After occupying a supporting role over the past five years, the radical left of British politics has been suddenly thrust into the spotlight. For a while, attention has largely focused on Zack Polanski, the “eco-populist” vying to be elected leader of the Green Party in September. (He currently stands as the favourite.) An influx of interviews, clever comms and his outgoing personality took Polanski from a relative unknown to being anointed by some as the leader of the modern left-in-waiting.
Late last Thursday evening (July 3), everything changed. After months of speculation, the British left’s worst-kept secret was abruptly made official: Zara Sultana MP announced that she would resign from Labour and start a new, left-wing party alongside former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn. (Sultana was suspended from Labour last July after voting against the two-child benefit cap.) There are still a lot of questions to be answered of this new left alliance: most pertinent of all concerning Corbyn – who was reportedly “furious and bewildered” about the sudden announcement – and his involvement.
“Join us. The time is now,” Sultana urged in her declaration on X. Could this mean that Polanski and the Green party’s riding of the new-left alternative wave is over?
It could’ve turned out so differently. Another whisper doing the rounds at the same time as the Sultana-Corbyn party was the former having discussions with Polanski and potentially defecting to the Greens. “I have thought about rolling out the red carpet for people like Zarah Sultana,” Polanski told my colleague Megan Kenyon in May. Talks happened, but the prospect of joining the Greens back in the spring never truly appealed to Sultana.
Nor, does it seem, from her summer announcement, that Sultana is interested in any collaboration or pact with Polanski and his party. “Billionaires already have three parties fighting for them. It’s time the rest of us had one,” Sultana’s statement read. It’s very obviously a dig at the interests of Labour, the Conservatives and Lib Dems – but also a more implicit slight on the Green Party and its current (and future) ability to advance a progressive agenda. Despite getting rebuked by Sultana, Polanski’s – public – reaction to the new party-slash-rival is one of a diplomat: “Anyone who wants to take on the Tories, Reform and this failing Labour government is a friend of mine. Looking forward to seeing what this looks like in practice.”
The left, in pursuit of its goals, often meets a persistent, often impenetrable force: the left. Left-on-left infighting isn’t new, but should history repeat itself in today’s political climate, it could detract from the shared aim of both Sultana and the Greens: to stop Nigel Farage’s Reform Party and its lead in the polls. Exclusive polling shared with the New Statesman by More in Common found that a “new Corbyn-led party” would receive 10 per cent of votes if an election was held today. Rather than harm, this analysis suggests, it would bolster Reform’s lead in the polls (currently 27 per cent) by splitting the “left” vote by cutting Labour’s share by three points (from 23 per cent) and the Greens by four (from 9 per cent). The hard-yards earned by the Greens over the past year – from quadrupling its Parliamentary representation at last year’s election, to building on its presence in regional government in May’s local elections – could be lost with the inception of a new Sultana-Corbyn led party.
Still, all hope is not lost for the Greens. Especially for Polanski: membership of the Green Party has reportedly risen at least 8 per cent since May (when he launched his leadership bid), in what some have described as a “Polanski surge”. The findings from Novara Media suggest that the party (which has not officially declared its latest figures) has at least 65,000 members, a smidge behind its 2015 peak of 67,000.
If a week’s a long time in politics, then a year is a lifetime. When I followed the outgoing Green co-leader Carla Denyer on the campaign trail in Bristol last year, she told me that the overwhelming priority for the party, nationally, was to highlight its own merits – rather than just being seen as the logical place for Corbynistas to go following Labour’s “return to form” towards the centre of British politics. She raised the 2019 election, when she missed out on the Bristol seat she later won in 2024. The difficulty wasn’t in winning the argument, Denyer told me, but of national circumstances: “The challenge [in 2019] was that constituents wanted the Conservatives out, and they felt that they had to vote Labour to do that. We had people saying: ‘We agree with you more… [but we] have to vote Labour this time.’”
With Reform currently leading the polls as it is, perhaps history may repeat itself – only with the Tories being recast by Farage and Reform. That will be a challenge the Greens, a Sultana-Corbyn party and indeed Labour will have to contend with. But an ever more divided left could make that challenge extremely difficult to overcome.
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