The Greens are the very antithesis of populism

Since the Green Party’s win in the Gorton and Denton by-election last month, the mainstream media have been hailing it as a left-wing ‘populist’ movement that can challenge the right-wing populists of Reform UK. In the excited words of Politico, the Greens ‘played Reform at its own game – and won’.

The Financial Times seemed similarly enamoured. One of its op-eds claimed that leader Zack Polanski had turned the Greens from a cuddly environmental campaign group ‘into a combative left-wing populist political vehicle that advocates for working people against the ultra-wealthy’. Even right-wing commentators have acceded to the characterisation of the Greens as left-wing populists.

The presentation of the Greens as a populist alternative to Reform, indeed as counter-populist movement, has been months in the making. Last September, The Times painted Polanski as a proponent of ‘left-wing populism’ who ‘hopes to hypnotise the electorate with his own brand of Faragism’. The following month, a commentator on UnHerd talked up the rise of the Greens’ counter-populism, as ‘the backlash to the backlash’ against the political establishment. 

The argument commentators and politicos have been advancing over several months is simple enough. They claim that the Greens are peddling a populist politics to rival the appeal of Reform. They believe that Polanski’s counter-populists can beat conservative populists at their own game – that the Greens can neutralise Reform’s appeal

But there’s one big problem with all this. The Greens are anything but populist. Indeed, the very fact that significant parts of the mainstream media are so keen on the Greens is a sign of their elite appeal.

The programme and behaviour of the Greens show that they are best characterised as a radical centrist formation. Under Polanski, a former Lib Dem activist, the Greens have shown they have virtually no non-negotiable principles. During the recent Gorton and Denton by-election, they conspicuously avoided campaigning around the party’s long-held concerns about the environment. Even the party’s current embrace of ‘anti-austerity’ politics was pushed into the background. Instead, they focussed on identity politics, mobilising Muslim voters by playing the Islamic sectarian card.

This identitarian obsession is telling. One of the defining features of populists, whether of the left or right, is that they claim to speak for and represent the people – for all citizens of the nation. The Greens did not do that in Gorton and Denton. They opted to engage with one section of the community, even publishing election literature in languages that the vast majority of British people do not understand. Similarly, Green activists waved the flags of Palestine and Pakistan, rather than the flags of Britain or England. This was tribal politics – it was the very antithesis of populism.

This is hardly a surprise. Today’s Green Party is profoundly hostile towards a key element of any populist politics – namely, democratic citizenship. Its vision of a ‘world without borders’ negates the very idea of being a citizen of a national polity. Hence, it would happily extend voting rights to all migrants with visas, grant them access to the benefits system, and allow them to bring family members to join them.

In effect, the Greens would denude citizenship of its meaning. Voting, having been a privilege confined to citizens, would be extended to just about anyone entering the UK. And the social contract between citizens and the state, underwritten by access to social services and benefits, would be torn apart.

Historically, left-wing populists took defending citizenship rights very seriously. In the 19th century, the American People’s Party, one of the first radical populist movements, was committed to protecting the people from the ruling class’s attempts to lower living standards through the importing of cheap labour. Its platform called for a shorter working week, restrictions on immigration and public ownership of railways and communication lines.

Populists proper take the nation and national borders very seriously, because it is only within such boundaries that democracy can flourish. Popular sovereignty is intimately linked with the sovereignty of a nation. A people, a demos, can only exist within the confines of a clearly demarcated community.

But the Greens regard such a bounded community with contempt. They prefer a politics that privileges divisive ethnic affiliations over national citizenship.

Far from being a people’s party, the achingly middle-class Greens are the party of Britain’s cultural elites. They share the same worldview, the same luxury beliefs, the same obsessions. They are the party of identity politics, gender ideology and pseudo-bohemian lifestyles – hence the commitment to legalising hard drugs.

The Greens’ commitment to erase national borders and national citizenship put them firmly at odds with the British people and their interests.

Frank Furedi is the executive director of the think-tank, MCC-Brussels.