The leaders of the Green party have promised to hold to account a “timid” Labour government as the party gathers for what will be a celebratory annual conference after it returned four MPs in the general election. Carla Denyer and Adrian Ramsay, who both won seats on 4 July, told the Guardian that the gathering in Manchester of the England and Wales Greens would be both a chance to mark the successes of a party “on a roll”, and to set out what comes next – and how best to exert their new parliamentary influence. For Denyer and Ramsay in particular, the election was a very personal vindication of an electoral strategy some in the party – and plenty outside it – dismissed as unrealistic.
“A lot of journalists wrote articles over the last few years, saying, ‘Of course, realistically they’ll get two MPs at best,’” said Denyer, of their decision to closely focus resources on the four seats. “Is it nice to say, I told you so? I may have made that point. We were never 100% confident that we would get four, but we always knew it was achievable.” Denyer took the Bristol Central seat from the Labour frontbencher Thangam Debbonaire, while Ramsay won the new constituency of Waveney Valley on the Norfolk-Suffolk border. The party also held on to their one previous seat, Brighton Pavilion, with Siân Berry taking over from Caroline Lucas, while Ellie Chowns took the previously Tory constituency of North Herefordshire. “The party is on a roll,” said Ramsay. “We’ve had five sets of local elections where we’ve seen major increases in our growth in councillor numbers, and a fivefold increase over that period of time. So we’re a major force in local government across the country.” The conference will be in part a chance for the ultra-democratic party to not just decide policy but begin to plot a way forward, both in terms of future target seats and how to best use its MPs. Much of the latter, Denyer said, would be to pressure a Labour government elected on what she called a “quite timid” platform, which has become no more ambitious in its first weeks of office.
Government policies thus far are not “really the scale of change necessary to fix the problems in this country”, Denyer said. She added that while the Greens welcomed Great British Energy, the new publicly owned clean power generation company, the growth of renewable electricity was “relatively low hanging fruit”. In contrast, she said, the pre-election decision to slash its planned £28bn annual spend on areas including home insulation and wider decarbonisation meant “they no longer have a serious plan for those areas”. Ramsay said he was shocked at the decisions to means test the winter fuel payment for older people, and a big cut announced earlier this week to the nature-friendly farming budget in England. Such decisions had seemingly dismayed some Labour MPs as well, Ramsay said, as the Greens “will be building relationships across parties, including with Labour backbenchers who are unhappy”. For now, the co-leaders and their colleagues are still trying to get to grips with a workplace which, they say, seems largely governed by unspoken and arcane rules. Ramsay recalls being told that the Commons tea room is split into government and opposition sides, but not that the latter is in turn separated into tables for each party: “I was wondering why there were loads of Conservative MPs coming to sit at the same table.” Denyer professed herself baffled at the system by which MPs have to secure spots in a Commons chamber much too small to seat all of them by arriving early to place down a prayer card, likening it to “a medieval version of putting your towel on a deckchair”. After a conversation with Chowns, previously an MEP, who had been particularly struck by the differences with her former workplace, Denyer added: “This is a parliament where not every MP has a seat, there’s nowhere to plug in any of your devices to work from, or somewhere to put your water. This is just the basic stuff.”