Throughout the six-week Euro-election campaign the Green Party scored highly in the opinion polls. The party's best ever pre-election polling results included, in the days leading up to Thursday's vote, suggestions that the Greens would match their 1989 result of 15%. And now that the UK has a proportional system for Euro-elections, this would translate into seats in most English regions plus a seat for the Scottish Greens.
Party spokesperson Spencer Fitz-Gibbon said today: "An increase in the number of Green MEPs would be very good for this country. It would mean the bigger parties would have to take more note of Green policies, not least our million-jobs manifesto for tackling the recession and the climate crisis at the same time.
"And it would be a very important signpost towards the breakthrough we hope to make in the next general election."
County results give grounds for optimism - and also a warning
The Green Party's target constituencies for the general election include Brighton Pavilion and Norwich South, to be contested by party leader Caroline Lucas MEP and deputy leader Cllr Adrian Ramsay respectively. In both these constituencies the Greens hold a majority of the local council seats. And in Thursday's county elections, Norwich Greens reinforced their challenge to Labour by capturing five new county seats, taking a bigger share of the vote than any other party not only in Norwich South but throughout the entire city of Norwich.
The Green success in Norfolk, and the party's simultaneous breakthroughs onto Suffolk and Cambridgeshire County Councils, give the Greens grounds for optimism in Eastern region, where Norwich city councillor Dr Rupert Read heads the regional Euro-list.
And strong Green votes in the Lancashire and Cumbria county elections - including a second Green seat on Lancashire County Council - were a positive indication for the North West Greens, whose leading candidate Peter Cranie hopes to deny a seat to BNP leader Nick Griffin.
However, this weekend the racist BNP was predicting that it would win up to four seats, based on its county election results which included the far-right party's first ever county council seats, one each in Hertfordshire and Lancashire.
Danger ahead?
Spencer Fitz-Gibbon commented: "If the BNP wins seats in the European Parliament, this will be the biggest step forward for the far right in British history. The BNP will have achieved what Oswald Mosley's fascists failed to achieve in the 1930s - success in national elections."
He added: "I don't believe that most of the BNP's voters understand how thoroughly racist the BNP actually is. A rising BNP vote is partly attributable to the way so many people feel utterly let down by the three biggest parties, which increasingly look the same. But it's also partly attributable to the fact that much of the media coverage of the BNP has failed to show what the BNP is really about.
"It's true that a lot of the media coverage during the campaign has pointed to BNP members' links with neo-Nazi parties in other European countries, holocaust denial, criminal convictions and so on. But there has been relatively little scrutiny of the BNP's most outrageous policies. And that includes its flagship policies of 'voluntary repatriation' and the dismantling of racial discrimination laws."
Fitz-Gibbon concluded: "Whether the BNP wins MEP seats or not, some very important things need to happen. We need a complete reform of British democracy in ways that will involve and engage people far more, and make sure parliament really reflects the views of society as a whole, not just those of the biggest two parties. And we need a Green New Deal to tackle the recession and lay the basis for an economic system that's fairer as well as sustainable for future generations."