With the collapse of the Liberal Democrat vote it is tempting for Labour party campaigners in areas where they’ve long been strong to sit back and wait for council seats to fall. And to an extent this is effective – recent polling from YouGov suggests that more than a third of those who voted Liberal Democrat in 2010 would switch to Labour. However, Liberal Democrat seats are often full of voters who are highly vulnerable to the Green party. These are middle class, Guardian-reading leftist intelligentsia, many of whom rejected the Labour party after the Iraq war and who have yet to bring themselves to return.

The Progress fringe breakfast at the Labour party conference on beating the Greens underlined the problem and the difficulties in countering it. Despite the hideous hour there was  a huge turnout, indicating that many local campaigners are increasingly realising the extent of the problem, and several representatives from Brighton. Chaired by a very able Luke Akehurst, despite fatigue, the panel included Ben Page from Ipsos MORI, Luciana Berger and an impressive Douglas Alexander, who drew up an insanely complex eight-point response to the discussion on the back of a flyer.

As the discussion moved round the table, it became clear that many attendees’ experience of the Green threat was similar. As one delegate put it, the further you walked up the hill in his ward, the bigger the houses, and the more likely the voter was to vote Green.

Several factors emerged. First, that Green voters and those vulnerable to turning Green fell into several shades. The deepest Green voters were genuinely engaged with environmental issues and were committed to their political choice. However, the other two categories included former Labour voters who had defected in protest, and community-oriented voters who were engaged and energised by intensive local Green campaigns.

Second, that Green voters were often middle aged and homeowners, relatively wealthy and well educated. They often lived in university towns and cities, and another large tranche of Greens was to be found within academic institutions. One delegate made the point that, during her campaign, Caroline Lucas virtually lived in the student union in Brighton.

Douglas made the point that the electorate doesn’t make rational choices. Green voters rarely read the party’s manifesto. Rather, people make decisions on an emotional level, and the rationale follows. In order to counter the Greens, therefore, we have to respond to their emotional appeal.

For a start, we need to challenge their local councillors so that voting Green stops being seen as a harmless activity. Are their voting choices in committees and council part of an anti-growth agenda? That might appeal to their committed supporters, but less so to former Labour voters.

Next, don’t produce literature that’s rubbish. Douglas recalled a rather fabulous leaflet he once designed in which he was a minor superhero of the municipal world – here pictured with a shovel, there pointing glumly at a pothole. Ed Miliband, who was visiting at the time, told him: ‘You look like Forrest Gump’. The point being that, too often, we produce leaflets dense with facts about us and not in the least reflecting the things that matter to the electorate. Intelligent campaigning needs to see us on the street, genuinely engaging with the electorate, rather than the traditional route of ‘fire out the leaflet, hit the voter and drag the corpse to the ballot box’. We need to become farmers, not hunters.

The tenor of the meeting had striking echoes in the sessions on community organising and the best practice outlined in Refounding Labour. However, it was most startling how far it seemed we had to go. In my own constituency we’ve been doing street-level campaigning for some time, and have had recent successes against the Greens. We also work very closely with the Cambridge Universities Labour Club. But this is still not necessarily the norm. There are still too many silos in which campaigning units merrily go their own way regardless of the wider strategic demands.

Even in Cambridge, I had a facepalm moment just this week when I realised that three separate wards were going out campaigning on the same day; that none of them had publicised their sessions beyond their own wards and that all of them were going out at exactly the same time.

The Greens ship in coachloads of activists to their targeted wards, and they’re often wards where we’re weak, where we don’t necessarily have a campaigning branch, and where the activists that do exist may lack training and support. To counter that threat, we need to be able to respond in kind. The informal connections made over the Green breakfast will increase the sharing of good ideas and maybe even boots on the ground, but for any Labour party activist eyeing the Green peril in their own constituency, the solution cannot lie just at ward level. The job will need coordination and a concentration of activism and activists, to farm those votes rather than letting them grow weedy and Green.

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Carina O’Reilly is a Labour member of Cambridge city council

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Photo: Leo Reynolds