The Green Party’s shallow revolution Polanski will usher in Farageism

Two weeks ago, at the Green Party conference in Bournemouth, Polanski set out his stall for what he calls “eco-populism”. Climate politics is almost secondary to this vision, with the speech instead resembling a long paean to all the bien-pensant positions of contemporary British radicalism. Privatisation, austerity, Israel — Polanski hit the standard notes of righteous, indignant condemnation. But the Mancunian’s speech, as well as his subsequent viral positioning, has revealed a new purpose to his brand of Green politics: he is staking his claim not merely as the spokesperson of environmentalism, but of the whole British Left.

In small “c” conservative Britain — until recently a beacon of political stability, its majoritarian voting system shoring up a stable two-party system — the Greens were always something of an oddity. In the national imagination, the party was long held as the natural political home of England’s eccentrics. David Icke was once its most eloquent spokesperson, while its supporters were a prickly thicket of New Age mavericks, vegan allotment-tenders, long-haired CNDers, and middle-class utopians talking earnestly about “the Gaia hypothesis”.

But a shift has taken place. As far back as the 2000s, the disappointments of New Labour led some of Blair’s Left-liberal voters to seek out supposedly kinder political pastures. Under Caroline Lucas, the Greens positioned themselves as a more professionalised outfit, the paragons of a woolly but more robust progressivism. These efforts paid off, with the Greens securing their first MP in 2010 and turning Brighton into their very own citadel of social liberalism.

Since then, the Brexit conflagration has accelerated the realignment of our politics, melting our once-solid class-based voter blocs into air. Old divides have been smashed apart and remade, while Britain’s class system, and related debates on the political economy, are increasingly interpreted through the prism of a tribalistic culture war. This is based less on policies or worldviews than on something more immaterial: the stuff of cultural-political signifiers, of semiotic coding, of vibes. Indeed, this vibes-based politics is a symptom of our age, a populist moment intensifying as we approach our third decade of stagnation, and one in which savvy political entrepreneurs can thrive by exploiting voter volatility, omnipresent cynicism and a radical dealignment of party loyalties.

The Greens, in this world of signs and signifiers, are now thoroughly Left-coded. And, of course, they’re middle-class-coded, too: whatever Polanski’s radical rhetoric, old visions of homemade vegan flapjacks and quixotic People’s Vote marches die hard.

A former actor, hypnotist and Lib Dem, Polanski seems to understand the contemporary moment better than most, and he’s set about changing the Green Party vibe, radically. Before he assumed the leadership, the Greens’ vague liberal and ideological quietism allowed them to position themselves as big tent ecologists, appealing to several demographics at once. In 2024, this relative vagueness propelled the party to a record number of seats, winning in trendy Bristol and Brighton, as well as Waveney Valley and North Herefordshire, a pair of constituencies in the formerly True Blue countryside.

These rural seats are not full of right-on “Watermelon” radicals: green on the outside and red on the inside. Rather, the Greens took the shires by conducting highly localised campaigns blending pro-conservation and anti-development messaging, promoting their Nimby-ish opposition to new housing and (of all things) electricity pylons. Far from attempting to hoover support from a disaffected Left, leaflets were aimed at wealthy, home-owning Boomers who voted for David Cameron, love Countryfile, and care as much for saving barn owls as they do about actually achieving net zero.

All this stands in contrast to the projection of Green politics in their urban redoubts. Here, the Millennial-graduate laptop class occupies overpriced coffeeshops in gentrifying, multicultural enclaves, and they have swallowed the new religion of Gaza, Greta and gender politics wholesale. This is a Green vibe far more congruent with Polanski’s new vision of “eco-populism”, pumped out across social media posts and podcasts with rising and frantic frequency. There are no qualms here about wealth taxes, or open-borders signalling. There’s clear Corbyn-Sultana-adjacency, but without the Trotskyist infighting. Polanski is happy to borrow from other parties too, notably mimicking Reform’s slick, well-produced communications.

In other ways, clearly, the Greens are no fans of the turquoise tide — Polanski has taken to dismissing Nigel Farage as a fascist at any given opportunity. Given these hardening ideological stances, the rural seats won on Nimby, conservationist tickets will inevitably be vulnerable at the next election. For Polanski, the trade-off is that the Greens will likely challenge Labour in far more urban cosmopolitan constituencies — from Bristol and Brighton to London, where the party came second in 18 seats.

As in the Blair era, then, the continued disappointments of Labourism are fuelling the rise of alternatives. Among a certain demographic — some Muslim communities, yes, but also among young, semi-aware scrollers harvesting their geopolitical views from TikTok and Instagram reels — Starmer isn’t merely a let-down: he’s borderline genocidal. He’s implementing “austerity” and he’s refusing to “tax the rich”. He’s pandering to fascism by promising lower net migration, and he’s spreading bigotry by supporting the prioritisation of biological sex over subjective gender identity.

And with Your Party’s launch looking like a damp squib, Polanski is presiding over an explosion in Green membership, doubling their numbers by setting himself up as the polar opposite of Starmer, Farage and “this sort of thing”. Prominent Corbynistas are throwing in their lot with him too. And if those exploding membership figures weren’t enough, YouGov’s national polling has the party on a record 15% support, just five points shy of Labour. There’s every chance, on current trends, that Polanski could seriously challenge and even supplant Labour’s status as the party of the large metropoles.

But where will “eco-populism” leave the British political landscape, especially now those safe two-party certainties feel like a relic of another age? It’s clear that a Green surge would be a disaster for Labour, as it faces losses to the anti-migrant Right in Red Wall marginals on the one hand, and haemorrhages support in ultra-progressive cities on the other.

Any yet Starmer’s losses would not necessarily be Polanski’s gains. In Caerphilly, certainly, the Greens were accused of taking much-needed votes from Plaid Cymru and therefore helping Reform. Their effect nationally will be broadly similar, wrecking Labour’s hopes as they ease the path to a historic majority for insurgent Farageism. That’d be quite an irony, and surely recompense for that one time Nigel voted Green.

Whatever happens in 2029, though, Polanski’s rise is just as important for what it says about the state of progressive ideology in modern Britain. For the Left, coalescing around the Greens would be a final abnegation of their historic mission to represent the labour interest, the voice of working-class people politically. There are working-class Green voters, no doubt, and significant swathes of its city-based electorate struggle in low-paying jobs and live in insecure, rented accommodation. Yet in the Britain of vibes, the party still oozes bourgeois-bohemian signifiers from every pore; materially speaking, it’s Reform leading the way among C2DEs, the skilled and unskilled manual workers in non-degree occupations. Today’s very real working-class revolt is not taking place under a Green banner.

Without any organic connection to the trade-union movement, the Green pivot to an inchoate Left-populism disguises a tendency towards neo-Malthusianism, perhaps even reaction. Rather than a forward march, the abandonment of the traditional labour movement in favour of an eco-populist roadshow led by a former Lib Dem feels like a capitulation, a recognition that the era of a confident Left, forming broad, cross-class coalitions, is over. The rise of Polanski represents a retreat into the comfort zones of what the French economist Thomas Piketty has identified as the Brahmin Left. In the Greens’ warm embrace, progressives will be unburdened by having to deal with the views of the actually existing working class, and having been relegated from any proximity to the levers of state will be able to breezily adopt all manner of high-status positions without conceding to inconvenient reality.

Viewing the decline of mass civic institutions, mass culture and the nation-state, the late Marxist literary critic Fredric Jameson identified a condition of postmodern cultural fragmentation. That cultural fragmentation is complete, and the political arena has been transformed away from its old, 20th-century model. No longer do two great historic monoliths battle for the affections of the median voter in a handful of swing seats. The old institutional power of the Beeb, the Lobby, and the top-down legacy media, with their reasonable tones and cosy fireside chats, has given way to an infinitely disordered information age, one buttressing a political implosion of the electorate into disparate and mutually opposed segments.

Polanski’s Green surge is symptomatic of this broader trend — the splitting and re-splitting of the electorate into hostile tribes in permanent flux. Since Brexit, our political complexion has, paradoxically, become more European, with half-a-dozen parties catering to smaller voter-blocs, vying to be noticed in a saturated attention economy. Secessionists, the eco-Left, and the populist Right, as well as the old liberals, now bustle along with the traditional parties of the centre-right and centre-left, frightened shadows of their former selves. First-past-the-post wasn’t designed for this: but if our creaking electoral institutions are edging towards collapse, that’s also changing how politics ultimately feels. Electoral support, after all, is no longer about triangulation, about broadening a message through moderation, but about sincerity, playing to the base, and never, ever apologising. The old world, in short, is dead, and vibes are in, and the Greens are happy to make organic hay.

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