A leadership election is under way in the Green Party between the incumbent shared leadership of two Green MPs Adrian Ramsay and Ellie Chowns (who is replacing the Bristol MP Carla Denyer on the ticket) and Zack Polanski, currently the deputy leader of the Green Party and a member of the London Assembly since 2021.
Polanski is standing for leader as an ‘eco-populist’, wanting to say to the millions of people who have supported Labour in the past, “you’re not leaving the Labour Party. The Labour party has left you”.
“People are done with the two old parties and we’re in this dangerous moment where Nigel Farage is absolutely ready to fill that vacuum”, he told The Guardian newspaper when announcing his leadership bid in May. The Greens won four MPs in the 2024 general election, Reform won five. At the 2025 local elections, the Greens won an additional 86 seats, Reform won 677. ‘Eco-populist’ Polanski thinks that the Greens can get in on the electoral success of right-populist Farage.
The gaping political vacuum is blatantly staring everyone in the face. It is consequence of crumbling support for Labour and the Tories, and a product of British capitalism’s crisis. In the BBC’s analysis of the 2025 local elections – extrapolated to take into account those who couldn’t vote in England, Scotland and Wales – the votes for the Labour/Tory ‘duopoly’ collapsed to 35%. The 57.4% at the 2024 general election was already the lowest since the end of the first world war.
The process of duopoly disintegration has been taking place for decades, declining from the two-party peak of 1951 when it had 96.8% of the vote. It accelerated through the process of Tony Blair’s counterrevolution to transform Labour into an out-and-out capitalist party, no longer with a mass working-class base able to exercise its democratic influence. But it was cut across by the emergence of Jeremy Corbyn as Labour Party leader in 2015.
Speaking minutes after the 2024 general election exit poll announcement on the BBC which revealed the Tories being smashed, right-wing Brexiteer Steve Baker acknowledged that the Tory party had only managed to hold itself together for so long to avoid a Jeremy Corbyn government.
In fact, ahead of Corbyn’s Labour leadership election in summer 2015, there had been a modest ‘Green surge’. Thousands of mostly young people joined the Greens, furious at the Tory/Lib-Dem coalition government austerity and unenthused by Ed Miliband’s Labour leadership. But not Zack Polanski. In spring 2015 he was standing as a local council candidate for the Liberal Democrats, at the time of their about to be ousted coalition government with the Tories.
Almost one in ten of those who voted in Corbyn’s first Labour leadership contest in 2015 had voted Green in the local elections months before: 214 Green Party candidates applied to vote, although they were rejected by the Labour machine.
But it wasn’t until 2017 in fact that Polanski joined the Greens: precisely at the time when the centre of political battle was in defending Corbyn’s anti-austerity leadership against the Blairites in the Labour Party! The Green Party, meanwhile, stood against Corbyn in Islington North in 2017 – and then again in 2019 and 2024 (when Corbyn stood and was elected as a left-wing independent against Labour). The Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition wrote an open letter to the Greens in April 2023 when Corbyn was finally debarred from being a Labour Party candidate, urging them not to stand if he contested the seat as an independent. They declined, even though the Green Party had been prepared to make an electoral pact with the Lib Dems and Plaid Cymru in 60 seats in 2019.
Despite Zack Polanski’s record however, and the record of the Green Party generally, it is possible that his election challenge will draw an enthusiastic response, particularly from young people looking for an alternative. And it is entirely possible, depending on what steps are made in developments towards a new working-class party, including with the involvement of Corbyn, that the Greens could get more Farage-like electoral successes in the 2026 elections.
However, the Green Party already has 859 councillors. It currently has a majority on Mid Suffolk district council, and is the largest party on Bristol city council with 34 out of 70 councillors, sharing committee chairs with the Lib Dems. The Green Party leads coalitions in twelve local authorities, and is part of coalitions in two dozen more.
What are these elected Green politicians doing to organise the fightback against this Labour government, defending working-class communities from further cuts? They are certainly not using their positions to spearhead a national fightback for funding from Starmer’s government. For example, by adopting the position of Unite the Union and the Unison local government group for councils to set no-cuts budgets, mobilising a campaign to demand central government coughs up.
Polanski himself is a London Assembly member. What struggle has he launched to force the Greater London Authority to address the huge crisis of 366,000 households on council housing waiting lists in London (higher than the population of Leeds)? What is he doing in his position as chair of the London Assembly Fire Committee to reverse austerity cuts on London’s fire services or act now on the thousands of homes still with unsafe cladding?
A visit to his campaign website, backzack.com, offers not much insight into what he stands for, beyond his desire for “bold leadership” to get “millions more votes” for the Greens. The question is what would he and the Greens do with those votes?
When invited to speak at rallies, for example at several ‘We Demand Change’ events organised by the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), he has rightly been challenged by activists from the floor over the Green Party’s record. But it is a mistake to allow him and other Green politicians to go unchallenged from the platform on this as well.
The same mistake was made during the movement against the Iraq war, with the SWP prominent in the Stop The War Coalition leadership, when Liberal Democrat leaders were allowed a platform, unchallenged, to present themselves as being a progressive ‘anti-war’ party.
Polanski should be challenged over what he makes of the £51 million of cuts Bristol city council voted for this year, which has a Green Party council leader, Tony Dyer. In an interview with the BBC last autumn Dyer argued that “the reality is we have to work within the constraints that are placed upon us”, summing up why Green politicians end up carrying out cuts. Without an alternative vision for how society should be organised, they end up defaulting to what the capitalist system demands – that the working class is made to pay for its crisis. That is the experience of Greens when they have been in coalition governments internationally, including, for example, alongside the Scottish National Party in the Scottish parliament.
The gaping political vacuum left by the collapsing duopoly is up for grabs but will only be temporarily filled by forces ‘working within the constraints of capitalism’. The Tories were smashed, and Labour is unprecedentedly unpopular both as a consequence of carrying out austerity in service of the capitalist class.
The working class taking steps towards its own political representation is needed. A layer of radicalised young people and workers may temporarily look to the Greens as a left alternative. But Corbynism showed how even a potential route opening up towards the working class having its own political voice can cut across support for the Greens. Trade unions taking the lead in forming a new working-class party would transform the political landscape, pulling the rug from under the Greens and seriously curtailing Reform’s ability to continue electoral progress.
Josh Asker