Well, I don’t have time to take on the post as a whole since its the day before an election. I will just say that yes, many people do vote green because they support the greens. Many people also vote Green as a protest vote. People do and will vote for smaller parties just to express anger at the larger parties. The “semi-establishment” Lib Dems thrive on this so its not like its some kind of belittiling attack, its just how some people vote.

Also, this is D’Hondt, not pure PR! A Green vote in, say, the North East or Wales is as useful as a Green vote there in parliamentary elections- which is to say not very. Of course, its fine to just go out and vote for the party you believe in- if everyone just did that we would probably have a better government. But from a tactical perspective, there will only be a few parties in your region with a chance of winning, Euro Elections don’t free you from these pressures.

Also, you keep assigning motives to people for not endorsing the greens. Maybe they just prefer the Lib Dems? Even you exempted or diminished much of your criticism of them, and when some of you science policy was slammed in the guardian your own deputy leader appeared to comment it was moronic and we should just ignore it as their MEP’s will. There doesn’t need to be a conspiracy for people not to pick your party to support.

Citation for the deputy leader “moronic’ comment please?

Most Green votes will by people who would rather stab Brown in the eye with their pen but find voting against him the closest they can get: same with BNP voters.

Any argument the Greens make about the Euros showing that the UK is turning Eco can also be used by the BNP to demonstrate we hate Johnny Foreigner.

Still, a protest vote’s still a vote and I’d rather it went to hippies than fascists.

Labour is going to get butt-fucked because of their unpopularity, not because Left or Right-wing parties have won the argument.

I totally disagree with Shatterface@3.

First Past the Post elections require people to vote tactically, and they most certainly do that in vast numbers. And so they provide no reliable baseline evidence of the real level of “first choice” rather than “best available in the circumstances” support for the parties.

Our closed list PR elections (albeit highly imperfect, Tinter’s point @1 is well taken) offer a more reliable sense of where people’s real first preferences lie. In London (don’t know about Scotland & Wales) the Assembly top-up ballot showed relatively little divergence between the Euro results and the Assembly results. It may be true that in both elections support for the minor parties was boosted by the perception that both London Assembly and Euro parliament ultimately have little power and are therefore “safe” for a protest vote. But I would bet my bottom bippy that the extent to which this overstates minor party support is dwarfed by the extent to which FPTP hides the real level of support for alternatives.

My apologies for the comment on the Green Party Deputy Leader, which would be Adrian Ramsay. That comment was made, but my Adam Ramsay, a Scottish Green Party Euro Candidate. Obviously I am very sorry I did not check things out properly before posting, the confusion is probably understandable but not acceptable when making an attack.

Nonetheless, the place I took it from was http://timesonline.typepad.com/science/2009/06/political-science-be-careful-what-you-vote-for.html

In the comments below both Adam and the Scottish Green Parties deputy leader lay into some England and Wales Green Party policies. Obviously they are members of another party- but they are also greens and I think it does show that you can support Green issues and still have problems with many, many things contained in MFSS and other Green Party policy documents. And I’m not refering just to the points made in the linked article. GPEW is for example much less supportive of Europe, markets and disagrees with most continental Green Parties on a lot of issues.

Tinter, my point was that commentators belittle small parties too readily, enforcing the idea that it’s either a Tory or a Labour government. Were they to treat all parties on their merits rather than their current size politics would be livelier and more accessible to those who views are not well represented.
I never made a comment as to which party I support, mentioned tactical voting or criticised the Lib Dems because that is all completely irrelevant to the article.

Strategist: In London (don’t know about Scotland & Wales) . . .

Strategist, if you are in London and walk far enough in any direction, you come to a place called England. Hardly anybody lives there, though.

Tinter, you’re wrong again.

Adam Ramsay, assuming it’s the same Adam Ramsay, is a Scottish party member, but he’s not a candidate. Our election candidates are Elaine Morrison, Chas Booth, Kirsten Robb, Alastair Whitelaw Ruth Dawkins & Peter McColl.

There has been some debate about the science/health aspects of policy, and I personally don’t believe in homeopathy, but to go from that to imply broad disagreements in the party/parties is a real stretch.

David- You took a view of protest voting in your article- all of my comments were related to that. Its a real phenomenon, and is related to things like tactical voting. All of my discussion was aimed at issues around protest voting and votes for small parties, which takes up a lot of you article, so I don’t think it was unrelated.

As for media coverage- I don’t think thats the case. Simply managing to stand candidates does not make a group of equal importance or weight to the public. Do the Jury Team and No2EU, heading for desultory votes and with almost no active supporters, deserve equal coverage? I don’t see why the public should be interested in them because they don’t matter.

Parties with ~5,000 members and some elected representatives deserve more, yes. But they are unlikely to even be involved in running local councils, never mind the government. So how can they be of as much interest?

The largest decisions lie with Labour and the Convervatives. The membership bases of both (labour less so nowdays but nonetheless…) have several times more members. The actions of these parties are clearly of more interest to the public than the lib dems, greens, UKIP or anyone else. Its not at all unreasonable for media coverage to reflect that fact.

As to the lib dems, you felt the need to invent motivations for the Guardian to endorse the Lib Dems. And invent absurd lines of reasoning for Bunting to… call for a vote for the Greens in language you feel didn’t make adequate pretense of them being competitors in more than 2 parliamentary seats? I think thats enough for a paragraph response.

Surely the fact that the original article was by MADELEINE BUNTING should have been sufficient warning to approach with extreme caution?

Even if she hits upon something that appears sensible, it’s only ever by accident.

Ho hum.

@ 7 Trofim: “if you are in London and walk far enough in any direction, you come to a place called England. Hardly anybody lives there, though.”

…and nobody whatsoever there gets to vote in a PR election outside of the quinquennial Euro elections. So there’s not much chance of comparing people’s behaviour in terms of protest voting in local-vs-Euro PR elections, which was the subject of my post, if you’d bothered to read it, rather than getting the hump about an imagined slight to your provincial sensibilties.

Green voters are doing more than registering their dislike of Lab/Con policies; they are registering their approval of Green policies and hoping the Green candidate wins.

The party political system means that for most of us our vote is a compromise. I may vote Green but that certainly doesn’t mean I approve of all of their policies, rather that I would prefer to have them in the European parliament than members of the other parties. It’s foolish to ignore that because you might start to believe that people condone everything a party does when they vote for them and that simply isn’t accurate. I don’t approve of some of the Green party science policy but I vote in spite of this because the compromise is more practical from my point of view. Could I do so in a general election in light of the statements made on embryonic stem cell policy by a Green Party spokesperson this week? Probably not.

To follow on from Nina’s point. Quality and longevity of human life has improved enormously since the industrial revolution. Or whenever. Science and engineering have allowed us to increase human numbers, to feed them adequately and to provide lifestyles beyond past imagination. Liberal lefties acknowledge inequality and wish to correct it, similarly seeking to identify technologies that optimally benefit all human kind. By contrast, the manifesto of the Green Party undermines medicine, and precludes nuclear energy and GM crops. I’m dubious about both of the latter but I expect a serious evaluation.

Humans may, or may not, be the cause of global warming. For the people who will die or lose their homes when their islands are swallowed by the ocean, the cause is unimportant. The Green Party talks all the time about reducing carbon emissions and country targets, which aren’t going to be achieved anyway, and even if they are achieved they may not prevent the rise of sea levels. So what are the Greens going to say? I am sorry that your land disappeared but I did switch off my mobile phone charger every night.

I have had a go at the Greens, but the same question can be asked of greens in all parties. Given that oceans will rise, what are you going to do about the South Sea islanders? After the homes of Gaugin and Robert Louis Stevenson have been preserved at heritage sites, are you planning anything else?