Britain's resurgent Greens are threatening the Labour Party's hopes for election victory in May even though the leftist environmentalists will probably capture no new parliamentary seats and could even lose the only one they hold. Ed Miliband's main opposition party is neck and neck with Prime Minister David Cameron's Conservatives, so every voter who leaves Labour for the Greens could push Cameron closer to a second win under Britain's first-past-the-post electoral system.
"Every vote you give to the Green Party makes it easier for David Cameron to stay on as prime minister," said Sadiq Khan, a senior Labour lawmaker who has been specially charged with creating a strategy to counter the Green threat. "If you don't vote Labour, if you vote for the Green party in some seats, it could mean you're helping a Conservative member of parliament to be returned."
At the last national ballot in 2010 the Greens claimed their first Westminster seat but polled only 1 percent of the vote. The party, seen as fringe activists, has never been the major political force in Britain that it is in European countries such as Germany where, since merging with the Alliance 90 party, it has over 60 seats in the Bundestag.
However surveys show that might be about to change as voters turn away from the two parties which have dominated Britain's political system for a century and as Labour voters become disillusioned with their party's commitment to cutting public spending.
While the Green party's anti-austerity message is unlikely to cause the political earthquake of Syriza, which won last month's election in Greece, one recent opinion poll put its support as high as 11 percent. Over the past few months the Greens have scored between 6 and 9 percent, often higher than the Liberal Democrats that are the junior coalition partner in Cameron's government.
The swing to Green is a major headache for Labour, which has already lost droves of traditional working class supporters to the Scottish National Party after that country's independence referendum last year. It is also battling to stem the flow of votes toward the anti-European UK Independence Party (UKIP) which has capitalised on the resentment of an austerity-weary public and accuses the European Union of opening the flood gates to "job stealing" immigrants.
Now another 22 constituencies out of the 650 that Labour must hold or capture to win the election are under threat from the Greens, estimates Rob Ford, a senior lecturer in politics at the University of Manchester. "It's a horrible position for Labour to find themselves in," Ford told Reuters. "They're basically finding their electoral coalition being eaten away at both ends and...can't appeal to one group without offending the other."