After a week of typical anguish and conflict for the Traffic Light Coalition, the Green Party have, perhaps not surprisingly given recent events chosen to go it alone.

As I noted to /u/padanub for his Saltcon piece:

We’ve seen the umpteenth Traffic Light Coalition form, and the umpteenth time the Green Party has ejected itself. While the last time the Greens were edged out of coalition was down to a combination of a lack of activity and ideological divides, the cause this time is much more specific; the decision of the Greens to endorse a former-Green in a by-election, and the associated fallout.

Indeed, the last time the Green Party left the TLC it was down to mere ideological divide - a divide that in my view is not as wide as those involved perhaps think, but being inside a bubble does tend to give one a fish-eye view of things - and that sort of disagreement is at least understandable, even admirable. Another example of this type of thinking is in talks prior to the formation of last term's Liberal Government, where members of both parties decided they simply could not work with the Libertarians. Is this a pragmatic view? No, not hugely, but it has a merit and it is defensible.

However, this time we've seen a fairly baffling story line emerge.

First, /u/ContrabannedtheMC, probably the Greens' only true Parliamentary heavyweight, leave the party to form the People's Movement with, among others, a former Deputy Leader of the Liberal Democrats. The Liberal Democrats were not materially harmed by their defection; they are, after all, a larger - in membership and in Parliament - party than the Greens, and have other MPs more prominent and influential. In contrast, this was a real blow for the Greens, and /u/ContrabannedtheMC's energetic campaigning and enduring popularity in the middle-England seat of Oxfordshire and Berkshire has for the last couple of general elections provided probably the only ray of light. Ally this to his strong presence in the House of Commons and in other public forums, and we can see he's left a big gap.

Second, the Green Party elected not only not to fill the seat vacated by /u/ContrabannedtheMC's defection, but also to back him in the subsequent by-election. And back him to the hilt. Sources told our reporters that the Green Party did not inform other members of the TLC about the plans to do this, and were therefore taken aback when Labour, the Liberal Democrats and Plaid Cymru baulked at the idea of supporting a non-coalition candidate. What followed were 48 hours of accusations, counter-accusations, arguments and ill-tempered debate that occasionally spilled into Twitter and, indeed, onto the pages of this newspaper.

Finally, the inevitable occurred. The Liberal Democrats began with informal indicative votes on their status within the TLC, and shortly afterwards the Greens began the formal process of leaving the coalition. And here we are today, with the Greens having left and the TLC, once again, dead on arrival.

Why is this baffling? It's baffling because the Greens are in a poor state right now, and have been since at least the last general election. We have noted on these pages how the Greens ought to have done much better in the last general election given that they merged with the SNP. In the event, they now hold no Westminster seats, and the former Scottish Greens leader /u/weebru_m joined the Liberal Democrats. They're struggling in the polls and in Westminster, and their former leader went AWOL before /u/IceCreamSandwich401 took up the reins.

What the Green Party could have done is bob along in the wake of their coalition partners, growing their base and showing their worth to their electorate, and then benefit from the traditional glow of opposition at the next election. Instead, they have left a coalition because of an issue started by their decision to endorse a defector, who set up a rival political party, and now they're on their own having alienated their closest ideological allies. It does seem rather like cutting off one's nose to spite one's face.

The future of the Green Party must now be in real doubt. With their most influential members defecting to other parties, one of whom has set up a party that directly competes for Green Party votes, and with few friends in Westminster, we see only difficult times ahead for the Green Party. The one saving grace is that these things are often cyclical. The Labour Party and the Liberal Democrats have in recent times been nearly dead and buried in Westminster, but both bounced back, just as the TLC bounces back every couple of terms.

Creating the Green Party as a small but potent force in Westminster was never going to be easy, but I fear that recent events have made the task more difficult than it needed to be.