How will the Green Party work with Your Party, the nascent left-wing force currently being set up by Zarah Sultana and Jeremy Corbyn? Following the election of Zack Polanski earlier this week, the Greens have shifted towards the populist left: exactly the territory Your Party hopes to occupy. Will voters be able to tell the two parties apart?
Corbyn thinks so. “We’re different organisations,” he said, when we spoke on Thursday. “Ours is in much more of a socialist direction than the Green Party. The Green Party obviously stands by its name,” he said. Polanski – who spoke to Corbyn over the phone the day before his victory – is more open to working with Your Party than his opponents in the leadership election. “I get on very well with Zack,” Corbyn said, “we will cooperate, we will work together. But we are different.” He added: “He wouldn’t mind me saying that. I wouldn’t mind him saying that about me.”
Though Corbyn maintains that the two parties are distinct from one another, he did not shut down the possibility of the pair working closely together. “At a local level – to give you an example, there was a local council by-election in Tottenham, the Greens put up a very strong candidate. People who now support Your Party were all out campaigning for that Green candidate and he won the election.”
That informal alliances are already forming shows there is a serious possibility both parties will come to a more robust agreement ahead of next year’s local elections, and at the next general election in 2029. But Corbyn’s comments might sit uneasily with some Green Party activists. The memories of 2019 still linger; many Green members felt pushed aside by Labour and seen as the junior electoral partner to Corbynism. Corbyn’s assertion that the two parties are “different” and that Your Party is “in much more of a socialist direction” than the Greens, may not go down well with still-indignant Green Party members.
[See also: Stop trying to make Zack Polanski happen]
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