Q. I understand that some Workers’ Liberty people, excluded from the Labour Party, have joined the Greens and are working with the Greens for the 7 May local elections. Why?
A. Lots of people have been excluded from the Labour Party, in successive waves since 2015, and there’s still a trickle of new exclusions. Or they have dropped out because they find their local Labour Party lifeless and the Labour Party conference control-freaked. Zack Polanski has been speaking out for similar politics to the broad Labour left of 2015-20, and better on a few issues, notably the EU. Lots of young people see that as a new opening. Why wouldn’t we want to work and discuss with them, especially in Lambeth, where the local Greens are unusually left-wing?
Q. Oh, it’s just a cynical “raid”?
A. No, our comrades in the Greens are diligent in activity. They also use the structures available to them to argue for socialist ideas. Why shouldn’t they?
Q. Why not, then, give up on the Labour Party, and go whole hog into the Greens? The Greens will make huge gains on 7 May.
A. Yes, the Greens will do well on 7 May, and Labour badly. But the Labour Party is still despite everything the party of the labour movement, linked to the trade unions.
Q. Well, maybe, vestigially. But Zack Polanski would do much better in government than Keir Starmer.
A. Zack Polanski’s output is about as left wing as Keir Starmer’s when he stood for Labour leader in 2020. Polanski comes across better on social media, but there is no more reason to trust Polanski in office than to trust Starmer. Less, in fact, because he has less of an organised movement on his back.
Q. Nonsense! Zack Polanski has taken the Greens way to the left!
A. As Carla Denyer recently pointed out, basically everything Polanski says is in the Greens’ 2024 manifesto. Polanski says “on a personal level” he “agrees with the majority (?) of socialist principles”, but wants to avoid annoying “all the people who are anti-socialist who might have voted Green” and wouldn’t if the Greens “said we were socialists”. He prefers the label “eco-populist”. Sian Berry said back in 2025: “A lot of Greens — not me, though, and not [former party leader] Caroline Lucas — were definitely nervous to say we were socialists before Natalie [Bennett]’s leadership” [in 2012]. But not since.
Q. Now the Greens could get into government in 2029.
A. Look at other Green Parties, and not even far away: Scotland and Ireland. The Greens have got into government in many countries, and everywhere they have bowed the knee to capitalism. Even in England, the Greens are already part of governing 52 councils, mostly in coalitions. Not in left-wing ways.
Q. Well, no worse than Labour.
A. I doubt even that’s true. The labour movement has been able to extract some gains even from this miserable Labour government (Employment Relations Act, Renters’ Reform Act, rail renationalisation, repeal of two-child benefit cap...) The Greens’ greatest political triumph world-wide has been forcing a move away from nuclear power in Germany, resulting in reversion to fossil fuels and worse carbon emissions. Labour councils (including some really right-wing ones) have built more new council homes than Green councils. The leader of the jewel in the Green council crown, Mid-Suffolk, says the Greens won there on a promise to stop new house-building.
Q. You’re really resting your case on a few wretched Labour mini-reforms?
A. Not at all. We are not in the Labour Party in the hope that a sop here and a sop there will overwhelm capitalism! We are there to transform the whole labour movement, politically and organisationally, through a fight for pro-working-class measures and democracy.
Q. Not much to show for it!
A. We’ve had defeats. People are fed up, and consequently going Reform or Green. That is a shift, but not a general shift of opinion to the left. And the fight is not over inside Labour. Even now there are stirrings, like the Restore Labour Democracy initiative.
Q. Feeble!
A. Maybe demoralisation after the 7 May elections and after the looming economic crisis, which is likely to drive the Labour government further to the right, will stop it and set back the left even further. We don’t know. But there’s a fight to be fought. Experiences of Labour doing badly in government have often led to sizeable, if all-too-delayed, kickbacks. Remember 2010 to 2015. Remember 1979-82. Nothing like that has ever happened in a Green party after government shame.
Q. Ah, that’s all finished. Nothing like that will ever happen again.
A. Sociologically, it’s true, the domination of the Labour Party heights by a layer of third-sector manager types has progressed horribly for a long while now. It’s not just a matter of a pendulum swinging from left to right to left. The Irish Labour Party, founded by James Connolly, ended by scrapping its whole union-affiliate structure in 2017 and languishes at 4% in the polls. Similar could happen here. But then the Irish Labour Party has been thin since the 1920s. Only 6% in the 1933 election. The British Labour Party has thicker roots. It is too early to concede defeat.
Q. You clutch at straws while there is fresh wheat in the Greens! The Greens have lots of young members who will drive them left.
A. Look at the Greens’ Spring Conference on 28 March. It debated only two bland motions because all the rest of the time was taken up with Standing Orders challenges. And the Green left had almost nothing on the agenda to radicalise the party socially. The big “left” push at the conference was for an actually right-wing proposition, to brand all “Zionists” (i.e. all Jews who show reflex empathy with Israeli Jews, however critical they are of Netanyahu) as “racists”.
Q. Ah, but local Green parties have autonomy.
A. Lambeth Green Party has now accepted that motions can be debated and voted on at its meetings. Good! But that sort of democracy, long ingrained even in right-wing trade unions and Labour Parties, is not a norm in local Green Parties. Greens Organise, the new Green left faction, has been going for 17 months, so we might expect more by now, no? As Marxists, we have always criticised the Labour Party as “electoralist”. But there is still in the Labour Party some sense of the party being part of the labour movement, with the trade unions, and thus of workplace and social action being essential to progress. The Green Party is thinner and more electoralist. And now many of its chief leftists will be councillors after 7 May. We know from Labour experience that being a local administrator is not good for your leftist health. The German and Australian and French Greens were more street-action-y (against nuclear power, mostly) in their early days, but those days are gone.
Q. The Greens will replace Labour as the left choice in elections.
A. We’ll see. And will it be any real advance if they do? The Liberal-SDP Alliance replaced Labour as the main “left choice” in 1982, and the Lib-Dems for a while in 2010. The SNP probably has to be reckoned as replacing Labour as the main “left choice” in Scotland, since 2015. Plaid Cymru may now replace Labour as the main “left choice” in Wales. The Greens have long been the default “left choice” in Bavaria. In Italy, Five Star was the biggest single party in the 2013 and 2018 elections. Its initial surge was surely a more “left” way of “being fed up” than the surge of the Lega. In Spain, Podemos ditto. It was ahead or close to the PSOE in the run-up to and at the 2015 election. Not now. Is the Greens’ current poll success as the “fed-up” choice much more than those thin, often ephemeral, “left advances”? Our comrades in the Greens will do their best to widen leftism there, but we are far from the Greens having built a wide enough channel that class-struggle leftism can flow through it from now on.
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