Why did the Green Party do so badly in the May council elections in Brighton & Hove?

In the elections to Brighton & Hove City Council on 4 May 2023, Labour won 38 seats, the Green Party won 7 and the Conservatives won 6, with various independents winning the remaining 3 seats. For the Green Party that was a loss of 12 seats compared to 2019.

Why did the Green Party do so badly?

Before answering that, let’s recap the Green Party’s fortunes since its breakthrough in 2010.

According to jollyexplorer.com/is-brighton-council-green, the Green Party won 21 council seats in 2010, with the Conservatives winning 18 and Labour 14.  In 2015, partly due to a split within its ranks, the Green Party lost 10 seats.  In 2019, alongside Caroline Lucas’ retaining her seat as MP for Brighton & Hove, the local elections were a comeback for the Green Party, as they won 19 seats, only one behind Labour’s 20.

Nationwide, the 2023 local council elections saw the Green Party make a record 200 gains: the highest-ever growth in the party’s 50 year history, according to www.greenparty.org.uk/news/2023/05/05.

Again, why did the Green Party do so badly in Brighton & Hove when they did so well elsewhere?

If you want answers, you need not look at www.opendemocracy.net/en/green-party-adam-ramsay-councillors-local-elections-2023. While it mentions Brighton several times, it omits the elephant-in-the-room question about why did Greens do so badly.

Then there was a Green Talks Post-Election Special (on the GPEW YouTube channel) where Dr Sofía Collignon, a lecturer in Comparative Politics at Queen Mary University of London, proposed an answer. She said that the Brighton losses were due to the 'incumbent effect'.

It will be interesting to see how the 'incumbent effect' works in two of the places where the 2023 elections saw great gains for the Greens:

• East Hertfordshire Council, where the Greens became the largest party, and
• Mid-Suffolk Council, where the Green Party won a majority.

Anecdotal evidence about why the Green Party lost badly in Brighton & Hove includes the following.

There was concern about the proposal to close the public toilets in Brighton for which the Green councillors were held most responsible (according to Unison members in the town).

There was concern that Brighton Greens were ignoring the council estates and working-class people generally, while relying too much on the student population for support. 

There was concern about the Brighton Women’s Refuge (which was the first one ever in the UK) and how its funding was cut. Allegedly this was because it wanted to remain a single-sex service but the Green Party wanted it to be ‘inclusive’ of transwomen even though there was already an LGBT refuge elsewhere in Brighton that was not subjected to funding cuts.

There was general concern about the Greens not being competent. They were still being largely blamed for mishandling a strike by refuse collectors several years previously. There were also concerns about lowering the speed limit on roads that weren't suitable. There was a scandal about migrant children going missing.

Among the many factors involved, it is hard to know how far the Greens’ loss was due to its rigid position on gender ideology. On the one hand, Brighton is one of the places where such a position is likely to have the greatest support of anywhere in the UK. But on the other hand, it's still only a minority of people, even in Brighton, who actively and fervently support the position that transwomen are women and transmen are men.

Certainly, gender ideology was not a highly publicised or prominent feature of the Green Party’s successful campaigns in places like Herefordshire and Suffolk.