Victor Anderson asks: Can the Green Party move left without leaving the environment behind?
The Green Party has made dramatic advances in the opinion polls. Its membership figures have soared, and its prospects for the elections in May have vastly improved, especially in inner London boroughs. At a time of climate crisis and anti-nature rhetoric from Cabinet ministers, a strong green voice is needed now more than ever.
But will the rise of the Greens provide that? There are reasons for worrying that it might not. The recent successes of the Greens cannot be separated from the double disappointments of both Starmer and Your Party. Although Zack Polanski has his charisma and quick wits, above all he was in the right place at the right time in his bid for the Green Party leadership.
The disappointments of the Starmer Government have been discussed many times in Chartist. Examples include complicity in genocide, failure to get on top of the privatised water industry, and an authoritarian style of party management. Many have concluded that Labour can never change and shift away from its current approach in government. That has been the conclusion reached by many Labour Party members and many of those people looked to Your Party to provide a new political home.
But the more they have looked, the less promising the new party appears. So far it has proved shambolic at a national level, with a falling-out (to oversimplify the complex picture of factions within factions) between the Corbyn and Sultana sides of the party. Not only that, but the way is open for further bitter internal argument through the vote carried at the first party conference in favour of allowing in members of other political parties, promising to turn Your Party into a playground for competing left sects. Nothing wrong with debate, but threats of legal disputes and boycotting the first day of the party conference (as Zarah Sultana did) have discouraged many potential party members.
All of this is at a national level. Even where there were local exceptions, with promising “proto-branches”, the national shambles has led some to rebrand themselves as “community independents” or join the Green Party. In what looked like the best-organised region for Your Party, North-East England, where there is a left organisation called Majority, its leader Jamie Driscoll and many of its members have given up on the idea of being a region within Your Party and joined the Greens instead. Your Party decided not to stand a candidate in the Gorton and Denton by-election, while the Green Party is thought by some commentators to be on the verge of winning the seat (readers will have the advantage of knowing the actual result).
The double disappointments of Starmer and Your Party have created a floating population of “post-Corbynistas” looking for a political home and finding in many places that the Green Party is really the only show in town for those on the Left. All of this is a far cry from the origins of the Greens, going back to the Ecology Party and its predecessor, People, where the general tendency was the idea that green politics is “neither left nor right” but something new. Over the years there has been a shift to a more clearly progressive political position, but nevertheless there is now in the Green Party a culture clash between some long-standing ecology-first members and the influx of “post-Corbynistas”.
The danger for the Green Party – and for the environment – is that the ecological issues which have given it a distinctive and particularly valuable role become played down and the party comes to be identified with a much more traditional progressive agenda, picking up where the Labour Party left off following its defeat in the 2019 election. Some of Polanski’s rhetoric and interview answers point in that direction, tending to make the climate and nature crises into just two more items on a long left list.
However, there is a much more promising direction the Green Party could take now that it is clearly on the left of British politics. Some of what Polanski has been saying points in this direction. This is to make clear connections of ideas, explaining cause and effect, between capitalism as an economic and social system that has created most of the problems mentioned on the Left’s traditional list and is now, at the same time and increasingly, chipping away at the life support systems of the planet.
So then the Green Party wouldn’t be opportunistically adding a populist set of economic promises and complaints to an already existing untouched environmentalist agenda. Instead there would be a genuine integration of the “red” and “green” rooted in the historical reality that capitalism has always been about mobilising resources to create commodities, while in the same process generating huge costs to the labour force, colonised peoples, future generations – and practically always also the environment.
Many of the examples of this long history are still current and actually pretty simple to communicate, such as the clear conflict of interests between the billionaires making money from continued oil production and the billions of people suffering the effects of the climate crisis.
A political agenda really integrating “red” and “green” would ensure that in moving leftwards, the Green Party doesn’t forget the environmental issues which led to its creation in the first place.