Whilst a lot has been speculated about UKIP, less has been said about the impact of the Green Party on Labour’s vote – and having attempted to crunch the numbers, according to my calculations, The Green Party cost Labour up to 10 seats – ten to the Tories, one to the LibDems (lucky Greg Mulholland) and one to the Greens (Caroline Lucas, of course).
To make this claim, I combined the votes received by both Labour and Green candidates, to see if that would have affected the winner.
If Greens had backed Labour in Derby North, Croydon Central, Bury North, Morley and Outwood, Plymouth Sutton and Devonport, Brighton Kemptown, and Telford, it would have been enough to deny David Cameron a majority, and Ed Balls would still be in his job. That’s just 2984 votes that would have needed to change hands.
The story is similar in Weaver Vale, Bedford, Leeds North West and Brighton Pavilion. Had the vote not been split by the Greens, the Parliamentary arithmetic would mean that the Tories would be playing with 319 seats instead – and Labour would have a marginally less dire 242.
Incidentally too, Green voters in Dumfriesshire, Clydesdale and Tweeddale had voted SNP, they could have denied the only Tory north of the border, David Mundell, his seat too.
Obviously, there are plenty of caveats to these findings. For example, not everyone who voted Green would want to vote Labour – many Green votes could have been “protest” votes from people who didn’t want to elect anyone from what we used to call the major parties. Similarly, many Green voters could conceivably prefer the LibDems or even the Tories to Labour – so had the Green Party not contested their seat, they may have allocated their vote differently. So this is a very crude interpretation – based on the assumption that Green voters would have broadly preferred a centre-left government to the Tories.
Similarly, it would be essentially meaningless to carry out this same exercise on the UKIP vote – unlike the Greens clearly being a left-wing party, though often characterised as being of the right, it is likely that UKIP split the vote in both directions – taking votes from both Labour and Conservative candidates. The above analysis relies you on you buying into my assumption that most Green voters would prefer to see a centre-left government – something which I don’t think is unreasonable to assume.
You can check my calculations here. I hope I’m right!
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