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Green energy chief and Labour Party member Dale Vince gave £3,000 to a local Green Party branch via his firm – in a seat that Labour failed to win by just 1,500 votes this July, Byline Times can report.
Vince, who is the founder and owner of green energy firm Ecotricity, is also a prominent donor to the Labour Party. Labour rules bar members from supporting rival parties.
It is not clear if Labour will take action against Vince for financially backing Swale Green Party (Kent) at a time he is understood to have been a member of Labour.
Electoral Commission records show that Vince’s company, Ecotricity, donated £3,000 to the Swale Green Party on July 21, 2023. It was only reported to the Electoral Commission on April 30th this year, and has gone unnoticed until now.
The donation was listed among many larger donations Vince has made to the Labour Party in recent years.
Swale Green Party party stood a candidate in Faversham and Mid Kent, which the Conservatives won on less than a third of the vote on July 4th. While the Green vote more than doubled compared to 2019, second-placed Labour missed out by a thin margin as Conservative Helen Whately MP slipped through on a split vote.
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Labour has previously suspended and threatened to expel members for showing even minor support for the Green Party, such as liking Green Party tweets on social media.
Neal Lawson – a Labour Party activist for more than 40 years and a leading figure in the push for cross-party cooperation on the left – received a letter out of the blue last July, saying he was being investigated by the party, on the threat of expulsion, over a 2021 tweet in which he dubbed council-level cooperation between the Liberal Democrats and Greens “grown up politics”. He had shared a tweet from left-wing Lib Dem MP Layla Moran.
Lawson is the director of Compass, the progressive group that has, for more than 20 years, drawn in ideas from other left-of-centre parties and brought them together.
It remains to be seen whether Labour might hold its funder to similar standards. Vince’s Ecotricity has donated nearly £3.4m to the Labour Party since 2021, according to analysis by Byline Times.
Dale Vince told Byline Times the Green Party donation “came about from a brief conversation at Glastonbury, after I gave a talk on the Speakers Forum” in the Green Futures field.
“Someone asked me to help their campaign unseat a Tory MP and I did. I’m not a member of the Green Party but am a member of Labour, or was last time I checked,” he added.
Vince, a green energy industrialist with an estimated net worth of £107 million, has been a major financial backer of Labour for several years. But Ecotricity does not appear to have funded the Green Party except last July, aside from a referral ‘bonus’ scheme.
The Labour leadership may have already been aware of Vince’s Green Party donation, given that the renewable energy entrepreneur gave a tour of constituencies during the election, to encourage Green voters to support Labour candidates.
That included pro-Labour campaigning from Vince in Bristol West, a seat which eventually saw Green co-leader Carla Denyer unseat senior Labour frontbencher Thangam Debbonaire.
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One Green staffer told Byline Times: “Given that Labour have kicked out members for liking Green Party tweets in the past, I wonder what happens when a donor gives £3,000 to the Green Party?…”
“Vince is, I believe, a Labour Party member. I’m pretty sure that any other member would get kicked out for donating thousands to another party, but will they turn a blind eye to a multi-million pound donor?”
Vince was appointed OBE in 2004 for services to the environment and has also garnered attention for initiatives like creating the world’s first all-vegan football club, Forest Green Rovers.
Earlier this year, he defended his donations to Labour on Twitter/X, stating “there is no moral or legal basis” for Conservative demands that the party return his contributions, amid controversy over his gifts to direct action groups like Just Stop Oil (since ended).
A source in Swale claimed Vince’s donation was “based on the assumption that Labour had no chance of winning in this [Faversham] constituency, which was technically true at the time of the donation – but far less true by [this] July”.
The Labour Party has not responded to a request for comment at the time of writing. There is no suggestion that any political funding rules were broken.
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