ACROSS much of the country, voting for a left-of-Labour, pro-Gaza candidate in the general election can only mean voting Green.

The party is standing in almost every constituency across Britain, four times as many as the next largest effort, by the Workers Party, and around three times as many as all other socialist parties and independent left candidates aggregated.

And it is taking advantage of the evident gap in the market opened up by Labour’s march to the Establishment centre by offering a programme closely based on the popular Jeremy Corbyn offer of 2017.

Now boasting over 800 local authority councillors, with a presence in every county except Wiltshire, the Greens are looking to increase their representation in the Commons from one MP to four.

They are running a campaign of ruthless focus on those four seats. Probably the most high-profile is Bristol Central, where polls have co-leader Carla Denyer odds-on to unseat Labour’s Thangam Debbonaire.

Thus to Stokes Croft, Bristol’s answer to San Francisco’s Haight Ashbury, with all the attendant charms and in-your-face social problems, and Denyer’s campaign HQ.

This is in a backstreet. You enter through a twin garage with the trestle tables and piles of leaflets that betoken a campaign in full swing and up a set of stairs into something like what CS Lewis must have imagined when he sent his youthful charges through the wardrobe into Narnia.

A verdant garden expanse, thronged with earnest Green activists labelling, stacking, stuffing envelopes, dispatching colleagues to the surrounding streets. Turns out this is the home of a supportive architect, and I had come in through his studio.

Amid all this bustle is Natalie Bennett, one of Denyer’s predecessors as Green leader and now making most of the opportunities for intervention afforded by membership of the House of Lords.

She was in town to assist the final push to unseat Debbonaire and was fresh, if that is the word, from the spin room at the previous night’s televised question time pitching Denyer’s leadership partner, Adrian Ramsay against Nigel Farage, the latter bizarrely becoming almost the election’s main character.

Sitting down with the Star, Bennett contrasts the politics of the two main “outsider” parties. Reform, she says, “is just kicking the Establishment. 

“We offer real hope, real change, we have a positive message about a caring society. We have the hope, they have the fear.”

Farage, she says, represents the continuation of neoliberalism. He “wants to privatise the NHS and what could be more neoliberal than owning your own political party — it’s the ultimate privatisation.”

So in an election in which many socialists feel disenfranchised, what is the Greens’ appeal to those on the left seeking change?

“We are about fairness, the only party arguing for a wealth tax,” Bennett replies. “Inequality has exploded, millionaires have got richer, everyone else has got poorer. 

“We are standing to address the level of inequality, we are saying end the two-child benefit rule which is already pushing children into poverty. 

“In the Lords we had a bishop on the side of social justice on this but the Labour Party was not willing to vote for it.” She adds that the party also wants a benefit uplift and action to reduce foodbank dependency. 

Sounding more Corbynite by the minute, she stresses that “we want to bring water back into public ownership, run for the people’s good and not for private profit, same with the energy companies.”

While acknowledging the Greens’ own identity, the pitch for 2017 Labour voters turned off by Starmer is explicit. Are they the heirs to Corbynism?

“Certainly we meet a lot of Labour people out canvassing who are not Labour now,” Bennett responds, slightly cautiously, and keen to stress the Greens’ independent positioning.

“We say as Greens we cannot have infinite growth on a finite planet, and we do not think people find their place in society solely through paid work,” identifying two points which do not sound very non-Corbynite to me. 

But she stresses support for trade unionism and democratic reforms, like “getting big money out of politics and scrapping voter ID, something Labour is not committed to.

“We want to end right-to-buy. Housing is being treated as a financial asset,” she adds, having by now outlined a very comprehensive pitch to the left-wing voter.

The Greens, she says, have to supplement their electoral offer with a very disciplined targeting operation.

“We do what we have to do. We do not believe in first past the post. Labour could get 40 per cent of the vote and 70 per cent of the seats,” she says, but repeats “we do what we have to do” under the prevailing system.

“We are aiming to go from one MP to four, with a decent number of second places,” she says, stressing however that the Greens offer an alternative across the country.

“In North Hereford and Waveney,” two of the other target constituencies, “we are facing the Tories, we are competing everywhere.”

The fourth target is the one seat the Greens already hold, Brighton Pavilion, where Sian Berry is strongly favoured to succeed Caroline Lucas, the pioneering Green parliamentarian who is standing down after 14 years.

Bennett doubles down on the paucity of Labour’s programme at this election. “It’s more of the same, only offering more competence than the Tories,” which she acknowledges is a low bar to clear.

“I would certainly welcome more competence, but Labour have tied themselves tightly to the same economic philosophy. 

“And their chief criticism of the Tories is that they are low-growth. I want to criticise them on poverty, inequality and privatisation,” not just growth and competence, she says.

In Bristol, Debbonaire must have despaired when Starmer and Rachel Reeves ditched their £28 billion green investment plans under pressure from the Treasury and the Tories, turning her already steep challenge mountainous.

Bennett agrees that this was a supplementary gift to the Greens. “There are so many saying ‘I was voting Labour but now I am voting Green.’ They are angry. It’s a mixture of Gaza and the £28 billion” commitment being abandoned.

Having raised Gaza, she outlines the Green position. “Back in October we were calling for a multilateral ceasefire, release of hostages, for an end to British bombs being exported to Israel. Lord Cameron’s answer was the weakest I have ever heard in the House of Lords. ‘We do not export very much’.”

Certainly, the crisis in Palestine has strengthened the Greens’ position among Muslim communities. Bennett remembers support already growing there when she stood as the party’s candidate against Keir Starmer himself in Holborn and St Pancras in 2015, winning more than 12 per cent of the vote.

She is also outraged by Starmer’s remarks about deporting Bangladeshis. It was “dogwhistling. Labour in some parts of the country is worried about losing votes to Reform. The answer is not to kow-tow. It is to stand firm against them. It’s a failure of mainstream politics to stand firm. It has encouraged racism.”

Should all this be enough to sweep Debbonaire out of the Commons, it is widely anticipated that she will simply move across the palace of Westminster to join Bennett in the Lords, perhaps joining dozens or more fresh Labour peers.

“The Lords is ludicrous and will be further exposed,” Bennett says. “I want to abolish my own job as soon as possible.”

In the meantime, she sees her and the Greens as keeping the “Overton window” of the politically possible open. In a nutshell it is the “Green philosophy of fairness, working for the public good within the physical limits of this very fragile planet.”

And then it’s back to the streets of Stokes Croft, where Cafe Cuba sits around the corner from an immense mural proclaiming “Ceasefire Now” and the bohemian cafe scene is only enhanced by the sudden appearance of a group of bicyclists for Palestine.

It is only part of the constituency, of course, but this is clearly not Starmer territory. His itch would likely be to arrest about half of the voters on the streets. Still at liberty, they will surely send Denyer to the Commons this week.