The Green Party Is Great, But It’s Not Enough

The Green party is not enough.

Don’t misunderstand us. The Greens aren’t the problem – right now, they’re an asset. After years without mainstream opposition to the rightward lurch in British politics, the Green party now provides it. Zack Polanski’s polling spikes, positive media coverage and viral videos have revived hope on the left that after decades of austerity and misery, we can still turn the tide. Still, this is not enough.

Fascism knocks at the door, with far-right marches drawing hundreds of thousands onto the streets. Our government enables a genocide, and imprisons without trial those who attempt to stop it. Climate breakdown is accelerating, with the only real remedy – ending capitalism – considered too taboo to even mention.

To meet the challenges of the moment, we need a mass socialist party, built from the ground up. The Green Party, for all of their use of the word socialist, are calling only for reforms to capitalism, not a deeply democratic worker-owned economy that we require for socialism. They also have a notable absence of organisation in their grassroots. Despite a tripling of their membership over the past 6 months, there has been no noticeable uptick in community activity. The Greens have mobilised impressively for the Gorton and Denton byelection, but coming out for one-off elections is not the same as deep and sustained community organising all year round. And it shows: why is a 35-year-old party of 190,000 members outnumbered on protests and pickets – as they were at both the London march for Palestine and Birmingham megapicket in the same weekend – by a half-formed party with only a third of that figure?

The reason is that the Greens are an exclusively electoral party trying to solve these issues at the ballot box, a strategy which, at best, kicks the fascist can down the road. But reforms alone cannot change the source of the fascist problem, which requires a rebuilding of class power. Without that power, even the party itself risks slipping back towards the centre, and the Greens have shown that at the council level, they won’t hesitate to vote through cuts. The touted alliance with a post-Starmer Labour would also temper their ambitions. We need a party which both fights in elections and organises in communities all year round, not just mobilising for elections. We need a bridge between the ballot box and the streets, a party of the whole working class.

We need a party that brings together disparate liberation struggles under a single banner. A party that brings anti-war activists onto the streets with tenant organisers and anti-racism campaigners. Where striking workers are joined on the picket line by queer liberation movements. We need a party that doesn’t just talk about causes, but actually fights for them.

Only one group has the ambition and potential to fulfil this vision of a unified mass party. Not the Greens, certainly not Labour, but Your Party – which is why we’re both standing to lead it.

A rough start.

Your Party has not had a smooth start – that is obvious to everyone. The unelected interim leadership have not empowered members, but instead held us in contempt. Grassroots activists have had to do the work of establishing branches on their own without funding, support or promotion from the party centre. This makes what they have achieved all the more impressive: over 200 proto-branches, with thousands of active members, landing wins for workers’ rights on picket lines, mobilising for Palestine and against fascism, again and again.

Entirely on their own, the grassroots have organised to a level not seen in Britain for generations. Instead of waiting for direction, branches have worked hard to unite people and organise around busy day jobs and responsibilities. Activists like us – Candi in Bristol, Anahita in Islington – have built active, member-led, democratic branches rooted in their community, centred on the daily fight for working-class power, not just winning seats in elections.

In Bristol, Your Party has grown rapidly. Through community organising, we’ve expanded our base from 40 to 400 people since September. We’ve built a volunteer-led political education programme, organised a south-west regional assembly attended by hundreds and established five local proto-branches. On the ground, we’ve mobilised most weeks for Palestine, and have successfully prevented the far-right from entering hotels housing people seeking asylum. We’ve brought people together from all walks of life around shared struggles from different movements, and people who’ve never been involved in politics before.

In the Islington proto-branch, we are running political education programmes of talks, workshops and cultural events. We are running mass listening campaigns, going door to door, not to ask for votes (at least, not yet), but first to understand the issues people actually face, and try to solve them together. We are protesting and marching for Palestine under the Your Party Islington banner, not just at the big national demos where politicians love to congregate for photo ops, but also at smaller weekly demos vital for keeping up the pressure. We have been tirelessly campaigning for the pro-Palestine hunger strikers held without a trial. Morning after morning, we have turned up to the picket lines of striking education workers in our borough, helping them win a 7% pay rise.

And there are scores of proto-branches across the country doing similar work. Nearly 200, in fact.

These are not the branches you’ve experienced in Labour or the Greens – the bureaucratic, procedural, hierarchical structures that produce little concrete results – but something radically new. They are places of activism and community organising year-round, where open debate and democratic decision making thrive, and our aims go far beyond collecting donations and canvassers for the next election.

Building power in our proto-branches hasn’t been without its challenges. Hundreds of members in Bristol and Islington alone have signed up, but we can’t connect with them because HQ won’t give us their data. Around 60,000 people – more than have been members of a UK socialist party since the second world war – have been paying dues for months, and proto-branches have no access to that money nor clarity on where it’s going. We’ve tried to make contact with HQ to advertise meetings, grow the branch and support members, but received no response. The Grassroots Left slate we’re standing on will change that on day one, delivering members’ data and money back to them, rather than hoarding it at the top.

We’ve been let down by MPs too many times. We don’t need another Labour party. We need one rooted in our communities. Your Party, led by ordinary members from across the UK, offers something different. Something far beyond the failed “vote every five years” model: an opportunity for working-class people to vote on every important decision and policy. We can no longer rely on the narrative of hope alone. We need to move beyond slogans towards a politics of building working-class power on a mass scale.

Bureaucrats out, members in.

At Your Party’s founding conference in November 2025, members voted for something rare in British politics. They rejected the party being run by a single MP, in favour of collective leadership by a central executive committee (CEC) of ordinary people elected from regions across the UK.

The CEC elections are underway, and the future of the party hinges on the results. Everyone who joins Your Party before 5 February – this Thursday – gets a vote that will determine the shape of the party and its role on the left. Two competing slates have emerged: The Many, backed by Jeremy Corbyn; and The Grassroots Left, backed by Zarah Sultana, on which both of us are standing.

The Grassroots Left has endorsed both Corbyn and Sultana as co-founders, because this is not a clash of personalities between the two, as some believed it was last summer. This is about resolving a political and ideological difference about what the party should be. Do we want Your Party to be a top-down imposition of Labour 2.0? Or do we want it to be a democratic, member-led, socialist party capable of bringing about the systemic change we so desperately need?

We can’t continue with unelected bureaucrats running the show. We need to redistribute power and build actual democracy from the ground up. That means branches with access to their membership data, proper funding so they can campaign effectively, and structures that make leaders accountable to members, not the other way around.

To build a mass party, we have to welcome new voices and reject the elitism that suggests credibility is determined by who you know. If we keep doing what we’ve always done, we’ll keep getting what we’ve always had. With fascism on the streets and the cost-of-living crisis spiralling out of control, that’s not a risk we can afford to take. We can’t afford, as the Greens are doing, to prioritise elections over community organising. We need something radically different.

The Grassroots Left wants to build that. Join Your Party by 5 February and take part in a vote that will decide the future of the British left.

More information about Candi Williams and Anahita Zardoshti’s Your Party CEC slate Grassroots Left can be found at grassrootsleft.org.