LABOUR won the English local elections. Wins were mainly in urban settings and in places where backsliding over Jeremy Corbyn’s pledge to honour the referendum result had weakened the Labour vote.

The Tory media management strategy fell apart when the 1,000-seat reduction they trailed — in the expectation that their losses might be less — itself proved to be too low. For the first time this century Labour is now the largest party in local government.

Now the interesting bit. 

Labour picked up barely more than half of these lost Tory seats while the Greens clocked up 200 wins.

As a consequence Labour strategists now focus on whether the party’s gains signify that it might be able to form a majority government.

Conventionally the media construction of British elections centres on the Labour/Conservative duopoly exemplified by the “swingometer” originally introduced into TV election coverage in the 1955 general election.

A short-lived 1970s Liberal by-election blip meant the red and blue device was temporarily retired only to be brought back when this third party challenge, as usual, faded away. 

The mechanical device has been replaced by computer simulation but nowadays it barely illustrates the real movement of votes. 

Even the invention of the 3D swingometer failed to capture the dynamics of multiparty elections in which nationalists, the Greens and the short-lived iterations of Nigel Farage’s ego disrupt the binary model.

In these latest English local elections, and in relative terms, the really big winners were the Greens whose 200-seat gain included taking majority control of Mid Suffolk. 

Dig deep into the figures and it is revealed that 155 of these wins were at the expense of the Tories.

The Tories lost seats in places where the Greens were seen as best positioned to aggregate “wasted” Labour and Lib Dem votes while attracting those Conservative voters most alienated by Tory scandals.

The Green Party broke through in North East Derbyshire, Sevenoaks, New Forest, Southend-on-Sea, Havant, Erewash, Worthing, Staffordshire Moorlands and South Kesteven.

Under Britain’s increasingly anachronistic first-past-the-post voting system the two main class-based parties, Labour and Conservative, both pile up “useless” votes in their safest of seats while the system-induced “necessity” to win over swing voters in constituencies where the parties are most evenly matched drives the consensual politics which “class cuddle” Labour rightwingers most favour.

“One nation” Tories are today as elusive as a dishwasher-proof Starmer pledge. The dominant Conservative factions unambiguously wage the class war while the Labour leadership assiduously avoids it.

The reason why a bourgeois consensus exists on preserving the FPTP system is because the class composition of British society is so substantially proletarian that an electoral system that drove parties to mobilise on class issues puts parties serving the rich at a greater disadvantage.

This is rarely articulated in clear tones, but in 1976 the Tory peer Lord Hailsham warned readers of the BBC magazine The Listener that a Labour Party bound to a rising class consciousness of the popular classes threatened an “elective dictatorship.” By which he meant a Labour Party obliged to satisfy the material needs of the masses whose labour provided the profits off of which his class lived.

Those in favour of preserving the status quo are best served by low voter turnouts in situations where working people in need of radical polices of wealth redistribution see little prospect of their votes affecting very much. When change can be seen as arising from a vote working people turnout in great numbers.

This truth was demonstrated with great clarity when turnout in the referendum on European Union membership greatly exceeded numbers routinely voting in general elections. 

The same dynamic was apparent in the referendum on separating Scotland from the United Kingdom. It lies behind the most recent Tory attempts — on the disreputable US model — to reduce turnout. It lay behind Labour’s 1945 victory and Corbyn’s 2017 surge.

Today’s rising Green tide compels us to figure out what this signifies for class politics.

The global climate change crisis has driven the growth of Green Party movements in many countries but everywhere it takes distinctive national paths. 

In the US it is a conduit for both environmental and anti-war opinion, in France it is part of the New Ecological and Social People’s Union (NUPES) challenge to Emmanuel Macron, in Portugal Los Verdes are long a part of the Communist Party’s coalition.

But in Germany Die Gruenen are the most warlike of the government parties with Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock the most ferociously committed to war in Ukraine. In Ireland the Greens serially disgrace themselves with unprincipled efforts to stay in government with the Fine Gael-Fianna Fail fandango.

It is impossible to draw any firm conclusions about the future political trajectory of the global Green movement save to observe that it is, of all political tendencies, the more easily diverted.

The Greens in Britain have already abandoned their opposition to Nato membership, a disappointing move from a party that played an important role in mobilising opposition to Nato’s wars but one that might have been anticipated given the illusions it harbours about the neoliberal EU and its pact with Nato.

The Greens’ much-diminished participation in the organised peace movement is matched by its withdrawal from the organised anti-austerity mass movement now replaced by little more than rhetorical opposition to government policies.

And yet. Every encounter with Green activists shows there is a strong strain of radical and progressive thought that goes beyond a core concern for the environment and robust campaigning around climate change.

It is this that gives the Greens momentum and allows for advance even under the FPTP electoral system. For the hosts of disappointed Labour supporters increasingly alienated from the Labour leadership, or members excluded from the party, the Greens are both a refuge and something of an opportunity.

Winning seats in the thousands of local contests where turnout is usually around one third of the electorate and where the more mainstream parties fail to inspire is different from coming first in over 600 general election constituencies. 

But such is the Greens’ local strength in places where Labour has lost credibility that election wins in their target seats — in Bristol and East Anglia — are conceivable.

Even the most optimistic of Greens do not see their party becoming the main parliamentary opposition and while the party is buoyed up by its local successes, it is lacking in a strategic vision which could leverage policy changes around their core concerns, let alone form a government.

This time round the Greens lost control of their flagship Brighton Council. Labour took control of the city, winning 38 out of 54 seats with more than 47 per cent of the vote. 

This was mainly the product of Green mistakes but it reveals a tribal approach by official Labour that avoids taking account of why the Greens compete for Labour votes.

Baron Bassam of Brighton wrote in Labour List: “In the most recent set of elections, liberal sentiment has been pleased to see Greens taking seats off the Tory Party. However, in some of those areas, Labour should be the main challenger — places like Lowestoft, a former Labour seat, and Lancaster too. Labour should not be conceding ground politically in smaller rural towns and coastal communities.”

Bassam typically gives voice to the arrogant assumption that Labour — irrespective of its policies or the character of its leadership — has a prior claim on the loyalty of progressive voters. Thus Greens, like the communists, are deemed to have “split the vote.” 

Labour functionaries are outraged and warn that the Greens may have “prevented” Labour winning in up to 10 parliamentary seats and are “actively frustrating the party’s ability to take control of a number of councils.” 

The logical inconsistency in simultaneously claiming that the Green voters help make up a “progressive” majority yet they must be defeated forecloses any possibility of a creative strategy which would offer advances to all parties with a claim to a place on the “progressive” spectrum and deny ground to the Tories and their Lib Dem former coalition allies.

With the salience of the climate change issue the Greens have a distinct and vital contribution to make to politics. For a left that is serious about socialism there is a ready audience among Greens who increasingly understand that without system change climate change is unstoppable.

And the wider left needs to pay serious attention to what the Greens say about their core environmental concerns. 

We cannot devise a national strategy from local circumstances but where general trends are visible it is possible to see how the immense social pressures which underlie our cost-of-living strike wave might find a political expression in a rapprochement between the labour movement and Greens.

Working-class areas are deep in crisis and the resultant social tension finds all kinds of outlets. Strikes are one kind of threat to established order. The Cardiff rioting a few days ago is another, expressing the alienation from the state and its emanation in the police of a good part of the working class.

Labour’s lacklustre agenda, coupled with the party leader’s charisma-free persona is insufficient, even when combined with the continuing Tory meltdown, to decisively challenge the government or inspire very much of working-class Britain.

Even on the Labour right there are worries that Labour is simply not cutting through to win a majority.

If the issue is how to rout the Tories co-operation, even cohabitation — like the relationship between Plaid Cymru and Welsh Labour — is not impossible. 

The class composition and heterogeneous ideological positioning of the Greens limits their appeal but climate change is an issue that will transcend other issues only too soon.

Behind the obdurate opposition of the Labour right to a productive arrangement with the Greens lies a preference for a dodgy deal with the Lib Dems so desperately burying memories of their complicity with David Cameron’s austerity regime.

The two-way transformation of Labour over recent years — and the highly effective measures by media, the state and big business to restore its right-wing regime — shows just how seriously our ruling class takes a challenge to its system.

Under the pressure of events and the mass movements against austerity and war every political formation can be reshaped. Whether the Greens find a path to class-orientated progressive politics or slip into reaction or a discredited irrelevance is not just in their hands but depends critically on the capacity of the working-class movement to challenge for leadership throughout society.