Credible and Pragmatic

Paul Knaggs writes:

I was due to have coffee with Chris Williamson this week. Nothing complicated: two old campaigners, a pot of tea gone cold, the kind of unhurried conversation you only get away from the cameras. He pushed it back to next week. Given what he did in the days in between, that was probably for the best. I would have arrived with rather more to say to him than either of us had planned for.

Williamson resigned this week from the Workers Party of Britain, ending three years as one of its deputy leaders, in protest at George Galloway’s decision to stand in the Holborn and St Pancras by-election on 8 October. Writing on X, he said he had “a huge amount of respect for George Galloway” but believed the left should instead get behind Green Party leader Zack Polanski, whom he called the main left challenger to Labour in the seat. His reasoning was blunt: Labour, Reform, the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats are all, in his own words, “in the pocket of the neoliberal Zionist war machine,” and only a united front behind Polanski stands a chance of shifting them.

It is worth dwelling on the seat itself, because this is not some forgotten corner of the map. Holborn and St Pancras was Keir Starmer’s constituency. Starmer resigned as Prime Minister in July, forced out after a leadership crisis inside his own parliamentary party, and was replaced by Andy Burnham. Six weeks later, on 1 September, he resigned the seat too, taking on the ceremonial office of Steward of the Chiltern Hundreds purely in order to vacate it. The man who delivered Labour’s 2024 “landslide” could not hold together his own backyard, let alone the country, for even one full term. Keep that fact in your pocket. We will need it again before the end.

Fifteen names will appear on the ballot on 8 October. Labour has selected Sagal Abdi-Wali, leader of Camden Council. The Greens have selected their own leader, Zack Polanski. And George Galloway, after months spent outside the country following his detention at Gatwick, has now filed nomination papers in his own name for the Workers Party. His party’s statement on why voters should choose him over Polanski did not mince its words: the Greens, it said, had shown through their “reckless backing for the war in Ukraine” that they could not be trusted, adding, in a line clearly aimed at exactly the coalition Williamson is now urging, “we are a socialist party and not a liberal or ‘leftist’ one.” That is not a private disagreement playing out on a WhatsApp group. It is the public position of the party Williamson just walked out of.

I understand the instinct behind what Williamson has done, because we have all tried the tactic. For years, the rallying cry was GTTO, Get The Tories Out. Socialists, liberals, Greens and Labour loyalists were all invited into one great tent and told to hold our noses for the sake of the shared enemy. We know how that ended. In July 2024, Labour won 411 of 650 seats, 63 per cent of the Commons, on 33.7 per cent of the vote: the lowest vote share ever to deliver a majority government and, on most measures, the least proportional result in British electoral history. That was never a mandate for anything Labour actually stood for. It was arithmetic. Reform and the Conservatives split the right-of-centre vote in seat after seat while Labour’s own support fell. And it produced a government so brittle that its own MPs forced its leader out inside two years: a Prime Minister with a majority of over a hundred, unable to survive contact with a single full term. Now we are being asked to build another broad church, and hold our noses again. This time for Zack Polanski.

I want to be fair to the Greens here, because pretending there is nothing worth taking seriously in Polanski’s programme would be dishonest, and that is not a trade I am willing to make even to win an argument. Public ownership of water and rail, a wealth tax on extreme fortunes, real opposition to Britain’s protest laws: these are positions serious socialists hold, and Polanski deserves some credit for putting them back into a national conversation Labour long ago abandoned.

That credit needs a footnote, though, because when the Greens actually got to vote on it, the socialism turned out to be thinner than advertised. At their March 2026 conference, delegates passed a motion deleting the party’s long-standing commitment to nationalise the five biggest energy supply companies, replacing it with language stipulating that electricity generation and storage should have “diversity of ownership including private.” The party kept its commitment to bring the transmission and distribution grid into public hands, so calling it a wholesale vote against nationalisation, as some outlets did, overstates it. But quietly deleting a specific, long-standing commitment to take the big five suppliers into public ownership, in favour of leaving the actual power stations in private hands, is not the language of a party trying to out-socialist Labour. It is the language of a party trying to sound radical while keeping the door open for private capital. But agreement on some things does not make disagreement on others trivial. And the places where Williamson’s newly preferred party and the tradition he says he represents pull apart are not footnotes. They are load-bearing walls.

It is worth pausing on the man himself before turning to the policies, because his political history does not inspire much confidence in the word “reinvention.” Polanski joined the Liberal Democrats in 2015 and stood as a council candidate for them. In 2016 he was still Lib Dem enough to heckle Jeremy Corbyn outside a rally, calling out over Europe, “Where were you when we needed you?” He joined the Greens the following year. Since then his own CV has needed rather more correcting than most politicians manage in a career: an admitted false claim to have been a Red Cross spokesman, an admitted false claim to have worked at the Ministry of Justice when he had in fact been hired through a temping agency to role-play in mock court exercises for a quango, and a hypnotherapy career he has spent years trying to explain away, including a claim about hypnotising a newspaper reporter into growing a larger bust that he was still defending on local radio six days after supposedly apologising for it. None of that makes him uniquely dishonest as politicians go. It does mean the rebrand deserves rather more scepticism than the coalition-builders are giving it. He is, by training and by trade, a performer, and the “eco-populist” turn reads less like a political awakening than the best part he has ever been cast in. He is not the route to change. He is a continuation of the same politics in another name, which is precisely what makes the choice in front of the left worth taking seriously rather than waving through. 

You would think the Green Party’s defining mission would be stopping environmental collapse. Instead, under Polanski, it increasingly looks more determined to convince the public that men can become women. One of those is the ecological crisis the party’s name was built around. The other is an ideological obsession that has swallowed the party whole. Start with sex. The Green Party’s 2024 manifesto commits it to gender self-identification, allowing people to be legally recognised in their chosen gender through self-declaration, without a medical diagnosis, while scrapping what it calls the spousal veto and reviewing the Equality Act itself. Whatever you make of that policy, and serious socialists hold different views on it, it is not an administrative footnote. It sits at the centre of an argument this country has been having for a decade about sex-based rights and single-sex spaces. Tellingly, when Williamson listed his own differences with the Greens on resigning, he did not mention this one. He named their “pro-EU and pro-NATO stances” instead. The omission does not make the disagreement go away. It only means nobody has had to answer for it yet.

Chris Williamson, Polanski and the Left's Broad-Church Trap

That commitment on paper is one thing. What it looks like in practice inside the party is another, and it has not been pretty. In February 2024, an employment tribunal ruled that the Greens had unlawfully discriminated against their own former deputy leader, Dr Shahrar Ali, over his gender-critical beliefs, the first ruling of its kind ever brought against a British political party: he was awarded compensation and the party was later ordered to pay roughly £90,000 towards his costs. Emma Bateman, a former co-chair of Green Party Women, has now been expelled three times over the same underlying complaint, for questioning gender ideology and mocking invented pronouns, and is suing the party under the Equality Act. Fourteen members of the Scottish Greens, some with forty years of service between them, were expelled for signing a declaration stating that sex is a biological reality. Polanski himself has said people are “not necessarily” born male and female, and has made expelling members he judges transphobic one of his personal red lines. A party that keeps losing in tribunals, and keeps paying out anyway, is not defending a principle. It is running a purge and calling it one.

It’s worth knowing that, given Williamson’s own gender-critical views, he would find himself far from welcome inside the party he is now urging the rest of us to back, and would soon find himself at the sticky end of a disciplinary, if not a tribunal, the moment he said so out loud. I suppose that’s what some would call compromise. On Europe, the Greens describe themselves as “pro-European, and proudly so.” Their 2024 manifesto commits to rejoining the EU Customs Union and restoring free movement, and delegates at their September 2025 conference voted to go further still, backing motions for “much closer relations with the European Union” including re-entry to the single market. That is a perfectly respectable political position. It is also a straightforward rejection of the argument, held by plenty on the socialist left including Galloway himself, that Brussels was never a friend of British workers and that national democratic control over trade, migration and state aid is worth having back.

Zack Polanski, NATO and the Cost of Defence

Then there is foreign policy, where the supposed differences become even harder to file away as merely fraternal. Polanski wants Britain, eventually, out of NATO. Telling Byline Times last year that “the age of NATO is now over,” he has argued that reform from within is impossible because roughly 86 per cent of Britain’s arms imports come from the United States, and has called instead for “an alternative alliance with countries based in Europe, plus Brazil and Mexico.” That sounds like a rupture. It is not quite one. Asked directly whether he would honour Article 5, NATO’s mutual defence clause, while Britain remains inside the alliance, Polanski did not hesitate: “we’ve already signed up for that,” committing British forces to war if another member state were attacked. So the position, in full, is this: stay in, fight if called upon, and leave only once an entirely new European security architecture, with its own weapons and its own guarantees, has been built to replace it. That is not dismantling the machinery of collective defence. It is proposing to build an identical machine next door and move house once the new one is finished, which, as critics on the left have already pointed out, in practice means never.

This publication made exactly this argument a year ago, in a piece comparing Polanski’s contortions to Keir Starmer’s own history of sounding radical for exactly as long as it takes to win power, then quietly discarding the act the moment it becomes inconvenient. The comparison still holds up rather better than either man’s actual foreign policy. Ukraine sharpens the point. Polanski has called Russia’s war “an illegal invasion of Ukraine” and said refusing to negotiate with any head of state would be reckless. Fair enough, as far as it goes. He has also draped himself in the Ukrainian flag on social media while warning against arms-industry profiteering, which is an odd straddle, since one of those things tends to fund the other. But in an interview with the Italian paper Repubblica this year, he went further than most of his own party were comfortable with, saying of Putin, “I’ve never seen him threaten genocide,” in pointed contrast to Donald Trump. His own leader in the Commons, Ellie Chowns, distanced herself within days, telling the BBC that Putin had launched an illegal invasion responsible for tens of thousands of deaths and that the comparison was not her view. That is not a rounding error inside a shared anti-war analysis. It is a live, unresolved fracture inside the party Williamson wants the whole left to fall in behind.

And behind all of it sits a question about money that nobody arguing for a Polanski coalition has satisfactorily answered. Polanski’s economic case leans heavily on the insight, borrowed from Modern Monetary Theory, that a government issuing its own currency cannot run out of pounds the way a household runs out of savings, and that the real constraint on spending is the productive capacity of the economy, not the headline size of the national debt. There is something to that. As the Cambridge economist Dimitri Zenghelis has argued, “what unsettles the bond market is not the level of UK public debt” so much as doubt about the country’s capacity to grow. But that insight cuts against the Green position on defence just as hard as it supports Green ambitions on housing and the NHS. Money is not the resource. Steel, skilled labour, energy and the people to build and operate weapons are the resource, and they cannot build a hospital and a howitzer with the same hands at the same time. Polanski himself has acknowledged as much, warning against “lining the pockets of arms companies with a limitless spending bill” even while insisting proper defence still has to be paid for.

Inside his own party the argument is already open: the Greens Organise faction that backed his leadership bid has called on the party to oppose further increases in defence spending outright, while his parliamentary leader Ellie Chowns has accepted the government’s planned rise and argued only that it should be funded through higher taxes on wealth. Polanski himself has been reduced to insisting the two should not be “pitted against each other,” which is a wish, not a costing. So if the honest answer on NATO is eventually, once something else exists to replace it, if conventional defence spending has to continue in the meantime, and if support for Ukraine continues, as it should, then somebody inside this proposed coalition needs to say what that means for everything else on the list when the bill actually lands. The Bank of England can create pounds whenever Parliament asks it to. It cannot create engineers, steel, or the years of patient investment this country has needed since long before either Williamson or Polanski entered politics.

This is the trouble with the broad church, every single time it gets built. It can win an argument, occasionally even an election, while its members have agreed on absolutely nothing about the morning after. If one wing believes in national sovereignty and another wants deeper integration with Brussels, if one thinks sex is a material fact with legal consequences and another has built self-declaration into its founding programme, if one wants Britain out of the machinery of military blocs and another has already promised, in terms, to fight under Article 5, those are not “fraternal disagreements” to be quietly filed away until after the count. Calling them that does not make them disappear. It only delays the argument until the moment power actually has to be used, and by then it usually arrives too late to matter.

There is something else worth naming, because it does damage that outlasts any single by-election. Telling voters, yet again, that principle has to be suspended because the other lot is worse is exactly how British politics ended up here in the first place: managed decline, administered in turn by whichever coalition currently frightens people slightly less than the alternative. Vote Labour because the Tories were worse. Vote Tory because Labour was worse. Vote Reform because everyone else has failed you. Each election becomes an exercise in prevention rather than construction, until eventually nobody is voting for anything at all. They are only voting against something, and a politics built entirely on fear of what comes next has no destination of its own.

And the trap cuts both ways, which is exactly why it is a trap. Nobody arguing for it seems to have asked what happens the day the right works out how to run the same play. Reform and the Conservatives split the right-of-centre vote against each other in seat after seat in 2024, which is the main reason 33.7 per cent of the vote turned into 63 per cent of the Commons. Psephologists have calculated that under a genuinely proportional system Labour would have returned something closer to 220 MPs rather than 411. Every time the left teaches itself that holding your nose and uniting against a shared enemy is simply how elections are won, it is also teaching the right the same lesson. The day Reform and the Conservatives work out how to stand aside for each other in enough marginals, and nothing stops them doing exactly what Williamson is now recommending to the left, a great many Labour MPs who owe their seats to vote-splitting rather than public enthusiasm will discover how thin their majorities always were. When all anyone is voting for is someone’s removal, everyone eventually forgets to vote for a reason to put somebody in. That is the real cost of a generation spent building broad churches. It has left us with parties that know exactly who they are against and increasingly no idea what they are for.

I sent Chris an early draft of this piece before publishing it, and, to his credit, he engaged with the whole of it rather than waving it away, as is his nature. His actual case, once you strip away the broad-church language, turns out to be sharper than his Facebook post suggested: the Workers Party standing risks helping Labour hold the seat, and propping Labour up delays the harder project of destroying it as an electoral force, which he sees as the precondition for anything better. He also argues that a wave of socialists has joined the Greens over the last year and could shift the party from the inside, that Polanski is the only party leader in Britain talking sense on the monetary system, and, above all, that Green support for proportional representation is a prize worth the trade.

Take the last point first, because it is the strongest one, and because this piece has already spent two sections on exactly the disproportionality PR would fix. Nobody wanting it is wrong to want it. But Labour has just won a stonking majority under first-past-the-post and has no conceivable reason to legislate that majority away, so support for PR is a fine principle for the next decade and no help at all on 8 October, when the system on the ballot paper is still the one everyone agrees is broken. Wanting a fairer voting system some day does not answer what anyone should do under the system that actually exists this Thursday, which was Williamson’s own question to begin with.

On the Greens being reformable from within, perhaps. But that is precisely the bet Labour’s left made in 2015, when a large influx of socialists joined a different party hoping to bend it their way, and nobody needs to be told twice how that ended. A party is not an empty vessel waiting to be filled by whoever signs up in the largest numbers. It has its own apparatus, its own leadership and its own culture, and the disciplinary machinery described above has not slowed down because of the socialist influx, it has continued straight through it. Hoping to out-organise your way to a different Green Party from the inside is just the broad church built one floor down, with the same argument waiting to happen all over again. On the economics, we simply disagree about how much weight one correct insight about currency issuance can carry inside a platform this contradictory everywhere else, and I have said my piece on that already. On drugs, crime and immigration, I will need more than “credible and pragmatic” to go on before I change my mind about any of it.

Chris Williamson has fought real battles over a long career, and I do not for a second doubt the sincerity of the conclusion he has reached. When we finally get that coffee, I will say all of this to his face rather than only in print, because that is the difference between disagreement and dismissal. But I will also tell him plainly that resigning in public, and handing Zack Polanski his blessing in the same breath, did more damage to the prospect of a genuine socialist alternative this week than Labour, the supposed bogeyman, has managed on its own. Resigning from a party because it dared to contest an election, then asking the rest of us to line up behind a party we disagree with on sex, on Europe, on NATO, and on how any of it gets paid for, is not a new strategy. It is the same roundabout the British left has been circling for a generation, with a different face at the wheel and the exit sign still missing.

We do not need another broad church, hastily built to survive one Thursday in October. We need a socialist movement with the nerve to say plainly what it believes, and the discipline to defend it long after the votes are counted. A coalition tells you who it’s against. Only a programme tells you what it’s for. The British left keeps building the first and calling it the second, then wonders, every time, why the roundabout never lets it off.