The Greens could learn from the success of Ukip

Is there a better left-wing political brand to own at the moment than that held by the Green party? It is hard to think of one.

After all, we are in the midst of a three-part BBC television profile of Greta Thunberg that even the Independent has described as ‘effectively an act of worship’; environmental awareness has become the new religion in the run-up to the UN COP26 conference in Glasgow; and the Labour Party is in the middle of an obvious crisis – communicating neither a sense of idealism nor the feeling that it might win an election anytime soon. One could also add that the less said about the Lib Dems the better, were it not for the fact that almost nothing is being said about the Lib Dems.

Nature, it is said, abhors a vacuum and lo, the Greens are indeed on the up. The latest YouGov poll last week put them level with the Lib Dems on 8 per cent – a chunky score for a party that is accustomed to fighting for fourth, fifth or sixth place in vote share against the SNP and whichever Nigel Farage entity is in the field.

So are the Greens entitled to feel pleased with themselves, with a spring in the step of their vegan trainers? Hardly.

As I have written about here before, they have a massive political opportunity and are currently failing to seize it.

A look at politics in Germany underlines this point. There, a new nationwide poll has put the Greens outright in the lead on 28 per cent of the vote. It is the 24^th successive poll to have given them a rating of at least 20 per cent. The old giant of the German left, the SPD, is trailing far behind them.

The rise of the German Greens has coincided with the party’s decision to moderate its outlook somewhat, choosing both its current co-leaders from its mainstream centre-left elements rather than sticking to its traditional formula of having one centrist and one out-and-out left-winger.

The German Greens now specialise in using telegenic advocates to communicate non-outlandish environmental ideas, mixed with standard attitudes to issues such as immigration.

Their British counterparts certainly have their own telegenic double act in co-leaders Sian Berry and Jonathan Bartley. But a read through their current policy offerings shows they are still in the grip of the hobby horse politics of an activist fringe. Indeed, the pronoun fetishists appear to be running amok.

Some of the party’s longest policy chapters are not on the environment at all, but on issues such as trans rights, intersex rights, travellers’ rights and prostitution and the sex industry.

The Greens should be asking themselves one question about any policy outside their core offer of saving the planet: is this idea likely to advance us or inhibit us in the polls?

Back when I was a significant figure in Ukip, this was the approach we took to ratcheting up pressure for an EU referendum. So out went policies that were popular with influential libertarian activists – such as NHS privatisation or bringing in a ‘flat tax’ that would favour those with high incomes – to be replaced by stuff we knew resonated with our target older, blue collar voters: more cash for the NHS and tax cuts targeted on working-class people.

We adopted an approach that the Tory polling guru Lynton Crosby once described as ‘taking the barnacles off the boat’. From foreign aid to immigration, defence to law and order, every major policy we adopted was designed to make our vessel go faster through the waves and anything that was found to be a drag was ruthlessly cut out. And it worked. The party’s poll rating began a long climb from 3 per cent to the mid or high teens, leaving the Lib Dems far behind and piling irresistible pressure on Cameron to give us our referendum.

Environmentalism now is at least as hot a topic as Brexit was then. The top target voters of the Greens are undoubtedly younger, highly educated voters, most of whom somewhat ironically live in urban settings. So there is no need for the party to completely abandon its liberal-leftish inclinations on social issues. But it needs to be reasonable. Hounding out members who want to save the planet but who do not agree that ‘trans women are women’ in every regard is, for instance, not an approach likely to broaden support.

An inspection of the Greens’ recent social media output suggests that this message is beginning to hit home. There is far less emphasis on ultra-militant sexual politics or wokeism in general than there was a couple of months ago.

The party’s response to the death of the Duke of Edinburgh – one of the leading patrons of the World Wide Fund for Nature – was pitch perfect. Both its co-leaders put out respectful messages. Green party videos now invariably feature shiny happy people in natural settings too.

I fully expect the Greens to kick on to a double figure poll score very soon. That is when the mainstream media will pay them a lot more attention. But as an old Ukip hand I can attest that this will be a double-edged sword.

If they’ve dealt with voter-repellent features in advance and got their more militant activists on a short leash then the next ten points will come easily. If they haven’t, then the air will rapidly seep out of their balloon.