It isn’t the most fitting of metaphors, but Zack Polanski may have just shot Jeremy Corbyn’s fox. While “Your Party” is yet to decide on its name, its leader and its policies, the Greens have been welcoming thousands of new members and now claim to have overtaken the Liberal Democrats. What’s more, the Green conference in Bournemouth at the weekend confirmed the party’s decisive shift to Left.

For instance, the party now wants to ban landlords, which prompts the question of how such a policy might be achieved. As the BBC report drily notes, “there are currently no costings for the plans.” Meanwhile, on trans issues, the Greens highlighted their inclusivity by last week banning the Green Women’s Declaration — a group which advocates for sex-based rights for women — from the party’s conference.

Some striking ideas have emerged on foreign policy, such as a motion passed — and supported by Polanski — calling for the Israeli Defense Forces to be proscribed as a terrorist organisation. The Greens are also demanding an apology for the 1917 Balfour Declaration, in which the British Government expressed its support for a Jewish homeland. Would Polanski also insist that the United Nations apologises for recognising Israel as a sovereign state in 1948?

Far from seeking to broaden the Green Party’s appeal, the new leadership is moving aggressively to consolidate the most Left-wing portion of the electorate. Whereas Polanski was once content to align himself with Your Party, he’s now parking his tanks on Corbyn’s allotment, a strategy which appears to be working. Recent polling from JL Partners, Opinium, Ipsos and others all show significant boosts for the Greens, putting the party’s support in the 9-12% range. That’s a substantial improvement on the 6.4% they won in last year’s general election.

However, it’s worth noting that if pollsters specifically mention “Your Party” as an option then the Green vote slips back down into single figures. And that, of course, is before the publicity likely to surround Your Party’s belated founding conference later this autumn.

A second fly in the ointment is that even if Polanski does outflank Corbyn to consolidate the Left-wing vote, 9-12% of the electorate isn’t enough to net the Greens many more seats than their current tally of four. With the exception of political microclimates such as Bristol and Brighton, the Green vote isn’t sufficiently concentrated to overcome the hurdle of First Past the Post.

To become a significant parliamentary presence, the Left needs to mobilise the Muslim vote. According to 2021 census figures, there are 30 constituencies where the Muslim share of the population is over 25% — which, considering our currently fractured politics, could provide the basis for a genuine breakthrough.

The key question is whether an insistently progressive party like Polanski’s Greens can make the necessary connection. In France, Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s La France Insoumise has successfully forged a political alliance between the secular Left and Muslim voters. Yet French Muslim culture, with its predominantly North African roots, is distinct from the Pakistani and Bangladeshi heritage of most Muslims in the UK.

Following last year’s general election, Corbyn and his Muslim independent allies have established a formula for uniting the secular and Muslim Left in a British context. Because he knows where the votes are, Corbyn clearly intends to build Your Party around this red-green alliance (red for socialism and green for political Islam). It would, therefore, be a chromatic irony if the leader of the Green Party made off with the red half of Corbyn’s coalition.

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Peter Franklin is Associate Editor of UnHerd. He was previously a policy advisor and speechwriter on environmental and social issues.

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