Green political influence rising in the North East – but not through ‘climate preaching’

‘DOORSTEP politics’ and people’s direct personal experience of “climate chaos” are helping grow the Green Party’s influence inside North East councils.

So said its regional field organiser today, after a successful pre-election fundraising campaign which saw it hit a target of £500-a-month in new donations in less than three weeks.

The new donations will help fund campaigning and training for Green Party candidates at next year’s local elections, where the party says it is mounting 12 “competitive campaigns” for council seats across the region.

Ironically, said field organiser Jonathan Elmer, the rise of the Greens – who had no local North East councillors three years ago but now have 11 – has little to do with “preaching the climate message”.

That’s because the message no longer needs preaching.

Instead, by concentrating on helping with practical “hyper-local” community concerns, he says the Green Party is winning enough seats to make climate a part of the mainstream town hall conversation.

Mr Elmer, himself a Durham county councillor, said: “The thing that’s making a difference is that people are now experiencing the consequences of climate chaos, with floods and heatwaves, and they know it’s only going to get much, much worse.

“But actually, the biggest factors affecting our success in council elections are our focus on dealing with people’s everyday local concerns, and the complacency of existing councillors, who coast along and just assume they’ll get elected each time.

“We don’t go preaching about the global environment; we focus on getting out and about to deal with people’s hyper-local issues, because their priority is what we’re going to do about the disorder down the road, or local transport, or issues like that.”

That pragmatic approach is certainly paying off in South Tyneside, where the Greens now have six councillors – more than 10% of the area’s 54 borough councillors.

The rest of the regional Greens’ local councillors sit on Darlington (two), County Durham (one), and Northumberland (two) councils.

Mr Elmer said the strategy of “pragmatic politics” is winning votes – and seats – from both the Left and Right of politics, because the Green Party doesn’t sit on the traditional political spectrum.

“There are Conservative and Labour voters who all care much more now about the climate, and they’re starting to vote for us,” he said.

With electoral success comes the ability to influence debate and decision-making, to push the climate up the local authority agenda.

“For example,” said Mr Elmer, “in Durham County Council we’ve been able to drive through an ecological emergency motion, and they’ve done an exercise to analyse whether or not the global biodiversity crisis is apparent at a local level – and it is.

“Now they’re developing an action plan that the council can take forward. That’s only happened because there’s a Green councillor – but that’s not an election winner.”

He added: “We do need to get people elected, so we can influence the big decisions, but we are gradually influencing the way people think about their local actions and how their actions can contribute to national and international actions.

“I do think the Green Party’s time is coming.”

To illustrate his point, Mr Elmer offered an example of the influence the party is able to exert inside the halls of power.

“I was at a North East Combined Authority scrutiny panel the other day, which gave me a platform to talk about carbon reduction,” he said. “I was the only Green councillor there, and I was talking about the state of things – and the faces round the room were ashen.

“They clearly wanted me to shut up and go away, but they couldn’t shut me up, because it’s irrefutable.”