People Hate Politicians. The Greens Could Change That
Don't let Farage fill the void.
by Adam Ramsay
15 July 2024

Every recent general election has been defined by people’s frustration with the Westminster system.
It’s hard to see the Tories winning in 2010 without the expenses scandal, and the way it brought to the surface deeper frustrations with the Westminster system.
2015 was shaped by the asymmetric relationship between the nations of the UK – with David Cameron scaring English voters with the idea that Ed Miliband would be a puppet for Alex Salmond and Nicola Sturgeon.
In 2017, Corbyn became the anti-system candidate.
In 2019, Johnson promised to smash through the parliamentary barrier (he literally drove a bulldozer through some boxes) and promised to “get Brexit done so you can stop talking about politics and get on with your Christmas shopping” (the last part went unsaid, but was heavily implied. He made politics awful and asked people to vote it away.
In 2024, Starmer promised to make politics boring again. He didn’t win by exciting people to the polls with hope, but by convincing Tories he was so dull they could ignore the whole thing, stay at home, and not bother to vote against him.
Similarly, the Scottish referendum in 2014 and the Brexit vote in 2016 were both expressions (in the latter case displaced) of profound alienation from our political system.
Over the next five years, Reform UK’s Nigel Farage will work hard, and intelligently, to capture the deep sense that our whole political system is rotten.
So if the Greens want to succeed, they should attempt to rechannel that energy and become the vehicle for those who want to abolish Westminster (this happens to be the title of my forthcoming book).
Of course, Greens shouldn’t do this by adopting Farage’s rightwing anti-politics, or his ‘decide everything in the market or old Conservative hierarchies’ tone. Rather, the party needs to return to one of its four roots – as a movement for radical democracy.
That includes shouting about proportional representation, becoming the loudest voice demanding House of Lords reform, and taking the fight to Keir Starmer on corporate lobbying and his sleazy habit of accepting generous ‘gifts’ from big business.
But it also means taking on big institutions. The Treasury and Home Office, for example, are two of the biggest barriers to progressive change in this country – Greens should be the leading voices demanding they are abolished.
When the outgoing Green MP Caroline Lucas was first elected, she wrote a whole book about how the Houses of Parliament are a bizarre and alienating institution, utterly inappropriate for the work of discussing how we as a people want to live together. But there was only one of her, and she had little time to really advance this argument. The Green party’s four new MPs should have a bit more, and at least one of them should aim to become the leading voice demanding that the Palace of Westminster be turned into a museum, and even that parliament should be reconvened outside of London. Sheffield, perhaps.
Britain has the most centralised system of governance in the western world and, not coincidentally, one of the lowest levels of trust in politics in the western world.
Greens now have the opportunity to thrive as the party of ‘power to the people’, not by getting caught up in wonky debates about local government reform, but by demanding again and again that we rewrite the rules of our whole system to put the people of the country – rather than a bought-off political class – in charge.
The City of London and the oligarch-owned press sit at the centre of the present system, and Starmer has spent the past four years kneeling before them, kissing their hands, and promising them anything in exchange for power. It should be Greens who expose, denounce, and battle against the corrupt relationship between these institutions and those who are meant to lead us.
It was the writer Ralph Miliband – father of the new secretary of state for energy security and net zero – who documented how, 100 years ago, the early Labour MPs were indoctrinated into the system, how their anger at the way it all worked was carefully twisted by the cleverer of the Tories into a much narrower desire to occasionally have their turn sitting at the top table.
Greens mustn’t allow the same to happen. And not just for reasons of popularity: a system which is built for elite control will never be able to deliver the radical changes we need if we are to win environmental and social justice.
The four Green MPs mustn’t look too comfortable on those green benches. Instead, they should become a vehicle for the deep sense of frustration – felt by the vast majority of people in the country – that our whole political system is rigged for the powerful. They should embrace the controversy that will come with being happy warriors against a Westminster system that everyone can see is crumbling. Lead the way to something genuinely better and millions will follow.
Adam Ramsay is a Scottish journalist. He is currently working on his forthcoming book Abolish Westminster.