Green Party of England and Wales
The Green Party of England and Wales, often known simply as the Green Party or the Greens, is a green and left-wing political party in England and Wales. Since September 2025, Zack Polanski has served as the party's leader. The party has four representatives in the House of Commons and two in the House of Lords, in addition to more than 890 councillors at the local government level and three members of the London Assembly.
The party's ideology combines environmentalism with left-wing economic policies, including well-funded and locally controlled public services. It advocates a steady-state economy with the regulation of capitalism, and supports proportional representation. It takes a progressive approach to social policies such as civil liberties, animal rights, LGBTQ rights and drug policy reform. The party also supports a universal basic income, a living wage and democratic participation. It has taken a pro-immigration stance. It is split into various regional divisions, including the semi-autonomous Wales Green Party and is internationally affiliated with the Global Greens and the European Green Party.
In 1990, what was then the UK-wide Green Party – which had initially been established as the PEOPLE Party in 1973 – divided into the Green Party of England and Wales, the Scottish Greens and the Green Party Northern Ireland. Since 1990, they have been three completely separate and unique political parties, with their own separate leaders, memberships and policies. The Green Party of England and Wales went through centralising reforms spearheaded by the Green 2000 group in early 1991, and also sought to emphasise growth in local governance, doing so throughout 1990. In 2010, the party gained its first member of Parliament in its then-leader Caroline Lucas, although Plaid Cymru's Cynog Dafis was elected on a joint ticket in the 1990s. As the party's support is spread out across England and Wales and has rarely been found in electorally significant clusters, the party held only one seat in the House of Commons from 2010 to 2019, before reaching four seats in 2024. The Green Party supports replacing the UK's first-past-the-post voting system with proportional representation, which would grant all parties a share of seats in Parliament based on their national vote share.
Since 2025, and in particular since Polanski's election as leader, the party's membership has nearly tripled, and it has seen a significant increase of support in polling, notably from voters dissatisfied with the abandonment of policies and changes in direction by the Labour Party. In November 2025, the Green Party were, for a brief period, ahead of both Labour and the Conservatives in polling for the first time.
History
Origins (1972–1990)
The Green Party of England and Wales has its origins in the PEOPLE Party, which was founded in Coventry in November 1972. It was renamed to the Ecology Party in 1975; in 1985, the party changed its name to the Green Party. In 1989, the party's Scottish branch evolved to establish the independent Scottish Green Party, while the Green Party in Northern Ireland is a northern branch of the Green Party of the Republic of Ireland, leaving the branches in England and Wales to form their own party. The Green Party of England and Wales is registered with the Electoral Commission, only as "the Green Party". In the 1989 European Parliament elections, the Green Party polled 15% of the vote with 2.3 million votes, the best performance of a "green" party in a nationwide election. This election gave the Green Party the third-largest share of the vote after the Conservative and Labour parties; because of the first-past-the-post voting system, however, it failed to gain a seat. Many say the success of the party is due to increased respect for environmentalism and the effects of the development boom in southern England in the late 1980s.Early years (1990–2008)
Seeking to capitalise on the Greens' success in the European Parliament elections, a group named Green 2000 was established in July 1990, arguing for an internal reorganisation of the party in order to develop it into an active electoral force capable of securing seats in the House of Commons. Its proposed reforms included a more centralised structure, the replacement of the existing party council with a smaller party executive, and the establishment of delegate voting at party conferences. Many party members opposed the reforms, believing that they would undermine the party's internal democracy and, amid the arguments, some members left the party. Although Green 2000 proposals were defeated at the party's 1990 conference, they were overwhelmingly carried at their 1991 conference, resulting in an internal restructuring of the party.Between the end of 1990 and mid-1992, the party lost over half its members, with those polled indicating that frustration over a lack of clear and effective party leadership was a significant reason in their decision. The party fielded more candidates than it had ever done before in the 1992 general election but performed poorly, although it did win its first seat with the election of Cynog Dafis in Ceredigion and Pembroke North, who stood on a join ticket with Plaid Cymru. In 1993, the party adopted its "Basis for Renewal" program in an attempt to bring together conflicting factions and thus saved the party from bankruptcy and potential demise. The party sought to escape its reputation as an environmentalist single-issue party by placing greater emphasis on social policies.
Recognising their poor performance in the 1992 national election, the party decided to focus on gaining support in local elections, targeting wards where there was a pre-existing support base of Green activists. In 1993, future party leader and MP Caroline Lucas gained a seat in Oxfordshire County Council, with other gains following in the 1995 and 1996 local elections. The Greens sought to build alliances with other parties in the hope of gaining representation at the parliamentary level. In Wales, the Greens endorsed Plaid Cymru candidate Cynog Dafis in the 1992 general election, having worked with him on several environmental initiatives. and he was duly elected on a joint ticket. For the 1997 general election, the Ceredigion branch of the Greens endorsed Dafis as a joint Plaid Cymru/Green candidate, but this generated controversy with the party, with critics believing it improper to build an alliance with a party that did not share all of the Greens' views. In April 1995, the Green National Executive ruled that the party should withdraw from this alliance due to ideological differences.
As the Labour Party shifted to the political centre under the leadership of Tony Blair and his New Labour project, the Greens sought to gain the support of the party's disaffected leftists. During the 1999 European Parliament elections, the first to be held in the UK using proportional representation, the Greens gained their first Members of the European Parliament, Caroline Lucas and Jean Lambert. At the inaugural London Assembly elections in 2000, the party gained 11% of the vote and returned three Assembly Members. Although this dropped to two following the 2004 London Assembly elections, the Green AMs proved vital in passing the annual budget of former Mayor Ken Livingstone. At the 2001 general election, they polled 0.7% of the vote and gained no seats. At the 2004 European Parliamentary elections, the party returned two MEPs the same as in 1999; overall, the party polled 1,033,093 votes. In the 2005 general election, the party gained more than 1% of the vote for the first time and polled more than 10% in the constituencies of Brighton Pavilion and Lewisham Deptford. This growth was due in part to the increasing public visibility of the party as well as growth in support for smaller parties in the UK.
Caroline Lucas (2008–2012)
In November 2007, the party held an internal referendum to decide on whether it should replace its use of two "principal speakers", one male and the other female, with the more conventional roles of "leader" and "deputy leader"; the motion passed with 73% of the vote. In September 2008, the party then elected its first leader, Caroline Lucas, with Adrian Ramsay elected deputy leader. In the party's first election with Lucas as leader, it retained both its MEPs in the 2009 European elections.In the 2010 general election, the party returned its first MP. Lucas was returned as MP for the seat of Brighton Pavilion. Following the election, Keith Taylor succeeded her as MEP for South East England. They also saved their deposit in Hove, and Brighton Kemptown. In the 2011 local government elections in England and Wales, the Green Party in Brighton and Hove took minority control of the City Council by winning 23 seats, five short of an overall majority. At the 2012 local government elections, the Green Party gained five seats and retained both AMs at the 2012 London Assembly election. At the 2012 London mayoral election, the party's candidate Jenny Jones finished third; she lost her deposit.
Natalie Bennett (2012–2016)
In May 2012, Lucas announced that she would not seek re-election to the post of party leader. In September, Australian-born former journalist Natalie Bennett was elected party leader and Will Duckworth deputy leader in the leadership election took place. Bennett would take the party further to the left, aiming to make it an anti-austerity party to the left of the Labour Party. The 2013 local government elections saw overall gains of five seats. The party returned representation for the first time on the councils of Cornwall, Devon, and Essex. At the local government elections the following year, the Greens gained 18 seats overall. In London, the party won four seats, a gain of two. It held seats in Camden and Lewisham, and gaining seats in Islington and Lambeth. In 2013, there were allegations of factionalism and infighting in the party between liberal, socialist, and eco-anarchist factions.At the 2014 European elections, the Green Party finished fourth, above the Liberal Democrats, winning more than 1.2 million votes. The party also increased its European Parliament representation, gaining one seat in the South West England region. In September 2014, the Green Party held its 2014 leadership elections. Incumbent leader Bennett ran uncontested and retained her status as a party leader. The election also saw a change in the elective format for the position of deputy leader. The party opted to elect two, gender-balanced deputy leaders, instead of one. Amelia Womack and Shahrar Ali won the two positions, succeeding former deputy leader Duckworth.
In the 2010 general election, the Green Party contested roughly 50% of seats. The party announced in October 2014 that Green candidates would be standing for parliament in at least 75% of constituencies in the 2015 general election. Following its rapid increase in membership and support, the Green Party also announced it was targeting twelve key seats for the 2015 general election: its one current seat, Brighton Pavilion, held by Lucas since 2010, Norwich South, a Liberal Democrat seat where June 2014 polling put the Greens in second place behind Labour, Bristol West, another Liberal Democrat seat, where they targeted the student vote, St. Ives, where they received an average of 18% of the vote in county elections, Sheffield Central, Liverpool Riverside, Oxford East, Solihull, Reading East, and three more seats with high student populations – York Central, Cambridge, and Holborn and St. Pancras, where leader Bennett stood as the candidate.
In December 2014, the Green Party announced that it had more than doubled its overall membership from 1 January that year to 30,809. This reflected the increase seen in opinion polls in 2014, with Green Party voting intentions trebling from 2–3% at the start of the year, to 7–8% at the end of the year, on many occasions, coming in fourth place with YouGov's national polls, ahead of the Liberal Democrats, and gaining more than 25% of the vote with 18 to 24-year-olds. This rapid increase in support for the party is referred to by media as the "Green Surge". The hashtag "#GreenSurge" has also been popular on social media from Green Party members and supporters and,, the combined Green Party membership in the UK stood at 44,713; greater than the number of members of UKIP, and the Liberal Democrats.
Views subsequently fell back as the 2015 general election opinion polls arrived: a Press Association poll of polls on 3 April, for example, put the Greens fifth with 5.4%. However, membership statistics continued to surge, with the party attaining 60,000 in England and Wales that April. At the 2015 general election, Lucas was re-elected in Brighton Pavilion with an increased majority, but the party did not win any other seats. In part due to the greatly increased the number of contested seats of 538 from the 310 at the 2010 election, the Greens received their highest-ever vote share, and increased their national share of the vote from 1% to 3.8%. Overnight, the membership numbers increased to more than 63,000. However, at the local government elections the party lost 9 out of their 20 seats on the Brighton and Hove council, losing minority control. Nationwide, the Greens increased their share of councillors, gaining an additional 10 council seats while failing to gain overall control of any individual council.