The Green Party’s stunning victory in the Gorton and Denton by-election has shot them to second place in the national opinion polls. A Green wave could sweep through councils across the country in May’s local elections. As political analysts contemplate the party’s future, one might also reflect on what this means for its past. For the Green Party has not just come a long way electorally from its origins, half a century ago, as the Ecology Party (it was briefly, earlier, the People Party); ideologically, it is almost unrecognisable. Today’s Green Party is arguably barely a green party at all in the sense its founders would have understood.
Political philosophies inevitably evolve as economic and electoral conditions change. No-one would have expected the socialism of the postwar Labour Party to be the same as that of its predecessor Independent Labour Party in 1900. But it is striking just how different Green politics is today from that of its forebears. In philosophical terms it looks like another beast altogether.
As a distinct political philosophy, environmentalism emerged in the early 1970s as a response to the growing awareness that global pollution and ecological loss were not just minor side effects of economic growth, but threatened to undermine the foundations of life and society. In her path-breaking book Silent Spring (1962), Rachel Carson had shown how far pesticides used in intensive agriculture were poisoning and denuding natural ecosystems. By 1972 the equally best-selling Club of Rome report The Limits to Growth had extrapolated trends in population growth, resource consumption and pollution to forecast future ecological and social collapse. In the same year the astrophysicist James Lovelock first proposed the “Gaia hypothesis” that the Earth functioned like a single organism, self-regulating its biogeochemical cycles.
Lovelock famously argued that the Earth would continue to do this even if humans destroyed themselves. Others saw in the ecological imperative, rather, the requirement that humanity must live in harmony with nature. This meant overcoming the anthropocentric worldview which had driven industrial growth: that the Earth and the life upon it were God’s gift to those built in his image, their Eden to exploit. Western societies had instead to recognise – as indigenous peoples already did – the intrinsic value of the natural world, not just its economic use value. The emblematic environmental campaigns of this period were to protect nature in and of itself: to preserve old growth forests in Tasmania and British Columbia, and save the whales.
The Limits to Growth appeared to show that exponential economic growth on a finite planet could not continue indefinitely. So a new breed of ecological economists argued for a zero-growth “steady state economy” in which resources would be harvested on a renewable basis and wastes fully reused and recycled. But the critique of economic growth went further. Not only was it unsustainable, it didn’t make people happier. It was not just that GDP didn’t measure wellbeing, and higher GDP did not equate to a better quality of life. Those who later came to call themselves “greens” wanted to overturn the entire culture and psychology of consumerist materialism that underpinned western society and dominated its politics.
The philosophers of the emergent green movement built a wide-ranging ideology on these foundations. Aldo Leopold’s “land ethic” prioritised ecological balance over human interests; Freya Mathews proposed a new metaphysics centred on an “ecological self”. Arne Næss contrasted the “deep ecology” of a biocentric perspective with the shallow environmentalism of policy reform. Vandana Shiva’s eco-feminism tied ecological destruction to the marginalisation of women and indigenous knowledge, and called for local, organic food production as an alternative to global agribusiness. EF Schumacher championed small scale, arguing that modern industrial technologies dehumanised workers, and only small states and organisations could enable participatory democracy and social justice.
Some greens in the 1970s and 1980s joined the new green parties, but many more became member and supporters of the new environmental NGOs such as Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace, and non-violent peace movements such as CND. Many became local activists, forming housing and worker cooperatives, and opposing nuclear power and road construction. A sizable number became vegetarian. Some named their daughters Gaia.
The new green politics had similarities to long-standing if marginalised traditions on the left: the utopian socialism of William Morris and the anarchism of Pyotr Kropotkin. Writers such as Murray Bookchin and André Gorz indeed tried to recast green politics as “social ecology” or “eco-socialism.” But most greens resisted co-option. In his 1984 book Seeing Green, Jonathon Porritt, previously co-chair of the Ecology Party and Britain’s best-known environmentalist of the period, insisted that those who blamed capitalism for the environmental crisis were too shallow in their analysis. The communist Soviet Union had caused just as much destruction. It was the underlying human-centred drivers of industrialism and materialism which were to blame – evidenced by the then almost complete indifference of the left to environmental issues. They were as committed to exponential economic growth and consumption as the conservatives and liberals. Thinking globally but acting locally, greens had to build a post-industrial society from the bottom up. As Petra Kelly, co-founder of the German Green Party put it, green politics was “neither left nor right but forward”.
Founded in 1980, Die Grünen got its first members of parliament elected in 1983, riding a wave of anti-nuclear and civic protest. In the UK the Ecology Party changed its name to the Green Party in 1985. It is instructive to read its early manifestos. In 1987 its “greenprint for an age of understanding” began by emphasising the importance of the environment – “its health, its safety, its wholeness”. “Whenever we damage the environment” it warned, “we damage ourselves… Like all other forms of life, we depend for our survival and wellbeing upon a fragile network of physical, social and spiritual links with the rest of creation.” Green politics, it said, “is about building a new way of life… we need to stop building on the quicksand of materialism, patriarchy, competition and aggression.”
In its first chapter, on “green economics”, the manifesto argued for the priority of conserving resources, “rather than consuming them as quickly as we can in the race for ‘consumption’, ‘growth’, ‘competition’ and ‘progress’.” It proposed a universal basic income, taxes on resource use and land, tariff protection “to reduce consumption, stimulate local production and discourage imports”, and a phased programme “to liquidate the self-imposed and now intractable burden of national debt.”
Elsewhere the manifesto argued for the benefits of a lower population, small enough to be sustained indefinitely by the nation’s resources. It opposed “the cult of bigness and the centralisation of political power,” proposing that local district councils should be responsible for the bulk of state functions including taxation, benefits, policing and justice. It called for the phasing out of nuclear power. The Green Party would take the UK out of Nato, develop an alternative defence strategy of “locally-based, non-violent civilian resistance”, and increase aid to the developing world.
Of these principles and policies, very few have survived. The Green Party is still committed to a land value tax and higher overseas aid. But the 2024 election manifesto, Real Hope, Real Change, contains no high-flown rhetoric about the wholeness of the natural world, or the misguided value of competition. It does not criticise economic growth or call for an end to materialism. The manifesto is of course strongly pro-environment, prioritising the fight against climate change and nature loss. But in ideological terms it is fundamentally left-wing. It proposes the nationalisation of the railways, water and electricity companies. It wants the repeal of all anti-trade union laws and new rights for workers. It advocates rent controls. It supports a wealth tax. It condemns Israel’s actions in Gaza. When Zack Polanski wishes to emphasise his radicalism, he does not reach for the newly fashionable green concept of “degrowth”, but the left wing tropes of modern monetary theory. (The last raises an important doubt about whether the Greens’ brand of leftism is coherent or appropriate, but those are different questions.)
Why has the Green Party more or less completely abandoned its founding ideology and become an environmentalist left party? Two shifts have occurred over the last forty years which can explain this.
The first is the mainstreaming of environmentalism. Since the 1980s serious action has been taken to tackle environmental problems by western governments and the European Union under all parties: from lead in petrol to acid rain, from the protection of habitats to the promotion of recycling. Environmentalists have discovered that they don’t need an alternative overarching political philosophy to achieve their goals: public campaigning and MP lobbying are often sufficient. It is no longer true that people and parties of the left don’t care about the environment. The Green Party would like to get to net zero emissions by 2040 rather than 2050, but finds little in Ed Miliband’s policies to oppose. Within the academy, ecocentrism remains a distinctive philosophy. But environmental policy does not today present a strong dividing line between leftists and greens. We are all environmentalists now.
But if the left has moved towards the greens, many greens have also become more overtly socialist. They have recognised that actually it is capitalism which is responsible for the climate and ecological crises. And the urgency of taking action today leaves little room for the gradual adoption of utopian ideals such as local self-sufficiency and human-scale technology. Multinational corporations are destroying the planet now, and it is evident that only the hard-headed power of national states and international agreements can restrain them – along with a huge investment in advanced green technologies.
And of course electoral success brings its own compromises. Any party wishing to win in places such as Gorton and Denton needs to focus on the issues worrying the majority of voters. The victory speech made by the Greens’ newly elected MP, Hannah Spencer, went viral not because it was a statement of radical green philosophy, but because it spoke to the ordinary concerns of ordinary people in just the way a Labour candidate might have done.
As its popularity increases, and more parliamentary seats look within reach, the Green Party will no doubt face pressure to moderate its policies. But Polanski has so far proved defiant in the face of media attack. He knows that for a certain section of the public inclined to support the Greens, particularly younger voters, it is the party’s very left-wing radicalism – a field helpfully vacated by Labour – which most appeals. As Spencer showed, adding this to a very down to earth expression of working class disenfranchisement may prove a winning combination. If it means that the Greens defeat Reform for the populist vote and taking further seats from Labour at the general election, in a hung parliament they could even end up becoming part of the next government. It would be an extraordinary vindication for those who founded the party two generations ago, but perhaps not the one they envisaged.
[Further reading: Will Nato split the Green Party?]
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Subscribe here to commentI feel that many of the policies proposed in the original manifesto and the policies in the most recent are not mutually exclusive. The Greens have been advocating a UBI until very recently (I’d be surprised if it’s not in their current manifesto). They still support devolution and the industries they wish to nationalise are ones which, if more successful than at present, would reduce resource consumption. There may be more left wing policies now, but they are still formed through a very similar ideological lens. It’s more that the methods have changed.
The Greens under Polanski have become a gravitational force, pulling in anyone interested in a more honest kind of politics that talks to ordinary people and their interests. As Zack says, talking about the cost of living or the genocide in Gaza and the war against Iran is central to understanding how the current oligarchical system is leading the world to disaster. Yes, probably the Earth will survive us, but we can and should find a way back to living in closer harmony with our more-than-human neighbours.