In the wake of the May elections in England and Wales, HANNAH SELL assesses the significance of the Greens’ ballot box surge and their claims to be a ‘workers’ party’.
The May 2026 elections were a turning point in Britain. The votes of both Labour and the Tory party collapsed; ending the duopoly via which capitalism has ruled for the best part of a century. The right-wing populists of Reform surged, and so did the Greens. Under their new ‘eco-populist’ leader, Zack Polanski, the Greens won an average of 17% of the vote across English local authorities, resulting in 441 extra councillors and winning control of five new councils. In Wales the Green vote share was a more modest 8% because Plaid Cymru were seen by most voters as the more effective way to protest against Labour and block Reform. Nonetheless, in these elections the Greens were the main left alternative to the establishment parties and to Reform. Meanwhile, Green Party membership has soared to 230,000.
That was not pre-ordained. Zack Polanski took office in September 2025 having won the party’s leadership with just 20,441 votes, 84% of the votes cast. Just a few weeks before more than 800,000 people – undoubtedly including many who later joined the Greens – had signed up to show their support for a new party being founded by independent left MPs Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana. The potential was clear for a mass workers’ party to develop. Unfortunately, however, the mistaken approach of its leadership – top-down, controlling, and without any serious orientation to the trade unions – means that, while what became Your Party still exists, it has not met its potential. In the English local elections, Your Party only contested 20 out of the 5,000 seats available. In Wales it did not stand at all. Nonetheless, various brands of ‘left independents’, some of which were backed by Your Party, got over 400,000 votes and 101 councillors elected. On a national basis, however, these disparate local candidates were not able to make an impact, leaving the Greens as the obvious ‘anti-austerity, anti-war and left’ choice.
The Greens now lead additional councils in Hackney, Waltham Forest, Lewisham, Norwich and Hastings which are a potential bridgehead in the struggle against local authority austerity. Combined with the size of their vote, it is therefore inevitable that, as debate continues in the trade unions on how the workers’ movement could have a political voice, some trade unionists are wondering if the Greens are the answer.
Metamorphosis?
The Greens origins do not point towards that. They began in 1973 as the PEOPLE Party, founded by a group of business people and focused on the question of ‘overpopulation’. Soon afterwards multi-millionaire financier Edward Goldsmith joined and was a leading figure in the party throughout the 1970s, when it became known as the Ecology Party. In more recent history the Greens have been seen as more ‘left wing’ but the party has never been socialist or based on the working class. During the capitalists’ battle to remove Corbyn as Labour leader the Green’s tops often showed the limits to their radicalism. The ‘emergency cabinet of national unity to stop a no-deal Brexit’ proposed by Caroline Lucas, then the sole Green MP, was one example. It involved women from all parties, including Labour’s right, but not a single person from the pro-Corbyn left of the party.
Nor has Zack Polanski got a left background. In 2015, the same year that an anti-austerity surge was reflected in Jeremy Corbyn’s election as Labour leader, Polanski joined the Liberal Democrats, which only five years before had been in coalition with the Tories. Then in 2017, when Corbyn’s anti-austerity manifesto won an extra 3.5 million votes for Labour in the general election, he moved from the Liberal Democrats to the Greens. But neither Polanski’s personal record, nor the party’s history as a pro-capitalist, predominantly middle-class party, automatically determines its future. After all hundreds of thousands of predominantly left-wing people have joined the Greens in the last few months, looking to pick it up and use it in the struggle against austerity.
There are numerous examples in history of parties changing their class character under the impact of great events. Dominant are examples of the capitalist class grabbing hold of parties and remaking them in their interests. In Britain the Labour Party was transformed under Tony Blair into a reliable instrument via which the capitalists could rule. Prior to that it had been a ‘capitalist workers’ party’ which, while it had a leadership which was not prepared to break with capitalism, nonetheless had a working-class socialist base which was able to pressurise the leadership via the party’s democratic structures. Under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership there was an opportunity for the working class to wrest the Labour Party back, but that was missed, and the capitalist class ruthlessly gained a surer grip on Labour than ever before.
But there have also been instances of capitalist parties being transformed into workers’ parties. Today the Greek party PASOK gets referred to as the foremost example of a party equivalent to Labour in Britain being shattered as a result of implementing austerity. The phrase ‘Pasokification’ has become a way of describing the process currently being suffered by Labour. However, the origins of PASOK tell an opposite story. It was founded in 1974 as a socialist party, with a left programme, but it evolved around the figure of Andreas Papandreou who came from a liberal capitalist party, the Centre Union. Similarly, although on a smaller scale, in Chile MAPU was a radical left party which participated in Allende’s left Popular Unity government from 1970 to 1973, but it came from a split from the capitalist Christian Democratic Party.
Under the pressure of capitalist crisis and class struggle all kinds of metamorphoses can take place in the class character of parties. Does this mean that transforming the Greens into a workers’ party offers a route to workers in Britain having their own political voice? After all, on May Day 2026 the Greens declared that they are a ‘workers’ party’. The workers’ charter that they launched includes pledges which trade unionists would welcome, such as scrapping all anti-trade union laws introduced since 1979, combined with introducing “strong legal rights to strike, picket and protest, including solidarity action and action for political and social causes”. But the character of a party is determined by more than declarations.
Tested in power
The first test for how Zack Polanski’s Green Party could evolve will be where it is already in power, at local council level. Prior to the 2026 local elections the Greens did not use their 800-plus councillors to spearhead the struggle against local authority austerity. On the contrary, last year they were part of 41 council administrations, in coalition with everyone except Reform, including Tories, Labour and Liberal Democrats. Nor, so far, have post-election developments pointed to a change in approach. In Worcestershire County Council a Green is now council leader, at the head of a coalition with Liberal Democrats and Tories.
The justification given for this is the need to ‘stop Reform’, but this is entirely false. The increase in Reform’s vote, above all else, is an expression of huge anger at all the capitalist politicians after decades of, at best, stagnating living standards. Zack Polanski has recognised this. In his speech to the 2025 Green Party conference for example, he talked about how he went to Clacton, parliamentary seat of Reform leader Nigel Farage, and talked to people on the streets. “It was the same story over and over again”, he reported, “years of neglect, total detachment from the people actually making decisions. A feeling that there’s just not a future to get behind. Well, that’s where we come in”. But how does forming a coalition with the politicians voters rightly blame for ‘years of neglect’ help the situation? It may, for now, keep Reform out of power, but it also ties the Greens together with the politicians of the capitalist establishment, rather than staying outside and campaigning against all cuts and council tax rises; a stance that could actually start to win over some Reform voters.
Nor is it only in areas where Reform is a threat that the Greens have shown themselves willing to prop up capitalist parties. In Newham, East London, where Reform have not got a single councillor, Labour were reduced to 26 councillors in May 2026, while the Newham Independents – backed by Your Party – won 24 and the Greens 16. Yet instead of forming an anti-austerity coalition with the Newham Independents, the Greens have so far acted to prop up a minority Labour administration.
This approach is of a piece with the role Green Parties have played as junior partners in national governments in other countries. Across the EU, in this decade alone, Greens have been or are part of national governments in Belgium, Finland, Germany, Ireland, Latvia, Luxembourg, Poland and Sweden. In addition, the Greens in Scotland were in a governing coalition with the Scottish National Party from 2021 to 2024. As government ministers they have been responsible for implementing austerity and attacks on the working class.
Only the socially conservative Latvian Green Party, however, has been expelled from the European Greens. The issue has not even been raised about the Green Party in Belgium, where all three Belgian national trade union federations walked out in a general strike in May this year against cuts to public sector pensions and overtime pay plus other austerity measures. Yet the deputy prime minister and minister for the civil service and public enterprises overseeing the attacks is a Green. Nor has there been any proposal by the European Greens to sanction the German Greens for participating in the ‘traffic light coalition’ government from 2021-2024 which implemented austerity, ramped up military spending, and repressed pro-Palestine demonstrations. They were, however, punished by the German electorate, losing a million votes. Has Zack Polanski’s anti-austerity stance ever led him to criticise the crimes of other Green Parties? Yet if the Greens in England and Wales take the same approach as their European sister parties their claim to oppose austerity will be utterly discredited.
Greens Organise against austerity
There is another trend within the Green Party, however. Before the election over 900 Green Party candidates signed a ‘pledge to oppose austerity in local government’ put forward by the ‘Greens Organise’ group. They pledged to “hold an emergency summit to make our communities heard” involving “willing councillors, MPs, community organisations and trade unions to make the unmet needs of residents visible and build a cross-party, mass campaign to restore local government funding”. They also promised to “open the books on council spending, and pursue innovative revenue-raising mechanisms as well as reserves and borrowing powers”.
In most of the councils where the Greens have just won majorities a large proportion of councillors signed this pledge. In Lewisham a majority, 23 of 40 councillors, plus the Mayor, did so. In Hackney the Mayor signed along with a large minority of the Green councillors; 17 out of 42. In Waltham Forest the figure is 15 out of 31. The question now is how they organise and act to turn their pledges into reality.
On 7 May voters made their rejection of both Labour and Tory austerity very clear. The Labour government is reeling under the impact of voters anger. Andy Burnham, fighting to get re-elected to parliament in order to stand for Labour leader, is having to partially articulate the reality of working-class peoples’ lives under this government. He has talked about the need for Labour to represent the working class, how councils have been “hollowed out” and how mass council housebuilding is needed. If Green councils were to harness the mood that Burnham has no alternative but to faintly echo, they would find themselves at the head of a powerful movement against New Labour austerity, which could defeat this incredibly weak, fracturing government.
How could that be achieved? The starting point would be a clear commitment of Green-led councils not to implement any more cuts to council services, jobs, pay or conditions, or increases in council tax. Despite pressure to do so, Zack Polanski and the leadership of the Greens have not committed to Green councillors voting against all cuts. When publicly asked about the issue by a Socialist Students member at the World Transformed event in Manchester last October, Polanski replied that “if councils do no-cuts budgets” then “they effectively down tools, and then the government comes in and then do all the cuts anyway”. Unfortunately, this is a mistaken understanding of the vital question of no-cuts budgets. Greens Organise opening their emergency summit to combative trade union representatives would be an important step to drawing correct conclusions on this issue. ‘No cuts’ budgets are the agreed policy of all three of the major unions to organise council workers: Unite, Unison and GMB.
This is not referenced, unfortunately, in the 2024 Association of Green Councillors and the Green Party Trade Union Group’s joint statement ‘Drawing a Line: How Green Councillors can work with trade unions to oppose cuts and get a better deal for workers’. The paper talks about pushing “national policy campaigns that make the connection between council cuts and central government funding choices”, working with trade unions, and encouraging “frank and public conversations about the extent of the local government funding crisis, what its roots are, the constraints the council is under, and what fundamental change is required to resolve it”. It discounts, however, any possibility of refusing to implement cuts.
Lessons of Liverpool
Under the headline ‘contesting the cuts’, the Green councillors briefing gives only one example of doing so, in order to write off the prospect of taking the same path. No council, it says, “has attempted what Liverpool’s Militant Tendency tried in the 1980s, with the slogan ‘better to break the law than to break the poor’. Setting an illegal budget today would simply trigger the Secretary of State to step in and remove the council from control”. Almost the only thing they get right is that it was us, the Militant, now called the Socialist Party, who led that struggle. Yet our proposal today, to implement the policy of local government trade unions, by councils using reserves and borrowing powers to set a ‘balanced’ no-cuts budget, while building a campaign to demand extra resources from central government, does not even get a mention.
It is true that the law has changed since the Labour council in Liverpool took on and defeated Thatcher. Mainly this makes a local authority fightback easier, rather than otherwise. The power of surcharge, for example, which was used against the Liverpool councillors in the 1980s – not for setting an ‘illegal budget’ but, for three months, not setting a budget at all – was abolished in 2000. Nor is there any prospect of imprisonment which the Poplar councillors, the original authors of the slogan ‘better to break the law than break the poor’, faced in 1921.
Yes, the government has reserve powers to appoint commissioners, but this weak Labour government would not find it easy to win popular support for sending in commissioners against Green councils who had refused to implement cuts to services but instead had taken measures to meet the needs of their local communities. In any elections taking place in such circumstances new Green councillors would be elected with landslide victories.
There is a reason that, more than four decades on, the battle of Liverpool City Council is referenced in virtually every discussion on combating local authority austerity. It is because Liverpool, with our party playing a leading role, dared to fight, and it won. The council mobilised the working class of the city, including in strike action and mass demonstrations, to demand the money stolen from it by the Thatcher government. It succeeded in forcing an extra £60 million from the ‘Iron Lady’ (over £200 million in today’s values). With this more council houses were built than in all other local councils put together between 1983 and 1987. That was on top of the nursery classes, job creation and sports centres that were opened.
Liverpool fought alone, attacked by the Labour leadership and with every other Labour council except Lambeth abandoning the field. That is why eventually, in 1987, Thatcher’s District Auditor was able to surcharge the 47 councillors and removed them from office. However, contrary to the slanders, the Militant-led council did not leave Liverpool with huge debts. In fact, the debt per head of Liverpool’s population was roughly the same as all other major authorities in England and Wales. At the same time, the swing to Labour in the 1987 general election in Liverpool would have put Labour leader Neil Kinnock into Downing Street, had it been repeated on a national scale.
Back in 1921 the Poplar councillors also won a victory. As the movement in support of the jailed councillors grew, the government rushed through legislation to ‘equalise the rates’ across London boroughs in just two days, and the councillors were released from prison to huge celebrations after six weeks. Instead of discounting past experiences, Green Party councillors who want to fight should recognise that the capitalist establishment attempt to discredit successful struggles for a reason, and instead turn to study them in order to learn the lessons for the battles we face today.
Councils have power
There is another lesson of Liverpool that is relevant for the Greens Organise councillors today. Only eleven of the ‘47’ Liverpool councillors were supporters of Militant, and yet they were able to play a decisive role in leading the battle that ensued. The Greens Organise councillors are a majority in Lewisham, and far larger minorities in Waltham Forest and Hackney than Militant was in Liverpool.
Councils have power. Collectively they are responsible for more than a fifth of spending in public services. The Greens’ paper references the dangers of councils going ‘bankrupt’, but this is another misconception. Councils cannot go bust in the same way a private company can. Only an act of parliament can dissolve a local authority and therefore council finances are implicitly underwritten by central government. Yes that legally obligates local authorities to set a ‘balanced budget’ each year, but this leaves a lot of room for councillors to use borrowing capacity and council reserves to set ‘balanced budgets’ while they campaign for more money from central government.
If the summit proposed by Greens Organise agreed a joint stand of that character it would have a seismic effect. Look at how this government has been forced to retreat on the winter fuel payments and partially on cuts to disability benefits as a result of pressure from below, even without that pressure being organised. How can it be concluded that Green councils can do nothing beyond “frank conversations”?
Of course, frank conversations have their place. It is potentially positive, for example, that the Bristol Green Party, in the leadership of the council, have agreed to organise joint public meetings with Bristol Trades Council to consult the people of the city about what services they need. However, unfortunately, last year the Bristol Green-led council made £51 million of cuts. A ‘frank conversation’ that is in reality an attempt to put responsibility on the electorate for choosing which cuts to make is a divisive tactic used by Labour councils up and down the country. If, on the other hand, the Bristol Greens commit to no cuts next year, and use the consultation to draw up a programme for what is needed and start to unify and mobilise the Bristol working class to fight for it, that would be a ‘frank conversation’ worth having.
Beyond the council chambers
If a section of Green councillors were to throw their weight into the struggle against local authority austerity it would certainly be a significant step forward. There are many other aspects, however, which the workers’ movement will need to address when assessing the Green’s character and role in the struggle. This includes the party’s democratic structure.
The Green’s national conference meets at least once a year, usually twice. However, it is not delegate based and instead every member of the party is able – theoretically at least – to participate and vote online. Leadership bodies are also elected by the whole membership in postal or online ballots.
This appears ultra-democratic but in fact, as recent experience in Your Party has demonstrated, repeating the mistakes of other formations internationally like Podemos in Spain, this kind of ‘horizontalist’ democracy leaves decision-making in the hands of the leadership, with very limited means to hold them to account. Representative democracy, with units of the party electing delegates to a national conference, has far more potential for real debate and decision-making on the issues facing the party. In addition, there are no means in the national constitution to hold MPs or local councillors to account for their actions. This may be better in some areas, as local branches of the Green Party are given autonomy to write their own constitution; but this provision is also used to argue that no national directives not possible, on, for example, councillors refusing to implement cuts.
If a trade union was to affiliate to the Greens it would have no say in the party’s decision making. True, there is a trade union liaison committee, but it is elected by the whole membership at the national conference, and is a sub-committee of the national council. Its role is to “strengthen the party’s work with the trade union movement” rather than to represent the workers’ movement interests. For trade unionists debating whether to stop funding Labour, a party originally built by the trade unions in which they now have no influence, this is a crucial question.
It is also important in a broader sense. We live in a class society. The ruling capitalist class has numerous – mainly very unpopular – parties which represent their interests, while the working-class majority has none. The capitalist class will fight tooth and nail to maintain that situation. While some trade unionists might be eyeing up the Greens as a potential representative of their interests, it would be naïve to imagine that the capitalist class is not also considering how best to harness the Green surge. The record of the Greens in government in other countries, and to date in local councils here, will give them a certain confidence that Greens would accept the constraints of the capitalist system and represent their interests in a future coalition government with Labour and the Liberal Democrats, for example.
Of course, Labour governments, including in the pre-Blair past when it was still a capitalist-workers’ party, also ultimately did the bidding of the capitalist class. Nonetheless, Labour then was never a reliable instrument for them because of the weight of the trade unions inside the party. In 1931, for example, the capitalist class were demanding that the second Labour government implement savage austerity. A narrow majority of the cabinet were willing, but the pressure of the trade union movement meant that the government could not carry it through, and the capitalists had to resort to a national government.
Today we are in an era when the capitalist class demands relentless austerity. It is more akin to the inter-war period than anything we have faced since. Any party that is genuinely anti-austerity will be in a no-holds barred struggle with the capitalist class. A democratic structure, within which trade unions have a real say in decision making, will be vital to withstanding that pressure.
While trade unions, as workers’ organisations with over 6.5 million members, are key, a Green Party that was acting to bring together the different struggles against capitalist austerity would also need to make room in its structure for other mass organisations that will develop in struggle, such as renters’ unions, Black Lives Matter organisations, or youth movements. The current Green Party structure is not an ‘umbrella’ which attempts to bring different austerity forces together; dual membership is prohibited, for example.
What programme?
Being a workers’ party would not only require a charter taking up immediate workplace issues, but also a broader programme in the interests of the working-class. Yet this year’s Green Spring conference passed a motion which abandoned their previous support for the nationalisation of the major energy companies. Zack Polanski, in fact, only calls for nationalisation of water companies. He proposes to prevent household energy bills rising beyond the current price cap, not by nationalisation, but by setting aside £8.4 billion to subsidise the major energy companies. This can barely be described as Corbynism-lite, and certainly doesn’t match up to the left-wing views of the vast majority of new Green Party members.
The development of workers’ parties has always been linked to the struggle for socialism. Even if only in broad terms, such parties have recognised that we live in a class society and, reflecting the social, collective nature of the position of the working class in producing the goods and services for society to function, have seen their role as organising the working class to fight for socialist change. This approach still remains enshrined in the constitutions of many trade unions. Unite, for example, promises “to promote a socialist vision”, while the RMT agrees to “work for the supersession of the capitalist system by a socialistic order of society”.
The Labour Party had ‘Clause IV Part IV’ of its constitution until it was removed under Tony Blair, which summed up the party as standing for socialism and sought “to secure for the workers by hand or by brain the full fruits of their industry and the most equitable distribution thereof that may be possible upon the basis of the common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange”. The equivalent for the Green Party is called ‘our core values’, and talks about the need for social and environmental justice, but it does not even once mention capitalism, socialism or the working class.
What international?
To be a workers’ party would also require being part of a workers’ international, or if none yet exists, striving to create one. When members of the Green Party in England and Wales are criticised for the woeful record of their European sister parties participating in capitalist governments the excuse is often made that all Green Parties are independent of each other. This is an evasion – how can any party seriously engaged in the global fight to halt climate change, for example, simply ignore political developments because they are taking place in a different country?
It is also not accurate. The European Green Parties do coordinate together, including by making joint statements. For example, in May of this year the European Greens made a call for Britain to rejoin the EU given “the political and economic failure” of Brexit. Delegates from 30 Green parties agreed the text, including representatives of the Green Party in England and Wales. No points were made on the basis on which Britain should argue for re-entry.
Zack Polanski has stated that he remains firmly pro-EU, but “now understands why some on the left are critical of it”. So why didn’t he insist that this was reflected in the Greens appeal? If he had argued that a Green government in Britain would insist on the renegotiation of all anti-working class treaty provisions as a condition for re-entering, and calling on workers’ across the EU to support that stance, it would have been a different question.
Of course, there would be no prospect of the 30 European Green parties, many with a record of acting against the working class in government, signing up to such an approach. This one incidence alone illustrates how, if it was serious about becoming a workers’ party, the Greens in England and Wales would have to start building a new international. Capitalism has always been a global system and the struggle to overthrow therefore also needs to be international. Today, faced with climate crisis, the need to fight for global change could not be clearer.
In conclusion, the votes gained by the Greens are an indication of the appetite for a new workers’ party, as is their claim to be such a party. However, while elements of the Green Party, if they are prepared to seriously engage in the struggle against austerity, might become part of the process of the working class in Britain creating its own political voice, simply backing the Green Party as it currently exists would not be a step forward.