07.05.2026

Not red on the inside

Under Zack Polanski the Greens have attempted to redwash their policies. This has fooled many on the left, including some on the organised left. In reality the Greens remain a thoroughly petty-bourgeois party, says Carla Roberts

While an analysis of the local election results will have to wait for next week’s issue, there can be no doubt that many tens of thousands of self‑declared socialists and lefties will have ended up voting for the Green Party.

This is disappointing, from our perspective - but not really very surprising, for a number of reasons. The increasingly frantic campaign against the Greens by the entire establishment will have convinced many - wrongly - that a vote for the Greens presents a real challenge to the system. Every time the Daily Mail runs another article under its banner, ‘Beware the Green menace’ (The Sun’s equivalent is the logo, ‘Wacko Zacko’), a few more people will have been convinced to vote for Zack Polanski’s party. Ditto the ‘open letter’ by Met commissioner Sir Mark Rowley, who expressed his “disappointment”, when Polanski criticised two police officers for kicking the mentally disturbed Golders Green knife attacker in the head, when he was already writhing on the ground, paralysed by a taser gun. Apparently, that is what you have to do when you think somebody is about to detonate a bomb - kick them really hard.

There is also the ongoing campaign to label as ‘anti-Semitic’ any criticism of the crimes of the genocidal Israeli regime, a campaign which worked extremely well to get rid of Jeremy Corbyn as leader of the Labour Party. Mark Rowley, for example, writes in his open letter to Polanski that “anti-Semitism is a disease”¹ - reinforcing the Zionist myth that there is something about gentiles that makes them despise Jewish people.

Christian hatred

Yes, anti-Semitism is deeply rooted in Christian culture. And anti-Semitism was given a new lease of life with late 19th century social conservatism, not only by a visibly tottering tsarism in Russia, but by social conservatism in central and eastern Europe too. Paradoxically, Jews were collectively blamed, on the one hand, for Marxism, mass social democracy and the rise of the labour movement, and, on the other hand, for finance capital and the exorbitant interest rates suffered by peasant agriculture and small businesses.

Then came blood and soil Nazism which culminated in the gas chambers and industrial‑scale mass murder. However, modern Zionism was the ideological mirror image of this anti‑Semitism. It too wanted a solution to the ‘Jewish problem’. Not by violently uprooting anybody, that almost goes without saying. But by persuading the ‘eternal foreigners’ to voluntarily leave the country of their birth and relocate in their own ‘homeland’ many thousands of miles away. At last, promised the Zionists, the Jews can become a ‘proper’ nation.

Having carved Israel out of Mandate Palestine and dispossessed much of the indigenous population, the Zionists now seek to delegitimise any opposition to their ongoing colonial project by branding it as ‘anti-Semitism’. As a result the meaning of ‘anti-Semitism’ is being shifted, so that it basically equates with ‘anti‑Zionism’. In fact the two are entirely different: anti-Semitism is prejudice against Jews as Jews; Zionism is a Jewish supremacist ideology. However, because Israel is closely allied to US imperialism, the big lie which fuses together anti-Semitism and anti‑Zionism is something which the entire British establishment is more than happy to weaponise.

The re-trial of the Filton 24, in which a jury found four of the defendants guilty after a first jury acquitted them, is very much part of this, as is Sir Keir Starmer’s campaign to clamp down on dissident voices in the arts, universities, the health service … and on the mass pro‑Palestine protest demonstrations.

With the growing popularity of the Greens, who could win 22 seats at the next general election, it makes obvious sense to ramp up the campaign once more. According to the hysterical front page of the Mail on June 6, the Greens themselves are investigating 30 of their own candidates, two of whom have been arrested. The evidence is as sketchy as you would expect. Most of the comments and social media posts in question express criticism of Israel and Zionism, not Jewish people. The Daily Telegraph, for example, “unearthed” that “Zack Polanski liked several social media posts which accused Sir Keir Starmer of being on the payroll of powerful Jewish people” - in fact, the post talked about Starmer being supported by “Zionist philanthropists”.²

Polanski is slightly less of a pushover than Jeremy Corbyn, but the suspension of a number of Green Party members - among them Tony Greenstein - shows that the campaign is certainly working once again.

Left fragments

Another reason the Greens currently loom so large is that the left is almost entirely invisible, in the aftermath of the implosion of Jeremy Corbyn’s Your Party. The decision to ban socialist groups was the last step needed to turn YP into what Corbyn wanted all along: an organisation tightly controlled by his right-hand woman, Karie Murphy, without any pesky branches that could bother the dear leader with criticism or democratic conferences, where members could put forward the kind of programme a real working class party would have to adopt to effectively challenge the system. YP will now be a mere, tiny footnote in the left’s history, another Momentum‑style, pointless organisation.

A third of the 16,000 councillors in England will have been elected on May 7, in addition to the 129 members of the Scottish parliament and the 96 members of the newly enlarged Senedd in Wales. Socialist candidates were few and far between. The Socialist Party in England and Wales electoral front - the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition - was the ‘left front runner’, promoting “289 council candidates who applied to use a Tusc description”, as it states on its website. And indeed, the moniker was handed out to “every trade unionist, anti-cuts campaigner, community or social movement activist, and socialists from any party or none”. So long as they agreed to Tusc’s “six policy guarantees”, they were able to become a Tusc candidate.³ With an alleged membership of around 1,000, it is rather puzzling that SPEW did not manage to put up more candidates than that.

The six policies are, as you would expect, all about SPEW’s focus on “no-cuts budgets”, and also include opposition to “raising council tax to make up for cuts in central funding”. You see, Tusc councillors promise to use “council reserves and prudential borrowing powers to avoid making cuts in their 2026-2027 budgets and demand from the Labour government the additional funding needed to make up any future shortfall”. Inspiring it is not. Tusc councillors basically promise to shuffle money around, while asking for more from the Labour government. There are no political demands in the platform. All the while, SPEW is still campaigning for a federal party, in which trade union leaders would be allowed to set the agenda - ie, they are fighting for a Labour Party mark two.

George Galloway’s Workers Party in Britain grandly announced back in June last year that it would stand 1,000 candidates.⁴ Nothing wrong with being ambitious - unless you massively underdeliver. Despite the implosion of Your Party, it managed to find only a rather measly 83 candidates.

There is no WPB programme for the local elections, but its general Manifesto⁵ is a truly horrific read, summed up by its national-chauvinist title, ‘Britain deserves better’. In the ‘Defence of the nation’ section, it outlines that under prime minister Galloway “our armed forces will be highly trained and equipped with modern, reliable weaponry and equipment. Any threat to our country or our interests will be met with a highly effective military response.”

The chapter on ‘Mass migration’ promises that a WP government “will undertake investment in border security, including heightened sea‑going and coastal patrols” and that it “will make a regular calculation of the sustainable levels of migration”. There is not much red in this red‑brown offering!

Jeremy Corbyn’s Your Party endorsed a very short list of 47 candidates, only 25 of whom were given the title “Your Party candidates”, with the other 22 “Your Party-backed candidates”. To make matters more complicated, YP also endorsed a list of 14 ‘local community groups’, whose candidates are not listed on the YP website. They include Lutfur Rahman’s Aspire in Tower Hamlets - very much not on the socialist spectrum, whichever way you look at it. Small mercies perhaps that at least the Walsall Community Independents are no longer listed on the YP website - among their candidates are three former Tory councillors, who only discovered their love for independence after they were deselected by the local Tories in January 2026. No matter, Jeremy Corbyn was keen to attend their launch event and was happy to endorse them: the three even featured the beaming Corbyn on their leaflet.⁶

An attempt by Grassroots Left members on YP’s executive to require all endorsed groups to at least claim that they are “socialist” was voted down by the majority of Corbyn’s leadership faction, The Many. In any case, it is rather questionable if the phrase, ‘Your Party’, in the description will have helped the electoral chances of any of the candidates.⁷

There were also thousands of ‘independents’ standing in various wards, covering all shades of the political spectrum. And, yes, there are even some with a socialist persuasion, like the Islington Independents or Haringey Socialist Alliance. The key problem here is all too obvious: what possible opposition can local independent councillors put up to the system of globalised capitalism? The absence of an internationalist, democratic working class party in Britain is all too painfully obvious.

SWP goes Green

In most areas in Britain, voters have not even had such a choice. Most of those wanting to vote ‘left’ were confronted with the unenviable choice between Labour or the Greens. While Labour should still (just about) be characterised as a bourgeois workers’ party (not least because of the affiliated trade unions), there can be no doubt that it is not just socialists who find the Starmer government more than disappointing: it has delivered nothing but misery, rising prices and expensive support for Nato’s proxy war on Ukraine, all the while aiding and abetting Israel at the behest of the USA.

While it is understandable that many people will have voted for the Greens as the most ‘leftwing’ or ‘progressive’ choice on offer, we believe that socialists have a duty not to sow the illusion that the Greens present an actual alternative to the rotten capitalist system - as, for example, the Socialist Workers Party does. There is nothing wrong with inviting Zack Polanski to speak on a platform - but socialists should use that to at least question and critique him and his political outlook.

We are more than a bit puzzled by the Socialist Worker’s editorial on April 28, entitled rather hilariously ‘Will Greens stay red?’ A variation of the old rightwing joke about the Greens being ‘red on the inside’. With the SWP, however, it seems that the Greens are ‘red on the outside’ too. Either way, this must count as an explicit call on their members and readers to vote Green: “We celebrate whenever Polanski gives Starmer or Farage a bloody nose. But we still need a socialist alternative that sees building struggles outside of electoral politics as key to winning change.” ‘Vote Green and continue holding SWP placards on demonstrations’ seems to be the message here. Under its new leadership team, the SWP is drifting further and further to the right, while working class politics are quietly being abandoned.

Hence the editorial says nothing about the fact that the Green Party is clearly not anti-capitalist, let alone socialist. It does not try to characterise the Greens in class terms: they are a petty bourgeois formation - ie, they fight to reform capitalism in the interests of the small and medium‑sized businesses that apparently constitute the “backbone of the nation”.

No, socialists should explain that Polanski is rather good at walking a political tightrope - giving eco‑populist speeches, while assuring capital that he is not about to nationalise their businesses.⁸ He is speaking out in solidarity with the Palestinians, while conniving with those in the Green Party apparatus who did everything in their power to stop conference from voting for the ‘Zionism is racism’ motion. He has made no attempt to overturn the Greens’ commitment to the IHRA misdefinition of anti‑Semitism, adopted under former leader Caroline Lucas. He opposes Nato, but wants a European (capitalist) defence pact instead.

Polanski’s Greens might soon enough make the transition from being a petty bourgeois party to becoming a thoroughly bourgeois party, especially if they get called into a potential anti‑Reform coalition government after the 2029 general election - not an impossible prospect. In other words, the Green Party is not an option for genuine socialists.