02.04.2026
Getting ready to govern
It is very telling that Zack Polanski missed his own party’s conference. He feared embarrassment. But he need not have worried. The Greens have plenty of checks and balances against democracy and the membership is largely passive, says Carla Roberts
Oddly, we have to start this article with a disclaimer, as there are rumours going around that yours truly is a member of the Green Party! This has been spread by Hannah Hawkins, a member of Your Party’s central executive committee, who was elected as part of Jeremy Corbyn’s The Many slate.
Hawkins is obviously not among the brightest or well-versed, when it comes to the left, but still, come on! Not only is the Weekly Worker the paper of the Communist Party of Great Britain, but we have been very critical of socialists bigging up and sowing illusions in the Greens, which we have categorised politically as a petty bourgeois formation in countless articles. She probably has not read any of them, but to come out with nonsense like that says a lot about the quality of YP’s CEC.
It is also telling that she uses the Green Party as the bogeyman - and it is easy to see why: with 220,000 members, 17% in the latest polls and its media-savvy leader, Zack Polanski, it looks like a much bigger, much more successful and hugely more vibrant version of Corbyn’s failing vanity project. The soft-left ‘messaging’ is almost identical, but the Greens do it so much better. No wonder that YP has been haemorrhaging thousands of members to the Greens.
And, despite what happened at its March 28 spring conference, it is also a whole lot more democratic than Your Party. At least members can join branches and are able to bring motions to conference. At YP’s launch conference, sortitioned attendees could only choose between pre-prepared ‘options’ on various issues selected by Corbyn’s right-hand woman, Karie Murphy. While the internal structures of the Greens might be slightly better than those of YP (it would be difficult to imagine they could be worse), they are, of course, a far cry from the kind of democracy we would see in a real mass working class party, with vibrant and autonomous branches discussing policy, moved at the sovereign conference by democratically elected and accountable delegates.
Greens Organise
Instead, Green Party conference is open to any member who wants to go. There is no delegate structure. All you have to do is pay £10 (£5 if you are unwaged) and you can attend. Their hybrid conference in October 2025 in Bournemouth was attended by 1,800 members - online and in the hall. At that time, the party had just passed 100,000 members. Today the Greens have over 220,000 members - and yet only 700 attended the spring conference, although it took place entirely online. That is a measly 0.3% of the entire membership!
We could not believe these dismal figures at first, but they appear to be correct.1 The organisers had brought in technology that would have allowed 90,000 members to vote online2 (though in the end the system failed and members voted on Zoom by the ‘raise hand’ function). But the point is: there seems to have been no upper limit to the number of participants who could have participated.
Together march
Yes, there was the Together march in London on the same day, but we can say with absolute certainty that there were not 219,300 Green Party members marching. There was a healthy Green Party presence, but we would be very surprised if there were more than 500 of them. And, as the March 28 spring conference took place entirely online, they could have joined on their mobile phones during or after the demo.
These figures certainly put the ‘Green surge’ into an entirely different perspective. Compare that to the 11,000 YP members who voted during the launch conference and the 24,000 who participated in the CEC elections - out of 55,000 members. Yes, most are largely passive (who were partially mobilised through postcards being sent out by YP HQ) - but at least they could be bothered to vote!
It appears that the Green Party cannot even be described as an online party along the lines of Podemos or Momentum, where members occasionally participate in this or that email referendum. The Greens are even less than that. It is largely an electoral machine, which comes to life for this or that local contest.
This pathetic turnout also begs the question: whatever happened to the much-fawned over Greens Organise grouping? It claims “over a thousand paid-up members”, who pay at least £1 each per month.3 To do what exactly? Certainly not to mobilise for Green conferences. There are no events listed on its website, its social media consists of reposting stuff from the leadership and it does not even mention conference.
Some want us believe that GO is made up of dedicated socialists trying to push the Greens to the left. If that is the case, surely they should have mobilised to fight, for example, against the motion which removed a previous commitment to nationalise “the five largest energy supply companies”. This was replaced at spring conference with a plan for “diversity of ownership, including private, public, municipal and community schemes”, so that “consumers will have a choice between diverse retailers operating with fair competition”. Only 192 members voted to oppose the change, with 478 voting in favour.4
This was clearly a move to the right, to show that the Greens are not the ‘nutty semi-socialist’ party that the Daily Mail tries to paint them. No, they want to prove that they can and will be reliable servants of the system, all the while posing left to exploit that huge political gap in British politics.
While Greens Organise seems to have closed shop after campaigning to get Zack Polanski elected, there are a number of more activist-orientated groups like Greens for Palestine, Greater Manchester Greens and Muslim Greens. These were all in support of the now famous ‘Zionism is racism’ motion moved by British-Palestinian artist Lubna Speitan. However, the motion could muster no more than 333 co-signatories in the run-up to conference - which might indeed be a “record”, as Speitan claims. But, out of a membership of 220,000, that is utterly insignificant.
Anti-Zionism
It is very telling that Zack Polanski missed his own party’s conference. Instead, he not only chose to give a speech at the Together march, but stayed for the whole day, raving (very well) on the Trafalgar Square stage afterwards. He will have judged - correctly - that the viral clips of him dancing with Hannah Spencer will do a lot more for Green electoral chances in the May elections than engaging in an ‘internal’ debate about Zionism.
It also means he can continue to fudge on the issue. He has been uh-ing and ah-ing his way through a number of questions on the subject. Politico had previously reported that “Polanski would have supported the motion” entitled ‘Zionism is racism’.5 That is very doubtful indeed. For example, Green councillor Andree Frieze tweeted after conference: “Importantly, Green MP Carla Denyer was planning to speak against the motion on behalf of the MPs, peers, leader Zack Polanski and deputy leader Rachel Millward.”6 She was going to speak after Lubna Speitan, apparently - but, as we all know, conference “ran out of time”. We hear that deputy leader Mothin Ali is in fact the only top person who supports the motion.
The Greens do not have an expert bureaucrat like Karie Murphy, who has decades of experience in manipulating and stage-managing conferences, but they have certainly made use of the same playbook to sideline Speitan’s motion. Not only did the right in and around the Greens make ample use of bourgeois media outlets in the run-up to conference to attack the (pretty bog-standard) motion as “anti-Semitic”: they pulled out all the stops at conference itself. There were numerous motions of no-confidence in the chair (who kept allowing them); there was an effort to disallow the motion for not ‘following due process’; there was an attempt to rule it out of order because it would override the Green Party’s support for the so-called ‘two-state solution’; then the agenda was changed during a break, pushing the motion further and further to the back and, finally, there was filibustering and time-wasting, making sure that it had to fall off the agenda.7
Polanski will no doubt continue to play a game of posing left, while leaving the party’s support for Nato untouched. He will continue to talk about his support for the Palestinians, while not trying to overturn the party’s support for the IHRA mis-definition of anti-Semitism. At the same time, Polanski is now touring various unions and has already held “fruitful” talks with 10 of them,8 in the hope of getting donations and burnishing his ‘left’ reputation. He is, in other words, the prime example of a good bourgeois politician who is covering all bases.
He is very much getting the party ready to enter government, albeit as a junior coalition partner.
Targets
The Greens are certainly expected to do well in the May elections:
A list of Green targets seen by The Times shows Hackney, Lambeth, Islington and Southwark as the party’s top targets for taking control directly from Labour. Polanski’s party also hopes to enter coalitions in Norwich, Bradford, East Sussex, Suffolk and Newcastle. Other targets include Birmingham, Leeds, Sheffield and Manchester, as well as Cambridge, Oxford, Exeter, Reading, East Surrey and South Tyneside.9
Some comrades on the left hope that the Greens would soon ‘expose themselves’ by ‘enforcing cuts’, which would drive tens of thousands of the more leftwing members back into YP (or into one or the other confessional sects). That seems, to put it mildly, unlikely. The Greens - as we now know beyond a shadow of doubt - are not made up of a large, active, left membership that holds its representatives critically to account. The vast majority are passive, and just want things to change a little bit. Most members will be very happy with the Greens becoming part of local government coalitions.
The fact that there is no real left opposition in the Greens does not mean that socialists should “seize the opportunity and build one”, as quite a few confused lefties are now advocating. The Greens are and remain a petty-bourgeois formation (ie, they fight to reform capitalism in the interest of the petty bourgeoisie). They might soon enough become a thoroughly bourgeois party, especially if they get called into a potential anti-Reform coalition after the 2029 general election - not an impossible prospect.
Judging by the Together demonstration, much of the left would support that; and we note that Mothin is one of the main speakers at the launch of the SWP’s latest popular front, Stop Reform UK.10 A total dead end that not only blurs class lines, but ends up supporting all those failing bourgeois parties that have led to the rise of Reform in the first place.
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www.thecanary.co/uk/news/2026/03/28/green-party-conference-votes.↩︎
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www.thecanary.co/uk/news/2026/03/28/green-party-conference-votes.↩︎
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www.politico.eu/article/uk-green-zack-polanski-zionism-is-racism-motion.↩︎
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Some of the issues are covered here: x.com/LeftieStats/status/2038935250244435981/photo/1.↩︎
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The Times March 30.↩︎
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The Times March 31.↩︎