As someone who was always regarded as being on the party’s moderate wing during my 37-year stint in the Greens, I was not at all surprised that Zack Polanski, with his self-styled brand of leftwing ‘eco-populism’, won the recent leadership election and won very handsomely.
It was obvious to me that there had been a complete charisma vacuum at the top of the Green Party ever since Caroline Lucas stepped down as an MP. In spite of the party enjoying its biggest electoral success ever at the last General Election, the previous leadership was often lacklustre and incoherent, managing to turn the party into a national laughing stock in the very first week of the new Parliament by opposing the new pylons which will form such a vital part of the country’s future green energy infrastructure.
Zack Polanski, in contrast, came over as a media savvy and charismatic figure and offered a seemingly more down-to-earth and less esoteric approach, with an emphasis on storytelling rather than endless facts and figures and impenetrable eco-jargon.
As someone who spent decades striving to make the Green Party more like a professional political party and less like a bunch of well-meaning but eccentric hippies, this should have been music to my ears.
However, as we have seen on the populist right with Farage and Reform and now on the populist left with Polanski and the Greens, an engaging media presence is often used to mask extremist political positions that are anything but popular with the public.
Polanski’s victory is a clear step in the evolution of the Greens from a centre-left party that strove for a well-regulated, mixed economy operating within the constraints of liberal democracy, to a party of the radical hard left that sees no meaningful role for private enterprise at all and is utterly beholden to the wilder elements of student identity politics.
Evidence of this leftward trajectory came pretty early on in Polanski’s leadership campaign when he spoke in favour of leaving NATO. At the Green Party’s recent conference in Bournemouth, however, the catalogue of evidence that this was now firmly a party of the extreme left was piling up thick and fast: from passing a laughably unrealistic motion pledging to ‘abolish landlords’ thus completely eliminating the private rented sector, to leading members of the party standing on the beach enthusiastically taking part in a ‘From The River To The Sea’ chant, to delegates deciding to completely ignore the thoroughly-researched clinical evidence of the Cass Review in favour of doling out yet more puberty blockers and hormone treatment to vulnerable youngsters, regardless of the well-documented dangers.
This is just the start. The rapid growth in membership and the sizeable influx of hard left activists coming into the Green Party will inevitably mean more cranks, more conspiracy theorists, more antisemitism and more extremism. Moreover, it was very telling that immediately following Polanski’s successful leadership bid, he announced his aim was to replace Labour not work with them. That was very much not my position as an elected Green and is a marked shift from the healthy, symbiotic relationship between social democracy and green politics that had been taking place across much of western Europe over recent decades.
In spite of this, polling for the party is at an all-time high, their media profile is enjoying a dramatic boost and this new, revamped and reformatted Green Party poses a serious threat to Labour at the next general election. If it continues to make this sort of dent in Labour’s vote-share across the country we are almost certainly looking at the prospect of a Reform Government and Nigel Farage in Number 10, even if the Greens, themselves pick up only a small handful of extra seats.
How then, should Labour react to this new challenge? As a former Green Party politician, I would argue Labour’s response should be three-fold.
Firstly, Labour needs to be very upfront about the threat that a Farage government poses and spell out very clearly that in the majority of parliamentary seats a vote for Labour is the only realistic way of keeping Reform away from Number 10. Keir Starmer’s rousing conference speech was a welcome change in tone. Long may that continue.
Secondly, Labour needs to get far more combative in how it approaches the Greens, particularly in many of those ‘Middle England’ constituencies where the Greens have zero chance of actually winning but where scooping up 10-15% of the vote risks handing the seat straight over from Labour to Reform. Simply ignoring the Greens as an irrelevance and hoping they’ll go away is no longer a viable option. Just as with Reform, the Greens’ extremism needs to be consistently called out, both on the ground and in the media.
Thirdly, there has been a widespread perception that Labour have been far more interested in winning back the support of the voters they have been losing to Reform, rather than the ones they are losing to the Greens. This needs to change. The Green Party may now be full of extremists but most of their voters are not. These are largely progressive voters who want to see environmental concerns taken seriously, are internationalist in outlook and who care about protecting the vulnerable and improving our public services. Labour needs to offer those voters real hope for a better future.
My views on most issues have barely changed since I was an elected representative for the Green Party. What has changed is the Green Party’s abandonment of the centre-left in favour of the hard left and the fact that third party voters no longer have the luxury of knowing that, regardless of who gets in, the two main parties in contention for forming the next government are committed to working within the parameters of liberal democracy and upholding the rule of law, rather than being a stooge for Trump and Putin and a conduit for right-wing extremism.
The Green Party has changed dramatically. The political context has changed dramatically. That is why I will be voting Labour at the next General Election and will be urging others to do so.
