Environmental issues were barely mentioned for the first weeks of the UK’s general election campaign, although that changed when a couple of weeks back, when the main parties started talking about the “green” sections of their manifesto.
Many of the green promises are of the “motherhood and apple pie” variety; as noted here previously, no-one is going to come out strongly against them. Many are uncosted and others are aspirations rather than firm policy goals. There is also a frustrating lack of detail, a feature of this election.
But the green parts of the mainstream parties’ manifestos only tell a small part of the story.
A website offers an intriguing test for UK floating voters. VoteForPolicies.org.uk sets out the main policies of the three main parties, plus UKIP, the BNP and the Green Party. It covers a variety of issues, including the economy, crime, immigration, democracy, health, welfare and education. You are shown a set of policies in each of these areas but not told which party advocates them. You choose the policies you like best from the list, and at the end you are told which party’s policies most closely match your own.
It’s a great idea for a website, but the fascinating thing about it is the result. By quite a long way, the Greens are the most popular party, with almost a quarter of people who took the poll opting for policies that turned out to be green. Labour and the LibDems are on about 18 per cent, and the Tories on 16 per cent. At last count, about 245,000 people had taken the test.
Of course, this kind of anonymous website could be unrepresentative, and could fall prey to bias — for instance, in the way the policies are presented. But 200,000 is a large sample and the policies look to be set out in a fairly straightforward way.
So if these results are right, Britain should be electing a Green government, or at least a Green/Red or Green/Yellow coalition. (Or even a Red/Gold/Green coalition, which surely would have to be called the Karma Chameleon government.)
That will not happen. The Greens will be doing extraordinarily well to take the one seat they have a chance of winning, Brighton Pavilion, where their leader Caroline Lucas is standing. People in other constitutuencies will not vote Green – even if they have taken this test – partly because there is little chance of a Green victory, but also because the party has not yet shaken off the mantle of fringe politics, and can still appear eccentric and unworldly, even if usually well-meaning.
But it raises the intriguing question – are Green party policies the most popular with the British electorate?
The Greens are not likely to be a major force in British general elections any time soon, but in European elections and local elections they can do rather well. This will not be enough to make the major parties invite them in as coalition partners – but it could be enough, in future, for the big parties to steal some of the Greens’ ideas.
