‘The Green Surge’ has already become a fixed feature of the election campaign, but are we just reliving the giant damp squib of ‘Cleggmania’? According to Green Party officials, their membership stands at 45,558. Since Cameron declared they should be in the TV debates, thousands have supposedly signed on the dotted line. Apparently, of the 14,780 new members that have signed up since 1 Jan 2015, just 151 are renewals. But there has been zero independent verification of the numbers; they are asking us to take their word for it.
A spokesman tells Steerpike that the party was not prepared for the influx of new members: ‘Our servers did become overwhelmed for short periods. This was due to the quantity of hits to the site. We moved to a much more powerful site… and will continue to expand our systems as required.’ Mr S understands that they use CiviCRM membership software and the Green’s are quick to stress there was no problem with this: ‘To be clear the system held up fine, it was the bandwidth available to the server that was the issue.’
‘We’re due to go through our annual audit soon,’ says the same party spokesman, ‘and as part of that process membership numbers will be verified.’
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