Dave Kellaway’s assessment of the Holborn and St Pancras by-election gets a lot right. The media fixation on Zack Polanski’s leadership ignores what the numbers show. The Greens took 32.8% and 8,928 votes, their second-best by-election result ever by vote share after Gorton and Denton in February. Their share rose by 22 points, tripling the 2024 vote, while Labour fell by about four. Labour’s majority shrank to 3,364 in a seat it has held for decades. Holborn and St Pancras was always a long shot. Coming a close second there is not a defeat.

Where Dave’s piece goes wrong is in how it judges the Zionism motion. He asks, as many on the left have this week, whether it was “good tactics”. That question tells us more about where it is asked from than about the decision itself.

Judging from outside

From outside the Green Party, the motion looks like an electoral calculation, so people judge it by electoral results. Did it cost votes in Camden? Would Polanski have reached 34%, or only 25%, if conference had voted differently? Nobody can know. More importantly, that isn’t the question members at conference were answering.

Green Party members across the spectrum of views on the motion agree on one thing: this was not electoral opportunism. Members voted as they did because they judged it right. The left helped make support for apartheid South Africa something to be ashamed of. Many of them believe the same should happen to any ideology that gives one group more rights in Palestine than families who have lived there for generations. You can disagree with that judgement. But you can’t show it was wrong by pointing to a by-election that came a week later. The vote share was never the reason for the motion, so it can’t be the test of it.

Many who voted for the motion have some sympathy with Dave’s view of what it should have said. But that was not the choice in front of them. The choice was this motion or nothing, and for many members voting against it would have been unconscionable.

More than 1,000 members voted for the motion, and they knew it would be painful. Zionist protesters were outside the hall. Inside, the debate was respectful: people listened, and nobody booed. They were not trying to win over the media. They were explaining their own views to themselves and to the outside world.

Labour was in power when apartheid came to power in 1948. It could have acted strongly then. Instead, it took the Sharpeville massacre in 1960 to move Labour towards an arms embargo. The UN called for an embargo in 1963. Labour returned to government in 1964 and imposed only a partial one, still delivering strike aircraft and military equipment. It would have been electorally painful for Labour to act in 1948, or to campaign in the 1950s despite the Cold War. But it would have been right. Arguments about principle matter too. The left fought hard over Labour’s Clause Four in the 1990s, a question about the party’s ultimate aims rather than next year’s manifesto. Greens debate their own statement of principles at conference for the same reason. It is their party, and the choice and its cost are theirs.

Principle and strategy don’t pull apart here anyway. The voters the Greens most need are choosing between them and Labour. Burnham has narrowed many of the gaps, but Palestine remains the clearest dividing line. Much of the party’s growth came from people who joined because it called the genocide a genocide.

The decision was taken at the largest conference in the party’s history, with the youngest membership of any British party. These were members deciding policy themselves, which almost never happens in Labour. Dave speculates that most members who weren’t in the hall might disagree. That argument could be used against any conference decision, and it shouldn’t be.

None of this means ignoring what canvassers heard. Some voters on the doorstep said they had been planning to vote Green and were now unsure. Taking that seriously, though, means campaigning better, not abandoning a democratic decision.

If the motion had driven left-wing voters away, they had other places to go. They didn’t go there. George Galloway, standing for the Workers Party, won 314 votes. The pro-Palestine vote that went to Andrew Feinstein in 2024 came to the Greens, motion and all.

Polanski’s choice

Dave argues that Polanski should have gone to conference, argued for amendments, lost and voted against. That would have been worse. A leader who intervenes against conference and loses damages his standing on three fronts. Long-standing Greens expect the leader to respect conference as the party’s sovereign body. The many new anti-Zionist members would see him as standing against them. And the media would have its “leader defeated by his own party” story ready-made. He had also been asking members to balance conference with the campaign, so abandoning Camden to fight a floor vote would have looked hypocritical. He has instead committed to reopen the policy through the party’s democratic structures. Members are equally entitled to defend what they decided.

There is also something Dave’s account leaves out. Before the debate, MPs and the leadership had informally agreed not to speak on either side and to leave the decision to the membership. Polanski kept to that. It broke down only when Caroline Lucas chose to speak against the motion, which prompted Mothin Ali to speak in favour. Polanski staying out was not ducking the issue. It was keeping a collective agreement to let members decide.

Why has so much of the left reacted with alarm? Largely because of what happened to Labour under Corbyn, when spurious antisemitism charges went unanswered and a movement was broken. That memory is real, and so is its lesson: smears must be confronted, not appeased. But the Greens are not Corbyn’s Labour. Much of the reaction to the motion says more about that past than about this conference.

The real tactical test is how the party handles the attacks that follow. When Polanski is pressed on whether Israel has a “right to exist”, the best answer is to change the question: what kind of state, on whose land, and with equal rights for whom? Accusations of antisemitism are being used to shut down Palestine solidarity in universities, unions and parties. Greens need to say so plainly, while keeping anti-Zionism and antisemitism clearly distinct and showing Jewish members that they are welcome.

From pressure to challenge

Dave is right that “pressurise Burnham” can’t be a strategy, and right to criticise Momentum’s claim that Labour is “the only serious vehicle” for change. But his own evidence points further. Sagal Abdi-Wali won by sounding like a Green. She opposed new North Sea drilling and called for water to be taken into public ownership. Ed Miliband’s change of position on Palestine came after the Green surge. Labour moved because it was frightened of losing.

Pressure is a side-effect of a credible challenger, so the lesson is to keep being one. If Labour isn’t the vehicle, then the 220,000-strong party that took a third of the vote is more than one ingredient in a future alternative. It is where that alternative is being built.

Housing must lead

The campaign’s weakness was not that the party held a position on Palestine. It was that housing didn’t cut through enough. The Greens had the policy. On 2 October Polanski announced a three-year emergency brake on private rents, holding increases to CPI, wage growth or 2%, whichever is lowest. Rent controls, council housing and public water should lead every campaign. That should go together with setting out Labour candidates’ records on housing rather than letting them run on a change of mood.

What comes next

John Curtice says the Greens have lost a significant part of the support they gained in Polanski’s first year. They rose from about 9% to 15% by April and are now around 10%, with recent poll averages between 9.6% and 10.4% and YouGov at 11%. Look at what that means, though. Even after the fall, the Greens are polling above where they were when Polanski became leader. Curtice himself still calls them a more significant force than at any point in their history. In Holborn and St Pancras they won 32.8%, more than three times their national average. That is not a party in retreat. It is a party that can win far above its poll rating where it organises.

Membership has trebled. The Budget at the end of the month will show what the Burnham bounce amounts to: wealth taxes or welfare cuts, public water or more consultation.

The Greens should set the standard Labour is measured against, and organise outside Parliament to enforce it:

• mobilise for Saturday’s national Palestine march;
• take a full part in the Budget-week anti-austerity protests;
• work with Green Left and the Trade Union Group in workplaces and tenants’ struggles;
• in Palestine Solidarity Campaign branches and local trade union branches, push the message “From Ukraine to Palestine, occupation is a crime”.

Dave hopes struggles like those in the Spanish state and France can turn Burnham’s “vibes of Hope” into real change. So do we. But that change needs a political home free of Labourism, and in England and Cymru the Greens are the strongest candidate for that role.

l