Greens pull ahead of Labour

And both Labour and the British media are rattled.

In a shock poll, the Green Party under its new leader Zack Polanski has pulled ahead of Labour (just).

According to the pollsters Find Out Now, the Greens are on 15%, the same level as Labour. But as economist James Meadway notes, if you look at the detailed results, the Greens are on 15.31%, compared to 15.23% for Labour.

This is being a bit mischievous, because polling has a margin of error. But the trajectory is clear - the Greens are surging, and Labour is falling back. The Greens are enjoying their best polling in their history. Just 13 months after winning the election, Labour is on its worst polling recorded in the post-war period.

This is a massive political phenomenon - and it is clearly rattling the British media.

Its membership is also soaring - reaching over 115,000 members, having been less than 69,000 members before he took over as leader last month. Thousands are joining each day.

The party’s membership has soared past the Liberal Democrats and is about to eclipse the official Conservative party membership numbers of 120,000, although those figures are likely to be an exaggeration. But whatever the truth, the Greens are on course to have more members than the Conservative Party.

So how is the British media responding? Bear in mind the British media is made up of aggressively partisan political actors. They should be the essential means of dispensing information about what’s going on in the world in order to educate citizens so they can make informed decisions - thus playing a crucial democratic role.

Instead, almost all British newspapers are owned by a handful of extremely rich media moguls who are wedded to an economic order from which they directly profit. They have clear political aims and objectives - in short, they are political campaigners. The BBC, meanwhile, is governed by a Board stuffed with Establishment types - and it is always susceptible to political pressure from the government.

When Polanski won the leadership with 85% of the vote, you might expect the BBC to take an interest. After all, the Greens have 4 MPs, and the BBC gave Nigel Farage’s various outfits massive coverage and a huge platform when they had no MPs at all. Farage owes his rise to the BBC.

But the BBC’s flagship politics show hosted by Laura Kuenssberg refused to give him an interview slot, citing in part the need to cover the antisemitic attack on a Manchester synagogue, even though Polanski is a Jewish Mancunian, and the only Jewish leader of a British political party.

However he did get a slot on BBC Question Time - and he went on the attack over Israel’s genocide and against Reform UK.

He displayed a strategy very different to the Greens’ prior approach - going on the attack and not being afraid of picking fights.

And on Channel 5’s Jeremy Vine Show he was heckled by Carole Malone over taxing the rich and trans rights.

Again, he stood his ground and was direct while staying calm, rather than being slippery and evasive.

This week, the New Statesman’s George Eaton splashed on ‘Labour has a Green problem’. He notes, correctly:

The Greens might have enjoyed their best result at the last election, winning 6.7 per cent of the vote and four seats, but they struggled to exploit the opportunity this presented. During the first year of this parliament – with two little-known leaders – they were more stagnant than insurgent.

But Eaton - who is very well connected with Starmer’s crew, notes the surge in membership and polling, adding:

It’s a challenge that plenty in Labour are taking seriously. “Polanski is a real threat,” says a senior source, warning that the old assumption that “these people have nowhere else to go” no longer holds. No 10 has long believed that the Greens, rather than the faction-riven remains of Corbynism, pose the biggest threat (a prediction that has so far been borne out).

Though the Greens only won four seats in 2024, they finished second to Labour in 39 others across the party’s urban heartlands: London, Manchester, Bristol, Sheffield and Norwich. Here, like Charles Kennedy’s Lib Dems in the New Labour era, they intend to outflank the government from the left.

Starmer’s team had banked on being able to bury the left without any electoral consequences. Instead, they thought they’d just have to compete with Reform UK - which is where they’re comfortable, because they see the anti-migrant right as politically legitimate. This is now how they view the left, to put it bluntly.

There’s been a whole series of hit pieces on Polanski. ‘Polanski is talking nonsense about wealth taxes’ bellows the hard-right Spectator magazine in a piece written by Matthew Bowles from the Prosperity Institute, which was founded by the Dubai-based investment firm the Legatum Institute.

It’s worth noting that a team of accountants, economists, experts put together a very detailed plan for a wealth tax back in 2020. The fact that the nation’s wealth is sucked into the bank accounts of so few is clearly a huge crisis facing our country.

The Spectator clearly have something of a crush on Polanski. Another piece is headlined ‘The truth about the Green party’s booming membership’. The gist of this piece is that 110,000 members might sound like a lot but it’s only a tiny proportion of the population. Well, obviously - the vast majority of people don’t join political parties.

But we do know that the surge in membership of Labour under Jeremy Corbyn had everything to do with the party gaining 40% of the vote in 2017 - two points behind the Tories. Not enough to win, of course, but a big jump from a defeat just two years earlier where the party scraped 30%.

And in the current political climate, where voters’ loyalties are split in lots of different directions, the realistic objective is not to win 40% of the vote or anything like that.

The Telegraph in particular cannot stop attacking Polanski. “The Green Party’s woke new leader is even more deluded than we thought,” bellows one headline.

“The Green Party conference captured everything wrong with the modern hard-Left,” bellows another. “The Greens say they’ve got a plan to stop the boats. Unfortunately, it’s barking mad” bellows yet another. “There is a terrible creeping threat to our society, but it is not Reform”, is another Telegraph headline over a picture of the terrifying bogeyman of Zack Polanski.

These are early days, and it’s not clear how the party due to be launched by Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana factors into all of this. That hasn’t been going well, if we are honest, and the hope has to be that it gets its act together and forms a united front with the Greens. Whatever happens, both Corbyn and Sultana clearly have very important roles to play in the left’s future, as do those they’ve inspired to support their new initiative.

But right now, it is very heartening to see Zack Polanski causing waves. Our national political conversation has been bleak and depressing beyond words - it’s been about bashing migrants and refugees and minorities.

But actually there’s a huge number of people in Britain who want an alternative - they want public ownership of our utilities and services, instead of having them run as cashcows for profiteers. They want the rich to pay a fair amount of tax, so we can invest in our crumbling society. They don’t want to punish young people with debt for daring to dream of a university education from which we all benefit. They want workers to have proper rights and security. They want a green industrial policy that tackles the climate emergency while creating well-paid secure jobs, improving living standards and public health. They want to solve our housing crisis with top quality public housing, rather than lining the pockets of property developers. They want a foreign policy based on peace and security, rather than, say arming a genocide.

The problem that we’ve had is that we’ve lacked leadership. That’s now changing - and hopefully that means the political conversation will change, too.