Interview With A Green Peer: Has Zack Polanski’s Party Blown It?

Zack Polanski was the politician to watch less than a year ago.

His election as Green Party leader attracted a significant number of voters who had become disillusioned with Keir Starmer’s government.

He quickly secured notable support from the electorate with his promises to deliver “eco-populism” and take on Nigel Farage over key social issues.

The London Assembly member’s new approach transformed the Greens from the fringes of mainstream politics to a substantial group worth voting for and the party membership tripled within six months of Polanski getting into post.

The Greens went from strength to strength, winning the Gorton and Denton by-election and even getting into second place in the national opinion polls behind Reform UK in March.

The Greens seemed to be playing a major part in disrupting the two-party system as they provided a left-wing counterbalance to Reform’s sudden rise.

But then the wheels seem to come off the entire operation earlier this year.

Polanski attracted major backlash for commenting on the police response to the Golders Green attack and, more recently, for refusing to apologise after reposting a photo of a guillotine t-shirt which referred to Nigel Farage.

The party has slipped down to fourth place in the polls since Andy Burnham replaced Starmer in No.10, as the Labour party claws back its supporters under new leadership.

Polanski has also attracted backlash over his own delayed reaction to the summer drought, though the summer heatwaves and renewed fears about climate change should have heightened interest in the Greens.

While he did hold a press conference calling for the government to hold an emergency COBRA meeting earlier this month, the Green leader’s demand only came after Britain had already endured several heatwaves.

That has led to fears, including from his own party, that he is not focusing enough on the climate.

With growing scepticism towards Polanski’s leadership, has the party missed its big moment?

Natalie Bennett, who was the Green Party leader from 2012 to 2016, defended Polanski when speaking to HuffPost UK’s Commons People podcast, insisting he had not moved calls for action on climate further down his list of priorities.

The Green peer said: “If you look at the press coverage of my first press conference, you see people saying, ‘Oh Natalie is changing the Green Party, she’s not talking so much about climate and nature, she’s talking about social issues.’”

“The Greens have always understood that economic and environmental justice are indivisible,” she said.

On Polanski’s social media slip-ups, Bennett said: “I think people are really glad when they have a sense of a real person, rather than necessarily a carefully curated heavily-edited, heavily-filtered – in several sense of the term – person who has just been presented to them like an advertising product.”

The party peer also shrugged off concerns about the Greens’ decline with the public, saying “polls go up, poll go down”.

“What we saw in May was the Green Party peaking at absolutely the right point to elect an enormous number of councillors, our first mayors, to get our first members of the Senedd in Wales, to do very well in our sister party up in Holyrood,” Bennett said.

She also insisted the Green leader is the right man for the job, even though a councillor in Worcestershire defected to the Lib Dems earlier this month over concerns Polanski is “not fit to be our prime minister”.

Listen to this week’s episode as Bennett shares her thoughts on where the party is right now – and what the Greens must do next to win back voters.

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