The Green Party Will Regain Momentum if It Keeps Its Nerve

O n October 8, the Green Party fell short in a parliamentary by-election for the London constituency of Holborn and St Pancras that had been triggered by the resignation of Keir Starmer. The by-election was always going to be a long shot for the Green leader Zack Polanski, who stood as the party’s candidate. The result, which saw Labour retain the seat, was broadly what you would have expected from the current state of national opinion polls. That hasn’t stopped much of the British media from proclaiming the outcome to have been a game-changing disaster for the Greens and Polanski in particular. Some prominent Green politicians have also launched a push to reverse the party’s left turn under Polanski and guide it back into their political comfort zone. A motion that Green members passed at their recent party conference about Israel and Zionism has become a rallying point for Polanski’s critics. If the advocates of a more conventional and unthreatening approach to politics win out, the gains that the Greens have made over the last year will prove to be ephemeral. If the party can hold its collective nerve, there will be new opportunities to win support as the contradictions of Andy Burnham’s political platform reveal themselves in practice. From Starmer to Burnham Z ack Polanski became the leader of the English and Welsh Greens in August 2025 with resounding support from party members for his “eco-populist” agenda. At the time, Polanski’s leadership campaign was one of two projects that sought to capitalize on disillusionment with the Labour Party. The new Green leader declared his willingness to cooperate with the new left-wing party that Jeremy Corbyn and his allies were planning to launch in the next few months. In the best-case scenario for the British left, the parallel projects would have proved to be complementary. But there was a huge gap between the objective potential of the situation and the subjective readiness of Your Party’s founding team to exploit it. A faction fight between rival camps grouped around Corbyn and Zarah Sultana dominated the first months of the new party’s existence, while the enthusiasm of the previous summer gradually drained away. During a period of unprecedented volatility in British politics, Your Party proved to be much less than the sum of its parts. While all of this was happening, Polanski and his allies pressed ahead with their own project, and they made some very significant political gains at Labour’s expense during the first half of this year. In February, Hannah Spencer delivered the first ever Green by-election victory in the Manchester constituency of Gorton and Denton after a three-way contest with Labour and Reform, the hard-right party led by Nigel Farage. Labour sources explicitly stated that they would have preferred Reform to win the seat, because Spencer’s breakthrough showed that progressive voters no longer felt obliged to support Labour. Popular anger at the genocide in Gaza and Starmer’s endorsement of Israeli war crimes was an important factor behind disillusionment with Labour. Popular anger at the genocide in Gaza and Starmer’s endorsement of Israeli war crimes was an important factor behind disillusionment with Labour. Polanski and the Greens explicitly charged Israel with genocide and strongly opposed the ban on Palestine Action that resulted in hundreds of peaceful protesters being arrested and charged with terrorism. The fact that Polanski himself was Jewish merely added to the fury of his critics, who had grown accustomed to branding the Palestine solidarity movement as a putrid cesspool of antisemitism. The local elections in May represented another big step forward for Polanski’s party, which now overtook Labour in terms of projected vote share . For every English vote that Labour lost to Reform, it lost nearly four to the Greens. The Greens in Scotland have a separate organization with its own leadership team, but Polanski joined them on the campaign trail before they achieved their highest ever vote for the Scottish Parliament. The election results prompted a dramatic change of approach from the Labour Party, at least in terms of style and presentation. Under Starmer’s leadership, Labour treated left-wing voters with undisguised contempt and sought to compete with Reform on its chosen political ground. After Starmer’s meltdown, Labour turned to the Manchester mayor, Andy Burnham, as his replacement. Burnham was the most high-profile Labour politician who was not tainted by association with the Starmer project. He brought with him a new kind of rhetoric that contrasted sharply with the familiar tropes of Starmerism. Starmer had praised Margaret Thatcher for “setting loose our natural entrepreneurialism.” Burnham now declared his belief that Britain had spent “forty years on the wrong path” since Thatcher’s neoliberal Great Leap Forward. He promised that his government would be a “circuit breaker,” working to establish “a new political model and a new economic model.” There was also a clear discursive shift in relation to Palestine, with Burnham’s Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband taking the lead. His comments at this year’s Labour conference reflected the pressure of the solidarity movement, including its impact on the field of electoral politics: We call out ethnic cleansing by the settler terrorists in the West Bank. We call out the evidence of war crimes In Gaza. We call out Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestine. And we match words with actions. We will ban the import of goods from illegal settlements. We will disrupt the supply lines of British finance, British construction, and British services for illegal settlements. Surrendering on Day One I f we look beyond the rhetoric, the substance of Burnham’s new regime doesn’t measure up to his sales pitch. When he announced his first cabinet, he reappointed ministers like Pat McFadden, an influential figure who wants to roll back what is left of Britain’s welfare state and shares Tony Blair’s conviction that Labour should abandon its goal of phasing out fossil fuels by 2050. John McTernan, an unapologetic Blairite who nonetheless seems to recognize that Britain has changed radically since 1997, urged Burnham to defy a critical chorus by nominating Ed Miliband as his chancellor: “The journey of ending neoliberalism starts with one appointment.” For McTernan, shirking this “easy choice” would mean “surrendering, on day one, to economic orthodoxy and conceding to those who oppose your fundamental agenda.” Burnham disregarded his advice and surrendered to orthodoxy by selecting John Healey instead. If we look beyond the rhetoric, the substance of Burnham’s new regime doesn’t measure up to his sales pitch. There is also a big gap between language and policy when it comes to Israel. Miliband has ruled out applying any sanctions to Israel as a whole and condemned the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement. But the “illegal settlements” are in no way external to the Israeli state. The overwhelming consensus of the Israeli political class defines those settlements as an integral part of Israel itself. Moreover, the war crimes Miliband correctly identifies in Gaza were obviously not the work of “settler terrorists.” It was the regular armed forces that turned Gaza into a charnel house. Since Miliband delivered his conference speech, the British government has capitulated to Israel over the order to evacuate the British consulate in East Jerusalem. According to the reporting of Peter Oborne, this act of surrender was a victory for Burnham’s national security adviser, Jonathan Powell, who successfully imposed his line on the foreign secretary. The selection of ministers and advisers who are deeply committed to the economic status quo and Britain’s traditional role in world affairs gives us a much better sense of what Burnham’s project is going to deliver than his speechmaking. But we have to recognize that most voters won’t be paying close attention to the details of his appointments. For now, his language about “the break we are making with the flawed thinking of the last forty years” clearly does appeal to a section of Labour’s target electorate. Even if Burnham was deadly serious about his stated goals, it would not be possible to reverse four decades of economic policy in the space of a few months. Many people will be inclined to wait and see if he can deliver on his promises, especially when Labour still seems to offer the best chance of blocking a government led by Reform. In the month of the Gorton and Denton by-election, the average polling gap between Labour and the Greens was less than 5 percent. By September, it was almost 15 percent. In itself, this is enough to explain the outcome in Holborn and St Pancras. If Polanski had run for the constituency when Starmer was still the Labour leader, he would probably have won — but in that scenario, of course, there never would have been a by-election in the first place. To some extent, Polanski and the Greens have been victims of their own success. By forcing Labour to hold out the promise of a genuinely transformative agenda, they have inadvertently reduced the political space available to them, at least temporarily. Under these circumstances, the best course of action would be to remain patient, avoid panicking, and look for opportunities to expose the gap between Burnham’s rhetoric and the substance of his policies. If it were up to Polanski alone, or the members who voted for him, this would surely have been the main line of argument from the Greens as they sought to move on from the by-election defeat. But the result in Holborn and St Pancras supplied an opening for Green politicians who never wanted the party to challenge Labour from the left in the first place. Eco-centrism I t would be a mistake to speak about the right wing of the Green Party as if it were merely a smaller version of Labour’s dominant faction, since the two organizations have very different relationships with the British state and the capitalist class. As things stand, there is no Green counterpart of Peter Mandelson, who was passing on information about the Labour government’s economic plans to his friend Jeffrey Epstein while serving as a cabinet minister. Nor is there a Green version of Tom Watson, Labour’s deputy leader under Corbyn, who has recently taken up a job as a lobbyist for Palantir. There are clear ideological differences within the Green Party that were on display during the 2025 leadership campaign. At the same time, there are clear ideological differences within the Green Party that were on display during the 2025 leadership campaign. Polanski defeated a joint ticket comprising two of the Green MPs elected the previous year, Adrian Ramsay and Ellie Chowns. A New Statesman profile described Ramsay and Chowns, without any hint of malice, as “eco-centrists.” Ramsay claimed that Polanski’s approach would alienate more potential supporters than it gained, while Chowns insisted that the Greens were “way past those kinds of old ideas of politics being binary, left and right.” There is no reason to think that the experience of the last year has prompted them to rethink their basic political outlook. When Ramsay spoke recently about the need for his party to establish “a broad base of support,” it was more than a platitude. He would like the Greens to position themselves as an ecological version of the Liberal Democrats instead of competing aggressively with Labour for urban left-wing voters. This is a recipe for being all things to all people and nothing much to anyone in particular. It is important to note here that Ramsay and Chowns are Westminster MPs, while Polanski and the two Green deputy leaders elected alongside him are not (Polanski is a member of the London Assembly; Mothin Ali and Rachel Millward are local councilors). No matter how democratic a party constitution may be, elected representatives still occupy the key positions of influence, with MPs at the top of the hierarchy. There was a spectacular increase in party membership after Polanski took the reins, from 66,000 in September 2025 to 215,000 by the following spring. However, as the examples of Labour and the Scottish National Party from the last decade