“Amateurs talk strategy,” the US general Omar Bradley reputedly once said, “professionals talk logistics.” As the dust settles on an extraordinary set of elections, with Labour smashed in Wales, the West Midlands and the Manchester and Liverpool city regions, that is how to make sense of what just happened. Reform UK, whatever you think of their policy platform, are the party of logistics.
While Labour’s siren voices call for a ‘comms reset’, faster delivery or even a change of leader, Britain’s teal-hued insurgents are focusing on scale and speed. The cliche is hackneyed, but also underscores they are a business as much as a party: this is an organisation run like a VC-funded startup.
All of that is interesting Aaron, I hear you say, but the next general election is three years away – who knows what might change before then? This is partly the point. What should really worry Labour, and anyone who wants to stop a Reform government, is how the gap between the establishment parties and Farage’s troops is growing by the week. Certainly, Reform’s great vulnerability is that, for now, it depends on the most charismatic figure in British politics. But once you start controlling dozens of local authorities, that will change. Unlike UKIP and the Brexit party before them, Reform is building a party cadre. For a leftist, it’s almost admirable.
True, much of that is a function of money. Reform has received enormous, game-changing sums, particularly by the relatively austere standards of British politics. On the other side of the balance sheet, however, Labour and the Tories have centuries of cumulative experience, brand recognition and data. Rather than helping them, that now seems a hindrance. For large parts of the country, both suddenly feel like a relic from the past.
Other parties do logistics too, of course – if not with the elan of Reform. The Liberal Democrats have more seats at Westminster than at any point in their history – and more than their predecessor Liberal party going back a century. That is the result of superb ‘voter efficiency’, with the party taking far fewer votes in 2024 than under Nick Clegg but gaining more MPs. But the problem for Ed Davey’s party is that it has no politics. Defining yourself in opposition to things – Brexit, Corbyn, the Tories and now Reform – can be electorally lucrative. But it also has a ceiling. While the SNP and, increasingly, Plaid Cymru do both logistics and politics – they aren’t competing for votes across the country.
Which brings us to the Greens. Under Zack Polanski the party has achieved extraordinary things in under a year: a membership that exceeds 230,000 people, a first ever by-election win and Westminster polling regularly in the teens. To that now add an elected mayor in Hackney, along with extraordinary progress in Manchester, Birmingham and parts of London, too.
But to translate that to the kind of success Reform is now achieving – which is entirely plausible – they need to focus on logistics. The story of these local elections for the Greens – easily their best ever – remains uneven, and that’s because they have the most patchy operation of them all.
An example. In Central Southsea, the ward adjoining where I live in Portsmouth, a good Labour incumbent lost to the Liberal Democrat. No surprise there, you might think. But the Green candidate came second and garnered almost a thousand votes in the process – an unexpected result if you consider that their final leaflet mostly focussed on animal rights issues and PETA, with little acknowledgment of national or local politics. Many of the party’s newfound voters in the ward didn’t know the name of the person they were even voting for. What they did know, however, is that they didn’t want Starmer or Farage – and they liked what the Greens have said in recent months. An impressive launching pad, certainly, but not enough to seize local authorities in the manner of Reform.
Over the coming decade, the Greens will live or die by professionalising campaigns just like that. In Birmingham, candidates who were touted as the least likely to win got upgraded with just a fortnight to go. Some leaflets were hugely impressive, conveying a gin-clear strategic message – vote Green, stop Farage, get rid of Starmer – while others were immediately destined for the bin alongside takeaway menus and junk mail. Zack Polanski has been an incredible tonic for his party, taking it to the centre of the national conversation. But a party with almost a quarter of a million members can’t rely on magic moments.
This isn’t even primarily a failure of the party’s central operation – though scaling as quickly as they have presents challenges as well as opportunities (just see the media onslaught in recent weeks). Rather, it’s an outgrowth of the party’s radically democratic and decentralised nature. In a number of regions I was told of older members, veterans of the pre-Polanski era, functioning as a handbrake on bolder, more modern campaigns.
People power has energised the party in recent months, making Hannah Spencer’s shock win in Gorton and Denton possible. But how the party is run means it can not hope to replicate Reform. This gives it a certain resilience. After all, it survived after the departure of Caroline Lucas from Westminster. But if you want to help form a national government – which should be the ambition before 2030 – you need a powerful, central machine as well as autonomous local parties. The arrival of Verdant, the recently formed Green-aligned think tank, is an important step in the right direction – but it’s scratching the surface.
The collapse of the two party system is happening. And that poses a steely challenge for the Greens. Do you want national power? It might sound far-fetched, and the party has long pursued a gradual, steady path to progress. But the political moment now demands they think bigger – and build a party, like Reform, that can outperform the old guard.
For a political tendency built on activism, rather than management, that may be the biggest challenge of all.
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