Green membership in fact 50% bigger than Lib Dems

Lib Dem membership is much lower than widely reported

Rachel Millward, Green Party deputy leader, announced the party’s growth this morning

Green membership in fact 50% bigger than Lib Dems

Today, at their conference, the Green Party of England and Wales deputy leaders announced that their party membership has passed 83,500, saying that means that they have surpassed the latest publicly available figures for the Lib Dems across Great Britain - and that’s before adding the roughly 8,000 Scottish Greens.

However, the figure for the Lib Dems they are basing this on comes from a BBC article, which is, in a way, inaccurate. The BBC report says the Lib Dems have 83,174 members. And this isn’t quite right. The accounts that number come from in fact say that is the total number of members and supporters the party has. As one knowledgable Lib Dem explains to me, these supporters are people on an email list, paying no fee.

The party’s federal accounts for last year don’t give a number for paying members. But the England party’s accounts give the game away, saying there are in fact just 60,000 Lib Dems across England, Scotland and Wales.

This means that the number of Greens across Great Britain - around 91,000 - is around 50% more than the membership of the Lib Dems.