Geraldine Coggins has run as a Green Party candidate in every general election for the past ten years. Once in Stretford and Urmston (2015) and three times in Altrincham and Sale West (2017, 2019, 2024). It was only at the last general election that she managed to retain her deposit, winning 7.2 per cent of the vote. But she has had more success locally. In 2018, Coggins was elected as a councillor in Trafford and went on to lead the Green group there, as well as working alongside the Lib Dems when the council was in no overall control. But today, Coggins – a former academic who left Ireland for the UK in 1997 – has all her party’s political and organisational energy behind her. She is running as the Green Party candidate for Manchester mayor. In the space of a month, she has gone from being a little-known councillor in Greater Manchester to being at the centre of the Green Party’s biggest campaign to date. Now she gets recognised on the street.
The Green Party’s campaign for Greater Manchester started in mid-June in the middle of the Makerfield by-election. In early May, party insiders pledged to “throw the kitchen sink” at beating Andy Burnham in a north west seat (before Josh Simons resigned on 14 May, and the Makerfield by-election had been called). But soon after the race began, the party faced a false start in which the Green’s initially selected candidate pulled out after less than 24 hours. There soon came an internal acceptance that the by-election was not winnable for the Greens. (In the end, the party’s candidate, Sarah Wakefield, took just 0.7 per cent of the vote after a pared-back campaign.) Green officials instead began to put their energy into the Manchester mayoralty, a race that had not yet been called.
The Greens are confident. The party won the Gorton and Denton by-election in February and in May’s local elections enjoyed several wins on Manchester City Council and increased vote shares in the city region’s outer boroughs.
Zack Polanski has spent most of his time over the past month whizzing up and down to Manchester on Avanti West Coast. “He’s been so supportive and helpful,” Coggins told me. In mid-June, Elfrede Brambley-Crawshaw, the party’s chief London organiser – was sent up to Manchester to run the party’s campaign. Since recess began on 16 July, Hannah Spencer, the newly elected MP for Gorton and Denton, has regularly been out on the doorstep with Coggins. All of the party’s available MPs – Ellie Chowns, Adrian Ramsay and Sian Berry – have also made a point of campaigning in Greater Manchester. (Carla Denyer is currently on mental health leave.) One insider observes that this shows how seriously the Green Party is taking the campaign: “It’s notable the number of MPs who went door-knocking compared to Gorton and Denton.”
Has Andy Burnham’s return to Westminster opened a chance for the Greens to steal a Labour stronghold? It would certainly be a coup, and an early embarrassment for Burnham’s premiership. And it’s not impossible.
Current polling puts the Greens in second place, on 22 per cent, according to Find Out Now. Labour have a substantial lead at 38 per cent. Reform are directing the bulk of their resources down to Nigel Farage’s by-election in Clacton, rather than Manchester, which may also help the Greens. Officials, and Coggins herself, are keen to point out that they have seen a minimal amount of campaign literature from Reform UK across Manchester’s ten boroughs. “I’ve still yet to see a Reform leaflet,” Coggins told me.
Hannah Spencer’s victory is the blueprint the Greens are following. When I spoke to Polanski in June, he described the city region as “27 Gorton and Dentons”. But Gorton and Denton is just one of those 27 constituencies; others, including areas like Makerfield, Bolton and Tameside, are not typically fertile ground for Green voters.
Coggins suggests that voters chose the Green Party in Gorton and Denton to force a change and will do so again. “We don’t need tinkering around the edges. We need change. That’s what people voted for in Gorton and Denton,” Coggins said. “I was in Bolton the other day. The feeling of being left behind is palpable.” A Green source agreed: “There is a lot of complacency from Labour about Greater Manchester.” The Greens are betting that while voters like Burnham, dissatisfaction with Labour remains.
“In these very early days of the Burnham honeymoon, it will be very hard to stop Labour winning this mayoral race,” one Green Party source said. “So long as the Greens score a strong second place, that will be continued evidence of electoral strength.” There is a sense among some Greens that this is exactly the period – when Labour’s eye is off the ball – to be building up the party’s capacity to run large-scale, high-stakes campaigns. Another source noted that the value of running “the biggest campaign the party has ever run” ahead of other, perhaps more attainable races, such as next year’s London mayoral election, is “great for capacity-building”.
A Green Party mayoralty would focus on affordable housing, calls for rent controls and a more robust position on Israel’s actions in Gaza. If elected, Coggins plans to oppose Shabana Mahmood’s immigration and asylum reforms, and to more drilling in the North Sea. There would also, it seems, be plenty of attacks on Burnham and his record as mayor.
The day after our interview, Coggins gave a hint of her unorthodox plans for holding the Prime Minister to account. Friday (24 July) was Burnham’s first day in No 10 North – the government’s newly established headquarters in Manchester city centre. To welcome him, Coggins hand-wrote and hand-delivered a letter. “Lovely to have you back!” Coggins wrote, “unfortunately you have left behind a legacy of rising homelessness, more children in temporary accommodation and soaring rents.” Burnham has yet to reply.
“In many ways, I’ve been preparing for this for many years,” Coggins told me. The Greens have been gearing up for a fight like this. After Gorton and Denton, their electoral ambition has reached new levels. But is Greater Manchester their race to win?
[Further reading: Andy Burnham’s cultural revolution]
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Subscribe here to commentTelling and disappointing that most of their plans for the mayoralty involve campaigning on issues outside of its remit. Feel good virtue signalling politics that is unconcerned with doing much of anything that isn’t just, throwing demands out into the world
It would appear that the Greens are a Tory front, attacking Labour in its most vulnerable seats, and ignoring its remit as a progressive party that campaigns against poverty, lack of social housing, failure to tax the rich. Far easier to declare that Israel is committing war crimes in Gaza (who doesn’t know that), and taking a holier than thou approach to North Sea oil and gas, which we will require for at least 50 years, and whose revenues flow into the national coffers. Thatcher funded her entire disruptions of the British economy in the 1980’s on the £18 billion tax revenues paid from North Sea exploitation.
Be part of the possible. This Thursday, vote Green as your #1 preference!
Better to vote Labour and be part of the regeneration of the economy. Manchester has a growth rate of 3.1%, more than double the national rate.
The Greens in GM will have a problem putting together a coherent pitch as they represent very different politics depending on where they are standing. In the posher areas that they represent in Trafford (where Goggins sits in Altrincham, and Hannah Spencer did until recently in Hale) they are very much Tory adjacent NIMBYS opposing pretty much all development, whereas when they stand in more urban areas such as Gorton and Denton they seem move to the left considerably, in HS’s case with the same candidate. With the mayoralty, they will have to put together a policy slate that satisfies both of their core constituencies under one banner and I think they will find it hard to be consistent.