(Part I)
Let’s get one thing clear upfront: the Green Party is not going to ‘replace’ the Labour Party before the next General Election. It’s hubristic to suppose that we could – however deep a crisis it seems to have got itself into, however idiotically reluctant it still is to challenge today’s increasingly destructive new liberal orthodoxy.
But what the Green Party is going to do before the next General Election is to exert maximum pressure on the Labour Party to be the force for progressive politics in the UK that it now has to become. If it can’t, then it will continue to decline – and then the Green Party may indeed be in replacement territory.
For me to be able to write a paragraph like that, 52 years on from becoming a member of the Green Party, still seems surreal. But it’s a real tribute to everything that Caroline Lucas, our five MPs and two Peers, our still relatively new Leader, Zack Polanski, and huge numbers of incredibly loyal local activists, have made possible over the last five years or so.
Given that several polls now have the Green Party ahead of Labour, why shouldn’t we aspire to some kind of replacement narrative? Especially as Labour today is a veritable rat’s nest of unreconstructed neoliberal deadbeats, genocide-denying ‘friends of Israel’, illiberal, implacable enemies of human rights, enthusiastic growthists and nature-trashing climate sceptics (hang in there, Ed!), almost all of whom are apparently incapable of speaking to the inequality crisis that has ravaged this country since the 2008 financial crash.
That’s what persuaded more than 750,000 members/supporters of Labour to get behind Jeremy Corbyn and Zahrah Sultana’s Your Party in July 2025. And that’s what subsequently persuaded a lot of them to throw in their lot with today’s Green Party, which has evolved into an increasingly mature eco-socialist party.
A quick word on the extent of that evolution. As the co-author of the Ecology Party’s manifestos both in 1979 and 1983 General Elections, I can assure you that the Party has always been eco-socialist, in varying degrees, and always saw social justice and biophysical sustainability as two sides of the same political coinage.
As I wrote in my last piece about this, I believe the Party is absolutely right to be emphasising justice issues (taxation, wealth, human rights, militarism, cost of living, public services etc), even as I’ve simultaneously argued that it’s self-defeating to have relegated climate, nature and pollution issues (the biophysical sustainability side of the coin) to a secondary role.
What commentators are already getting to grips with are the crude numbers that will determine the outcome of the next Election. Whether or not you believe that we’ve now hit ‘peak-Farage’ (as I do), the combination of Reform, today’s Conservative Party and the utterly loathsome Restore Britain (busy disrupting Reform’s best laid plans in Makerfield), it’s hard to imagine that this ‘ right-wing front’ will get anything less than 30% of the vote in the next Election. With our right-wing media cheering them on every step of the way.
So, keeping it simple, how will broadly progressive voters in the UK (still the majority) ensure that our archaic, first-past-the-post electoral system doesn’t end up giving that right-wing front as big a majority as Starmer managed to win in 2024 – even though he persuaded half a million fewer people to vote for him than his apparently unelectable predecessor Jeremy Corbyn in the 2017 election!
Will it be Labour that enables that kind of progressive collaboration? Impossible. Starmer and Streeting are conviction tribalists, and it’s highly unlikely that others pursuing such collaboration would be prepared to work with either of them anyway. Which leaves either Angela Rayner (improbable) or the King of the North, the man-of-the-moment Andy Burnham. More of him in a moment.
The Lib Dems will be up for whatever emerges as long as its target seats are protected – mostly at the expense of the diminishing number of surviving Tory MPs. Time after time, however, Ed Davey has shown that he’s not the kind of leader capable of rising to this challenge. Both the SNP and Plaid Cymru are likely to be supportive, which I suspect is going to be a much bigger factor than most seem to be imagining at the moment.
Which leaves the Green Party, not just to ‘ sign up’ to other parties’ initiatives, but to be the driving force bringing together such a progressive coalition.
That is still a deeply controversial proposition within the Green Party today. Back in both 2017 and 2019, the Greens worked their socks off to help oust those two Tory governments. We lost out badly, particularly at the hands of Labour at its most intransigently tribal, with all sorts of consequences both for local parties and the national Party.
The truth of it is, however, that we had very little political heft back then. We had one MP. Fewer than 50,000 members, spread thinly across many constituencies. It’s not like that today. Without in any way being arrogant about it, it’s now Labour and the Lib Dems that must be looking at today’s surprisingly consistent polls showing that more people will be voting for the Green Party than for either of them.
Which makes for a heavy burden of responsibility for a Party that has lived most of its life in the margins of first-past-the-post, with a new leader who is still working out what all this means, nine months in, and more than 150,000 new members finding their own role in the Party. Which is why humility has to be right up there in our interpretation of what authentic leadership looks like at such an extraordinary inflection point in UK politics.
The Party’s decision to put up a candidate in Makerfield (despite outragious pressure from Burnham’s team to stand down in his favour) but not to fight a full-on campaign as we did in Gorton and Denton (despite some aggressive pressure from the Green Party’s own ‘tribal’ battalions) was both encouraging and pragmatic – given the very large number of Green voters who will be using their vote tactically to keep Farage out anyway.
It’s also encouraging that no one I talk to in the Party sees this as any kind of pre-emptive support for Andy Burnham as a potential future leader of Labour. He’s already sold off whole chunks of his political integrity both to Makerfield’s former MP Josh Simon (a leading light in a think tank called Labour Together — now rebranded as ThinkLabour — seen by many as the incubus at the heart of Starmer’s failing government) and Shabana Mahmood, whose utterly hateful and divisive position on refugees and migration in general makes her as irredeemably unacceptable in any future progressive coalition as Wes Streeting, a privatising, pro-Zionist, Palantir-promoting acolyte of Peter Mandelson.
As for Burnham, how many more deals will this shape-shifting neoliberal-lite do to secure the top job? The utterly absurd hyping of ‘Manchesterism’ (a marginally more modest version of ‘Burnhamism’) is already being exposed to far more rigorous scrutiny. It basically comes down to him having delivered somebody else’s vision of better bus services — which, by the way, are still being operated by the private sector.
Beyond that, he seems to be as keen on developer-led, speculative housing schemes (with minimal, if any, prioritising of social housing) as any other Labour/Tory council today he completely botched the politics of securing a Clean Air Zone for Manchester. He’s deeply ambivalent on re-nationalising water companies (“we first need to put them under stronger public control”), and sycophantically supportive of Rachel Reeves’ ‘ fiscal rules’, dutifully fawning to the all-powerful bond markets and the plutocrats that run this country.
And I really do hope that you haven’t been over-excited by both Burnham and Streeting having suddenly discovered that there’s a problem with chronic inequality in this country. How much post-hoc, blatantly opportunistic posturing do they think voters will put up with?
In that regard, let’s hear it for Zack and the whole Green Party for so uncompromisingly and so consistently calling for a whole host of tax reforms, including a wealth tax, taxing assets at the same rate as income, sorting out Council Taxes, cracking down on both tax evasion and avoidance, and so on.
So, no lionising here of the King of the North. Far from it. The influential commentator Rachael Swindon described Burnham’s patchy career as “ providing a masterclass in ideological elasticity”. Not so much a saviour for Labour, let alone the country, as a ‘sedative’. And that in itself represents a real threat to the Green Party as Burnham does everything he can to slow the rate of defections.
Even his apparently authentic advocacy for electoral reform has been more than a little undermined by his declaration that it won’t be possible to make anything happen before the next General Election. Which is fat all use to an electorate sick of the ludicrously unjust mismatch between votes cast and seats won. Especially as Farage may well be the next beneficiary of this crazy system.
Which makes Burnham far from an ideal candidate, but the alternative outcome for Makerfield (an unapologetically racist, misogynistic Reform MP) is unthinkable — in so many different ways. Let nose-holding prevail!
Just for the fun of it, here’s my ideal scenario for June 18th in Makerfield: Burnham wins by a reasonable margin, with Reform once again failing to take advantage of another by-election opportunity; Sara Wakefield comes in third for the Green Party, with a very respectable vote, leaving Restore Britain and the Lib Dems battling for fourth and fifth. The Tories, in sixth place, deservedly lose their deposit.
At which point, Andy Burnham gets to work plotting his challenge against Starmer, simultaneously seeing off Wes Streeting, even as the serious work of building a progressive coalition for the next General Election starts in earnest.
A good place to start will be a detailed analysis of what happened in France in 2024, when Les Verts took the lead in creating a ‘Front Populaire’ to keep out Marine le Pen, building an effective ‘common platform’ based on a small number of non-negotiable threshold conditions. Complex, sophisticated movement-building, which ultimately proved very successful – albeit working within a very different electoral system to our own (more of that in Part II on Monday).
Members of the Green Party, new and old, are gradually coming to terms with the extraordinary opportunity/responsibility that the Party is now confronted with.
Jonathon Porritt Friday 5th June 2026
Image: BBC Question Time, 4.6.26 — reproduced for commentary purposes.
