A week ago, the Green Party achieved a quite extraordinary breakthrough, with its1.95 million votes, as well as two members of the Welsh Senedd, doubling its previous highest vote in 2023. The BBC’s national vote projection translating these results into a general election outcome put the Green Party second (on 18%), behind Reform (26%) but ahead of Labour (17%), the Conservatives (17%) and the Lib Dems (16%).
If anybody had predicted such an outcome back in July 2024 (after what was already an exceptional success for the Green Party in the General Election, ending up with four MPs), they would have been ridiculed. And as a member of the Party for more than 50 years, with more of those years in the electoral wilderness than anyone should be asked to suffer, I’m still pinching myself to make sure this really just happened!
Much of that success is down to Zack Polanski, the Green Party’s leader since September 2025. He’s galvanised existing party members, inspired tens of thousands to join the party (with membership up from 60,000 to 225,000, of whom 40,000 are young members), proved himself to be a brilliant communicator, and offered a quality of authentic leadership that really cuts through with people.
(I say all that as someone who did not support Zack in the leadership election in 2025. I didn’t know much about him then, whereas I did know both Adrian Ramsay and Ellie Chowns (his opponents in that election) and was still wedded to the idea of co-leadership. I mean no offence to either Adrian or Ellie, but I’m glad Zack won – for them as much as for the Party as a whole).
This remarkable breakthrough has got the UK’s right wing media frothing furiously away, reaching for ever more excessive insults, slurs, falsehoods and blatantly antisemitic caricatures. The idea of a gay, Jewish man threatening to tear down their citadel of racist, misogynistic, entitled privilege is seen as a threat to civilisation itself.
We must expect a lot more of this. There are scores of journalists out there ‘scraping the barrel for any smoking gun they can get their hands on’, and Zack, like everyone else, makes mistakes.
There will be criticism from within the Party too, and within the wider Green Movement. Immediately after the election I heard people saying, “we could – and should – have done better”, or that “too many mis-steps were made along the way”. And many seem very unsettled by ‘Polanski the Polarizer’.
I think most of this is just nonsense!
What Polanski, the Party’s five excellent MPs, hundreds of councillors (old and new), and tens of thousands of inspired volunteers have done is to put the Green Party absolutely at the heart of the titanic political struggle that will dominate the next three years.
Despite all our excitement, this was Nigel Farage’s victory. His politics of resentment, intolerance, and vile racist ‘othering’ of refugees, LGBTQ +, and black and brown citizens persuaded huge numbers of people that Reform’s politics is the best/only way of addressing all their cumulative and continuing grievances.
Personally, I suspect we’re getting quite close to peak-Farage. He’s so venal, so hypocritical, with so many skeletons in so many cupboards, that the Farage brand could implode at any point. And he’s already almost as unpopular as Starmer himself.
Regardless of that, however, the politics of the next three years is now more starkly delineated than ever before. As Neal Lawson of Compass puts it: “We’re no longer dealing with two parties, but two blocs. One fearful, authoritarian and decisive. One democratic, pluralist and hopeful”.
Reform and what’s left of the Tories pitching even further to the right, make up one bloc, facing off against a potential progressive coalition made up of the Greens, the Lib Dems, Plaid Cymru and the SNP.
However, under Starmer (or, even worse, Streeting) Labour cannot be part of that coalition of progressive parties; it just about could be under Andy Burnham – and clearly needs to be for Labour itself to have any viable future. And whoever it is, it must include a formal, unequivocal commitment to a fairer, more proportionate electoral system.
Given Labour in limbo, it’s the Greens and the Lib Dems (supported, hopefully, by the majority of Trade Unions) who now have all the heavy lifting to do for there to be any prospect of a progressive ‘popular front’ gathering real momentum.
That is quite some responsibility for a party that up until July 2024 looked forward to near-permanent marginalisation under our first-past-the-post electoral system.
And it’s quite some responsibility for Zack Polanski as the Party’s leader, knowing that he’ll face further escalation from the virulent attack-dogs in the right-wing media and establishment. The parallels with the way the same media and establishment, subservient tools of the billionaire class, destroyed Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader back in 2017/2018, are quite chilling. And much of that will no doubt translate into pressure on the Party to get rid of Polanski and replace him with someone more ‘moderate’, ‘less polarizing’.
For what it’s worth, I hope we’ll see more polarization rather than less! I would like to see the party doubling down:
- On its courageous stance against the ongoing genocide in Gaza, supporting Palestine Action, refusing to be cowed by all those so manipulatively conflating opposition to the apartheid, Zionist state of Israel with antisemitism;
- On its clarion call for wealth taxes, an end to every aspect of rip-off Britain, nationalisation of the water industry, and the rights of renters and the need for genuinely affordable housing;
- On its determination to combat militarism and the raw power of the military-industrial complex, advancing a different approach to national security and defence spending, reclaiming what it really means to be patriotic in a world ravaged by decades of neoliberalism, billionaire greed and the suppression of independent media.
And beyond that, I want the Party to reassert the lead it once had in addressing climate breakdown and the continuing and devastating assault on the natural world. This has not been Zack’s priority, with his focus on fair taxes, restoring public services, the cost of living crisis, and ending the genocide in Gaza. But that’s been a bad mistake. He now seriously needs to get his act together on these non-negotiable priorities for the Green Party.
In all these areas, Reform has gloatingly staked out its territory as a genocide-denying, billionaire-friendly, faux-patriotic Party, in which many chauvinists, racists and misogynists feel right at home.
In all these areas, the Green Party represents the polar opposite of such cruel, intolerant and life-crushing politics.
So keep on polarizing, Zack, with the same kind of measured, non-tribal forthrightness that has already persuaded so many to join the party.
Jonathon Porritt 15.5.26
