This is a letter from David Hales, a long serving member of the Green Party of England and Wales and a WordPress subscriber to The Green Light blog.
Dear Green Light,
I recall an internal organisational motion requesting a review of conference voting and the setting up of a working group being approved at the Birmingham Conference in 2016.
In 2021, an excellent Utube video created by the working group was circulated to all members, leading up to a ballot which invited us all to rank a number of options in order of preference to reform our conference voting.
Some of those options may still prove worthy of being revisited, so please, do click here, if you have two minutes to spare.
Online voting as an add-on to face-to-face conferences came up top in the order of preferences. A few months later, the scheme was duly delivered by the technical staff. However, after 4 years of experiments with different software, the online provision has been somewhat disappointing in terms of increased Conference participation. It is however much appreciated by a few hundred members who, for personal reasons, cannot take part in our face to-face annual event. I believe that this alternative method of participation should remain on offer as part of our commitment to Equality and Diversity.
Note from The Green Light: The online conference software has, sadly, been fraught with too many technical challenges over the past three conferences. Members who choose to take part in Conference online may well decide not to register at all in future. We firmly believe that should the online facility which is meant to enable participants to fully take part in debates and voting on motions on an equal basis with other participants proves to remain technically flawed for the 2026 Autumn conference in Brighton, this is likely to be the last straw for many.
So, I wonder how could Conference – the Party’s “Supreme body” which determines all our policies and internal governance – now be made fit-for-purpose in this our 21st century when we have over 230000 members whilst our Constitution dates back to 1985 and when the membership was less than 10000 ?
Judging by the content of many of the organisational (D) motions making it to the Conference agenda over the past 5 years, there does not appear to be much interest from neither the grass roots (Regions/ Wales/Local Parties), nor the Executive or the Green Party Regional Council (GPRC) to address the issue.
However, the procedural paralysis caused by a single motion at the 2026 online-only Spring Conference – E12/E03 “Zionism is racist” – added to the repeated failures of the software seems to have finally rang a few alarm bells.
Additional note from The Green Light: according to the Conference Committee report, 2001 members registered for the online-only 2026 Spring Conference. 1135 members logged into plenary 1 and 1085 into plenary 2 on Saturday and 1052 logged into plenary 3 on Sunday. This means that around 1000 members who actually registered did not attend some or any of the Plenary sessions. Around 70% of participants where first-time conference attendees. Around 50% of those had joined within 6 months before the conference. For further comments on Conference, click here:
I don’t know who took the decision to carry out a survey of members who registered for the 2026 Spring Conference to talk about their experience of that particularly disastrous event. I have however been informed that it was carried out by a member of staff and that it could lead to the commissioning of an Independent Enquiry.
Whether the results of the internal survey will be circulated to all our members is doubtful. The Green Party of England and Wales is an odd Association with over 340 legally autonomous local branches governed by a highly centralised and secretive bureaucracy based in Central London. For where I have been standing for the past two decades, and as experienced new members may have observed, our organisation does move in the strangest and most mysterious ways.
But if a decision is made to use members’ money to pay for an independent consultant tasked to analyse what went so badly wrong at the 2026 Spring Conference, I personally would recommend to my branch members that we give our support to such expenditure. Sadly, we will probably not even be consulted about it.
If the Party’s ‘Supreme body’ remains unchanged with its dysfunctional format and undemocratic mode of participation, I strongly believe that sooner or later, further splits will become more frequent and members will just leave.
However, an independent consultant’s report would be expected to have a list of recommendations which could, potentially, be of assistance in proposing a new covenant between our Local and Regional Parties, the Association of Green Councillors, Common Interest groups and our Instruments of Governance, including Conference.
Should Burnham call for an early election under First-Past-the-Post voting system, we probably won’t be ready to make much progress regarding any necessary internal and democratic reforms. But if we are aiming to become the main progressive opposition to the Labour Party which a fairer voting system would deliver (the new PM has pledged to deliver on PR), the sooner we face the music and boldly embrace democratic reforms, the better.
As with any policies, a new Party’s legal status or proposed governance reforms, those must be accessible and open to a proper debate and where, in the end, every members’ vote regarding those must be duly sought and recorded. This could be done directly through locally elected Conference delegates/representatives, a ballot of the whole membership or by adopting new models of participatory democracy.
Keep up the good work !
David Hale
Your comments are always welcome.
TheGreelightBlog@protomail.com
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