Voting for the Green Party’s leadership closes today, Saturday 30 August; the winner will be announced next Tuesday. This is a significant moment, as at the next general election it may well fall to the leader of the Green Party to choose not just the fate of the British left but of Britain itself. Analysis seen by the New Statesman has shown that Labour faces greater electoral losses on its left than its right, and it is only to the left, at any rate, that any coalition is conceivable for Starmer’s government. But the two vying contenders for Green leadership have very different visions of how to lead their party and their country, and of how politics can – and should – be transacted in the 21st century. Party insiders – and more importantly, the candidates themselves – realise the gravity of this contest. Has the Green moment finally arrived?
Continuity is offered in the joint ticket of Ellie Chowns and Adrian Ramsay. Both are already MPs and are committed to maintaining what they describe as the party’s “distinct identity”. In recent times this has amounted to a “small is beautiful” conservationism, which some critics would describe as Nimbyism. Deputy leader Zack Polanski represents something more novel. He brands himself as an “eco-populist”, willing to claim new ground with an insurgent approach. And it is not just a matter of style. Perhaps the key question for a Green leader will be whether they are willing to collaborate with Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana’s inchoate left party. Ramsay and Chowns seem to have ruled out an alliance. Polanski is much more open to such a prospect.
The Green Party is not used to kingmaking. The party had humble beginnings: it was founded in 1972 in a pub near Coventry. A conversation sparked by an article in Playboy – which described the catastrophic consequences of simultaneous nature loss and population growth – spawned a desire for a new kind of politics, one rooted in the environmental movement. The People party (an earlier iteration of the Greens) held its first meeting that summer, and won its first council representative in 1976. The party remained a fringe influence well into the 21st century. It took almost 40 years for the party to win an MP: Caroline Lucas claimed Brighton Pavilion in the 2010 election.
2024 was the sea change. The party won four MPs (including Ramsay and Chowns) at the general election, immediately professionalising the Greens as a political force. One year on, and the shallow margins of Labour’s victory suggest that its majority could easily crumble. On issues like Gaza, welfare and immigration, Labour is now historically unpopular, leaving disaffected voters looking around for a political alternative. For party insiders, it is essential for the Greens to fill that role.
“For the Green Party, this election is about so much more than Zack Polanski vs two MPs,” said Steve Jackson, a campaigner with Greens Organise, a volunteer network for Green members which sits on the left of the party. “This election is about the Green Party finally stepping up to its true potential and learning from the failure of green politicians elsewhere in Europe.”
Zack Polanski holds that only a louder, confrontational position can counter the right-wing populism that has thwarted European Greens. In the UK, that means shouting down Nigel Farage. “We know fascism is at our door,” he said, the day before voting closed. He pointed to Farage’s comments about mass deportation and Keir Starmer’s tepid response: “I think lots of people in the country are asking ‘Where are the voices on the left who are willing to put together an argument for migration?’ It’s so important for us to be much bolder in our communication.”
Polanski’s campaign has already given a sense of what this bolder style would look like. At the end of July, he released a video in which, walking moodily along a beach, he delivered a polemic on the small boats crisis, placing the blame for public discontent at the door of British billionaires, rather than the migrants crossing the Channel. “The problem this whole time was the super-rich and their yachts…the same system that is poisoning our rivers is poisoning our minds.”
Chowns and Ramsay are uncomfortable with this tone. In their view, the Greens should build on the work the party has done to build appeal to a broad coalition of voters which culminated in the election of four MPs last year. “Where Zack talks about populism, Adrian and I focus on what it takes to win popularity with a wide range of voters,” Chowns said. “That relates to whether the party should be focusing on appealing to a very passionate but quite narrow section of the population, or whether we recognise that, actually, we have got to have a much broader appeal.”
The seats Chowns and Ramsay won in 2024 were both previously safe Conservative seats. The pair are clearly anxious that the style of leadership Polanski espouses will not sit well with voters in their constituencies. They highlight their ability to win first-past-the-post elections as a crucial strength of their candidacy. “We’re hugely committed to winning far, far more seats and so we are conscious of the risks associated with an approach to political communication that is very attractive to a small proportion of the population but perhaps doesn’t manage to bring everyone along with us,” Chowns told me. Their candidacy is widely viewed as the establishment choice: party grandees such as Lucas and Baroness Jenny Jones have given the pair their backing.
Polanski directly refutes this characterisation of his leadership. “Ellie and Adrian’s argument quite often has been that they’ve got broad appeal and I don’t,” Polanski said. He pointed to a recent poll from Focal Data which found that 38 per cent of Brits would back a Polanski leadership, compared with 20 per cent for Chowns and Ramsay. “It’s fine for a team to say they have a broad appeal, but I think it’s much more important to look at the data and what people actually respond to,” Polanski said.
The prospect of a Polanski leadership has triggered excitement outside the existing Green membership. Several influential former Corbynites joined the Greens explicitly to back Polanski, including the political commentator (and former New Statesman columnist) Grace Blakeley. Many involved in Corbyn’s new party are keen to form a bloc with Polanski. Matt Zarb-Cousin, a former media spokesperson for Corbyn, said “the present leadership [of the Greens] has not connected with people on an emotional level, leaving space for Reform to pick up support from people angry with the status quo.”
He pointed out that a Polanski victory would mean a significant change in tack for the Greens. “Zack will be instrumental in bringing about that shift in the Green Party,” Zarb-Cousin said, “and he is open to working constructively with Corbyn/Sultana to stop Reform – which is essential if environmental, economic and social justice is not to be set back decades.”
The Green membership may not want to seize such an opportunity. Insiders have pointed out that some party veterans are averse to Corbyn. Bitter memories from 2019 linger: some Green members remember informal electoral agreements between the Greens and Labour winding up with Green candidates treated as junior partners, expected to step aside or pick up grunt work for Corbyn’s Labour. But to others, the magnitude of the opportunity, and of the threat posed by a Reform victory, means nothing should be off the table.
“This leadership contest has come at a critical time – the two-party system is on its knees, and the Greens have had election after election with growing success,” Steve Jackson said, “Voters are crying out for something different and looking beyond their traditional habits to provide that alternative. If a new party that shares our goals emerges, then we’ve got to be open to figuring out a way to pool our efforts and take on the establishment – whether it’s Starmer or Farage.”
This is potentially the most significant moment in the Green party’s history. For more than 40 years it has grown from a disparate movement in a pub, to a fringe political movement, to a significant potential force in British politics. Leftists across the West are debating whether to follow the right into populism and win by counter-insurgency, or to hold the line at the status quo and seek victory by the old means. In France, Jean Melenchon’s New Popular Front has shown that a well-coordinated left-wing coalition can be a formidable political force.
A Polanski-Corbyn-Sultana alliance could carry real weight at the 2029 general election. And based on the anecdotal popularity of his campaign (including boosts to the membership numbers of local Green Party branches), Polanski is the clear frontrunner. But the broad, centrist political tradition within the party has not disappeared – “eco-populism” may not be what party members want. Either way, the choice the Green party makes this weekend will not only determine the direction the party itself takes, but the future configuration of the British left.
[See also: Flags and loathing in Birmingham]
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