Politics is a funny old game, isn’t it. Almost exactly a year ago, Zack Polanski, newly elected leader, was at his first Green Party conference, carrying all before him, and he was reading the funeral rites over the twitching corpse of Keir Starmer’s broken Labour Party. With all that sunny, charismatic, breathless energy he once possessed, it was he who was the great hope for “progressives”.
His confidence was almost suffocating in its intensity: “I said when I won [the leadership] that I didn't want to just be concerned with Labour, I wanted to replace Labour”. To Polanski, Labour was a party “collapsing in in itself”, and he generously offered asylum to its supporters, and he was “very open to a conversation” with “progressive, particularly left-wing” Labour MPs looking to defect because their “home is in the Green Party”.
Back and even more at the round of elections last May, another disaster for Labour, Polanski and many others proclaimed the death of the old party system, and that now the choice facing Britain was between Reform and the Greens. The thing is that no one then was laughing at such prognostications: well, they are laughing at him now.
Rarely has a politician shot up like a rocket only to fall to earth like a rock quite so fast. According to Polanski’s old script he would have easily won a seat such as Holborn and St Pancras. It’s unusual even for London in its demographics – very young, socially mixed, a high proportion of ethnic minorities and renters, lots of the well-educated and students… and Polanski was even a proud Camdenite, almost a local, with a national profile. The Green gods had even arranged for a scorching hot summer to remind the voters about the transcendent issue of climate change; and the situation in Palestine was rarely out of the headlines.
Polanski, in other words, should have walked it. In the days, not long ago, when Labour was routinely suffering 20 percentage points swings against it in by-elections and when the Greens almost effortlessly grabbed Gorton and Denton, one of the party’s safest seats, Polanski would have walked this by-election and arrived in the House of Commons as future of the Left.
In the event, if you combine the vote won by the Greens and an independent Left candidate at the last general election in Holborn with how Polanski polled, the difference was imperceptible – a minimal swing against what is now Andy Burnham’s Labour party. A re-run of 2024 really – but no less momentous for that. No matter how the Greens spin it, this was a crushing defeat for them, and for Polanski personally.
Much of it is his own fault. Always over-excited, he began to believe his own propaganda and though a seat bequeathed by rival a party leader should usually be a tough challenge, this seat was indeed ideal for the Polanski offer. So he wasn’t that brave in taking it on – in reality he had no choice if we wanted to avoid looking like a coward. But as his predecessor Caroline Lucas has pointed out, at that critical point at the Green Party conference when it passed the notorious “Zionism is racism” motion, Zack the brave Green warrior was nowhere to be seen. At that moment he didn’t show up and he didn’t show the leadership he should have done in shielding his party from its own worse instincts. Perhaps he’d not have persuaded the stubborn people in the conference hall; but that he didn’t even try to fight and fight again to save the party he loves was a dereliction of his duty that was to harm no one more than Polanski himself. This morning he is rather shrunken, if not disgraced, figure.
The fact that this debacle was not entirely his own fault is no comfort to Polanski either. Between them, Burnham and Ed Miliband’s shifts in policy on Israel, and Labour’s general tilt to the Left would always have blunted the Greens’ radical appeal – but Burnham is here to stay, and it is he who now has the momentum. The by-election success was “proof of concept” for Burnham’s leadership.
Polanski is also saddled with a party that is naturally difficult to lead and has that same awful tendency to antisemitism that the Corbyn Labour Party suffered from – where compassion for the suffering of the Palestinian people shades into holding Jewish people living in Britain responsible for what Netanyahu does. More than that, though, the contemporary Green Party is an unstable and combustible mix of nice middle-class environmentalists holding seats in Suffolk and Herefordshire and a rather more militant leftist group in its urban strongholds (of which Holborn and St Pancras was once destined to be another).
The first group have much more in common with the Liberal Democrats; the latter are more akin to the pro-Palestine independent and Corbynite MPs from the North West and the Midlands. The Zionism debate highlighted in the most dramatic and corrosive fashion just how incompatible these wings are. In other words, the Green coalition that Polanski was steadily building has already collapsed, and with it his own political career. In such circumstances, and with such a poor sense of leadership, what exactly is the point of Zack Polanski?
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