I stood for the elections to Essex County Council as a Green Party candidate. I fought a one-man battle, distributing just 800 leaflets and wearing my home-ade Zapatista t-shirt constantly. The area (Thaxted in Uttlesford) was a strong die-hard rural Tory area and I garnered 477 votes - 6.1 per cent. Considering the odds stacked against me, it was a positive vote for an alternative to the three grey parties. While all the anarchists on this website will deride me, I still think its a triumph for the small-time socialist in what is a solidly right-wing area. OK, so the Green vote won't change anything. But I'm not going to wait around for the revolution to do something. I shook up the other candidates and by standing, the turn-out in my area was around 75 per cent! I'm chuffed.
In the rest of Essex, the Green vote was similar, starving the self-proclaimed 'left-wing' LibDems of votes. In Witham, James Abbot received 14 per cent of the vote, beating the slimey LibDems into fourth place. With an average of 6 per cent of the vote, the Green did well. Moreover, they trounced right-wing parties such as the fascist BNP and the little englander UKIP (Sykes actually gave £10 million to the UKIP, and they still lagged behind the Greens).
For me, the Greens are just a small part of the growing disenchantment with the aggressive capitalist system and present an egalitarian alternative to the nice but mad Trotskyites and their many vanguard parties. In Tohyy Essex, a 6%+ Green vote is a sea-change and I'm proud to be a part of that.