After a rough week, is Zack Polanski’s Green surge in peril?

I t was early September and Zack Polanski was deep in thought. Sir Keir Starmer had announced his resignation from Holborn & St Pancras. Almost immediately, focus turned to whether the Green Party leader, who had previously expressed a desire to stand as an MP in London, would put himself forward. It was not an easy decision. There were, those close to him say, two alternatives. They could back a local Green candidate in the seat. The risks to Polanski’s reputation would be lower. But so too would the chances of victory: the party won only 10 per cent of the vote in the seat in 2024 and a figure with no national name recognition would struggle to mobilise the ground campaign. 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The party had slumped from its high of more than 20 points in the polls in the spring to the low teens. The seat itself was hardly a top-tier target for the party in London. And Andy Burnham, newly ensconced in No 10, was as yet relatively unblemished by office and appeared to be winning back progressive voters lost under Starmer. But this by-election was a different beast. For the past year, Polanski, 43, had led a unique life compared with rival party leaders. Not in parliament, he continued to serve as a member of the London Assembly, taking an annual salary of £66,390 and unburdened by Westminster’s many obligations. That this new, telegenic leader — sporting his own podcast and having met the social media team of Zohram Mamdani, the progressive mayor of New York — had initially boosted the party’s membership, and fortunes, was a source of admiration in both the new and old guard of the party. Advertisement Elected leader in September last year, he had enjoyed a run of early successes. The party doubled its vote share in the polls. In the May local elections, Polanski’s Greens secured the largest increase in vote share of any of the parties, gaining 441 seats while Labour haemorrhaged support. Indeed it was only months ago some spoke of the Greens replacing Labour as the main force on the left. Top stories 1 Mortgage rates dip after weeks of painful rises Mortgages So he now had a decision to make. In the end, one senior Green figure said, if he didn’t stand it would have been held as a failure of leadership. “Everybody’s talked about him running, including Zack himself,” they said. “So you’re going to end up running.” Polanski listens to the victorious Labour candidate, Sagal Abdi-Wali Shutterstock Editorial Polanski’s loss in the early hours of Friday was seen by vanishingly few in the party as a reason for him to consider his position. Asked whether he would still be in his position by the weekend’s close, dawn breaking over the Camden council headquarters, a source close to him gave a resounding “yes”. In fact, as Russell Warfield — author of The Green Socialist , a book about Polanski’s rise — said, this was cause for optimism and “puts the Greens in a really strong position for the next general election”. Burnham’s Labour, Warfield believes, is now clearly taking notice of Polanski’s message — a source for encouragement. He said: “Under Starmer, and the people around him, I think that they would have looked at this result and just considered it mission accomplished, and just pettily danced on Polanski’s grave. Whereas I think that Burnham — who has demonstrated some awareness of what Labour’s voting coalition actually is — will actually look at the result a bit more carefully and with some seriousness.” Advertisement Polanski reflects on his defeat to Labour But while his allies assessed the risk to Polanski from the contest alone were low, events of a few days earlier were posing more serious questions about his leadership. On Sunday the party passed its “Zionism is racism” motion, which defined Zionism as an ideology supporting “an ethnonationalist Jewish state” and backed a “single democratic Palestinian state in all of historic Palestine”. The motion was brought by Lubna Speitan , a British-Palestinian artist described in US court documents as a “close friend” of a British al-Qaeda supporter accused of plotting a suicide attack at Heathrow. The motion — backed by less than 1 per cent of the party’s membership — has drawn widespread condemnation from the party’s old guard, and many of its new. Caroline Lucas , a former party leader, said Polanski had failed to show leadership over the “dangerous” and “divisive” motion, opposed by four of five of the Green Party’s MPs. More condemnation followed, with the resignation of the former Green deputy leader in Wales and the European Green Party umbrella group distancing itself. Lubna Speitan Last week, the Green Party launched an investigation into Speitan, who said she “reject[s] all defamatory and nonsense claims made about me”. Following the passage of the motion, Polanski, who is Jewish and refused to vote on it or commit himself to a position until Friday morning, was banned from visiting Israel by the country’s foreign minister. Asked five times on the Radio 4 Today programme on Friday if Israel had a right to exist, Polanski declined to answer. Natalie Bennett, the former Green Party leader, was asked the question six times on Times Radio and also declined to definitively state that it did. Under Green Party rules motions supported by members become official party policy — but Green MPs have suggested it will not be included in the party’s manifesto at the next general election. Advertisement The Campaign Against Antisemitism referred the Greens to the EHRC , the UK’s equalities watchdog, for a breach of human rights over the motion; more than a dozen Labour MPs lodged a separate complaint. Polanski was not at the vote last Sunday. This now puts him at odds with Mothin Ali, one of his two deputy leaders, who spoke in favour of it. Ali, a Leeds city councillor and accountant with a YouTube channel for his family garden, has emerged as a possible rival to Polanski, and now the two sit on opposing sides of the most controversial question the party must answer. (On October 7 2023, during the Hamas attacks in southern Israel, Ali posted on social media that “white supremacist European settler colonialism must end” and that Palestinians had the right to “fight back”. He later apologised.) Polanski and Ali in January, during the Gorton and Denton by0election campaign JOEL GOODMAN/LNP Describing the experience of Sunday from inside the conference hall, Elise Benjamin, a Jewish Green and former Oxford city councillor who has been a party member for 38 years and wrote the party’s antisemitism policy, said it was “horrible”. “A few of us tried to stick together, mostly Jews but also allies,” she said. “We felt it was like when you’re the only one speaking out and there’s hundreds of people just looking at you and you feel like suddenly you’re in a bubble, very isolated and very alone. And to know that those people are not Greens, they joined just for the motion. I could see people who I know over the years have had quite problematic views about Jews. And there they all were, lining up.” “It’s really sent shock waves through the party, like no other time in our history. And it’s not like we didn’t try to warn people, but it was very, very difficult to warn the wider membership because the small numbers of us who were fighting this didn’t know who to trust.” Benjamin said she knew several Jewish members who had left the party this week. Local branches, meanwhile, have been publishing statements in the hope of preventing members from leaving. Advertisement In response to one such letter from the Greens’ leader of Haringey council, the Highgate Synagogue surmised that the leader was “embarrassed” by the motion and said that “we don’t accept your assurances that we are safe under your watch”, noting they had been forced to invest significantly in “building terrorism-proof fences around our premises, and employ both volunteers and professional security with stab vests” to ensure their continued function. Despite the wave of criticism, Polanski’s own leadership position appears relatively safe: he is up for re-election next summer and, until then, dislodging him would require either a petition from 10 per cent of members or a two-thirds vote of the Green Party Council, the party’s ruling body. The Trendline newsletter The numbers you need to make sense of modern Britain, written by our award-winning data team. Sign up with one click You’ve successfully signed up to the The Trendline newsletter Explore our newsletters An error occurred. Please use the link below. The Trendline newsletter Explore our newsletters One senior Green source said it simply was not a “realistic thing on the cards” that Polanski would be forced out. “I don’t think anybody is seriously talking about that,” the source said. “Nobody is going to suddenly make this happen. If you really wanted to, 10 per cent of the members would have to sign a petition saying they wanted a leadership challenge, which is 23,000 or so people. The mechanics are not there.” Alice Thomson: No decent person can vote for the Greens now Greens Organise, set up a few years ago to promote a kind left-wing version of the party, have also reiterated their support for Polanski. Described as a “cloak and dagger” organisation by one Green Party source, it is a 1,000-member affiliated group co-founded by Zoë Garbett, the Green mayor of Hackney, and is credited with the overwhelmingly successful campaign to get Polanski elected. Its ability to organise and push members towards eco-socialist and populist agendas has been compared with Momentum, the group that backed Jeremy Corbyn and pulled Labour politicians towards the radical left. Advertisement Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb, who has been a member of the Green Party since 1988, said despite this latest of period of “turbulence”, this was no moment to give up on the party or its leader. “In Zack we have a leader for our times,” she said. But more immediately, the row has raised serious concerns about the Green Party’s own vulnerability to entryism and its hyper-democratic structure. In the run-up to the vote, Greens for Palestine publicly pushed supporters to join the party specifically to ensure the motion made it onto the agenda and had enough support to pass. “It could well be true, we’re easy to infiltrate that way,” Jones said, on account of the low membership fees and ability to join the party at short notice ahead of its conference. Ellie Chowns, the Green MP for North Herefordshire, said she wanted to ensure the party was not “vulnerable to capture by extremists and racists”, telling the Today programme: “I think it is clear that if we have policy, such significant and damaging policy, made by a vote of just 0.4 per cent of our members, that something isn’t working in our structures and our policy-making process.” One idea gaining momentum internally is the possibility of a new delegates structure, one in which local