Green vote in UK doubles.

• Author: Rose, Chris
• Position: Brief Article

You may find it difficult to believe how happy we are with an election result that did not deliver any seats in Parliament. Under our first-past-the post electoral system, however, we did not expect to win any seats.

Between the Scottish Greens and ourselves, we fielded 145 candidates out of a possible 659. The total Green vote was 166,626. Vote share doubled from 1.38% in 1997 to 2.85% with 50% more candidates this time.

The deposit was saved (i.e. we got over 5% of the vote) in 10 constituencies UK-wide. This was only ever achieved once before at Westminster level (6.1% in Vauxhall by-election on 1989 Euro polling day when we got that 15% result). This time around, our top result was 9.35% in Brighton Pavilion. In a first-past-the-post election, this is a very encouraging result.

The areas where we got good results are predominantly those in which we have Green councillors or where we had a high profile Greater London Authority (GLA) member candidate supporting residents over a controversial local issue.

On the basis of the results (if not candidate numbers) we have cemented a clear position as the fourth party of UK politics--the more so if our local election effort is also taken into account. The "big three" in UK politics are Labour (now essentially Social Democrats), the Conservatives (similar to Christian Democrats) and the...