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The Green party has achieved its best-ever election result, capturing all four of its target seats and bringing its total in line with Reform UK.
Co-leaders of the party Carla Denyer and Adrian Ramsay won Bristol Central and Waveney Valley in Suffolk, while Ellie Chowns won North Herefordshire and Siân Berry secured Brighton Pavilion.
“We’ll be pushing the new government to be bolder because Keir Starmer’s been somewhat timid in this election,” Ramsay told the BBC. “People haven’t been massively inspired by Labour and have looked elsewhere.”
The party was able to attract leftwing voters that had distanced themselves from Labour as Starmer watered down his green policies and moved the party to the centre ground.
The Greens also drew some support for their stance on the conflict in Gaza, calling for sanctions on Israel and an end to arms sales to the country.
Chris Hopkins, a pollster at Savanta, said that the party had overcome the huge barriers thrown up by the first past the post system and would probably be a “thorn in Labour’s side for a while”.
“They are taking votes from Conservatives too, so their electoral coalition remains broad enough to make gains at the next set of locals and use this momentum to keep building,” he said.
The party took both Waveney Valley and North Herefordshire from the Tories, overturning a majority of nearly 25,000 in the latter. In Bristol Central, the Greens ousted Labour’s shadow culture secretary Thangam Debbonaire.
In addition to its signature environmental policies, including ramping up investment in renewable energy, the Green manifesto contained radical proposals to redistribute wealth, increase taxation and invest in public services.
It pledged to introduce a wealth tax of 1 per cent on people with assets above £10mn, and 2 per cent on those with assets of more than £1bn, as well as align capital gains tax with income tax rates.
It also said it would charge the basic 8 per cent rate of national insurance contributions on the upper earnings limit, up from 2 per cent today, which it estimated would impact only 5mn people in the UK.
The party said these changes would raise between £50bn and £70bn per year in 2024 prices. It also said it would raise up to £80bn from a carbon tax to be set initially at £120 per tonne of carbon emitted, while adding that it was “prepared to borrow to invest” further.
The Institute for Fiscal Studies poured cold water on the Green party’s proposals, saying the policies would be unlikely to raise as much revenue as the party claimed and would be likely to come at a serious economic cost.