Stroud is a constituency where even die-hard Greens are sometimes tempted to vote “tactically” in the General Election. If we thought that was a good idea then we wouldn’t have stood a candidate in the first place. Here are just some of the reasons why we believe that you should vote for what you believe in:
- If you vote Labour, you’re giving a mandate to a Labour government. You’re signalling approval of their policies, which include support for “austerity-light”, maintaining Trident, fracking, prioritising perpetual economic growth over solving the climate crisis; the list goes on. David Drew may personally oppose some of these things, but his presence in parliament props up a Labour government over which he has little influence.
- All it takes for the Green party to start winning seats is for people to start believing that they can win seats. That means increasing our vote share. If people carry on voting tactically for what they don’t want, then they’ll never get what they want. When the labour party first started out, they had little share of the votes. If people had carried on voting tactically, they would never have got anywhere.
- The collapse in Labour’s vote in 2010 was due to the war in Iraq, not the Green Party. Why do Labour say we are stealing their votes? Those votes aren’t somehow theirs by right. We have every right to give people the opportunity to vote Green, and the reality in Stroud is that Labour are stealing our votes, not the other way around.
- Many key figures in the Labour party refused to back a fairer voting system in the AV referendum, cynically calculating that our completely un-representative first-past-the-post system might suit them better. Likewise Labour continues now to oppose voting reform. If we had AV or PR (Proportional Representation) then these tactical voting problems wouldn’t exist.
- Lastly, did you know that if a party has an elected MP (as we do) then it receives a small amount of government funding proportional to the number of votes it receives? So even if your favoured Green candidate doesn’t win, a Green vote does go a little way towards helping the party next time around.
Remember, as Caroline Lucas has said in a letter to the Guardian today: To Get Green You Need to Vote Green.