Tory councillor ‘more worried about Greens’ than Reform at 2025 local elections

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Louise Thomas

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Green candidates could thwart the Tories in council elections next year, a senior councillor has said.

At the Conservative Party’s conference in Birmingham, Phil Broadhead told activists that voters had “got a lot of their anger out of their system” at July’s general election.

The Conservative Councillors’ Association chairman described Nigel Farage’s Reform UK as a potential threat to his party’s electoral success in May 2025, but added that Green Party candidates have won victories in “posh Tory areas”.

He said: “We have a lot of issues that are kind of cross-party nowadays, you know, environmental issues, for instance. I know that there are some people that are on the kind of opposite side of it.

“But I can tell you, being out there in communities, travelling around the country as we did for the general election, this is a huge issue and actually politically we’re talking a lot about the threats, and who knows what the threats might be when they manifest themselves in May, but of Reform etc.

“I’m more worried about the Greens actually.

“In my campaigning at this election, I was going to places as far apart as Bristol and Bury St Edmunds where we have Greens running the council now.

“And these are areas that – it’s not because they’re… socialists, these are kind of posh Tory areas but people care about these particularly environmental protection issues.

“So I think we need to occupy that space and regain it.”

Mr Broadhead, who sits on Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole Council in Dorset, accused councils in Bristol and Suffolk of having started “vanity projects or kind of ideologically driven ventures”.

The authority which Mr Broadhead led rolled out electric bin lorries, which he said was an example of “doing things that are providing the services, doing it in a Conservative way, saving money and making better services at the same time”.

Essex County Council leader Kevin Bentley said his party “lost lots of councillors because of behaviour that was going on in Parliament” over recent years and added “that cannot happen again”.

Of his party’s leadership election, he said: “Whoever the winner is, we all get behind them. None of this five families and all that nonsense. I don’t wanna hear it.

“All I want to hear about is getting Conservatives into power at the town hall, county hall, Parliament or wherever we possibly can, so we all rally around that new leader and no backbiting, no arguments.”