Green Party continue to surge in the polls

According to the latest poll from YouGov, the Green Party are in second place when it comes to the predicted seat count. Labour, meanwhile, have dropped to sixth:

This puts Labour below all of the major national parties; it also puts them below the Scotland-specific SNP.

New danger for Starmer’s Labour

The above polling is interesting for a few reasons.

Firstly, we’re now well past the point where Reform look capable of forming a majority government. At the same time, they would be placed to form a coalition with the Tories. This is something we all know they’d jump at given how many Tories they’ve accepted into the party.

Secondly, the centrist and left-leaning parties would fall short of being able to form a government even if the Greens, Lib Dems, SNP, and Labour joined forces. This is not good. It’s especially not good because despite the four parties’ seat share being below that of Reform and the Tories, their vote share is higher – i.e. more voters would have voted for them.

Thirdly, Your Party are on track to get three seats despite having less than 1% of the vote share. The three seats represent an increase of three despite their overall vote share dropping. Your Party have certainly had a chaotic fortnight with many members resigning in protest at the recent ‘purge’ motion, so it will be interesting to see how things look a week from now.

Fourthly, as ever, the above shows what a mess our current voting system is. Ideally, you’d want the number of seats to reflect each party’s vote share. Instead, we get stuff like the following:

• Only Reform sitting in a seat share position which matches their vote share.
• Reform on track to win close to half the seats despite only having 24% of the vote share.
• Restore getting zero seats despite having 4% of the vote share.

Ignoring all the above, it’s important to remember that polls are just a snapshot of the current moment. Things could change dramatically in a general election. And as we keep saying, it’s definitely the Green Party who have the momentum – not to mention the right answers to most of the days big questions (although we have criticised their stance on Zionism).

Proportional Representation

Make Vote Matters write the following about proportional representation:

Proportional Representation is any voting system in which the share of seats a party wins matches the share of votes it receives. There are many different systems of Proportional Representation, but they all aim to make sure seats match votes.

The UK currently uses the primitive First Past the Post voting system – which causes severe problems for voters, our politics and our society. From its definition alone, it’s easy to see how Proportional Representation solves the problems of First Past the Post.

‘First Past the Post’ is how we ended up with a century of Conservative-Labour dominance. For the past forty years, this allowed the two parties to offer little besides reheated Thatchernomics, as they knew voters had nowhere else to go.

Make Votes Matter also said:

Proportional Representation (PR) could potentially revolutionize the UK’s political landscape by ensuring that each party’s share of seats in Parliament aligns more closely with the proportion of votes they receive nationwide. Under such a system, smaller parties would have a greater chance of representation, breaking the dominance of the two-party system.

This is outdated now, of course, because the two-party system has already broken down. Our voting system still needs to catch up, but voters just don’t care anymore.

They’re sick of the neoliberal Labour and Tories, and now they’re voting for whoever they like – voting system be damned.

Momentum

Looking at YouGov’s voting tracker, it isn’t the first time the Greens have polled higher than Labour:

The Greens overtaking Labour was unthinkable a year ago.

Now we know it’s possible, we need to think bigger.

Featured image via Stats for Lefties / Barold