Dave Hill: Where are the Greens going in London?

London has been important for the growth of the Green Party, thanks to the London Assembly. Eleven of its 25 members are elected through proportional representation. That has enabled Greens to win seats at City Hall and make a mark there, initially with two members – including Jenny Jones, who was Ken Livingstone’s statutory deputy for a year – and, since 2021, with three. Now, one of that trio, Zack Polanski, has become national leader of the party.

I first encountered Polanski in November 2019 when he was the Green candidate for Cities of London & Westminster in the general election of that year. He stood no chance of gaining the seat, but at a hustings, competing with the then Westminster Council Tory leader, Nickie Aiken (the eventual winner), and former Labour minister turned Liberal Democrat, Chuka Umunna, he acquitted himself confidently and well.

This was “the climate election,” he said, marrying that line with the familiar Green claim to be “the natural party of small business” and with the large assertion that “we need to absolutely transform our economy”. He also said the capital’s housing shortages could be meaningfully reduced if its empty homes were brought into use, saying these numbered tens of thousands in central London alone. Polanski was already emerging as a prominent protest activist, demonstrating with Extinction Rebellion and objecting to the Met’s response. The outline of the “eco populism” he now espouses was already there.

Having an assembly platform has helped him hone and highlight it. He articulates his “bold politics” with clarity and charisma. He’s making a splash. The Greens are becoming still more firmly established as the party Left-leaning people turn to if they think Labour is too Right. And, following Green gains in various local and last year’s general election, Polanski’s admirers believe he will power them on to greater things in the capital and elsewhere. Are they right?

The answer may depend on two things: one, the plausibility of the policies Polanksi espouses; two, their appeal for some Londoners who’ve voted Green in the past.

Taking the second point first, let’s look at Richmond-upon-Thames. At the last two sets of full borough elections, held in 2018 and 2022, Green candidates have won four and five seats in the borough respectively. Those wins were facilitated by a local electoral pact with the Liberal Democrats which has helped to wipe the Tories, who led Richmond Council from 2010 until 2018, off the borough’s map. The two parties’ collaboration began sooner, in December 2016, when the Greens chose not to field a candidate in a famous parliamentary by-election that saw Lib Dem Sarah Olney unseat Tory Zac Goldsmith.

How will Londoners who’ve voted Green in Richmond at the last two sets of borough elections feel about the party under Polanski’s more strident, radical approach? It’s not hard to see how Greens and Lib Dems could occupy common ground in policy areas such as the environment, conservation and localism that would appeal to sorts of small “l” London middle-class liberal professionals who live in Richmond and have become alienated by the Tories’ every tighter embrace of a Brexit mindset. Will they feel as warmly towards a party that suddenly can now make Jeremy Corbyn sound like a squishy centrist?

This is a suburban London variation on a question being now asked about the Greens nationally. Will his unvarnished stances, his willingness to “pick fights”, over issues such as private landlords, drug legalisation, Gaza and trans rights put off voters in rural areas for whom the appeal of Greens so far has been their wish to protect nature and oppose impositions on sylvan idylls, such as wind farms and HS2?

By contrast, in several inner London boroughs the potential for Green gains seems very apparent. They have already established themselves as an election-winning force in Islington, Camden, Hackney, Lambeth and Newham, albeit in small ways – smaller than in Richmond – so far. A Green by-election win in Hackney a year ago at Labour’s expense will have given them plenty of encouragement. Already, they leafleting the borough energetically with next May in mind.

All that said, and even with Polanksi giving them fresh energy as thousands of new members join, the Greens have a lot of ground to make up. In a recent True London podcast, the LSE’s Jenevieve Treadwell pointed out that in 2022 the Greens won fewer seats in all 32 boroughs put together than Aspire won in Tower Hamlets, and that in last year’s general election, although they finished second in a bunch of London parliamentary seats, only in two – Stratford & Bow and Poplar & Limehouse – did they come within 30 percentage points of the Labour winner.

The Greens have had other recent borough by-election encouragement in Greenwich, where they made a gain in June, and by coming what Lewis Baston called a “highly creditable second” in Barking & Dagenham in August. However, the first of these owed a lot to specific local factors and the second seemed to reflect an influx of new local residents who might not be numerous enough to turn a good second into a first next May.

“I think the promises Zack Polanski is making are quite grand, they might be quite invigorating for many of their voters, but it doean’t reflect the position the party is in right now,” Treadwell said.

That was a month ago and with Polanski still just getting started in a political landscape full of fractures and splits, perhaps the Greens really will mount a sustained surge in the capital over the next seven months. But as an alternative to Labour, they already face competition from local Independents in Redbridge and Newham and, just possibly if they get their act together, from the Corbynite Your Party as it is currently named for the time being.

Candidates and policies will also come under closer scrutiny. Would the Greens be better than Labour at getting affordable homes built, given their antipathy to property development? How would they make a better job of dealing with the huge pressures on borough budgets than the experienced Labour councillors they want to replace? The Greens are feeling pretty good just now. But they have a big job ahead of them if they want to knock big holes in Labour’s London red wall and hardest parts may be yet to come.

Follow Dave Hill on Bluesky. Photo from Zack Polanski’s X/Twitter feed.

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