Can the Greens swing to the left enough?
JVL Introduction
This interview with Zack Polanski, currently Deputy Leader and campaigning to be Leader of the Green Party makes for fascinating reading. At a time when a push for a new party of the left is gaining traction, Polanski would argue that there is a ready made alternative to the current Labour Party.
We know that there is a campaign within the Greens to push it further left, to become explicitly socialist; could that be enough? But Polanski is equivocal about possible alliances even over parliamentary seats but he is talking the language of the 99% – v -the 1%, he has spoken on picket lines and talks the talk about community organising and not being totally focused on Westminster; he recognises that if you are worried about paying the rent you do not have much time for traditional green issues. We should note perhaps that the Greens advocate for a wealth tax, which Labour, under Starmer and Reeves, has ruled out as an option and unlike Labour is clear that “When it comes to Reform, they are a party of millionaires representing the interests of billionaires, but claiming to be the voice of the working class. With the right message, we can absolutely speak to Reform voters.”
As always we welcome your views and comments i up to 300 words.
LL
This article was originally published by Open Democracy on Fri 16 May 2025. Read the original here.
“We don’t have time for ‘briefcase politics’” - Zack Polanski’s pitch to lead the left
From ‘Rehearsing the Revolution’ to building it for real, Zack Polanski talks to oD about his bid to lead not just the Greens, but the wider progressive movement
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Second article/ interview I’ve recently read about Zack Polanski. Why is no one asking him what his stance/ policies are? No good just describing what we all know is a shit situation. How would Greens under his leadership change that? Is everyone on the Left just grasping at straws/ hope?
“The one huge barrier at the moment to us winning a huge bloc of Green MPs is fundraising”
Ok, but he completely omits the fact it’s either anti worker, as demonstrated in the Greens handling of sanitation worker strikes in Brighton, or just indifferent to class, so ends up being a sanctimonious middle class thing.
The key thing for me is quite simple. Does the Green Party oppose capitalism and the free market? Does it want to replace a society where production is for profit with one where production is for need?
We live in a profoundly undemocratic society where capital and the large multinationals rule via the elected representatives.
The first thing the Green Party could do is to scrap NATO and make clear its opposition to Zionism.
But it can’t do any of those things (apart from NATO) which is why I won’t join. Nor can the Green Party explain why its Irish sisters kept in power two Tory parties and kept out Sinn Fein. Or why the German Greens are so fervently pro-Zionist, pro-Genocide and pro-NATO with former Green Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock leading the way.
Joining the Green Party is an alternative to the much harder task of building a genuine Left Party
I can’t quite put my finger on where in this interview I began to feel depressed – maybe at ‘it’s really important to say that though it’s not my decision, there’s an elected group of people in the Green Party who make decisions about defections, but of course, as leader, I would have a say…’ (I wonder how Clive Lewis feels about the fact that he’s apparently being lined up to ‘defect’ to the Greens?). Or his vague aspiration to ‘put eco-populism at the heart of the offering’. It all sounds like the same, tired politics to me (with a nice greeny tinge, of course).
I also wonder what Polanski thinks about what the UK Green Party’s relationship might be with other more electorally powerful Green parties elsewhere in Europe (e.g., Germany, where the Greens, in a coalition government, led the charge for massive increases in arms spending and also voted unanimously for new regulations equating the expression of pro-Palestinian sentiment with anti-Semitism, not to mention tacking right pretty fast in the last elections when they saw themselves losing ground to the right).
Maybe the Greens might like to consider *joining forces* with the emerging socialist grass-roots movements in the UK *in alliance* rather than aiming to appropriate and absorb them by somehow turning themselves into *the* working class party of opposition to fascism.
I’m keen on lots of Green policies – on housing for instance they are streets ahead (pun intended), and in my reading they are fairly explicitly anticapitalist. But I am bothered that they still won’t form electoral pacts with Independents. This stance
can work to their own detriment, as it did at the last election in Holborn & St Pancras where the Greens did not even bother to leaflet for their own party but still refused to join Andrew Feinstein’s campaign, and ended up with even fewer votes than usual. It should be possible to have varying foreign policy positions ; Tony you are being maximalist above!
However a bigger obstacle is that the Greens are still riven with factions. For instance, there are two separate groups called Green Feminists and Feminist Greens, with different positions on Trans issues; and most relevantly to us, the Greens went ahead and endorsed IHRA (against explicit advice from many of us) and then added the Jerusalem Declaration belatedly, so there is no clarity there.
My biggest worry is that Zack P does seem to be saying that Greens are going to fight against Clive Lewis, Zara Sultana, Corbyn and other vital progressive MPs at the next election unless those MPs join the Green Party. All I can say is , DON’T!
Zack Polanski puts across the argument that the Green Party is a “a ready-made, fully-democratic party.” Some of us beg to differ. As a former member (and elected official ) of the Greens and as a long-time investigative reporter, I have written about 6 or 7 articles on the Green Party in the past 8 months. Here are two of them from THE LEFT LANE:
Mimicking Labour: more than 20 Green Party activists expelled or suspended in recent months is “without precedent”
and
The Green’s cull continues. Now it is a GP who served as the party’s spokesperson on Health.
Yes, can the Greens be left enough is a good question. I would also ask: can the Greens be democratic and transparent enough?
https://theleftlane2024.substack.com/p/mimicking-labour-more-than-20-green
and
https://theleftlane2024.substack.com/p/the-greens-cull-continues-now-it
Some points:
1. Will left-wing Labour MPs come to believe that “Labour’s lost, love” – as a left-wing green outlet put it a while back? (I do; I don’t think the left / centre-left will ever have any influence in Labour again.)
2. Will it become clear to those left-wing MPs who are still in Labour, that Labour is likely to deselect them before the next general election? (I guess it will.)
3. Do the MPs believe that a new specifically left-wing (‘socialist’) party has a chance of winning seats? (I don’t; it might win one or two, but no more.)
4. Will these Labour MPs see that the Green Party’s policies are pretty closely aligned to their own/? (They will if they’ve got any sense.)
5. Is Labour about to go down the electoral S-bend – in which case there’s not very much point in being in it? (From current polling, I think it is.)
6. Will the Greens let former Labour MPs in? (Yes, almost certainly – particularly if Polanski becomes Green Party leader, which I think he will.)
Exactly Tony Greenstein, the Greens, like Labour, are a complete dead end.