What risk could the election of Zack Polanski as leader pose for the Green party? That’s what journalists wondered aloud on one current affairs format after another, on Tuesday evening. Would he alienate the party’s new-found Tory switchers, conservationists who’d given the party a chance after a decade of disaffection with their tribe? Surely, by peeling off the leftwing elements of the Labour party, Polanski was simply strengthening Reform, whose path to victory through this division would be assured?
Polanski is sometimes described, per his own self-fashioning, as an “eco-populist”, but more often called the “left” or “hard-left” candidate, which I don’t think anyone would quibble with, though the fact that his victory Instagram post landed as soon as he won points to a new kind of hard-left, one that has its shit together. I use that, rather than a milder phrase, to echo Polanski himself – whether he’s talking about sewage in the waterways, the cost of living crisis that hasn’t gone away, or British arms sales to Israel, he doesn’t say “parlous”, he says this is “shit”. Sometimes the mystery of why party members vote for the values candidate over the putatively electable one is not that mysterious: maybe rightwingers aren’t the only people yearning for someone to stand up and talk normally.
