What risk could the election of Zack Polanski as leader pose for the Green party? That’s what journalists wondered aloud on one current affairs format after another, on Tuesday evening. Would he alienate the party’s new-found Tory switchers, conservationists who’d given the party a chance after a decade of disaffection with their tribe? Surely, by peeling off the leftwing elements of the Labour party, Polanski was simply strengthening Reform, whose path to victory through this division would be assured?
Polanski is sometimes described, per his own self-fashioning, as an “eco-populist”, but more often called the “left” or “hard-left” candidate, which I don’t think anyone would quibble with, though the fact that his victory Instagram post landed as soon as he won points to a new kind of hard-left, one that has its shit together. I use that, rather than a milder phrase, to echo Polanski himself – whether he’s talking about sewage in the waterways, the cost of living crisis that hasn’t gone away, or British arms sales to Israel, he doesn’t say “parlous”, he says this is “shit”. Sometimes the mystery of why party members vote for the values candidate over the putatively electable one is not that mysterious: maybe rightwingers aren’t the only people yearning for someone to stand up and talk normally.
Straight talking is valorised on the right, and generally deplored on the left. A hardline anti-immigration candidate is “charismatic”, a hardline anti-corporate one is “divisive”. It makes no sense at the level of the vocabulary – very few of us feel an emotional allegiance to corporations. It would be extremely hard to divide a community by slagging off Thames Water. Of immigrants, the opposite is true. Communities, even individual families, are riven when human beings are spoken about with contempt, and yet somehow that’s charisma, fun, music-hall politics. Stick around, folks, and see what Richard Tice will say next: he might do it in song. The double standards in reporting on the left and right are so well-worn it’s a bit tedious to mention. It’s also deeply understandable. The foundational assumptions about the British electorate are so far off-base, the fallacies can only be upheld by language that says the opposite of what it means.
The Green party did not win those Tory defectors by feinting to the right. Its 2024 manifesto, complete with wealth taxes, rent controls and multiple, radical proposals about the decent treatment of refugees, was easily as leftwing as Jeremy Corbyn’s 2019 equivalent. And even if the Greens had been going for a coalition in the last election, between the humane, Caroline-Lucas left and the tribal but bee-loving right, four MPs is probably just about all such a fragile alliance would ever yield.
Reform, meanwhile, does not draw its strength from infighting between the centre and the left; rather, it’s maximising the opportunities presented by a centre that promises a better, fairer Britain and then spends its entire first year drawing up austerity 3.0. This is unfolding before our eyes; all we talk about is how high Nigel Farage is riding, and this is after five years of the Labour party expelling its left wing members and the Greens keeping their heads down. Exactly how quiet does the left have to be before this infighting theory can be laid to rest?
Even if that classic West Wing argument – pipe down, idealists, in case the electorate hears you and the bad guys seize the advantage – still worked, having been superseded by 30 years of events and never having worked in the first place, I’d still be a bit hazy on its directives. I’ve never seen it on any political hero’s tombstone: “First you say nothing, then you compromise, then you continue to say nothing, then you win.”
Responses to Polanski’s leadership campaign showed just how much even those on the left had internalised these impossibilist arguments. I heard disaffected Labour members wondering whether to join the Greens to get him over the line; post-match analysis about where he’d gone wrong before the match had even taken place; people bemoaning the timing, relative to Corbyn and Zarah Sultana’s launch of Your Party, fearing that the two projects would somehow suck the energy from one another, having duplicated their offer without thinking through the electoral consequences. It’s a sidebar to Polanski’s success, but relevant, that Your Party seems to be working on the basis that the groundswell of radical energy during Corbyn’s first tenure was an event so freakish that it could only be replicated by the same conditions: Corbyn, his exact same team and his magic beans.
Even people who solidly shared Polanski’s politics were preemptively dismissing him because of his colourful past as a hypnotherapist – detailed in a story from the 2010s in which he was apparently touting hypnotherapy as a useful tool in breast enlargement. Even though I have heard first-hand how that story came about – a Sun journalist fishing for a silly season story, a possibly too polite and definitely too gullible Polanski going along with it – I accepted it as a block to his political ambition. All the talk – which was not off the record, exactly, except insofar as there is almost no mainstream record of where leftwing people talk to each other – was of how he might possibly edge a win over his more plausible opponents, as if Green members were broadly similar to BBC commentators, pragmatists with a sprinkling of extra climate anxiety.
In the event, of course, he won the leadership by a landslide. What it means for the Greens, electorally, is probably not the doom-loop pollsters predict; and what it means for the left more broadly is that it might be time to have more confidence.
Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
