CRITICAL ADVICE: Green & Indy candidates should heed these warnings.

Right, so there are warning signs following the local elections for the Greens and Independent candidates and you might be surprised to hear me say such things following what were ostensibly very successful local elections for them, having snatched seats from all parties, having hurt these parties and their aims and it has been brilliant to see that a lot more people appear to be turning their backs on establishment parties, so much so that now we’re looking at hung parliament territory according to an extrapolation by Sky News. However as many people who pay attention to such things know, local election results are not always a good indicator of General Election voting intention, though certainly you can pick out factors that do carry over. There are lessons to take away from this for Green and prospective Independent parliamentary candidates too though and they really ought to take note if they’re going to genuinely cut through at that level though.
Right, so brilliant results for the Green Party and for Independent candidates up and down the country in this years local elections. The Greens now have 812 councillors nationwide, having added another 74 seats to their total. They have now become the largest party on Bristol City Council, Hastings Borough Council and Stroud District Council. They took 9 council seats in Maidstone off the Tories and took seats off Labour all over the place too and they got their first councillors in Bolton, Basingstoke, Cherwell, Kirkless, Plymouth, Redditch and more as well. It was undoubtedly a very successful night for them and more and more they are being seen by more and more people as a viable alternative for their votes, goodness knows they have the policy for it.
As for the Independents, many of these candidates have been created in no small part by the actions of Keir Starmer and his changed Labour Party, which despite his protestations, are not more popular, they are less so. There are now another 93 Independent councillors serving their local areas on locally important issues, as these elections are meant to be about. I’ve covered numerous resignations of Labour Councillors in disgust at what Labour have been saying they’ll do in power and their unequivocal support for Israel despite the genocide they are committing and Labour have reaped what they’ve sown in that regard. One area I covered as such was Pendle, which saw a swathe of councillor resignations, between Pendle Borough Council and two town councils of nelson and Brierfield within the Pendle Borough area, 20 Labour councillors resigned just a month ago. Following the local elections this week, Labour has now been completely wiped out on Pendle Borough Council, they won 10 seats last time these seats were contested in 2021. All on Starmer.
Additionally, you can look at the West Midlands Mayoral election too. The Tories are on their backside so badly now under Sunak, so reviled across the country, that their candidate Andy Street, the incumbent was seeking to distance himself as much as possible from his own party, yet Labour only just managed to beat them there, Labour won by just 1500 votes, hence numerous recounts and one leading reason for that was an independent candidate, Akhmed Yakoob, who took third place and nearly 70,000 votes, who was standing on a platform of resolving housing issues, burial service issues, various other local issues, he wanted more foreign investment apparently, which is quite economically Conservative, but also stood as a pro Palestinian candidate backed by George Galloway. Labour’s stance on Gaza hurt them and what will hurt them still further was comment from a Labour spokesperson ahead of these results, where Labour had feared they’d lost it, with a Labour spokesperson saying that:
‘It's the Middle East, not West Midlands that will have won Street the Mayoralty. Once again Hamas are the real villains.’
An absolutely disgusting, racist, entitled comment a massive slur against the people of the West Midlands, what a way to win your vote! These are votes Labour had already lost though, Yakoob took a disproportionate number of votes from Labour, it shouldn’t have been that close if Labour weren’t just as rancid in so many ways, far too similarly to the Tories in most of them.
But that isn’t to say there are not lessons to be learned here and now so that the success Greens and Independents have seen at local levels can be carried forward to general election level.
The first thing they need to get across is to convince people that voting for them will make a difference. Where people right now are disgusted by the main parties, by the Tories corruption and ineptitude, by labour politically being barely any different or indeed no different in many instances and of course the disgust people feel over the matter of Israel and Gaza. The biggest obstacle to that is the media and the lack of coverage given to them and to an extent that is beyond the control of these candidates, but we’ve seen the over platformed Reform UK, in a repeat of what used to happen with UKIP turning up on BBC Question Time and the like, yet they won just 2 Councillors nationwide. This should be something that is repeated ad infinitum, but I’d also argue that the sort of media platforms that give the likes of Richard Tice a wildly disproportionate amount of media coverage, aren’t necessarily the sort of platforms that give a more left wing a more altruistic candidate a fair crack. The BBC are the most at fault for this, but equally Talk TV might as well be Reform UK’s own TV Channel. This will become much more blatant in a general election campaign, especially if it is as usual the Greens getting censored in effect by lack of coverage, much more noise needs to be made about that sort of media conduct as we’ve seen in the past. Communication is key and although there’s little time in all fairness to implement something like this now, with the general election so close, developing their own media outlets, would benefit them more. If mainstream channels won’t platform you, develop your own, it’s working for George Galloway and his Moats TV, so why not alternative political parties as well?
Certainly from the Green perspective, but also for many other smaller parties and Independents and definitely amongst many voters, there is a desire to see a hung parliament, which we appear to be on course for according to Sky News’ extrapolation of these results, in order to force through electoral reform so that parliament becomes truly reflective of the views of people up and down the country, so that every vote actually counts. In that vein, in order to achieve that goal, and this might sound completely counter-intuitive coming from a Green Party member such as I am, I really do think conversations need to happen between the Greens and Independent candidates and possibly other smaller parties, I’m thinking for example, the Liverpool Community Independents for instance, so that candidates working towards that aim, which delivering everything else these parties of independents stand for hinges upon, should seriously consider not standing against each other in some areas. Theres a means to and end situation here right now, there will be time after reform to stand for everything else you believe in and against each other to make those cases going forwards once that is done, but until First Past the Post is toppled, everything else will remain academic. Where there is common ground, use it, don’t fight it.
A key issue that I’ve heard come up and this has actually led to people sticking with what they know and still choosing to back Labour or whoever at the end of the day, has been a lack of knowledge about what a given party stands for. Now I can say as a Green that all policy is on the Green Party website and they email you all the time with updates, but you can’t force people to open an email and you can’t force them to take time to read through a website. It just doesn’t happen, there has to be a more proactive way of doing things here and getting the message across and there’s a lesson from the past we can take, which worked before and therefore there is no reason it can’t do so again and actually this could bring the Greens and other progressive groups and Independents too, which would be a new Chartist Movement, a nationwide movement stood on a platform of, for example, electoral reform, with mass meetings nationwide, ordinary working class organisation determined to back candidates dedicated to a given aim. It terrified the establishment back in the 19th Century after all, in this day and age with all the additional freedom of speech and freedom of expression we have, there’s no reason it can’t be done again.
Now these are just my ideas, this is just me spitballing, it is harder to c ut through at a parliamentary level than at local level, especially for independents, however more and more of them are standing, are being financed locally, by their own communities to enable them to do so, so the potential is there, the question is one of opportunity. We don’t have long before a general election, there isn’t long for alternative candidates to get some much needed cut through, I hope as much as the Greens all manner of Independents and other progressive candidates had great success this week, that they are looking at what not only worked for them, but what didn’t and still isn’t and what they need to do to make sure they get heard by the people who need to hear them.
Meanwhile, for as much as Green and Independent success shouldn’t be played down either, massive congratulations to all who took part, stood up to be counted, Labour narratives of success are pretty dishonest when you drill down into their results overall as I did here on this video recommendation for you to consider watching next and I’ll hopefully catch you on the next vid. Cheers folks.