Should Never Be Seen

Although she takes a predictably regrettable turn at the end, Elaine Graham-Leigh writes:

The Green Party’s victory in the February 2026 Gorton and Denton by-election took the party’s MP count from four to five, but felt in many ways more consequential than the already creditable 2024 election results. When coupled with the party’s impressive showing at the 2026 local elections, where it gained control of five councils, and with membership at 215,000 by March 2026, there is a sense that this is the electoral breakthrough the party has been chasing since it won 14% of the UK vote back in the 1989 European elections. That this is finally happening at a time when, under Zack Polanski’s leadership, the party is positioned clearly to the left of Labour raises the question of whether the Greens could be the socialist electoral alternative. Has the answer been in front of us the whole time?

The Gorton and Denton result was clearly a left-of-Labour victory, in that the Green campaign centred on the cost-of-living crisis and opposition to Israel’s genocidal attack on Gaza. In this respect, it did the immediate job of providing a left alternative, demonstrating that this is the most effective way of preventing far-right electoral success by defeating Reform. In the local elections, the Greens were also able to capture previously left, Labour-strongholds like Hackney and Waltham Forest in north London. This does not necessarily mean, however, that the Green Party has become the socialist opposition to Labour that we have been trying to build.

Recent Green converts argue that the left’s distrust of the Greens as the socialist electoral alternative is outdated. It fails to understand the shifts that the Greens have made in their policies and relies on tropes which, to the extent that they were ever true, are not true now. James Meadway, for example, argued in the Morning Star on the eve of the Gorton and Denton by-election that a Green victory could mark ‘the long-delayed arrival of a left politics fit for the 21st century.’ His argument here was that the Greens’ lack of connection to organised labour in the form of the trade unions is an advantage, enabling them to speak to ‘the plumber and the hairdresser’ rather than just to public-sector workers. While not everyone sees the Green Party’s detachment from the trade unions so positively, as an issue, it may at least seem fixable if the party could build links with unions dissatisfied with Labour. Indeed, Polanski is embarking on a tour of trade-union conferences over spring/summer 2026 to try to do just that.

The extension of the argument that the Greens are not connected to organised labour is that they don’t represent or appeal to working-class people. Green supporters contend in response that the idea that ‘the Greens are very white, very middle class, very liberal’ is ‘a by now quite tired stereotype’, as shown for example by the election of Mothin Ali, first as a Green councillor in Leeds and then as deputy party leader. They point out that the Greens’ core supporters are ‘financially struggling and exploited by landlords and employers,’ and thus that the Greens are representing at least a section of the proletariat. To the extent that Greens are more likely to be highly educated professionals in urban areas, they could point out that the same was true of Corbyn’s Labour Party and probably would be for Your Party.

Arguments about the class composition of the Green Party membership only take us so far in understanding the nature of the party and its move to the left. In the first place, it is necessary to be clear about how we are viewing the nature of political parties. Implicit in the argument that the Green Party is, or is developing into, the socialist electoral alternative is that political parties are always blank slates. Regardless of their history, they can adopt any policies their members want, subject only to the extent to which the party machinery is bound to pay attention to the democratic will of the members. Thus, it is pointed out that the Green Party of England and Wales (GPEW) is particularly ripe for influence by the influx of new, socialist members, as its internal party structures are properly democratic.

There are differences of opinion on how long this process has taken within the Green Party. A view that the Greens’ left turn is purely the creation of the collapse of Corbynism and despair at the state of Your Party might see it as a temporary adaptation to the space that has opened up for an electoral vehicle to the left of Labour. Others argue that the party’s left turn is the result of decades of careful work. Zack Polanski’s election as leader was not, in this view, simply the election of a good communicator who happens to be left-wing, but the result of this long campaign to shift the party leftwards. Adam Ramsay, for example, stresses in his account of this process how, although the party wasn’t founded (as People, in 1972) from the left – ‘it’s founders came from a middle-class, Tory-ish milieu’ – it had certainly developed a left current within it by the time it became the Green Party in 1985.

Regardless of the ease of the leftward shift or the time it has taken, the common thread in the arguments that the Green Party is now the left party is that the Greens’ origins and tradition are unimportant as long as the majority of the current members will support left-wing policies and the party’s structures will allow them to be heard. In its most extreme form, the implication would be that we should be wary of putting any effort into any political party, since a left-wing party today might be turned into something very different tomorrow. Even the version which sees the Greens’ transformation as the product of a longer process is, however, in danger of underestimating the extent to which the core nature of a party, the tradition from which it comes and the class interests it represents, may not be as mutable as the new Greens may like to think. This, in turn, limits the ability even of a majority left membership to transform just any party into a socialist electoral project.

The Greens and imperialism

While the Green Party’s 2024 manifesto and subsequent campaigning stances have generally been well to the left of Labour on domestic issues, particularly the cost-of-living crisis, their policies on war are a different matter. It is important to understand this, not only because the policies are important in themselves, but because the Greens’ stance on imperialism demonstrates the class nature of the party.

The Greens clearly see themselves as an anti-war party, opposing the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Gaza and Iran as well as nuclear weapons, and periodically describe themselves or are described by others as ‘the anti-war party’. This does not, however, as Rivkah Brown pointed out on Novara, mean that they are ‘flower power pacifists’, opposing all wars on principle, and therein lies the rub. For Brown, this is a positive statement, showing how the Greens are alive to political realities and are not simple utopians. As an expression though, of how far the Greens are adapting their policies to a section of elite opinion, it is a demonstration of how they cannot serve as a genuine left alternative.

The example that shows that the Greens are not against all wars, only bad ones, is Ukraine, where the party’s position is that ‘the UK must keep supporting Ukraine to defend itself’. What that means is not always spelled out, but their statement on the fourth anniversary of Russia’s invasion, calling on the government ‘to defend Ukraine’s right to self-determination in the strongest possible terms on the international stage, making explicit that the UK will stand against any bad-faith actors who attempt to bully or intimidate Ukraine into appeasing Russia’s demands’, made clear their commitment to Ukraine continuing to fight. The stance on Ukraine is, of course, closely linked to the stance on NATO, with the view that Ukraine should be enabled to fight on, leading to the adoption of a pro-NATO position at the party’s March 2023 conference. This was then reflected in the 2024 manifesto, which stated that ‘the Green Party recognises that NATO has an important role in ensuring the ability of its member states to respond to threats to their security.’

Some of the recent acclaim for the Greens as ‘the anti-war party’ is because Polanski has been signalling a change back to something that appears closer to the pre-2022 position, commenting, in January 2026, that he didn’t think that it was possible to reform NATO from within. It is important to note, though that this was a specifically anti-Trump stance, rather than an opposition to the militarism that NATO represents. Polanski was clear that he was not rejecting any military intervention on principle, assuring journalists that ‘once you’ve exhausted every possible option, then you ask for further military intervention too.’ There is nothing in the Green Party’s position which rejects European rearmament. Indeed, the party’s commitment to rejoining the EU appears to align it with that agenda. The rejection of NATO is a rejection of the US now that Trump is openly pursuing an America-first policy, but with the apparent aim of effectively creating a European version of NATO, without the US, but with the wars in Western interests.

The Green Party is therefore not so much an anti-war party as it is a party aligned with European rather than US militarism. The immediate driver of this stance is clearly the Ukraine war, but it can also be seen to have deeper roots. The party has had an at-best semi-detached attitude to the anti-war movement, at least from the point when Caroline Lucas stepped down as a patron of the Stop the War Coalition (StWC) in 2015 over ‘some recent StWC positions that she didn’t support’ on Syria. That attitude to the anti-war movement itself arises from deep within the basic assumptions the party makes about power and how to win it.

The German Greens are a cautionary tale on the left for how an anti-imperialist party can become an enthusiast for military intervention. In 1998, its election manifesto was clear in its opposition to both ‘military peace enforcement and combat missions’, but in the following year, Green Party leader Joschka Fischer was celebrating the Nato bombing of Belgrade. By 2011, the party was so committed to militarism that Green Party voters were more likely than any other German voters to support German involvement in the Nato bombing of Libya. Its current positions include support for arming Ukraine, continued arms sales to Israel and that supporting the Palestinians equates to antisemitism.

The German Green Party is so notorious that tarring GPEW with the same brush might seem unfair. While Green parties around the world do take inspiration from each other, and the English party changed its name in 1985 from the Ecology Party to the Green Party to capitalise on the popularity and profile of the German Greens, they are separate organisations with their own policies. The important consideration here though, is why the German Green Party has evolved as it has and how that can help our understanding of the parallel evolution of GPEW.

Green attitudes to power

The German Green Party has largely taken the view that the primary objective is to get individual Greens into positions of power, regardless of the policy compromises this may necessitate. Some of this has undoubtedly been driven by the career aspirations of the individuals concerned, but careerism is only a partial, not a complete explanation. The transformation of the German Green Party into a party which was prepared to work with the SPD and other neoliberal parties in fighting imperialist wars represented a victory of the ‘realos’ in the party over the ‘fundis’. Despite the compromises with the right, this was not primarily a fight about particular policies, but rather about how to achieve them in practice. The fundis were opposed to compromise with parties to the right of them and saw elections as a way of advancing the goals of activist greens by getting a wider platform for their ideas. The realos, on the other hand, thought that green goals could best be achieved by using election victories to get people into powerful positions, as close to government as possible, where they could drive through incremental changes from within the system.

This same division between fundi and realo positions clearly exists in GPEW, with long-term tensions between those who wanted the party to be decentralised and to concentrate on local, grassroots campaigning, and those who were pushing for a tighter, national electoral operation. In previous versions of this debate, the left in the party has tended to be on the decentralising (fundi) side, with the realos seen as right-wing careerists, adopting ‘that post-Cold War, Blairite common sense that it was impossible to win elections while admitting that you wanted to nationalise things and tax the rich’.

What has happened more recently is that policy positions for the left have combined with the organisational approach of the realos. This could represent the left in the party adopting a new commitment to electoral strategy, or it could be that a new generation of political realos have perceived that looking socialist can be electoral gold rather than electoral poison. Which is more correct is not easy to judge from the outside, although the party’s willingness to abandon any public concern for environmental issues at a time when political opinion has been concluding that green policies are a vote-loser rather than a vote-winner may indicate that it’s more likely to be the latter than the former. It may, however, be a distinction without a difference, as in both versions, overtly left-wing policies are united with a belief in the electoral process as a way to achieve meaningful change.

This is not simply about winning elections, but about using election victories to get as close as possible to wielding even small amounts of power within the system. The most obvious recent example of this strategy in practice was the 2021 Bute House Agreement between the Scottish Green Party and the Scottish National Party, which gave Greens ministerial positions in the Scottish government, but there are also previous instances, such as when Green London Assembly member Jenny Jones served as London deputy mayor to Ken Livingstone in 2003-2004.

Both of these agreements, in their different ways, involved the Green parties in compromises with forces to their right which they did not control. The check was that the Greens could always resign if some undefined red line were to be crossed in future, although it is worth noting that identifying and acting on that red line was obviously harder in practice than it might appear in theory. Despite what might be thought to be considerable provocation, neither of these arrangements was ended by the Greens. Jones’s deputy mayorship finished when Livingstone won re-election as Labour’s candidate for London Mayor in 2004. In Scotland, the Greens hung on in the Bute House agreement even while the SNP implemented significant cuts to green causes like public transport, active travel and just transition, and dropped the target of cutting greenhouse-gas emissions by 75% by 2030. The agreement was finally wound up in 2024 by SNP First Minister Humza Yousaf.

The record of Greens in government, in Scotland under the Bute House Agreement and in various local councils, shows the difficulties inherent in exercising limited power within the system to carry out left-wing policies. Green-led councils have found themselves implementing austerity, passing cuts budgets in both Brighton and Hove and in Bristol. These may be accompanied by expressions of sorrow and sympathy for those affected: Tony Dyer, Green leader of Bristol City Council, said of its cuts budget in 2025 that ‘they won’t be painless cuts. You can’t make those changes without someone losing out. It feels bloody awful.’ The behaviour of Greens in control of local government has however, not seemed very different in practice from Labour. The Green council in Brighton sparked a week-long bin strike in 2013 when it proposed, much like the then Labour council in Birmingham would go on to do, to equalise pay for different jobs by cutting up to £4,000 a year from the pay of some refuse workers. A subsequent Green administration in Brighton caused the bin workers to go back on strike for several weeks in 2021 by imposing poor working conditions and doing nothing to address low pay.

The results of this are often damaging to the Greens: the party, for example, lost control of Brighton and Hove council in 2023. The accounting at the end of the Bute House Agreement in 2024 was generally that the Greens had achieved some small gains by ‘setting a greener tone’ to the government, but at the cost of working within a neoliberal regime, which was very happy to allow the Greens to act as a scapegoat for government cuts. It is also inevitably dispiriting for Green activists to be ‘told to celebrate budget cuts in housing and environment or cheer for slight policy adjustments.’

The difficulties are, of course, not all of the Greens’ own making. Controlling a council in a time of endless central government cuts to local government funding is always going to be something of a poisoned chalice, so it is not that the Greens are uniquely at fault here. However, this is an inherent part of the strategy of advancing the environmental cause by working within the existing institutions of the state. As Marx said, ‘the working class cannot simply lay hold of the readymade state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes.’ The Greens’ record in power can be seen as a demonstration of one of the ways in which such an attempt will fail, by being co-opted by ruling-class interests and by accepting small gains at the price of not threatening the status quo.

This is why the Greens’ position on imperialism is so important. The centrality of imperialism and war to the British state means that any left party’s position on NATO is an indication of how far they understand the realities of the system they’re confronting. The Greens’ failure to oppose all forms of imperialism functions as the price of entry to the system. It makes them a safer left opposition in a way that a consistently anti-imperialist party cannot be. It also undercuts the system change they think they stand for. A party which takes the view, explicitly or implicitly, that it is possible to combine fighting for justice and equality at home with supporting the state’s military adventures abroad is one whose capitulation to the state will ultimately undermine all its policies, foreign and domestic.

The uses of elections

Given the problems in the strategy of achieving system change by working your way to power through the institutions of that system, it is worth asking why Green parties continue to pursue it. It is not that such a strategy is inherent to any electoral project. Marx and Engels consistently argued that participation in elections was important for revolutionaries as a way of building the revolutionary movement, pointing out, for example, that being elected to the Reichstag gave German comrades August Bebel and Wilhelm Liebknecht a platform from which ‘the entire world can hear them’. Lenin also stressed the need to fight elections, writing in Pravda in 1912 that ‘we must take part in the elections, firstly, to rally and politically enlighten the mass of the workers during the elections, when party struggles and the entire political life will be stimulated and when the masses will learn politics in one way or other; and, secondly, to get our worker deputies into the Duma.’

Lenin went on to commend the worker deputies in the Duma, who, he said, ‘have done, and can do, a great deal for the working-class cause’. This might sound like an endorsement of the Green view of the importance of getting people into positions where they can exercise power, but it is nothing of the kind. Lenin makes clear that the elected deputies could only play a useful role ‘provided they are true worker democrats, provided they are connected with the masses and the masses learn to direct them and check on their activity’. In other words, they were elected to the Duma so that they could amplify the extra-parliamentary struggle, not primarily in order to use elected office to implement reforms.

The Green Party, however, does not have a connection to the movement in this way. Growth and electoral success for GPEW does not translate into amplification of the green movement in general. The recent Green surge, after all, has come at a time when the level of activity in the green movement is low and when the climate crisis has fallen off the mainstream political agenda. That the Green Party’s reaction to this is to exclude environmental issues from its own headline campaigning is a demonstration of how electoral success as a route to power, rather than electoral success to help build the movement, is at the core of its strategy.

It is, of course, easy for any electoral project to slip into thinking that electoral victories are pre-eminent in and of themselves. The Green Party’s disconnection from the movement is not, however, an accident or easily overcome, but reflects a major current in green thinking which does not see mass organisation for system change as important, or even desirable.

The Greens and revolution

That the capitalist system is the root cause of the climate crisis and other environmental problems is now a fairly mainstream position within green thinking. ‘System change not climate change’ was, after all, the slogan of the demonstrations at the Copenhagen international climate talks in 2009 and for many other international protests since. This does not mean, however, that the green movement has adopted a revolutionary position. Views of how to achieve the necessary system change are many and various, but have a tendency to avoid calling for revolutionary organisation, even where that would seem to be the logical conclusion to their diagnosis of the problem.

In part, this is likely to be the result of the historic distrust of socialism within green circles. As Derek Wall points out, ‘eco-socialism’ as a concept was coined out of an understanding that unmodified socialism was by definition not ‘eco’, and adoption of an eco-socialist position often involved an explicit rejection of the socialism bit. Despite the left-wing policies of GPEW, for Greens on the left, the best that can be hoped for in terms of an open commitment to socialism is still apparently that their leaders wouldn’t ‘see any need to centre the word socialism, but wouldn’t deny it if asked.’

Green thinking also has a tendency to distrust central, state-controlled organisations, perhaps seeing it as redolent of Stalinist five-year plans. For many greens, the idea of organising to seize control of the means of production on a national or international basis is therefore anathema. The gap in green thinking where calls for revolutionary organisation could be is often filled instead by proposals for local and individual ways to withdraw from capitalist production and consumption, such as co-ops for food production and power generation, in the vein of the Utopian Socialists. In the same way that if what you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a nail, this then drives an understanding that small, local, community organising is green and that it represents system change.

This understanding sits alongside what is often a profound distrust of ordinary people, in Western countries at least. In much green thinking, the working class in the West is at best unenlightened about the climate crisis and at worst addicted to its ‘imperial mode of living’ with which it is destroying the planet. That these views can sit alongside organising for what have at times been substantial demonstrations on green issues can seem a paradox. For many in the wider green movement, however, the point of street activity is to raise awareness so that individuals will be inspired to make changes in their own lives, and to put pressure on the government to act to enable those changes. This lends itself in particular to direct action rather than mass demonstrations, seeing ordinary people as the target as much as they are potential recruits to a wider movement.

These veins of thought in the wider green movement affect the Green Party. This can be seen in debates on its policies, where positions argued for by the left are limited by the assumptions now deep within the green movement. A recent example was the vote at the Spring 2026 conference to change the party’s previous commitment to electricity nationalisation to allow for ‘diversity of ownership including private, public, municipal and community schemes,’ such as the small-scale, local community electricity generation, which is the bedrock of much green thinking on power generation.

They are also the source of the Green Party’s theory of how to get change. Since the green movement in general does not have a theory of change which allows for proletarian mass action, for the Green Party, there is no organised movement whose cause it could be amplifying through electoral success in the way that Marx, Engels and Lenin set out. To the extent that greens see any point in trying to change the system, rather than simply withdrawing from it, it is a separate activity from the movement work of raising awareness of the climate crisis.

The recent Green electoral successes are undoubtedly an expression of people’s desire for a genuine left alternative to Labour. The Green Party’s ability to look like an answer to that desire is likely to make the task of building a genuine socialist electoral project more difficult than it has already proved to be, by taking the space and raising questions about splitting the vote and letting Reform in. In many ways, it would be much easier if we could abandon attempts to create a new electoral vehicle and simply all join the Greens. Unfortunately, parties are not blank slates. However socialist some of their policies may appear, the Green Party represents a different understanding than ours of what a left electoral project is for and what it can achieve. For socialists, it is no sort of answer.