I watched the Zack Polanski result and his speech on TV. His words and the feeling of hope they engendered reminded me of another leadership election, which Jeremy Corbyn won ten years ago. Like Corbyn, we knew a while before the announcement that he had won. This victory over two well-established leaders and Green MPs was a landslide. Zack won 85% – 20411 votes to their 3705. Rachel Millward and Mothin Ali, who supported similar positions, won the deputy leader spots. As Mothin stated:

The party was now led by a “gay Jewish man, a straight practising Muslim with a big beard and from a northern working-class background, and a middle-class woman who’s a feminist[…]

Some people on the left have sniffed at the turnout – only 34% out of 64,000 members – comparing it negatively to the Labour Party internal leadership elections, such as those for Corbyn and Starmer. However, both were held when the right and left wings of the party were mobilising hard. Recent elections for NEC places have a lower turnout – only around 10,000 people voted for the left candidates.

A green/left programme

His victory speech included these points:

• described what was happening in Gaza by its proper name – genocide
• defended migrants as the backbone of the country and refused to get into a numbers game
• demanded the nationalisation of water and energy companies
• supported striking workers – he was straight off to a strike struggle of migrant workers
• taxes on the rich, such as a wealth tax
• supported trans rights and the struggle of all oppressed communities
• reiterated the Green’s strong ecological policies, like ending fossil fuel production

He is also on record as questioning the role of NATO, although whether he manages to get the party to take an official anti-NATO position is unclear. Currently, they are not anti-NATO. Indeed, although he won handsomely, there will be resistance from the MPs, although not all, to his eco-populism.

The more traditional Green members – who do not make the links he does to the radical struggles of workers and the oppressed communities – will also not go along completely with his line. Although we should not overestimate a rural/urban split in the Greens along radical and less radical lines, there are obviously political differences.

Roots of his victory

In some ways, it relates to the same radicalisation behind the vast number of people who have signed up to the new left party launched by Corbyn and Sultana. Indeed, the delay Corbyn has taken in moving to openly challenge Labour has meant many people, including lots of his supporters from the original Corbyn project, went to the Greens and worked to get Zack elected.

Thousands were allowed to join the Greens just a short time before the leadership campaign. The Green Party has supported the Palestinians, and leaders like Zack have spoken alongside Zarah Sultana at the big national demonstrations.

Students and university-educated renters in the big urban centres have also swollen the ranks of the Greens, and unlike older Green activists, tend to be more left-wing. Adam Ramsey has a useful analysis here. This demographic has been appalled at Starmer reneging on his student fee promise, his failure on Palestine and adapting to Farage’s narrative on migrants.

We should not underestimate the growing immediacy of the climate crisis – five of the hottest years have happened in the last decade or so. Starmer’s early backtracking on his green transition plans, such as dropping the £28 billion target, has also dismayed many.

The Green party’s steady electoral progress – over 800 councillors and now 4 MPs, over 2 million votes – means they are looking more credible to people searching for a political home. Depending on the area, Green Party members are active in campaigns that attract thousands of people, such as those related to water.

Impact on the Left

Zack’s win not only radicalises Green Party politics but will also have a positive impact on the greening of left-wing political practice. Often, left-wing groups pay lip service to ecological issues and do not truly integrate them into their day-to-day interventions. For example, economic growth is sometimes seen as unproblematic.

A crude Marxist position assumes that it is enough to change property relations for the productive forces to be developed without threatening planetary life. Considering how we produce food and how we can modify our diet is not viewed as a question for today.

A headline in the Guardian for an article about Polanski’s victory gave the impression that he was ruling out an electoral alliance with the new left party. If you read the article, what he rules out is some immediate programmatic coalition, even before the new left party is adequately defined. But he makes it clear that he welcomes an intellectual alliance as proposed by left-MP John McDonnell.

Elsewhere, he has said that there would need to be arrangements not to split the progressive vote. In any case, he says it is a matter for discussion in the party. His openness to electoral pacts with the new left party opens up a perspective of securing a significant red/green bloc of councillors and MPs in the upcoming elections.

It is already a concern that groups like Countefire grudgingly welcome Zack’s win but downplay the radicalism of the Greens and are cool on any electoral arrangement with them. At one point, the writer argues that it is all less significant because the strength of the Palestine solidarity movement drove up a lot of his support. But the fact is, the Greens officially supported the movement, called out the genocide, its leaders spoke at demonstrations, members built local campaigns and are part of the ‘unofficial’ Gaza inquiry in parliament.

You cannot pretend that they picked up support despite their political line. True, Greens have not opposed austerity cuts when they run councils, and they are not a Leninist, Marxist or anti-imperialist party. However, the new left party will be broad and will contain people who share the progressive policies of Zack and the majority of Green members.

It is illogical to set a higher bar for an alliance with the Greens than for supporting Corbyn when leader of Labour. He never proposed quitting NATO or nuclear disarmament while leader of the opposition.

Are the Greens just a bourgeois, middle-class party?

Another dubious argument against relating to the Greens is that they are simply a bourgeois party with no links to the working class and are predominantly middle-class. The Greens are winning working-class voters unless you define all their base in urban areas as students or not ‘real’ workers.

The working class today includes people who are wage earners, and they mostly work in services rather than factories. As for the middle-class tag, it probably applies to the background of many activists in radical left groups, if you adopt a narrow definition.

For the left who supported Brexit, take campist positions on Ukraine or do not defend trans people, then the Greens are a problem since they have different positions on these issues. Those positions are not always coherent, but working alongside people who challenge the narrative shared by your members can be fruitful.

One unfair argument that you hear in these criticisms of the Greens is to list the misdeeds and betrayals of their European counterparts, such as the German Greens joining austerity governments, for example. However, the Greens have always been more radical here than in Europe – they are against Trident and work much more closely with the labour movement.

Nobody should have illusions about the Greens as a political current. If we thought they were the solution, we would join them rather than build the new left party. However, we need to be accurate about their politics and remain open and non-sectarian in our approach to joint work and electoral arrangements.

We must listen to their expertise and understanding of ecological issues. We can learn from them in the same way we can hope to influence Zack’s new leadership along ecosocialist lines.

Labour and bosses recognise the threat

The attack on Zack by Starmer at Prime Minister’s Questions brought up that he had questioned the usefulness of NATO and had done something silly in his professional life as a hypnotherapist a dozen years ago.

That the Prime Minister had to immediately attack the leader of the Greens in Parliament and that the party’s communications team was blasting this over social media shows us they are rattled. Labour knows the Greens are second in 39 seats and that they are still winning council seats in these areas. At least Zack Polanski did not make ten leftist pledges in his leadership campaign, as Starmer did, and then ditch every one of them.

Attacks from the bosses’ press will be stepped up. If the electoral deal is made with the new left party, you can expect this to be turbocharged. Zack is also right that we can take the fight to Reform, too. Already, his punchy and articulate defence of migrants is puncturing the political consensus dominated by Farage.

A first joint-campaign between the new left party and the Greens could be around getting out the truth about migrants and asylum seekers.

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