Imagine, for a moment, a political system much like ours, drawing on many of the same traditions and powered by familiar left-right energies. Now imagine that over the last decade or so, first one of its major parties imploded while in office, and then the other, taking over, tanked as well. Now imagine that one big winner of this crackup is a left-populist environmentalist party, which has surged in polling and tripled in membership since a change in leadership last September.
That imaginary land is Britain, and that left-populist party is the Greens under 43-year-old Zack Polanski, who has refocused the party’s message on affordability and economic inequality and the cruelty and fecklessness of the country’s two longstanding mainstream alternatives — both of which now look like shells of their former selves. Last August, I took a look at the state of British politics and saw a possible warning about what might happen on this side of the Atlantic, with Nigel Farage’s noxious Reform upstarts cannibalizing the old Conservative Party and Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana’s new Your Party poised to draw support from the left of unpopular Labour.
As it happened, Your Party has crashed and burned, and the left flank of British politics now seems to belong to the Greens — who in the last election won only 4 seats in the 650-seat Parliament. Now, they are neck and neck nationally with both Labour and the Tories, depending on the poll. In some surveys, the Greens are now Britain’s most popular party among all voters under the age of 50. Already, in February, behind a charismatic plumber and plasterer named Hannah Spencer, they stormed to victory in a highly competitive, off-cycle election in a Manchester constituency called Gorton and Denton — which as recently as the 2024 general election was judged one of Labour’s safest seats. In the aftermath, the Greens’ polling surged again.
This may all prove a bit illusory, or only a Pyrrhic victory. Another national parliamentary election won’t be held for years, and Farage’s right-wing Reform party still leads the polls, largely thanks to its strength among the old. Labour may well pivot and discard Keir Starmer as leader, potentially reviving its fortunes along the way. And if an election were held today, analysis suggests, the Greens might win only 56 seats or so — a huge jump from their current position, but not exactly a dominant share in a 650-seat legislature.
But the Green surge is nevertheless a rebuke to the popular story about the rightward shift of young voters across the rich countries of the world, a story that is also undermined by the apparent evaporation of the so-called vibe shift in America, and the U-turn of casual Trump voters against the president not long after inauguration. And it illustrates one big risk for moderate liberalism in an anti-establishment age, given the utter collapse of Starmer’s popularity: that voters might want less of a technocratic restoration, from liberals, than something that looks much more like genuine change. (In fairness, Mark Carney’s popularity in Canada offers a contrasting case study.) And it may point the way forward for the climate left more generally, given that the Greens have bundled environmental concerns with the cost-of-living crisis and rage about billionaires and made major political gains as a result, often targeting the left-behind working class typically described as the Reform base.
“I don’t think the threat of Reform should be underestimated,” Polanski told me by phone in mid-March, as the country as a whole tried to make sense of the Gorton-and-Denton outcome. “Nigel Farage would clearly be a disaster for this country on so many different measures and metrics. But what I think we’re seeing is that the collapse of the Labour Party and the rise of the Green Party just means our politics is in some ways arguably becoming a two-party system again. It’s just that it’s becoming the Reform party versus the Green party.”
The conversation below has been edited for length and clarity.
I want to talk about the astonishing last six or eight months — for the party and for you. But I actually want to start by asking about Labour and the state of Keir Starmer’s government.
I wrote before the 2024 election that Starmer was likely to win a large but empty victory. And yet even so, I’m shocked both at how little Labour has accomplished and at how far they’ve fallen politically — from the second-largest parliamentary majority since World War II to the least popular prime ministership in Britain’s modern history. What explains that? How do you understand what’s happened?
I think I’d start by saying I think we should all be angry. And I’m not someone who believes we should sit in anger and just stay there because that’s what the right do. But I think it’s important to recognize what a catastrophic and deliberate failure on so many policy fronts Keir Starmer has been.
Let’s go through them.
Well, the most obvious: We’re speaking on a day where the Mandelson files have been released —
This is about Peter Mandelson, the former British ambassador to the United States, who it turns out was not just an associate of Jeffrey Epstein but is now also being accused of sharing state secrets with him.
And it turns out Starmer was warned about Peter Mandelson and his connections to Epstein and still made that decision. I think we need to recognize how deeply despicable that is.
Then, on the climate crisis and the nature crisis. We have one of the most nature-depleted countries in the world. And yes, there are complexities to having a housing crisis and protecting nature at the same time. But the way this prime minister has dealt with that is to cynically launch an attack on bats and newts.
And then I think the very obvious genocide in Gaza. Starmer went straight out and said that Israel had the right to cut off water and electricity from the Palestinians. He later said that wasn’t what he meant, but his shadow foreign secretary at that time, Emily Thornberry, went out a few hours later and doubled down on it.
And this is all on top of the most immediate thing, I think, to most Brits, which is the cost-of-living crisis, where we’ve had years and years and years of conservative austerity and underinvestment in our public services.
I expected you’d start with that, actually. From where I sit, it seems intuitive that Britain is struggling now in large part because of the austerity policies that were put in place after the financial crisis, and then continued. And so I would have expected a much more explicit reversal once Labour came into power — even from a centrist Labour party like Starmer’s.
Well, this is a Labour government that has been bought and paid for. And once you accept that fact, their decisions they make then make a lot more sense, because they have no interest in protecting working-class communities in our country. They have interest in protecting power and the status quo. As soon as you look through that frame, every decision they make and every press conference they do starts to make absolute sense, because they’re doing as little as possible to actually change the economic status quo, while still every so often trying to pretend that they’ve changed things.
There are so many distortions in our economic system, which are quite clear the moment you look at them, and which would be low-hanging fruit for any government who is serious about making economic change and serious about tackling inequality in our society. But they’re not serious about that. In fact, they’re quite serious about the opposite, which is protecting power and wealth.
And then the final thing I’d say is that people often say, people don’t know what Keir Starmer stands for.
The caricature is as a kind of poll-chasing, triangulating weather vane.
But actually, there’s been an increasing trend toward authoritarianism in the past year in particular. Examples of that are the push for mandatory ID cards and the scrapping of our juries — something that’s been a vital cornerstone of our democracy for a long time — and of course for proscription of Palestine action, which is where pensioners have been holding up cardboard signs saying “I support Palestine action,” and then have been arrested for it. And so I don’t accept that this is not a man who doesn’t stand for anything. I think it’s clear what he stands for, and that’s to protect the elites who are destroying our communities, our democracy and indeed our environment.
Of course, in a lot of ways, the story is bigger than Labour. The Tories have given way to Reform, right after a 14-year run of parliamentary rule. And in not very much time, the country has gone from what was basically a two-party system with a few marginal upstarts to a much more wide-open system, in which the two establishment parties have lost a huge amount of support. In America, you often hear about how Reform is leading in the polls, which they are. But there are now four parties all polling between 15 and 30 percent. Labour won that thumping majority last time with just 33.8 percent of the vote. Reform could win the next one with an even smaller share. And this is not unique to Britain: Across the wealthy world, you see declining support for establishment parties of the center-left and center-right. In many places, there’s been a kind of splintering, produced by basic distrust of the system as a whole. How do you understand that phenomenon, the anti-establishmentarian turn of Western politics over the last decade or so?
I think we have to go back further. Without giving a long history lesson, I think we have to go back to Thatcher and Reagan and recognize that a lot of the things that I’m calling for — and which now people are feeling finally hopeful about — often get painted by the right-wing media and my opponents as some kind of wild, radical ideas. But actually, we’ve seen them over and over again, both in British society and around the world, when they were working perfectly well until neoliberalism came along. The fact that someone could be an apprentice, for instance, and be earning a small wage and then over time could imagine buying themselves a house. Today? I don’t think anyone believes for a second that anyone who works hard as an apprentice or has a low-paid job could ever imagine getting on the property ladder. In fact, there are lots of people who are being paid good wages who can’t imagine getting on the property ladder. And there are many reasons for that, but I think a big part of it is the financialization of our economies.
And politics is now seen as part of the corporate bureaucracy. People no longer see reasons to believe in the power of the centrist parties to change things, or even the power of local democracy to change things. Instead, what we’re seeing looks like this managed decline. And so it’s not a surprise that we’re seeing the collapse of those centrist parties, because the story they’ve been telling us — it’s the least hopeful thing in the world. It’s just grim and depressing when you listen to them talk. And Starmer is an embodiment of that — even when he won his election with a big majority, we were hearing from him that everything was going to be tough, nothing’s really going to get much better. Whereas the only thing I’m certain of is that the status quo will not maintain.
So the question the United Kingdom has right now is, do we fall to the increasingly worrying ways that Trump has fallen? Over there you’ve got quasi-paramilitary ICE on the streets, shooting people in cold blood in daylight like Renee Good. Or are we going to move toward a much more hopeful, community-based politics that looks at our new economic model of doing things?
And I’m absolutely convinced we can do the latter, because I think people are craving the kind of change we’re talking about and also unwilling to be silenced. Social media has definitely not been entirely a force for good, but I think one thing it has done despite its algorithm is connect voices around the world who are building increasing power by saying it doesn’t have to be this way. Saying we deserve better.
A lot of Americans watching your rise have made an intuitive connection to Zohran Mamdani’s spectacular arrival here in New York. But even on the left, there are questions about whether that’s a model for national politics or only something that could work in certain parts of the country — not to mention whether it offers a model for real governance or whether it’s really just a line of critique that helps illuminate the shortcomings of the status quo.
First of all, you can’t underestimate what Zohran has done for the world just by existing as a beacon of hope — someone who has not been bought and paid for, but is willing to challenge the establishment and is willing to speak in a way that amplifies the needs of marginalized communities and people who are really struggling. Symbolism like that should never be underestimated.
Oh, I agree.
Now, how much do the Democratic Party look at him and realize that’s what they need to move to? Or will they see him as some kind of abstract idea, a little bit quirky — oh, that’s for New Yorkers, that’s not what the country needs. That would be, I would say, a failure in the long term.
I think a real success in the long term will be that he can demonstrate in New York right now that you can accept small donations from lots of people, you can build power in communities through organizing and union power, and you can make changes with the power of the collective, as opposed to that change being top-down.
There’s a similar set of questions about the Greens, right?
I often talk about having hope and a plan. Hope without a plan clearly isn’t going to work and a plan without hope sounds bureaucratic to me. And I will get to the plan, I promise. But first: Don’t underestimate the hope.
Personally, my experience of the last six months has been absolutely surreal. After this phone call, I’m going to Wembley Stadium and I’m giving a speech there and also introducing Adam Lambert. That’s not where I expected my life to be six months ago. But people really wanted an alternative. Labour kept promising they were the alternative to the Conservatives and then came into office and just offered the exact same thing.
And we just had Gorton and Denton. Labour and Reform threw everything they had at that election. I can’t count the amount of Labour M.P.s who were sent to try and stop us. They were putting out attack videos about me; they said I wanted to turn playgrounds into crack dens. I mean, a demonstrable lie, obviously. Nigel Farage visited the constituency several times to try and bring his so-called star quality.
Starmer came, too — which is now kind of embarrassing, in retrospect.
And we didn’t just win slightly. We won by a very, very wide margin. And I think that’s a couple of things. One, we had a brilliant candidate in Hannah Spencer. But second, people have just had enough. They are so ready for something that genuinely represents them, that is exciting, that’s bold, that listens to them, that deals with complexity and nuance.
We don’t need a purity politics. But we’re laying out simple principles: A couple of very wealthy people in our country shouldn’t be allowed to extract our power, our wealth and our democracy, and we’re here to take it back. I think that’s resonating with people.
Are you at all worried about kneecapping Labour and in so doing enabling Reform?
One other thing that’s changed after Gorton and Denton: The Labour Party can no longer ever say, “You need to vote Labour to stop Reform.” We knew it was a lie during that campaign, but we’ve proved it again by winning. And if Labour really want people to vote Labour to stop Reform, then it’s their responsibility to offer a platform that appeals to people. And they’re still not offering that.
Now, does that mean in the future they might swing to the left and they might offer a genuine alternative? Sure. And then that will change the dynamic of this conversation. But right now, the Labour Party by any meaningful metric could not be considered a left-wing party. I would go so far as to say they couldn’t be considered a center party, because actually, when we look at so many of their policies, they’re more to the right than David Cameron was, when he was prime minister in 2010, committing the United Kingdom to decades of austerity. That was devastating. They’ve destroyed this country. And I think people are sick of being held hostage by a government that isn’t offering an alternative and then being blamed if they don’t vote for them.
And what about the governing side of it? In America, we also have a lot of talk about affordability — what you guys call the cost-of-living crisis, and what we used to call the inequality crisis. But we don’t yet have a very clear or serious set of proposals, from the left or the right, about what could be done to address it.
I think there are some basic things we need to do. We need to lower our bills. We could end the increasing bills of water companies by ending shareholder dividends by bringing our water companies back into public hands, and this links directly to where we started this conversation. Water nationalization would not be an experiment in this country. Our water was already nationalized. But we moved to a privatized system, which has been devastating both in terms of nature, where it’s being polluted, and in terms of the cost-of-living crisis, because of people’s bills.
Or on rent: We have spiraling rents. Because we’re not charging national insurance on investment income, that means someone who is a landlord might be paying less tax proportionally than the renter who’s really struggling and having to pay rent every single month. And we also have, in this country, a system called leasehold, which is in between renting and owning a property, where people are being hit with really bad service charges every single month.
Second, I think it’s about having a fair taxation system. So we put a wealth tax at the center of our policies — this is a tax on assets. People often say things like, “Won’t rich people just leave?”
People say the same about a similar set of proposals here.
Actually, it’s very difficult just to pick up your property and leave. And if you’re a multimillionaire or a billionaire, and we ask for 1 percent or 2 percent on your assets, those assets are still growing, even if we’re taxing 1 percent or 2 percent.
This would be a much fairer way of taxing, to make sure that we’re investing in our public services. It means then we can spend on the foundational economy. That’s just basic Keynesianism.
But it’s also about simply stopping the hoarding of wealth. When people have run out of things they can spend their money on, they start to buy our media, our social media and our democracy.
Do you see any tension between this kind of Green agenda, focused on inequality and affordability, and the older one, focused on environmentalism and climate?
I think the climate crisis should be everyone’s No. 1 priority, but you can’t tackle the climate crisis without tackling the affordability crisis and the inequality crisis. It’s the same polluters who are destroying our environment who are extracting wealth from our economy to line their own pockets.
One obvious connection is dirty air or toxic air — far too often it exists in places that are working-class communities, full of racial minorities. Another example is that in Britain, we have some of the leakiest homes in Europe — they’re energy inefficient. And so if we insulated everyone who needed it, it would reduce people’s bills, which is literally addressing the cost-of-living crisis while reducing emissions in a climate crisis.
And a last one I’ll mention is what we’re seeing in Iran right now. Obviously my first thoughts and first priority are the schoolgirls who were killed and the thousands of people who were just recently killed by the Iranian regime. But we’re literally seeing oil rain from the skies. And our biggest strategic vulnerability right now is our dependency on fossil fuels. There was a report out just this morning from the Climate Change Committee — an independent committee from the government — showing that going to net zero by 2050 would cost Britain less than a single oil shock. A single oil shock. It’s incredibly dystopian, the path we’re on. And I think it’s important that we all connect those dots — with the environment, with internationalism and with peace.
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