Rupert Read (Norwich, The Green Party): Local election campaigning kicked off this week - what will it mean for the UK's fourth party?
A lot of focus will inevitably be on the situation in London. The London Mayoral race is hotting up. At the top, it is closely-contested by Ken Livingstone of Labour and Boris Johnson of the Conservatives. But the election system used for Mayor of London means that voters can pick as their first preference whoever they want, and transfer their vote tactically using their second preference vote. The Lib Dems are polling poorly, and are likely to drop below their score in '04 - the Green Party candidate (Sian Berry), on the other hand, is charismatic and dynamic, and it may well be that it is the Green Party that profits from the AV system. Sian Berry will quite probably get the highest-votes ever received by Mayoral candidates for the Green Party in a mayoral race.
Sian would make a brilliant Mayor, and it would be fantastic to see Green policies transforming our capital city. In terms of who would get my second preference vote; I'm not sure - but I'm afraid it definitely wouldn't be Boris. He is a very affable guy, and smarter than he looks (believe it or not, we used to be political allies!); but the Mayor of London has to be someone who can actually run the country's capital city. I don't think that that would be Boris's forte. Hosting "Have I got news for you" and running London are not really comparable enterprises. But now that Ken and Sian have cross endorsed one another, it is starting to look less likely, thankfully, that London will end up electing an un-green mayor this time.
As for the wider local elections, the Green Party will I believe expand by about 15-20% in terms of numbers of Principal Authority Councillors elected on May 1st. In the London Assembly elections, we will benefit from proportional representation and Sian's profile, and go from 2 members to 3, or possibly even 4. Crucially, we will also move into a position of much greater power and influence on several Councils around the country - including my own Norwich, where I believe we will on the night of May 1st gain somewhere around 3 seats, to become the official opposition. This will be a first, anywhere in the country, and will put us within striking distance of taking the Council. It will also turn a media spotlight on us that there has never been before, and frankly we are looking forward to that.
Across the country, on May 1st, many voters will have a chance to make their views known on (among other things) which Party could commit to actually tackling - globally and locally - dangerous climate change, the pre-eminent issue of our age. All three 'main' Parties have been "captured" by the rich and business interests; there is no realistic chance of them turning away from neo-liberal orthodoxy to a genuinely ecological alternative. All the main three Parties have to offer is green window-dressing overlaid upon the same old grey politics/economics. That is the underlying reason why I think that we Greens will once again move forward significantly, on May 1st.
The Tories will advance as well, partly through having as yet fooled a number of citizens that one can vote blue to go green, the evidence of their catastrophically anti-green local administrations around the country notwithstanding. But the more significant, for me, is the likelihood that Britain will awake on May 2nd with the Green Party very firmly established as the fourth Party of British politics, with many more Councillors (and more London Assembly members) than ever before.
