the Greens • ThinkLabour

Why Rowenna Davis was wrong not to attack the Greens

Last week ThinkLabour published Rowenna Davis’ lessons from her recent election campaign in Croydon, one of these was ‘attract rather than attack the Greens’. Oscar Harman, Chair of Streatham & Croydon North Labour Party and former special adviser to Steve Reed, sets out the alternative.

Croydon is an interesting case study in how Labour lost the council elections where we could have won. The Conservative government underfunded Croydon for years – refusing to link funding with deprivation as they increased poverty in the borough with a housing benefits cap that forced thousands of lower-income families out of inner London into boroughs like Croydon.

But with this Labour Government came fair funding – and Croydon is getting a 28% funding increase in line with deprivation levels across the borough. That’s a good news story. It’s fundamentally about social justice and it should have helped Labour win if we’d told the story well enough. But earlier this month the Conservatives narrowly won the election for Croydon’s directly elected mayor.

Our candidate, Rowenna Davis, fought an energetic and upbeat campaign. Writing for ThinkLabour she explains she did not offer voters any reasons for not voting Green and would do so again. That, she explains, is because those voters were not ideologically wedded to the Green Party. Instead, “they wanted a bigger politics that was courageous about taking action on social injustice... I could not attack them for that.”

This is a fundamentally flawed argument, but one I’ve seen in other elections where we face a Green threat. Attacking the Green Party on the facts of what they stand for is not an attack on potential Green voters – it’s providing them with information they need to take their decision in the ballot box. Elections are about choices, and if we don’t make the choice clear to voters, no one else will.

Voters who care about social justice deserve to know that the Greens routinely oppose council housing that could help end the housing crisis, oppose investment for jobs that puts money in local people’s pockets, and even oppose the infrastructure that is necessary to get clean climate-friendly energy from where it’s generated to where it will be used.

And voters deserve to know that the Greens have been infiltrated by racist antisemites, including many who were kicked out of the Labour Party but found an open door and a path to power via the negligence (at best) or collusion (at worst) of their new party.

One Green candidate in Croydon was suspended by the national Green Party for alleged antisemitism but backed by local Greens. Shamefully, Labour’s campaign in Croydon remained silent on the matter, so most voters never found out. He was elected in the ward I grew up in.

Rowenna’s not the only Labour candidate who’s shy about attacking the Green Party’s record – but it’s not a restriction applied to other parties. Rowenna was vocal in her attacks on Reform, joining a demonstration and giving interviews outside the hall when Nigel Farage came to speak. She lambasted the Conservatives for putting council tax up 33% in four years, and hung the Lib Dems’ record in coalition with the Tories round their necks.

Labour campaigns have to make our positive case to the voters but we also have to highlight the failures in other parties’ records whoever our main opponents are. The Greens pulled no punches with frankly dishonest attacks on our record. The idea that we should exempt them, uniquely, from legitimate scrutiny is misguided.

Labour lost Croydon’s mayoral election to the Tories by just 1000 votes, while the Green candidate won almost 20,000. Just 500 of those voters staying with Labour would have swung the borough our way. But our campaign deliberately placed no barriers in their way.

Croydon now faces four years of a Tory mayor who will get to spend the increased funding his own party denied the borough and will undoubtedly refuse to spend it on those parts of the borough where poverty is highest.

That’s what happens when we don’t do everything we can to win elections. And there’s a very obvious lesson to learn from it.