This shouldn’t be the end of an era for green politics and politicians

So many politicians have taken a major hit in the last couple of weeks. Trump got criminally indicted. Boris Johnson lost his job. Not to mention the MPs that chose to follow him off that cliff. Nicola Sturgeon got temporarily arrested. Former Italian PM Silvio Berlusconi passed away.

But only one leaves a gaping and worrying hole in our democracy: Caroline Lucas has announced she won’t run in the next election.

That is a “goodbye” to the only Green Party MP in parliament. Doesn’t that seem a bit odd to you? The warnings about climate change and the threats to the environment have only been getting louder in recent years, with Generation Z heralding a new age of green politics.

So how can it be that UK parliament is about to lose the only person from a party whose top priority is fighting the climate crisis?

Now, I have no doubt that Caroline Lucas’s constituency of Brighton will elect a Green MP to take her seat. But unless David Attenborough decides to give parliament a shot, there is no bigger heavyweight in the UK than Caroline Lucas when it comes to climate change. So, the UK’s fight for the planet just took a major hit.

The question is: why was Caroline Lucas the only one there? Do Brits simply not want green representation?

The UK has had a Conservative or a Labour prime minister for exactly 100 years. And those parties almost always have a controlling majority in parliament. So Green votes have felt like wasted votes for over a century (unless you’re in Brighton).

And there is maths behind that: in the 2019 election the Conservatives got 44 per cent of the vote, but that gave them 56 per cent of the seats in parliament. Meanwhile, the Greens got 2.7 per cent of the vote, which should translate to about 18 MPs of the 650 in parliament.

Yet they only got one.

Don’t worry, I did the maths for you. I compared how many votes each party got, to the number of seats that gave them in parliament. Tory votes were worth 23 times more than Green votes.

People know this, even without the maths to prove it, because in the elections where they think the Greens can actually influence policy, a lot more people vote Green.

For example, the European elections use a proportional voting system where the MEPs in parliament reflect the parties that people vote for. In the 2019 European elections, 11.8 per cent of Brits voted Green. That’s more than four times more than voted Green in the general election a few months later where millions knew they had to vote tactically for Labour to stop the Tories.

So when people believe their votes will actually count, they’re less likely to vote Labour or Conservative, and more likely to vote green. We know that the younger generations are more passionate than ever about green issues, so let me say this simply: you don’t get to complain that young people aren’t voting enough, while supporting a voting system that doesn’t count the votes of the party most engaged with one of their top priorities.

A recent report calculated that the Conservative party has received £3.5m from individuals and organisations that are either in the fossil fuel industry or who deny climate change. So how exactly are we supposed to tackle the climate crisis if Green votes are worth 23 times less than Tory votes?

Fortunately, the majority of people in the UK now want to change our voting system to one where the seats in parliament match the votes of the people. So while Caroline Lucas will be a huge loss to the fight against climate change, hopefully her departure will act as an alarm to wake up everyone else.