no chance of real power, its eccentricities didn’t seem to matter. So why not send a message by electing a Green councillor?

But with the rise of Zack Polanski the mask has slipped.

Every time he appears on our screens to advocate for wealth taxes, uncapped immigration and unilateral nuclear disarmament there can be no denying that the Greens are a party of the hard Left. Furthermore, as they eat into Labour’s vote share, they edge ever closer to serious influence as part of a future Left-of-centre government.

The Conservative Party is therefore presented with a prime target — which is a relief because in respect to both Reform and Labour, we find ourselves at a strategic impasse. When we try to outdo Reform on policy, it has no measurable effect; but if we try to paint them as extremists, we embarrass ourselves. That leaves no option but to hold back and wait for Farage to slip up. With Labour, there’s the opposite problem: the Starmer government is in such deep trouble and inspiring such widespread hostility that most Conservative attacks are superfluous.

But with the Greens, there’s no reason not to get stuck in.

Indeed, it’s a shame that Reform got there first with Zia Yusuf’s attack video on Zack Polanski. Still, there’s time to catch up. Let’s calmly, but relentlessly, inform people what the GPEW actually stands for — because when voters find out they don’t like it at all.

There was a great example of this recently in East Sussex, where Polanski’s deputy,  Rachel Millward, is also deputy leader of Wealden District Council. Currently, the big local issue there is a government plan to house 600 asylum seekers on an army base just outside the town of Crowborough. Amazingly, Millward objected despite the extreme liberalism of Green Party policy on immigration. Local residents were unimpressed by her contortions.

Wealden is emblematic of the “blue wall” territory so carelessly surrendered since 2019. The growth of the Greens there has been dramatic — in 2015 they had no councillors, then two in 2019 and then eleven in 2023. Today, they run the council with the Lib Dems. I doubt that many local voters were aware of what the Greens stood for on immigration, but it’s being brought home to them now. There couldn’t be a better time or place for Tories to launch that fight back.

One might object that Wealden and other Con/Grn battlegrounds are too localised to matter much nationally. However, they’re part of a much wider phenomenon.

Consider what More in Common found when they polled people on a range of options for tightening the immigration rules — including the granting of temporary as opposed to permanent residence for asylum seekers. Over all, many more voters are in favour of restriction than against it — but the really interesting finding is that this is also true among people who voted Labour in 2024 and even among current Green Party supporters. In other words, there are millions of people who don’t want to vote for Reform, but who do want a sane immigration policy.

In the same vein, when voters were asked to choose between less spending on public services or higher taxes on working people — two thirds went for the first option. Remarkably, this included 61 per cent of Lib Dem voters, 56 per cent of Labour voters and 53 per cent of Green voters.

So it’s not just that there’s a sizeable group of voters who’d tactically vote Tory to stop Reform — but also that many of them are positively in favour of Conservative policies, if not the Conservative Party itself.

In rebuilding the shattered Tory coalition, it’s with these voters that we need to begin.