Will the Greens be the Reform of the left?
3 min read
The terrain of politics has changed. Green issues have become a political dividing line in recent months, but Labour hasn’t flinched despite attempts from the Tories to make it a ‘wedge issue’.
Labour’s pledge to deliver a publicly owned energy company, Great British Energy, is an effective solution to high energy bills and to help make Britain “a clean energy superpower”. David Lammy, too, sees climate justice as a critical part of Labour’s Global Britain.
But there’s one wrinkle – the surge in support for the Green Party. Will the Greens be to a Labour government what Reform were to the Tories? The answer is in Labour’s hands: if they understand the scope and nature of their landslide victory, the Green Party won’t be a threat to them.
First, Labour has to stop fighting the last war. After 2019, the party identified its core vote as the working-class red wall who lent their votes to Boris Johnson’s Tories to “get Brexit done”. Now Labour must hold on to those who voted for national renewal in all its forms – institutional, environmental, economic, and social.
A common failure of new governments is addressing the challenges of the day but neglecting to take the time to sell what they are doing to the public. This leads to the second critical point: Labour needs to be clear about its own politics. It is the big progressive party in a country where over six in 10 voters chose a progressive future – but it is a social democratic party. Labour must lean into its core purpose.
Labour aren’t centrists like the Liberal Democrats, nor are they Greens who wish to replace capitalism with a different economic system. The historic role of social democrats is to rescue capitalism from itself. That’s why we have paid holidays, pensions, and an NHS. Now the issue is to prevent capitalism from destroying the planet while maintaining economic growth.
This is the third and vital distinction that Labour needs to make between itself and the Green Party. Keir Starmer sees decarbonising the UK economy as an engine of growth. His National Wealth Fund will be created with a windfall tax on oil and gas profits, and it will be spent on modern manufacturing – green steel and green hydrogen. Those will create high-paid, skilled working-class jobs.
The contrast with Green Party advocacy of de-growth is clear and should be starkly pointed out by Labour. If the Greens don’t want growth, then they don’t want to tackle inequality.
In contrast, Labour knows that Grimsby needs growth and so does Glasgow. Until poverty and deprivation are tackled decisively, arguing for de-growth is at the least self-indulgent and at the worst a dereliction of social solidarity.
For 14 years Labour has been navigating a political landscape dominated by the divisions on the right of politics. The re-emergence of Nigel Farage and the rout he inflicted on the Tories was the last reverberation of that.
Now, Keir Starmer leads a country that wants progressive change and he must show confidence. Starmer changed his party and saw off three Tory prime ministers. That wasn’t by chance. It was fuelled by the same social democratic values that Clement Attlee’s government applied in post-war reconstruction and Blair used in rebuilding the public square after the Margaret Thatcher and John Major governments.
Time for Labour to show the same swagger again.
John McTernan, former political secretary to former prime minister Tony Blair
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