The Green Party of England and Wales is calling the results in the Old Bexley and Sidcup by-election on December 2nd a “great boost for the party.” The election was held in order to fill the constituency seat left vacant following the death of Conservative MP James Brokenshire. The Greens percentage of the popular vote increased by 0.6 percent, and the parti rose to fourth place, overtaking the Liberal Democrats, the UK’s third most popular party.
Although the Conservatives held the seat, their proportion of the vote dropped noticeably, from 64.5 percent to 51.5 percent. Still, Old Bexley and Sidcup remains a safe seat for the Conservatives, with the second place Labour Party winning only 30.9 percent of the vote. Green Party co-leader, Adrian Ramsay, said that “neither Conservatives or Labour can claim it was a good night for them. The Tories saw a steep drop in their vote but Labour failed to capitalize, showing they aren’t representing people’s concerns or adequately challenging the government.”
The Green candidate for Old Bexley and Sidcup, Jonathan Rooks, echoed the party leader’s sentiment: “The sharp drop in the vote for the Conservatives shows that people in this constituency have had their fill of Tory sleaze and are dismayed at government failure to tackle people’s real concerns on the climate crisis, fuel poverty and the protection of green spaces.”
The Greens overall percentage of the vote was very low, and very far from reaching double digits, at 3.6 percent. However, Ramsay claims that overtaking the Liberal Democrats “reflects national polling which now regularly places us as the third party in British politics.” Current polling alternately has the Liberal Democrats in their usual third place position, or fourth behind the Greens.
The third-place finisher in the Old Bexley and Sidcup by-election was a newcomer: the Reform Party, formerly the Brexit Party, focusing on a broad variety of right-wing, populist issues now that the UK has left the European Union. For the Reform Party, like the Greens, their status as a “third party” will likely hurt them in the next general election. Because the UK House of Commons uses the first-past-the-post electoral system, smaller parties win fewer seats than their vote shares would suggest. While the Greens won 3.4 percent of the vote in the seats they contested, they are represented by only one member of parliament (about 0.2 percent of the seats in parliament).
The Greens remain hopeful for continued success at the local level. Ramsay says that the party’s focus are the local elections in May of 2022, when they expect to “boost our councillor numbers considerably.” “Greens already have 462 elected members on 145 principal authorities in England and are in power or power sharing arrangements in 14 Councils.”
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