Zack Polanski has won the Green party leadership with over 84% of the vote, winning 20,411 votes to Adrian Ramsay and Ellie Chowns’s 3,705 – an extraordinary victory for an insurgent candidate taking on two sitting MPs, one of them the current party co-leader.
Polanski’s victory wasn’t just a result of his personal charisma and media nous – though he has plenty of both. It also reflects a seismic shift in the party. Leftists Mothin Ali and Rachel Millward won the deputy leadership race. 31-year-old socialist MSP Ross Greer and his colleague Gillian MacKay – best known for passing a law banning protests outside abortion clinics that was denounced by US vice-president JD Vance – were elected as Scottish Green co-leaders last week. Together, these results show a new radical consensus among Greens across the UK – one that’s been developing for a while.
Look, for example, at conference votes on Gaza or affiliating to the Enough is Enough campaign, which in the past would have been contentious, but have sailed through in recent years, says Chris Jarvis, a Green councillor in Oxford and editor of the website Bright Green says to me. It’s clear, he argues, that the party’s centrist wing is “still there, but not nearly as much as 10-15 years ago”.
For Jarvis, the party used to have two centres of gravity. There were those who came from social movements and pulled the party towards more radical positions. Then there were the councillors, who had been elected by focusing heavily on the local concerns of residents in particular wards. Often, conflict in the party came from fights between these groups – most prominently, disputes over whether to take more radical or technocratic responses to austerity.
In recent years, Jarvis says, that distinction has broken down. As the number of councillors has exploded, that base has tended to be comprised of people with much more clearly left politics. Today, Jarvis says, the person he thinks of as most representative of Green councillors across the country is new deputy leader Rachel Millward, who endorsed Polanski, and certainly wouldn’t be associated with the centrists of the past.
The changing makeup of the Green party, and now its leadership, also reflects a generational shift in the country. Opinion polls show that generation X and boomers are more likely to retain some faith in our political and economic systems, subconsciously clinging to centrist dad instincts: “If only we could get back to the 1990/00’s credit bubble.” Those younger than that – millennials whose coming of age was framed by the Iraq war and 2008 crash, and the gen Zers who grew up with austerity, climate collapse, Covid-19 and Gaza – tend to be much more sceptical of, and angry about, the system. While those over 50 prefer capitalism to socialism, the under-50s – and particularly under-25s – strongly prefer socialism.
That generational split has long been evident in the Greens, though the party has managed to bridge it until now. That’s partly because all Greens have certain things in common: they’ve joined a party committed to nationalisation and higher taxes on the rich. What they differ on are their assumptions about which policies should be shouted and which downplayed. Many older members had absorbed the neoliberal idea (repeated by Ramsay and Chowns) that leftist policies are divisive embarrassments you shouldn’t talk about. Younger members see them as election winners.
What’s changed is time: 10 years ago, the oldest millennials were still young. Now, we’re in our 40s. Throughout the Green leadership election, there was a sense that the party’s old guard – former leader Caroline Lucas, Green peer Jenny Jones, former Green MEP Molly Scott Cato – was supporting Ramsay and Chowns. But many Polanski-backing millennial socialists have been members for two decades. We’re the old guard now, too.
Indeed, I would put the outgoing co-leader Carla Denyer MP and former co-leaders Siân Berry MP and Natalie Bennett in this camp. All clearly have politics closer to Polanski’s than the Ramsay and Chowns’s. But where Denyer and Ramsay represented a compromise between two approaches, this leadership race became a clear choice between them, and the party opted for the more radical path.
Partly, the party’s radicalisation stems from changes within the social movements from which the Greens recruit. The surge in concern about climate change in 2009 – off the back of Al Gore’s 2006 documentary An Inconvenient Truth and the mass NGO mobilisation around the 2009 Copenhagen Cop – channelled many towards a sort of Obamaist faith in the system and a focus on individual action. The 2019 moment – school climate strikes and Extinction Rebellion – came after a decade of austerity and Trump’s election. It was much less naive about power politics, angrier, and more clearly anti-capitalist. If you joined the Green party because you got climate change in 2009, you didn’t necessarily come with the politics of Greta Thunberg. If you joined because you were a youth climate striker in 2019, you probably did.
Similarly, the peace movement has always been a recruiting ground for Greens, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan drew many into the party. British complicity in Gaza has been even more radicalising than those previous wars. Coming shortly after Black Lives Matter educated a generation about race and empire, the genocide has produced an activist cohort for whom a deep critique of the British state is a basic assumption. Millions of Britons have spent the last two years having a genocide live-streamed onto our smartphones every day – and seen our own government arm and spy for its perpetrators. I don’t think many of our politicians have understood how transformative that has been for a large tranche of their constituents.
And just as the environmental and peace movements have been pushed towards socialism and anti-imperialism by unfolding reality, so too have many socialists come to understand the climate crisis. Because no serious person can look at the world burning without concluding we need a rapid transition away from fossil fuels. While there are still smokestack trade unionists and red-brown socialists who somehow missed recent waves of feminism and antiracism, the intersectional understanding of power that has always been a feature of Green politics is now the standard on the left.
Alongside the announcement of the results, the party announced its new total membership figure: 68,500, meaning around 8,500 joined over the course of the campaign, mostly to vote for Polanski. Many of those will have come from the broader left, and some older Greens have worried that they don’t bring with them an understanding of how planetary limits have to change all of our politics. But I know lots of these people and don’t share that fear. Understanding of the climate and nature emergencies has grown significantly over the last decade – we’ve all just lived through the hottest summer in British history, seen the Amazon burning and noticed the terrifying collapse of biodiversity all around us. It is unimaginable that the sorts of leftists joining the Greens don’t get that.
A similar notable feature of this campaign – which points to the same generation shift – was the absence of any vocally anti-trans candidate for either leader or deputy. Adrian Ramsay was rightly criticised for his equivocations on the subject, but no one expressed the sort of angry gender-critical politics that represented a significant minority faction until recently. And, across the wider elections for the party’s executive, everyone seen as associated with anti-trans ideas was defeated. Over the last two years, action has been taken to expel anti-trans bullies and bigots, and while that’s sometimes been controversial – even for those who aren’t gender-critical – it’s worked. The terf wars in the Green party are over, for now. The intersectional feminists are in charge.
The new leaders of the Green party represent a politic that is much more serious about power – understanding how to build it and how to challenge it, rather than naively hoping just to ask things of it politely.
They – and Greer and MacKay – now have just nine months to make a mark with their leadership. Elections to the Scottish and Welsh parliaments are in May. In the context of Labour collapse, the new leftwing party’s emergence and the Reform threat, these will be hugely important in their own right.
And if Greens are going to win multiple new MPs at the next general election, then next years’ English local elections will be crucial. Most of the party’s best chances are in London. All London council wards are up for grabs, for the only time before the next Westminster election. And also all Birmingham and Newcastle wards, and many more seats in vital places for Greens across the country.
After their victory speeches, the new leadership team – Polanksi, Millward and Ali – briefly stood on the stage together. A Jewish Londoner, a woman from the home counties and a Muslim man from inner-city Leeds, united by a desire to remake their country in the face of both established power and an insurgent far right. For a moment, it was hard not to feel just a little bit of hope.
Adam Ramsay is a Scottish journalist. He is currently working on his forthcoming book Abolish Westminster and has a Substack of the same name.
