The Green Party of England and Wales has today announced that its membership has surged past 100,000 members, the highest in the Party’s history. This marks over a 45% increase since Zack Polanski was elected Leader of the party last month.
The news comes as the recent polling shows Greens on 15% nationally, their highest-ever figure, and just two points behind both Labour and the Conservatives, and a week after the Greens announced they had a bigger membership than the Liberal Democrats. Since then, it has been shown that the Liberal Democrats’ membership is actually just 60,000, and the Greens have grown an additional 17,000 in a week.
With so many of the other parties stepping on rakes, the greens are not only big enough to change results, they could even win a significant number of seats, every result they could change or seat they could win, the grift potential is there.
Ok but how would they go about grifting? Like I get that people putting trust in them and giving them power is a requirement for grifting, but there needs to be a method too. Their new core member and voter base is also going to be the wisest section of the electorate to that sort of thing too. It would also require a coordinated effort across the party. That’s easy to do with Reform, the Tories, Labour and so on when they’re committed capitalists who clearly aren’t in it for morals and to make positive change and whose main source of income are big donors. I’m just struggling to envision it
One way when you can sway but not win a seat is to take a bribe to moderate your campaign effort. Greens would take votes away from labour so a few quid from the far right and they could step up their campaign and ensure a win for Reform by splitting the vote. When a seat is won there is a ton of things MPs can do to influence a range of policies and decisions, if they take money for some special effort it’s hard to track, you basically have to look at what the Tories have been doing for the last 15 years. Look at the gambling lobbying, cash for questions, buildings approval, PPE scandal… those are just the ones we found out about.
If this momentum that the Greens have right now continues consistently for the most part then I’m sure we’ll see at least a few examples of Reform taking some seats. And it arguably being because the vote was split between Labour and Greens in the coming elections, including the GE. I believe we can have a good amount of faith that won’t be the intended outcome though. But that’s personal belief going off what we can see so far and the message they’re giving, for now. We won’t know until it happens and I don’t deny that most politicians could be capable of this. But if that’s the case, why have that be a reason not to join, if we have no believable indications it would be a thing with candidates in our areas? And they’re espousing views that align with ours, and especially when there’s no real alternative? What helps the Greens is how internally democratic they are and that they wouldn’t allow someone to be a candidate when there’s believable indications that they’d be shady. Obviously you bring up Zack’s hypnotist mess but I don’t think it indicates nearly strongly enough that he’d be corrupt. And also how, even if an elected official from them tried taking bribes, the rest of the party officials and it’s members (of which there will be a huge number of) would be vehemently against it. With it not being something that’s widespread throughout the party, unlike with the others, there wouldn’t be this omertà-esque thing going on and it would be far more obvious. And also that when it is revealed to the public there isn’t massive effort from all the powers in society in all their forms and the media, not just the party itself, to cover it up or minimise it. Obviously you can make your bag and run but it would have to be a short term thing and a lot higher risk, in this case. I understand your concerns after the shit we’ve had to deal with now and in the past, I really do. I just personally don’t feel them with this party nearly enough to see it as a reason to not join them. Could change in the future, who knows? I might regret becoming a member. But fuck it, we need to get some big antifascist movement going on and no other large party seems willing to fully go for it
Edit: wow didn’t realise how much of a wall of text I’d written there, typical leftist. Also I should say I understand that you haven’t said your concerns aren’t making you not want to join. I’m just speaking broadly of how trust is tied into all of these things
I’ve just been watching some of Zack’s responses to the hypnosis stuff and his explanation seems reasonable, I’ve not found the original article but it it could have been a stitch-up. I was under the impression he made DVDs but it sounds like he just spoke to a “journalist”
I think the left are just so disappointed with Starmer that everyone seeking leadership viewed with healthy skepticism.