Who are today’s Greens?
The Green Party’s success at the Gorton and Denton by-election has shown that as the mainstream parties haemorrhage support, it is not just populists like Reform UK that have benefited. But equally, the Greens are not simply the party of old. Having spent decades largely as a protest vote, they have moved centre stage by emphasising issues other than the environment. Zack Polanski may reiterate a litany of traditional left-leaning policies on wealth tax, tackling billionaires and rent controls, making him a bête noire on the right. But the headline causes embraced by his party are a toxic and paradoxical mash-up that are causing external condemnation and internal disquiet.
The Greens’ seeming obsessional focus on Gaza and ‘genocide’ appear to have attracted a disproportionate number of antisemitic activists to its ranks. Incendiary historic comments from the party’s co-deputy leader, Mothin Ali, who once described a Leeds rabbi who’d served in the Israel Defence Forces as an ‘animal’, and a post during Hamas’s attack on October 7 that included the phrase: ‘White supremacist European settler colonialism must end’. Mothin has since apologised for these comments, which are regularly cited media and critics as evidence of deep-rooted problems.
But while the Greens are undoubtedly attracting a lot of support from both conservative Muslims and some unsavoury Islamist-adjacent allies. Yet there are some glaring contradictions with other causes embraced by student activists angered by Israel’s actions but more broadly typical of the identitarian youth the Greens have attracted.
For example, the party has become the most vociferous supporter of trans rights, even going so far as to discipline, demonise and expel their own sex-realist members, from Shahrar Ali to Emma Bateman. These seemingly polar-opposite key issues are reflective of the demographics of Green Party supporters. Ipsos data earlier this year revealed that a staggering 40 per cent of young women (aged 18–34) say they intend to vote Green, giving the party a 17-point lead over Labour. In general, graduates who are renting their accommodation are more likely to vote Green. A second strand of support is among Pakistani and Bangladeshi communities, commanding 37 per cent of the voting intentions compared to 28 per cent for Labour. And in this melee, traditional eco concerns like climate change and pollution have slipped down the list of policies the Greens campaign around.
What explains this vibe shift from environmentalism to Israelophobia and radical ‘woke’ identity politics? Is Zack Polanski reflective of wider international trends, propelling the likes of Zohran Mamdani to the mayor’s job in New York and making radical left issues cool again? Or, with signs of some cooling of Green support since that by-election victory, is the Green surge just a flash in the pan – or is it, as it were, sustainable? What impact does Green Party popularity have on other parties, particularly Labour?
