Sir Keir Starmer offers only “incremental change” from the ruling Conservatives, the Green party said as it launched an election campaign that pitched the party to the left of Labour.
Promising “real hope and real change” across issues including the NHS and housing, Green co-leader Adrian Ramsay suggested Starmer will deliver merely a “few tweaks” if he wins power in five weeks’ time.
Voters are “feeling utterly uninspired by the potential of a Keir Starmer-led Labour party,” fellow co-leader Carla Denyer told the FT, during a visit to her Bristol battleground constituency days before Thursday’s campaign launch.
With only one MP currently, the party is targeting four seats in the July 4 poll, as it builds on its expansion beyond its environment and climate focus to become a left-wing foil to Labour.
The two parties are increasingly battling for the same voters, said Sir John Curtice, politics professor at Strathclyde University.
“What is Labour’s core vote? Young, middle-class professionals,” he said. “That is also the Greens’ core vote.”
Pollster Tom Lubbock, co-founder of JL Partners, suggested the Greens face a watershed moment when voters head to the polls: the party could double its Commons representation — or face a wipeout.
“There is a world in which Labour just do so well they blow them off the map and they’re left with no seats,” he told the FT.
The Green party launch on Thursday demonstrated greater weight on social and economic policies, including support for more affordable housing and warnings about “creeping privatisation” within the NHS.
Psephologist Lewis Baston said the Greens’ longer-term strategy could be to “become for Labour what Reform UK is for the Conservatives: an electoral threat that causes the party in question to adapt its policies in the ‘right’ direction from their point of view”.
Analysts believe Reform UK could split the right-wing vote, leeching enough support from the Conservatives to allow Labour to win marginal seats.
However, Labour’s lead means it will be harder for the Greens to emulate this by splitting the left vote and handing seats to the Conservatives, said Curtice.
Only “if the election were to get tighter and university-orientated seats were to become more marginal, they [the Greens] could make a significant difference” and deny Labour victory in certain constituencies, he added.
The Greens are in fifth place in national opinion polls on 6 per cent, behind Labour on 44 per cent, the Conservatives on 24 per cent, Reform on 11 per cent and the Lib Dems on 9 per cent, according to the FT’s latest poll tracker.
Its only MP Caroline Lucas is stepping down from the Brighton Pavilion seat she has represented since 2010.
It remains one of the party’s four target seats, alongside Bristol Central, Waveney Valley and North Herefordshire. Analysts say the Greens’ best hopes lie in the Brighton constituency it is defending and the new seat of Bristol Central, which Denyer is contesting and which hosted Thursday’s launch.
Speaking last week in Bristol, Denyer, 38, said she is “certainly optimistic” about her chances, with the party enjoying a “real sense of momentum” after strong local election results made it the largest party on the city’s council.
Pollster Lubbock predicts the party “will easily hold Brighton and they’ve got a really good shot at Bristol Central — I’d say it’s 50/50.”
Denyer’s claims to receive “a really positive, warm reaction” on the doorstep is echoed by local — and newly won — supporters.
Sue Kilroe, 80, a retired lecturer at Bristol University, has always voted Labour — but switched because of her “deep, deep fear about the environmental catastrophe that we’re living in and not managing”.
Starmer’s party, which rowed back on plans to spend £28bn a year on clean energy investments, is “not giving sufficient attention to the environment”, Kilroe argued.
Chloe Slater, 41, a director of a community organisation called the People’s Republic of Stokes Croft, will also “vote for Carla”, adding: “I think she’ll definitely win”.
Slater, who describes her own politics as “fairly hard left”, said she was concerned about “huge problems with inequality in this country” and is attracted to “ambitious” Green policies on the economy, such as the proposal to introduce a universal basic income.
Support across the city sprawls beyond Bristol Central to other seats.
Flynn Willcott, 21, who works on a construction site in the city centre, said the Greens’ policy on “Palestine and Gaza” — which includes a long-standing call for a ceasefire and targeted sanctions on Israeli leaders — had won the party his vote.
In May’s local elections, when they gained 74 councillors in England, the Greens picked up some council seats in areas with significant Muslim populations, signalling that the party may be benefiting from disquiet among some voters about Labour’s stance on the Israel-Hamas conflict.
However, the party has also been forced to investigate some councillors over allegedly inflammatory remarks on the conflict, while its candidate in Bristol East stepped down this month following criticism after he reposted a picture on X comparing Adolf Hitler with Benjamin Netanyahu in 2022.
Former Labour minister Lord Peter Mandelson has warned that the Greens are at risk of becoming a “dustbin” for “disgruntled hard-leftists leaving the Labour party and some fairly unpleasant hardline Free Palestine activists as well”.
Denyer said the party investigated all issues “where we’ve been contacted”, but added: “It is really important to distinguish between cases of antisemitism and people criticising the actions of the Israeli government.”
She also rejected the characterisation of the Greens as a protest party, saying it had an extensive suite of “practical” policies. Critics laying that charge against the party point to its more radical proposals, including introducing rent controls, universal basic income and cannabis social clubs.
The upcoming Bristol Central contest will be the second time Denyer has gone head-to-head with Labour’s Thangam Debbonaire, who won the now-defunct seat of Bristol West in 2019 with a majority of 28,219 over the Greens.
Yet, despite the gap, Labour is taking the threat seriously in the newly drawn seat.
Debbonaire told the FT that she was “never complacent” and was “working hard” for every single vote, but said Bristolians were “really savvy” about the best way to defeat the Conservatives.
Local voters are “desperate for a change of government, and that means a Labour government,” she said. “They know the way you get a Labour government is by re-electing Labour MPs and adding quite a lot more.”