Martin Shaw

Congratulations to Caroline Lucas, elected for Brighton Pavilion as Britain’s first Green member of parliament, in the general election on May 6 – a small but significant development in the context of the otherwise indecisive results (on which I will comment further once the outcome of coalition negotiations is clear). All I want to say now is that my analysis of the electoral situation in Brighton Pavilion has been fully vindicated by the result, in which the Greens got 16238 votes (31.3%), Labour 14986 (28.9), Conservatives 12275 (23.7) and the Liberal Democrats 7159 (13.8). The Tories did not have a serious chance of winning this seat. Even with the Green and Labour votes almost evenly divided, as happened, they came (as I predicted) a clear third. Therefore I was correct to argue that tactical anti-Tory voting should not be an issue here, and that left-wing voters should decide on principle between Labour and the Greens. My own vote (this is my home constituency) went Green, because I believed that after all the failures of the Labour Government, the opportunity to have an MP criticising Labour from the left was an important one to take.