It’s worth underscoring that Mamdani has himself consistently described events in Gaza since 2023 as a genocide. Indeed, right after that ceremony, he met Palestinian New Yorkers at a restaurant named after Hind Rajab, a five-year-old killed in Gaza two years ago. Nor have his interventions been solely symbolic. On his first day as mayor, Mamdani revoked several executive orders signed by his predecessor, Eric Adams, including the adoption of the controversial IHRA definition of antisemitism and a ban on city agencies participating in the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement.

Whatever one thinks of these moves, they were clearly significant concessions to the pro-Palestine movement. Yet parts of the radical Left, including individuals who claim to have previously campaigned for Mamdani, now oppose him with a vigor usually reserved for the extreme Right. Actually, it would be more accurate to say, with a vigor that is rarely reserved for the Right. After all, Andrew Cuomo, JD Vance and even Donald Trump himself aren’t held to account for their stances on Gaza to such a degree. And yet an elected member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), who has used his platform to highlight the Palestinian cause, is considered a suitable target.

To many not on the Left, this must seem hilarious. It’s the kind of thing you would do if you wanted to lose — a set of actions so politically obnoxious and self-destructive that it wouldn’t be unreasonable to speculate about the role of bad faith or even crisis actors. But no, this is simply how a minority on the radical Left now conducts politics. What’s more, far from being an isolated phenomenon, those opposing Mamdani symbolize a powerful trend in Western activism, specifically in the Anglophone world. This transcends Left and Right: and goes by the name of “virtue hoarding”.

To be clear, virtue hoarding is distinct from “woke” — by now a meaningless phrase generally deployed by old conservatives to disparage single-origin coffee and avocado on toast. Indeed, virtue hoarding is a far more precise term: and a political style that seeks to redefine “vanguardism”. It is also distinct from the old Leninist tradition of offering leadership to the masses. Here, the point is not to win power, but rather to display an unbreachable moral superiority over the rest of society. The point is to lose.

The term virtue hoarding was coined by the cultural theorist Catherine Liu in her 2021 work Virtue Hoarders: The Case Against the Professional Managerial Class. It’s a book that, despite its brevity, helps explain a great deal of seemingly inexplicable behavior, not least the political peccadilloes of the professional middle class (“PMC”).

More from this author

How the West got addicted to trauma

By Aaron Bastani

Liu describes how the desire to hoard virtue has become increasingly central to a form of managerial liberalism that emphasizes bias over inequality, and visibility over exploitation. For the virtue hoarder, policies about economic deprivation and racism always circle back to enhancing their personal “sense of political agency and cultural and moral superiority”. In other words, this unspoken, often incoherent doctrine, allows powerful, credentialed individuals to feel good about themselves — all while failing to address actually-existing exploitation.

Last month, for example, the Boston Globe published an extraordinary report about an LGBT bar in Greenfield, Massachusetts, where the heightened moral scrutiny of the Covid pandemic seems never to have ended. The Last Ditch, facing insolvency and rising debts having only been in business a year, had recently announced it would no longer require customers to wear masks on Saturday nights, though they would remain mandatory from Monday to Friday. That post, published on the bar’s Instagram page, led to a deluge of complaints and abuse — even calls for a boycott. As one comment put it: “I hope your venue gets firebombed”.

Never mind that there have been no recorded cases of Covid in Greenfield for months, and that almost every other venue in the state stopped enforcing masks years ago. Yet just as protesters branded the most pro-Palestinian politician in America a genocide apologist, so too did mask-supporting zealots attack the one venue anywhere close to agreeing with them.

The far side of the Atlantic is facing something similar. Once you recognize the phenomenon, countless political stories become clear — on both sides of the Atlantic. In the aftermath of the recent Green Party conference, for instance, some wondered whether passing a motion that “Zionism is racism” (which won by only a few hundred votes) was a smart strategy: not least because the Greens are struggling to deal with a Labour government now led by Andy Burnham. Just when the Greens needed to address the country with bold, broadly popular policies, critics argued, they had turned inward to debate the meaning of words.

And yet, once again, it was these same people — who are on the whole entirely sympathetic to the claim that Zionism is premised on ideas of racial superiority — who stood accused of being Zionists themselves. Some of the Greens’ newer members even called for the expulsion of the likes of former leader Caroline Lucas and Green MP Adrian Ramsay: someone able to win the Greens a seat in rural East Anglia. I myself was called a Zionist! I had said I understood why some European Jews, in 1945, were attracted to the Israeli cause in the aftermath of the Holocaust. But for the virtue hoarders, of course, that signaled little more than my own moral depravity.

Of course, such behavior isn’t entirely new, particularly on the radical fringes of politics. In Civilization and its Discontents, Freud expanded on his idea of the narcissism of small differences, where minor disagreements with those closest to you assume an outsized importance. You can see this everywhere, from intra-city football rivalries to religious sectarianism and bickering siblings. Later still, in “Left-Wing” Communism: An Infantile Disorder, Lenin offered a sociological critique, arguing that political purism is a temporary habit of the anxious middle strata — as movements mature and learn — rather than a universal psychological feature.

Both theories are arguably in evidence in the stories I outline above. All the same, it does also feel like something else is going on too, not least when it comes to the internet. This is the argument made by James Marriott in his recent book The New Dark Ages: that digital media is taking us closer to a post-literate age, whose “mystical, tribal and autocratic” characteristics feel more reminiscent of our “pre-literate past”. In the same vein, Liu sees virtue-hoarders as trying to transform all social struggles into “individual passion plays” — a phrase that might sound familiar to anyone acquainted with Instagram.

Still, it’s worth questioning whether Liu’s definition of virtue hoarding goes far enough. She observes virtue hoarding most clearly in academia and in white-collar professions. But it’s clear the habit has spread to the downwardly mobile graduates of Britain and North America. Such people are less likely to own a home than their parents and grandparents and should, in theory, be more inclined to a materialist politics.

What’s more, virtue hoarding has made movement politics functionally useless, capable at best of intermittent gains before abruptly imploding. Compare that with, say, the Bolsheviks, whose very name came from the Russian term for “majority” (a label they were canny enough to adopt even when it wasn’t strictly true). For his part, Antonio Gramsci wrote extensively about establishing a majority common sense for Left-wing ideas through cultural production, something he referred to as “hegemony”. It doesn’t matter what you think about Lenin or Gramsci: for two centuries, the Left’s chief ambition was to win over the masses. But now that’s changed.

More from this author

What I learned occupying London

By Aaron Bastani

That’s happened for two reasons. First, because vanguardism has seemingly become an end in itself. If virtue can only be hoarded so long as it is a minority position, then once mainstream opinion shifts towards you, you have to move once more. That is what is most striking about labeling Mamdani a Zionist, or declaring that Caroline Lucas should be expelled from the Green Party. It is precisely because power has made concessions, and the Left has made very real gains that the anger is directed at allies instead. If you’ve ever wondered why some on the Left can’t “take the win”, the concept of virtue hoarding should help explain why.

The second reason stems from the first. For Liu, the PMC rejects debate as a meaningful way of advancing knowledge or settling disputes. Instead, political disagreements generally assume a moral tone. As a result, the politics of virtue-hoarding proves unable to build coalitions around a minimal program — the basis for collective action and social progress. For virtue hoarders, the role of debate is instead replaced by a constant impulse to humiliate political opponents — another straightforward way to accumulate cultural currency on social media — or simply discredit their views as morally suspect because they don’t possess certain immutable characteristics.

It’s worth stating that none of this is limited to the Left, though it does remain most obvious there. Just look at the Right: no sooner had Reform stolen supporters from the Conservatives than Restore appeared to steal supporters off them. The point of Restore isn’t to win, but merely to be part of a vanguard whose prestige and sense of self-worth rests on isolation from mainstream opinion. Were Restore ever to usurp Reform as the default choice of the radical Right, you can rest assured that Rupert Lowe would be presented as a traitor to the faithful alongside Nigel Farage.

Perhaps the saddest thing in all of this is that those engaged in virtue-hoarding generally don’t recognize what they are doing. Still, there’s no doubt that they’re committed to bad politics. If you truly care about your cause succeeding, it’s worth isolating their behavior and explaining why they’re wrong. Because when you have the virtue hoarders on your side, who needs enemies?

Polanski’s Green Party is a party for the heirs of the student activists of the Sixties and Seventies, for whom it was an article of faith that “the personal is political”. And so it’s fitting that a slogan T-Shirt should have caused the greatest crisis of Polanski’s leadership so far. On Monday, he shared a post on Instagram showing one of his supporters wearing a black T-Shirt with a guillotine on it — with the caption referring to the XTC song, “We’re only making plans for Nigel”. “If I were to post anything as inciteful”, responded Nigel Farage, “then I would expect to be arrested, and so should Polanski”. Polanski was quick to delete the post, which he shared just 19 days after Ann Widdecombe’s murder, and to declare that he “unequivocally does not support this type of dangerous message”. But the police are now looking into it — and free-speech hypocrisies aside, Farage is surely right to sense a double standard.

It’s tempting to see all this as just another sign of Polanski’s immaturity, of a piece with his goofball grin and his Hackney house share. That’s true — but what’s even more striking is how his callowness has endured into middle-age. He may not look it, or act it, but Zack Polanski is 43 years old. That makes him seven older than Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and nine older than Zohran Mamdani, with whom he is often flatteringly compared. He may be old enough to have some faint memory of Thatcher, and certainly remembers Section 28. If, by some strange stroke of fortune, Polanski were to become prime minister at the next general election, he would enter Downing Street about the same age as John Major did in 1990. The Green Party is achieving most of its success among Gen-Z. But its leader is only a millennial by the skin of his famous teeth.

Aside from making his wardrobe even more embarrassing, that gives Polanski something rare in politics — a life before. Since he burst onto the political scene, the picture of that life has been gradually filled. What we find is a protean creature, a sentient Ship of Theseus. His first name changed and his surname changed, for independent reasons. When David Paulden became Zack Polanski, really he should have become Zach Polinsky: Polinsky was the ancestral Jewish name, and Zach, not Zack, is the Jewish character in Goodnight Mister Tom. Between that first reinvention and his election as Green Party leader in 2025, there was a phase of Corbyn heckling, Conference gospel singing, and Clegg-Cameron Coalition boosting. But across all this — and his infamous chapter as a hypnotherapeutic breastmaxxer — there has been one constant thread: Zack Polanski was an actor.

Suggested reading

The Green Party's shallow revolution

By Jonny Ball

Acting is what turned him into a political animal. Studying drama in Wales and then in Atlanta,  his political approach to theater goes all the way to a country whose current politics Polanski admires, and with which he wants Britain to form an alliance to replace Nato: Brazil. The Brazilian dramatist Augusto Boal developed the Theater of the Oppressed back in the Seventies. It was based upon his compatriot Paulo Freire’s book Pedagogy of the Oppressed, which was published, as one might expect, in 1968. A long-haired Leftist with a New York education, Boal was kidnapped in 1971 and tortured by Brazil’s far-Right government. He was then able to develop his theories of drama and politics during a 15-year exile. He then returned to Brazil on the collapse of the dictatorship, before being elected a city councilor in Rio de Janeiro. There he introduced something called “legislative theater”, a form of participatory democracy where stakeholders and policymakers share a stage to “co-create innovative and effective solutions to complex challenges, promoting equity, creativity, and fun”. Government by “participatory theater”: has a more obnoxious regime than this ever been devised?

In Boal’s plays, the spectators give way to “spect-actors”, who interact with the actors on stage. Regular spectators in regular play are, you see, passive, bovine, clouded by false consciousness, if you are an orthodox Marxist, or mauvaise foi, if you are of a more existentialist persuasion. Spectators have no power: or, rather, they do not know what is in their power. “Spectator”, Boal concluded in his manifesto, “is a bad word! The spectator is less than a man and it is necessary to humanize him, to restore to him his capacity of action in all its fullness”. For him to become a real man, he first has to act; the spectator must become spect-actor.

This, then, was the apprenticeship of Zack Polanski, his rehearsal for revolution. The Green Party website declares proudly of its leader: “Before entering politics, Zack worked in community theater, specializing in Theater of the Oppressed with marginalized communities to help them tell their own stories”. He first joined the Liberal Democrats, in fact, because the Theater of the Oppressed somehow opened his eyes to the injustice of First Past the Post. Polanski’s theatrical politics gave him the impression that politics is, so to speak, all for show; politics is a morality play, where a scenario of oppression awaits its interruption by a do-gooding “spect-actor”. When he is asked to summarize his outlook, he reaches for the phrase “radical compassion”. It is not enough to “be kind”; the spect-actor has to be kind, radically.

In practice, though, this also means that the only imperative in Polanski’s politics is to be (radically) compassionate to others. There are no conflicts, no trade-offs, no difficult decisions. In many ways, his worldview is as anti-intellectual as it is anti-political; there is no room, really, for serious ideas. If only the billionaires and the Israelis and Donald Trump were more compassionate, if only Britain would prove its compassion by stripping its wealth for the benefit of the global south, opening its borders to more immigrants, and promptly dissolving itself, then all will be well. It is, in short, an immature worldview — and one shallow enough that it can be displayed on a T-Shirt.

Suggested reading

How Gorton beat Denton

By Aris Roussinos

“When people ask for solidarity, the only authentic response is to give it”, as Polanski says in the context of trans rights. The obvious follow-up — that sometimes the interests of different people can collide, and therefore that choosing where to give “solidarity” is necessarily political — simply wouldn’t occur to him. The old binary between actor and spectator was collapsed in favor of another, a binary of justice and injustice, where the dividing line could be easily drawn by any “spect-actor” endowed with the requisite powers of compassion. Even before Polanski, the Green Party liked to fantasize about “citizens’ assemblies”; there is more than a whiff here of Boal’s “legislative theater”. It is always assumed, and with Polanski it is no different, that such assemblies would move towards something resembling the Green Party platform.

But Polanski’s “compassion”, his “solidarity”, only extends to the right kind of people. The guillotine T-Shirt makes that clear. In the end, his anti-political posturing gives way to a bracingly political worldview: he knows to extend “solidarity” to his friends and to withhold it from his enemies. He arguably shared the guillotine image because he’s inured to that strain of abrasive humor so common on the Left: “Eat the rich”, “Punch a TERF”, “the only good fascist is a dead fascist”. If so, he wouldn’t be the first Leftist to land in trouble once such slogans have escaped containment. One young Oxford student is currently awaiting trial for chanting “Gaza, Gaza, make us proud, put the Zios in the ground”.

This is the underlying power of Polanski’s anti-political politics. It gives you, clearly enough, an enemy. With the other parties, with the unjust status quo, he tells you, you really are a mere spectator of the world, a plaything of a venal class of billionaires. You are a passive audience. You yearn, if not for revolution — if not for the guillotine — then at least for that classic 1968 watchword: “agency”. Little wonder Polanski likes to describe himself as an eco-populist; and he has learned certain lessons from the Right-wing populism he is reacting so viscerally against. The message of the Theatre of the Oppressed, and of Polanski’s Green Party, is ultimately to “take back control”. Polanski is dressing up that old formula in such a way as to appeal to people like his younger self: recent graduates floating about, guided only by a vague sense of “social justice” and a lingering artistic ambition. The only way to escape the matrix, Polanski tells them, is to become “spect-actor” instead of “spectator”, to get up on stage. They must, in the end, become political — even if only by throwing on a T-Shirt.

But if he’s a hero abroad, Sánchez is more often cast as a villain at home — an opportunist who has clung to power at the expense of Spain’s national interest. Sánchez has been the Secretary-General of the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE) since July 2014 and in office since June 2018. In that time, he’s survived Covid, the economic shock that followed, and the rise of the hard Right. Britain in the same period has churned through five prime ministers — including one who lasted just 49 days — and the economy has stagnated alongside its sewage-filled rivers.

What makes this period of stability even more surprising is that for the majority of Sánchez’s time as PM, he has governed in coalition. Since his re-election in 2023, he has presided over what sections of the Spanish press term a “Frankenstein government”. Whether it’s truly monstrous depends on your political affiliation — and perhaps your appetite for the gothic — but stitched together it certainly is.  To pass laws, PSOE has been forced into a coalition with a Left-wing alliance of smaller parties called Sumar, a verb which means “to add up”, though “make up the numbers” might be more apt. But even with their support, Sánchez falls short of a majority. So he must also go cap in hand for votes from separatist parties in the Basque Country and Catalonia that want independence from Madrid. It’s the alliance with these groups that’s proved particularly controversial. Unpopular concessions to the separatists have followed, including, most bitterly of all, an amnesty for the organizers of the illegal 2017 referendum on Catalan independence. Outside Catalonia and the Basque Country, support for independence is tiny and the subject provokes anger, even from liberals. Try saying “let them decide” in a Madrid bar and watch how the mood changes.

Suggested reading

How Gorton beat Denton

By Aris Roussinos

So, many predicted this hodgepodge government couldn’t last. Yet it has, and Sánchez is winning admirers for the striking clarity of his values. So how on earth has he done it? 

For one thing, the Spanish system makes it hard to remove prime ministers. A government can only be toppled through a “constructive vote of no confidence”. That means opponents must agree on a replacement before they can bring the leader down.

Sánchez is also being helped by the fear of the hard Right, according to Pablo Simón, a political scientist at Carlos III University of Madrid. “Many parties back Sánchez not because they want his policies, but because they want to prevent the alternative,” says Simón. He’s referring to the emergence of the hard-Right party Vox, which has reshaped Spanish politics and coarsened the discourse, especially around immigration. In recent election campaigns, you occasionally hear the line Si te gusta el jamón, vota Vox — if you like ham, vote Vox — a charming refrain that left many wondering whether they really liked ham after all. The prospect of a coalition between Vox and the center-Right Partido Popular (PP) also helps explain Sánchez’s staying power.

But part of the answer lies in something that is almost alien to British politics, with its entrenched two-party structure, but which seems increasingly likely to define Britain’s next election: the politics of the bloc. Until recently, Spain looked very much like the UK — dominated for decades by just two political forces, PSOE on the Left and PP on the Right. That system cracked open after the 2008 financial crisis and fractured further with the rise of Vox. Sánchez has proved remarkably adept at navigating this new, uneven terrain. He cannily framed the 2023 election as a simple choice: vote for him, or get Vox. And for all the anger over his Faustian pact with the Catalan separatists, he has avoided giving them what they really want: a legal independence referendum.

The question for Britain is whether something similar may be happening at home. The recent Gorton and Denton by-election offered one of the clearest signs yet of the fragmentation of the two-party system. Together, Labour and the Greens took more than two-thirds of the vote, suggesting that in parts of the country a progressive bloc already outweighs the conservative one — music to the ears of those hoping a progressive alliance may finally be taking shape.  

A recent More in Common survey asked which parties voters would tactically block, and found that 38% of Britons would vote against Reform. Green voters were the most likely to say they would vote tactically against Reform, a view also shared by Labour and Liberal Democrat supporters. Britain’s electoral system may make formal coalitions less likely than in Spain, but informal dealmaking may already be beginning to take shape to prevent the alternative. Although progressive voters appear warm to the idea of cooperation between Labour, the Greens and the Liberal Democrats, the party machines are, for now, dead against it. Starmer’s sharp criticism of the Greens’ “sectarian” campaigning in Gorton and Denton hardly suggests he’s looking to them as a future bedfellow. And given the amount of energy he’s spent stamping out any whiff of association with the Corbyn-era Left, an alliance with the Greens of Zack Polanski would, surely, feel like the end of days.

Nevertheless, the comparison runs deeper than just voting patterns. Spain, like Britain, is a union state where the tensions pulling it apart feel familiar to anyone versed in Scottish or Welsh politics. A couple of years ago I invited my delightful Basque neighbors over for a drink. When I asked about their politics, they said they’d rather not say. It just “divides people”. As the penny dropped, I wondered briefly if this amiable couple were really cut out to be separatists. We changed the subject — Gibraltar, if I remember correctly — and got on with the rest of a pleasant evening. But in a very real way, it’s this ability to accommodate such differences that makes Sánchez’s coalition so striking: it forces the separatists to engage with the practicalities of governing, rather than just heckling from the sidelines.

“Sánchez has a remarkable political instinct,” says Simón. “His leadership style is extremely flexible and adapts quickly to changing circumstances.” Sánchez once ruled out an alliance with the separatists — until it became politically necessary. That flexibility can make him seem like a cynical operator, disguised as the handsome new doctor in a telenovela. But while the bloc holds, it also allows him to assert its values with apparent conviction. Sánchez excels at giving his base the signals it wants to hear. Time and again, he uses his power to claim the political banners that define his bloc: feminist legislation, defense of migrants, and forthright criticism of Israel’s military action in Gaza. 

And now his four-word rebuttal to Donald Trump. No a la guerra is not only a masterclass in clear communication, but a calculated callback to the Spanish Left’s opposition to the Iraq War. That conflict left a deep scar in Spain and brought down José María Aznar’s Right-wing PP government. Days before an election, ministers blamed the Basque separatists ETA for deadly train bombings, rather than the actual culprits, Al-Qaeda. 

Sánchez understands that in a multi-party system you can’t afford to be Diet Coke — you have to appear to be the real thing. Meanwhile, Keir Starmer is so preoccupied trying to prevent the drift of Labour voters to Reform that he struggles to communicate his values at all. On Iran, he seemed to plant the exact flag that progressives, still wounded by Britain’s own bitter experience in Iraq, so desperately wanted to see. But then he hoiked it from the ground like a caddy at Mar-a-Lago, leaving everyone to wonder if a flag had been planted at all. Still, he says, “we will not be drawn into the wider war.”

To be fair, Sánchez is on safer ground with his anti-war stance. A recent poll showed more than two thirds of Spaniards are against the war in Iran. In the UK, opinion is foggier — a YouGov poll found 49% opposed and 28% in favor, with the rest unsure. But Sánchez made his call at the outset of the war, before any polling had been published. Why? Because he doesn’t need to hedge his bets. He knows exactly what his bloc wants to hear.

Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that Sánchez is more adept at dealing with the reality of multi-party politics. Spain’s two-party system started to fracture long before Britain’s. During the protests that hit the country following the 2008 crash, pork products again entered the political arena as the public branded politicians chorizos, todos, or “a bunch of crooks”. From the anger emerged the new parties, Podemos and Ciudadanos, that shattered the old duopoly of PSOE and PP. 

The Right derided Podemos’s unconventional pony-tailed leader Pablo Iglesias as a “perroflauta” —  a brilliantly compressed insult for the Spanish breed of crusty found on town square benches with a dog (perro) and a recorder (flauta), and a repertoire consisting mainly of Manu Chao. But among Spanish progressives, excitement was through the roof. Many — including a friend of mine with three houses — joined the cause. A new energy swept through the Left, anticipating the early days of Jeremy Corbyn in the UK or Bernie Sanders in the US. Long-dismissed socialist ideas suddenly felt fresh, especially to a younger generation that had never heard them from the mouths of mainstream politicians. Within a few years of its creation, Podemos had won millions of votes and dozens of seats. 

Like Ciudadanos, Podemos has now faded. However, the blocs these parties helped create remain, and it’s between these sides that the political battle is now being fought. On the one side, you have Sánchez’s socialists and their regional allies; on the other, the conservative parties of PP and Vox. 

Of course, the comparison of Spain and the UK has its limits, not least the different electoral systems. And bloc politics is far from ideal. As Simón points out, it has some big drawbacks: increased polarization and making national agreements far harder to reach.

Suggested reading

The Bush GOP never went away

By Duncan Wheeler

But both Spain and Great Britain are dealing with fragmented politics and Sánchez is the master of the bloc. Far from being unstable, his coalition has proved more durable than Britain’s recent majority governments and forces him to take clear positions that resonate with his base. Across Europe, politics is now reorganizing around competing visions of migration, identity and the state. For a country where a night out rarely begins until midnight, Spain has arrived uncharacteristically early to the bloc party. British politicians may soon discover that survival depends less on commanding a majority than on mastering Sánchez’s delicate art of holding the bloc together. 

For Starmer in particular, if he can’t find a way to appeal to his own base, he risks looking less like Hugh Grant’s PM and more like a lonely teenager on a big stage clutching a sign that reads “Vote for Pedro”. 

Despite Labour’s propagandizing that the result was on a knife-edge, and the polls suggesting a three way split between the Greens, Labour and Reform, it wasn’t even close: Spencer won 60% more votes than the hapless Labourite Angeliki Stogia. Reform was a distant second to Labour’s disastrous third. (The Tories didn’t even keep their deposit.) Yet this was never Farage-friendly territory: too young, too inner-urban, too diverse. It was not Matt Goodwin’s to lose. But the ruling party has been cannibalized from two directions in a safe seat, its coalition riven in a way that defies repair.

Divorces are rarely amicable. This one least of all. Labour’s fractured base is represented perfectly across this Mancunian constituency. In Denton, to the east, the old, now very much post-industrial white working-class; and to the west, in Gorton, the Muslim and ethnic minority vote, living cheek-by-jowl with the declassé elements of Britain’s urban liberals. Here was the tripartite alliance of the contemporary Left in all its glory, fused together awkwardly just like the constituency itself, with a motorway in the middle. Labour has not lost an election here since 1931. Yet today, each of its tribes has found its own reasons to despise Starmer’s Labour: a project that was never comfortable in its own skin.

Perhaps it needn’t have been this way. When candidate selection for the by-election took place in the distant days of Morgan McSweeney, the party saw fit to block Andy Burnham — a man pollsters have consistently shown to be the most popular Labour politician in the country. Someone who might have united the disparate factions. But despite the Mayor of Greater Manchester’s epic support in the area, he was blocked from running to “end the leadership psychodrama”. The humiliated party may regret that move as Starmer, in the coming days, shifts from “dead-man-walking”, staggering on until May, to simply “dead man”.

More from this author

Starmer has written Labour’s suicide note

By Jonny Ball

Labour has presented voters with a heaving table of grievances from which they’ve filled their plates: Palestine, small boats, winter fuel, Shabana Mahmood’s punitive asylum proposals, proposed disability cuts, the cost of living, Labour’s repeated tendency to excuse proximity to paedophilia on the part of their factional allies. Each of these might have been carefully designed to alienate a completely different member of the famous “the Labour family”. And so the party is being consumed like the spaghetti in Lady and the Tramp.

There will, of course, be no kiss between Reform and the Greens when they reach the middle: the space between Faragism and Polanskism is a cultural chasm. Once the Labour family was united under a social-democratic banner. Now, two sides face each other with a mix of bemusement and horror. The Greens have proved they can hegemonize the Left vote, and Reform the Right, each offering a brand of unapologetic, insurgent, abrasive politics that eschews the old model of median-voter triangulation in favor of brash authenticity.

And what can tired old Labour do, an Edwardian party saddled with a late-20th-century politics, facing the archetypal entrepreneurs of our peculiar age: the unfiltered, un-focus-grouped model of political communications delivered in short-form vertical videos by men-with-an-iPhone without the mediating influence of the “MSM”. Farage mastered the medium, Polanski has merely tweaked the message — ditch and switch the easy panaceas; mass deportations become a wealth tax; net zero goes from national self-harm to national salvation. In Gorton, if not Denton, this noisy brand of “eco-populism” has been brilliantly effective.

Yesterday, on the ground, Green activists seemed ubiquitous. Levenshulme was a sea of Vote Green posters. A swarm of young enthusiasts asked for cars to honk in support outside the Lidl. Next door, an Afghan flag flapped outside a newsagent. Residents walked down a high street as diverse as any London borough, while a Labour van blared a warning that the Green Party would “teach our children to use drugs including crack and heroin and let our daughters be used for prostitution”. Dirty tricks, perhaps, or simply an exaggerated reflection of the ecologists’ foray into an extreme form of Left libertarianism at odds with the socially conservative instincts of Gorton’s Muslims?

The Green bloc marries ultra-liberal young gentrifiers to often deeply conservative British South Asians. But these quirks — even amid claims of “family voting” breaches in polling stations — don’t matter right now. What matters is vibes, signals and the loose cadences of political affiliation. As the cause of labor has wilted, the bobos and the brothers can get behind the cause of Gaza. The Greens have now staked their claim to the mantle of Britain’s foremost progressive party, with their first seat in the North, in a safe red citadel, trouncing Labour’s always-dubious claim that “only Labour can beat Reform”. Labour is no longer the “stop Reform” tactical option in our fragmenting system. They weren’t in Caerphilly last year, and they weren’t in Gorton and Denton last night. For the Greens now find themselves the acceptable home for the virtuous, the over-educated, the bien pensant opinion-havers. They’re the nice party, for nice people, not the génocidaires or crypto-fascists (notwithstanding the internal tensions over the trans question). “I think everyone should have a nice life, and clearly other people do as well”, Spencer said during her victory speech. That may as well be used as the next manifesto’s epigraph.

More from this author

Morgan McSweeney’s empty legacy

By Jonny Ball

Just before the polls closed yesterday, I found a disgruntled Labour member from outside the constituency. They were despondent. Who would they have voted for if they lived in the area? “Green, obviously. I’m not a monster”, they say with a self-deprecating laugh. It’s a reaction instructive of many people’s complicated relationship with their own party: they stay only out of habit, pining after a Reformation of Labour’s “broad church” that may now never come.

When the historian George Dangerfield wrote his interwar classic, The Strange Death of Liberal England, he blamed the decline of the once-great Liberal Party on “three wild strands”: “hysterical” proto-feminists, demanding women’s suffrage; “unreasonable” organized labor, demanding a greater share of the national income; and the Irish, demanding Home Rule. Today, with Labour seemingly in its death throes, the party established to represent the labor interest faces its own three strands of rebellion: problems far more structural than the Suffragettes or John Redmond.

The working class no longer has the manufacturing industries or trade unions that bound it so tightly to Labour politics, even as they balk at the repeated importation of low-wage workers from abroad. The educated middle classes find their children locked out of the housing market with stagnant wages, and are wedded to the mores of very online contemporary cultural progressivism. And, finally, the biraderi culture that once guaranteed wins for Labour, with its tight ethnic and clan-based voter-blocs, has broken down. The tripartite Left alliance is over.

Perhaps social democracy was merely a 20th-century phenomenon, a force for the era of mass production lines, trade unions and the Cold War. Starmer certainly can’t save what’s left of it, and Gorton and Denton makes it uncertain that even a politician with skills, charisma, and determined force of will can either. No contenders on the Labour benches have the communicative abilities or political dexterity to put a broken cross-class alliance together. Hannah Spencer might cheer that “we do things differently” in Manchester — but this city’s future could soon be the country’s too, with the death of Labour England writ large.

The show’s stumbling star Frank Gallagher is undoubtedly a selfish and untrustworthy figure, trapped in a never-ending hustle to score his next drink. Yet despite his failings, both as a father and citizen, his character periodically hints at a deeper political awareness, mediated primarily through his boozy rants about the depredations of “Thatcher’s Britain”. The eight Gallagher children are clever and entrepreneurial — most of them destined to outgrow and ultimately leave the Chatsworth estate for love, university and better things. Frank’s eldest daughter Fiona is caught in a constant struggle between her personal aspirations and her responsibilities to her neglected siblings, while eldest son “Lip” is a child prodigy, earning a living selling homework to his classmates.

But if the Channel 4 series tackled its subjects far more humanely than the red tops, Shameless still ultimately presented life on the Chatsworth Estate as obsolete, a trap which imprisoned its residents. Indeed, this view of life on Chatsworth, from the uplands of New Labour in its pomp, in many ways echoed the prevailing contemporary narrative on Britain put forward by its leaders — that, post-Thatcher, Britain had changed. The dirty industries that once sustained cities like Manchester were no more, and the country’s destiny instead lay in the course of globalized services, or the “knowledge-based economy” to use the dreary Blairite parlance.

For its first season, Shameless was filmed around Wenlock Way and Clowes Street  — an iconic example of boxy Seventies architecture in the throes of neglect and decay, replete with graffiti, rotting wooden fences and spartan stretches of municipal lawn. Wenlock Way is itself located at the far edge of the Gorton and Denton constituency, the far-flung corner of Manchester due to go to the polls today. Perhaps fittingly, the estate has since been demolished as part of Manchester’s regeneration process, a transformation which has rebranded a city once renowned for dingy, sooty alleyways into a glistening steel-and-glass metropolis.

Suggested reading

Things can't get worse in Gorton and Denton

By Tanya Gold

Manchester Council, under unbroken Labour leadership since 1971, fully embraced the post-industrial future heralded by the national Labour leadership. From the Eighties, it deliberately pursued a policy of attracting high-productivity services into the city, replacing the old textile mills and factories. At the heart of this was a gigantic program of investment in the physical infrastructure of the depopulated and grimy city center, financed primarily by foreign investment, pump-priming property values to attract high-earners from London. At the same time, and as I document in my book on the subject, Manchester Council pursued incredibly hostile policies towards the building of affordable housing  — seen as an embarrassing throwback to an industrial era New Labour had left firmly behind.

This focus away from Manchester’s pre-existing residents was felt hard by residents like those depicted in Shameless, embedding a deep sense of abandonment and enmity towards the whole political class. As Frank himself poetically notes in his opening monologue to series eight:

So you’ve had your Labour reclassifying scum sending prices sky high, literally, literally taking the grass from its own roots. Now you’ve got your Con-Dem-Nation. Liberals noshing Tories like altar boys picking dim-sum. Have we had a national fucking stroke, or what?

The truth, of course, is that real-life Chatsworths were always so much more than the lager-soaked hangover of deindustrialization. Behind the cultural noise, these places retained incredibly strong communities, mutual aid networks and inter-generational family ties. Even once the factories closed, solidarity persisted on estates sustained by affordable housing, enabling communities to remain rooted to their homes even as as their economic function vanished.

All the same, the estate life depicted by Shameless has been in decline. At the end of the Seventies, over four-in-ten of the British population lived in social housing — and in cities like Manchester, that figure was far higher. Today, the figure nationally stands at just 17%, with the proportion of Manchester households living in social housing dropping by a tenth. And despite the grand ambitions of New Labour, the story of fictional characters like Lip, leaving the estate in series five to start an undergraduate degree at Nottingham University, has failed to truly materialize. In the real world, the people of places like Chatsworth have been cast adrift — unable to sustain the stable life they once expected.

It’s no surprise, anyway, that such communities now form the vanguard of Nigel Farage’s insurgency, both in Gorton and Denton and across the country. The evidence is clear that as well as geographically — following the pattern of deindustrialization — Reform’s vote is positively correlated with the most deprived communities and co-morbidities of poverty: including poor health and low levels of social trust. Gorton itself is one of the most deprived wards in the country, with over 65% of households considered deprived by the indices of multiple deprivation and with 47% of children living in poverty.

In the absence of any understanding or interest from political elites, promises of pride, identity and purpose are clearly appealing. And yet one can’t help but note the discord between the self-proclaimed “Thatcherism” of Reform — and the voters it’s currently courting in places such as Gorton. It was, after all, Margaret Thatcher’s project which assaulted the economic bedrock of these places, destroying livelihoods and purpose, and starting the systemic financialization which has hard-baked inequality into British life. Manchester lost 82,000 manufacturing jobs between 1981 and 1991, and the population of the city declined by over 120,000. These statistics reflect an economic catastrophe which afflicted almost all of Britain’s industrial regions.

All the while, it was the Thatcherite Right and its successors that began a moral crusade against “the underclass” of “benefit scroungers” — cultural forerunners of Noughties chavs. You can’t help but notice that Reform’s candidate Matthew Goodwin himself came to prominence articulating the importance of high fertility, fertility which the same Thatcherite Right assaulted for decades on the basis that families were “having children they can’t afford” and running up the benefits bill. At the time Shameless was aired, meanwhile, you would more likely find politicians of the contemporary populist Right disparaging “the chavs, the losers, the burglars, the drug addicts” — in the 2005 words of Boris Johnson.

Yet somehow these same “chavs” are now the backbone of a new English nativism: a transformation in attitude which does, fittingly, feel rather shameless. Of course, Reform’s economic stance continues to be a matter of dispute — with calls to nationalize steel and other industries somewhat consciously courting voters in its new northern base. Yet with the defections of senior architects of the previous Tory government now embedded into Reform’s “shadow cabinet”, the party seems more than ever committed to the Iron Lady’s economic legacy.

Suggested reading

How Britain gets its future back

By Jonny Ball

That this transformation has been possible is testament to the extent to which Labour and the broader Left embraced Thatcher’s ideas. When the former prime minister told reporters that her greatest political achievement was Tony Blair, she wasn’t simply making a wry joke. New Labour was the formalization of the uniparty which has since come to define British politics, a rejection of our industrial heritage and the collectivism, community and solidarity that came with it. New Labour’s message was, ultimately, hardly more compassionate than the cruel mockery of the urban poor by the Tories, thriving on authoritarian “crackdowns” of various kinds, with ASBOs and the surveillance state largely there to discipline the tiresome oiks.

Once again, Shameless dealt with these themes explicitly, with one character receiving an ankle tag alongside his ASBO in series three, while elsewhere Department for Social Security officers swarm the estate to tackle benefit fraud. It’s hardly irrelevant that the Gorton by-election was itself triggered by the resignation of the area’s former MP Andrew Gwynne, after WhatsApp messages emerged showing him hoping an elderly constituent would “croak it” for daring to criticize him.

In the end, no one has become more convinced of the redundancy and insignificance of their voters than Labour. Yet when pushed, and whatever they might claim, many on the new Right still retain their contemptuous attitudes towards benefits claimants and the urban poor, possessing a basically instrumentalist approach to their new base. Earlier this month, for instance, Goodwin was caught sending out letters purportedly written by “concerned neighbor” Patricia Clegg — despite the 74 year old claiming she never signed off on them. Things have become so bad that Clegg’s son, a former Reform-voting veteran, has publicly attacked Goodwin online.

Though he was born and raised in leafy St Albans, meanwhile, Goodwin has emphasized his plastic Manc credentials via a campaign suggesting that he is as working class as Green candidate Hannah Spencer (who works as a plumber), and more Mancunian than Labour’s Angeliki Stogia on the basis that she was born in Greece (despite being a fully naturalized British citizen of over 30 years, and a local councillor for more than 10).

Yet this rebranded Thatcherite may tomorrow be the next MP for Gorton and Denton, carried into office promising to improve lives with the very same policies that caused such misery. Many Gorton and Denton voters have been ignored by Labour for decades, their support taken for granted. Goodwin may be selling snake oil, but at least he bothered to show up. And if, by some miracle, Labour hold the seat, the gap between the party and its downtrodden voters only seems destined to grow. That’s a shame. Estates like Chatsworth’s might not have been a “Garden of Eden”, in the wise words of Frank Gallagher, but they offered purpose, place, identity — all prerequisites for a life free of shame.

Once a safe seat — Labour won 50.8% of the vote 18 months ago — today, such things have evaporated. This by-election was called after its MP, Andrew Gwynne, resigned on the grounds of ill health (he is 51). He was previously suspended from Labour for writing in a local MPs WhatsApp group: “Dear resident, Fuck your bins. I’m re-elected and without your vote. Screw you.” As a paradigm of our fracturing democracy, it can’t be bettered.

Polling currently has Labour coming third, and Reform or the Greens winning, because blood will have blood. Last year, Reform took nearby Runcorn and Helsby from Labour by just six votes: and they didn’t have the help of the Greens, who this week are standing Hannah Spencer, a plumber with dancer’s legs, golden trouser suits and soaring, raging cadences. She begins most speeches with references to herself, because this is the era of politics as personal journey. Reform has Matt Goodwin, an academic-turned-broadcaster who vibrates like a tuning fork, trying to project the kind of wracked reasonableness that used to be native to Tory wets. He is helped by the presence of Advance UK, a Christian Nationalist party to the right of Reform, because they make Reform look like humanists.

But this feels less like a by-election than the frenzied, and thoughtless, herald of a coming war: extremists meeting themselves. To mirror it, this is a constituency in two halves. The west — poorer, nearer Manchester, and with a large Muslim population — is a forest of Green Party signs: 30% of this constituency is Muslim. The Muslim Vote campaign (“Peace in Palestine, Equality in the UK”) has endorsed the Greens: social conservatives will vote with trans advocates to punish Labour for Gaza. To the east, white working-class Denton is all Reform-leaning voters and Union Jacks. And here, in the Red Lion pub, unofficial Reform HQ, they sing karaoke with alcohol-fueled nostalgia. They seem to think in ballads, as if these songs were their politics. A large man rises, and sings:

Home is a love that I miss very much
The past has been bottled and labeled with love

But no one is listening.

An aged veteran talks about betrayal as he slowly gets drunk. He won’t let me record him or even take notes. “You know how I feel,” he says, in mitigation; and it’s true that a lot of people here talk as if they have read the same Facebook posts. The talking points — immigration; stupid Net Zero; the death of British culture — are identical. He shows me a photograph taken after a military parade. It is of him, and three friends. One went home from the parade, he says, and hanged himself. His drinking partner, a woman in her sixties, tells me: “We [the white working class] don’t matter.” She says this very deliberately, hitting the table with the side of her hand. She repeats it — “We. Don’t. Matter.” — and every time she says it, she hits the table. Then, in a blink, she is crying. “You don’t know my story. I’ve taken it from men. I’ve brought up three kids. I’ve worked every day. I’m not represented.”

The hustings in St Andrew’s Church, in Levenshulme, are sullen and angry. Ten candidates are here, including a representative from the Communist League, which feels oddly appropriate — if we are re-enacting the Weimar Republic, let’s do it right — and an Asda cashier standing as a Libertarian who behaves like he has won a prize. Only Sir Oink-A-Lot of the Monster Raving Loony Party is missing, as if it is too trivial for him. But it is hard to mock politics when it feels so joyless.

The candidates sit by a sign that says, “Fishers of Men”. The audience leans Green, but there are three Terfs in the front row supporting the Conservative candidate Charlotte Cadden, a former police detective who is skilled and sensible and looks exhausted.

They give opening statements which, consciously or not, evoke home. Green (Hannah Spencer): “I’ve probably fitted a toilet for some of you.” Labour (Angeliki Stogia, interpreting JFK): “I came here from Greece over 13 years ago, and I found a city that did not ask where I came from.” Liberal Democrat (Jackie Pearcey): “This is a great place to live. I’ve lived here long enough I’ve even managed to pay off the mortgage.” The response to Labour is tepid. Between, the “Dear resident, Fuck your bins”, message, the cost of living, and Gaza, her support has shriveled to a nub.

This constituency has common problems but despite this, and possibly because of it, they decide to talk about Jews for 40 minutes. This by-election deals in fairy politics: the theoretical, the fantastical, and the mad. Jew hatred is only one of many harbingers of collapse to choose from: and Gaza is a continent away. The first question: what is the candidate’s response to the rise of antisemitism since October 7, 2023?  Cadden, the Tory, replies: “I stand shoulder to shoulder with the Jewish community.” Goodwin finds it “utterly depressing”. Spencer blames “divisive politics and politicians who spread hatred and vile stories about individual groups”.

None of them has anything valuable — that is, analytical — to say about antisemitism, other than they don’t like it: they speak to air. But when a man asks: “Do you agree with the majority of genocide scholars that there’s a genocide in Gaza?” that air turns febrile. Jackie Pearcey says it comes, “pretty close”. Spencer says, “We do not need to wait a decade, or however long it takes for a tribunal to tell us that what is happening in front of our eyes is a genocide.” Angeliki Stogia, trying to hold the seat for the governing party, says in her tiny, gentle voice “it is heart-breaking”, and cries.

The SDP candidate Sebastian Moore, a ruddy boy, says, slowly and with genuine curiosity, “I don’t know if our politics has always been like this. Maybe people that are slightly older than me can tell me. What’s happening in the Middle East, whether I term it a genocide or not, has no bearing on the tragedy that is unfolding there. So, no, I’m not going to answer your question.”

There are heckles, particularly towards Goodwin, and, among some candidates, an overarching contempt for each other. Goodwin accuses Spencer of misrepresenting his tax policy; Spencer accuses Goodwin of misrepresenting her drug policy.

Real politics is soporific here – you can sense the room flagging. But the trans question, or rather statement — the Government is transphobic — ignites it again. Spencer says, inevitably, “I think I was here when the Levenshulme Pride took place!” The Liberal Democrat says she believes that, “trans people are people”, though no one is suggesting they aren’t. She is addressing a void. As we stare into it, Goodwin says he must leave: “I’m meeting pub landlords after this, whose businesses are being completely decimated by the current government.” He is laughed at, though I cannot see the joke.

The next day, outside the Green Party HQ, I meet a Muslim who has driven from Birmingham to campaign for the Greens. He says he joined the Party two weeks ago: “it is [the] first time that I’ve actually joined a [political] party.” He has been in the UK for 64 years. But only recently, he says, has he been asked “‘Am I English?’ ‘Am I British?’ ‘Do I belong?’. You know what they’re saying, but they’re not saying it. You not only fear the color part, but you also fear the part that you’re a Muslim and therefore an Islamist or therefore,” he speaks very slowly, and tiredly, “a terrorist. I have six grandchildren. For my grandkids, the times are desperate. Or will be.”

As I leave, I see a handmade sign: it reads, “Ministry of Plumbing and Plastering. Hannah Spencer, MP.” She is, I see, a bewitching candidate. And as I walk around this constituency and talk to the voters fleeing Labour, this election feels like it is playing in the realm of fantasy. It is not really about racism, though it is everywhere. It is about home, and where it is, and who has one, and who doesn’t. Real politics — the management of competing needs — is hard. Labour asked for a decade to fix the state, but patience has already gone. Instead, voters fall to magical thinking: that voting Green will help Palestinians; that voting Reform will recover the Empire; that you will, one day, find home.

The next day, Advance UK pitch their stall opposite the Red Lion in Denton, in an empty square. A woman tells me, “I’ve got brown skin, but I’m British through and through.” Her parents were immigrants from Jamaica. “I’ve got red, white and blue flowing through my blood.” Illegal immigrants, she says, have homes. They are staying in five-star hotels and swimming in pools, “whereas our guys [are] on the streets. People are getting angry. They don’t want to pay for people in hotels. They don’t want to pay for their tennis lessons and their trampolining lessons.”

Her fantasy is that Reform is, “controlled opposition. They’re paid to do what they do by whoever.” By whom? “I’m not saying. We need change,” she goes on happily, “but Nigel [Farage] is not the one to bring it. His right-hand man is Zia Yusuf. This is a Christian country. We shouldn’t be led at all by a different religion.” I ask her if she thinks there shouldn’t be Muslim, or even Jewish, MPs. “I’m not saying that we shouldn’t have any different religions, but not in high government positions.” I think of the woman at the bus stop, saying things can’t get worse, and watch Goodwin roll down the street on his Reform bus, which is as clean and empty as a new house. He waves a sign and promises, through his loudhailer, to rid us of Keir Starmer. His promise, if elected, is this: “This seat will never be ignored again. It will never be neglected, and it will never be disrespected.” Dreamland, again.

In the Queen Vic pub opposite, an angry young man points at his teeth. They are also a metaphor. “I need five fillings,” he tells me. “I’m fucked.” It will cost £3,995 privately, he says, and he cannot find an NHS dentist. He has a good job — he is an engineer — but suggests that perhaps, instead, he should become an illegal immigrant? “Do I need to go to France and throw my ID in the fucking bin?” he asks me. “Money shouldn’t be free,” he goes on, “I work seven days a week. Labour wants to tax the air that you breathe. Are you mad?”

Reform is “guaranteed” to win here, he says, from behind his reluctantly political teeth, but in truth it could go three ways. The Greens could edge past Reform, but the Muslim-LGBTQX coalition cannot hold long-term. Labour could still run through the middle, though in such reduced numbers victory will be considered defeat. By-elections are runes: they show us how angry people are, and these are the angriest I have met since Covid, and significantly more hopeless. “The Greens are fucking mad,” he says. “They will do heroin but not eat meat. If you’re a straight white man you’re a cunt. The white person is demonized more than anyone.”

Here ends centrist politics, at least for now, because hope in incremental solutions has gone. If you believe these runes, Reform will be the next government. And if Reform should win the next General Election?

“I’m not convinced governance will be so much of an issue,” Goodwin tells me. “Public opinion will be a challenge. We are living through managed decline, right? And so, the public appetite for change is enormous, but public patience is extremely limited”. He has told Farage that he thinks they may win the election “because we’re just the other guys, right? We’re not Labour, we’re not Tory, we’re just the other guys.” And so, he thinks, “there may not be a honeymoon period at all. There may not be a significant period of support in the polls. It may just sort of prove to be very febrile and very volatile. I’m convinced it will be much more like Trump 2 than Trump 1, and we’ve got so much that’s planned. The untold story about Reform is how much legislation is already drafted and prepared.”

Here, though, the voters do not know that; I am not even sure they care. In the Queen Vic pub, when I ask what will change under a Reform government, an older, red-bearded man, speaks for the first time. “Nothing,” he says. But he will vote for them all the same.

Whatever you think of his politics, Zack Polanski embodies the outsider narrative he preaches. His background is varied: actor, activist, youth worker — and, most infamously, hypnotherapist, where he apparently tried to enlarge a woman’s breasts. Polanski’s political development is just as striking. Elected as deputy leader of the Greens in 2022, he became the first openly gay Jewish deputy leader in British history. Born David Paulden, he reclaimed his former family name, and his religious heritage, at 18.

Polanski has made much of his unconventional personal journey, projecting authenticity and charming much of the media in the process. Branding himself as a youthful and emotionally charged disrupter, he has been careful to contrast himself with Green Party stereotypes — less Home County geriatric and more insurgent with a green beret. Even Polanski’s insistence that the Greens select a single head, dumping the party’s traditional system of co-leadership, points towards an incipient form of personality cult. The ex-actor’s showmanship is easy to criticize, as are his rather undignified scraps with Right-wing rivals online. Yet the results speak for themselves. Polanski’s campaign launch video received over two million views, while Green Party membership has surged roughly 8%, and is now approaching its 2015 peak.

More from this author

The social care Ponzi scheme

By Gabriel McKeown

This change of tone is echoed by policy, with Polanski’s Greens enthusiastically embracing so-called “eco-populism”. Aiming to strip environmentalism of its stodgy middle-class baggage, it instead aims to inspire apolitical voters. Polanski ties these reforms to redistributionist themes, painting every green policy as a step toward greater social justice. One example is linking climate action to wealth inequality, even as he argues that obsessing over immigration misses the bigger picture: a super-rich elite not paying its share. Unsurprisingly, Polanski also champions a comprehensive wealth tax of 1% on assets exceeding £10 million, and 2% on assets over £1 billion. This, he claims, means the green transition can be achieved without burdening ordinary people.

A longstanding tenet of the Green Party has been the so-called Green Economic Transformation, which the party’s leader will be expected to deliver. At its core, this is a commitment to spend £40 billion a year in new public investment. This will fund sweeping eco-friendly retrofits, from home insulation and low-carbon heating. Beyond that new wealth tax, this would be paid for via a steep carbon levy on all fossil fuels. Alongside canceling all new oil and gas licenses, and ending the relevant subsidies, the Greens would effectively legislate oil and gas out of existence.

Such radicalism is reflected elsewhere. For starters, Polanski hopes to renationalize key utilities, bringing trains, water and energy back into public ownership. Then there’s foreign policy. Polanski has called for the UK to leave Nato, in large part due to Donald Trump, whom he deems an unreliable ally. As for Gaza, Polanski has attended pro-Palestine marches, using his Jewish upbringing to assail Labour’s support for Israel. These stances underline his anti-establishment appeal, which has also started to reshape the party’s base. Much of its growth comes from former Labour activists and Corbyn-era allies. Eager to take on both the Right and mainstream Treasury orthodoxy, Polanski has even indicated a willingness to collaborate with other Left-wing insurgents, notably Corbyn’s and Zarah Sultana’s new outfit.

This approach seems to be working: internal Green Party figures suggest 30% of young people may now vote for them, an excitement apparently echoed by one-in-ten voters nationally. Yet if this is a 43% jump from the already-record vote share the party secured last year, the Green prospectus is very far from perfect. Consider, for instance, the question of carbon levies. In 2024, the Institute for Fiscal Studies noted that any success the tax had in cutting emissions would directly result in revenues collapsing. Many of Polanski’s spending pledges, in areas from health and social care, would effectively be financed by a revenue stream tailor-made to shrink.

The party’s proposed wealth tax is also flawed. An annual levy on complex assets, which make up the bulk of this wealth, would be administratively costly and prone to evasion. This is mirrored in the experience of other developed economies, notably the Netherlands, where the supreme court went so far as to rule that the tax was a violation of European law. Elsewhere, countries from Germany to Sweden were forced to repeal their wealth taxes due to capital flight, and because they deterred foreign investment and cut tax revenues. And if these fundraising measures look faulty, so too do the outlays.

One of the party’s main promises is to make electricity generation 100% renewable by 2035, completely eradicating carbon-based energy. Right off the bat, this goal is made more challenging by the party’s long-standing disdain for nuclear energy, which it deems unsafe and expensive. That’s debatable: but either way, around half of British power currently comes from gas-fired plants, with nuclear providing a further 9%. No less important, the grid isn’t ready for Polanski’s renewable revolution. Building the necessary battery storage infrastructure would cost hundreds of billions alone, far exceeding the party’s calculations. As for renewable projects, many remain stuck in connection queues, unable to hook into the grid, with waiting lists stretching to over a decade. For the Green Party to hit its renewable targets, it would need to connect more turbines than the entire current queue — and all within a decade.

In a way, though, and as Polanski’s own style implies, the point here is less about policy outcomes and more about radicalism per se — with those extravagant green offers simply one pillar of a broader anti-establishment platform. This, of course, raises the perennial question of whether the Greens are mainly an environmental movement, or else a progressive party that uses climate change as a Trojan Horse. Certainly, think tanks on the far Left have been advancing nearly identical policies for years, just without the green branding.

More from this author

TikTok will decide elections

By Gabriel McKeown

Whether this socialist turn will expand the party’s appeal is the biggest gamble of Polanski’s leadership. For if the polling numbers seem strong, the electoral fragmentation implicit in his strategy could yet be his undoing. Even a vote share of just 5% could see the Greens gain a number of seats, especially in our dawning age of five-party politics. More to the point, Polanski is probably right in thinking that a chunk of disillusioned Labour supporters are ripe for the taking, particularly after four more years of idea-free Starmerism. At the fringes, though, Polanski’s revolution extends even beyond that. Among other things, he claims that many Reform voters are simply frustrated by low pay and poor public services, and that Green “eco-populism” is clearly the solution.

Indeed, this idea has likely shaped Polanski’s decision to echo Reform’s campaign strategies, with the man himself stating that his party must “learn from Farage”. In practice, though, there are reasons to think that Polanski is overstretching. For one thing, campaigning for Labour voters undercuts any notion of shared purpose. If too many disaffected voters scatter, Reform’s vast poll lead will only grow. By emphasizing that they are not fundamentally at odds with Labour ideology, meanwhile, the Greens risk foundering were Starmer to tack Left. This places the party in a far more tenuous position than Polanski may realize — and that’s before you add his idealistic paean to the material interests of Reform voters, oblivious to the ways immigration and identity are transforming British politics. Hypnotherapy, political or otherwise, just won’t cut it.

Is it not curious how carnivorism is subject to endless negative news and analysis, whereas the same rules do not apply to vegan food? As a keeper of livestock in sustainable, ethical, regenerative farming systems, may I say I find it hypocritical to be lectured by those who fly on polluting jets to Egypt, Mexico, Peru and other places I will never see? Has the COP jamboree not discovered Zoom yet? So, for once, let us turn the dinner tables, put vegan food under the knife and fork, and examine its impact on the environment. Where better to start than with tofu?

An ancient, soya-based ingredient in Asian cuisine, tofu came to the West with stoned returning hippies, and was an obscure item in Whole Food shops until the early 21st century, when it started to appear on the shelves of every middle-class supermarket as the meat-free, climate-healing superfood. Suella Braverman’s recent rant about “Guardian-reading, tofu-eating wokerati” was not without its truth; tofu is as much a right-on political choice as a potential ingredient in tonight’s family dinner.

Tofu, for those unacquainted with the stuff, is curd made from soybeans that have been soaked in large tanks and churned into a slush, which is then heated, filtered and coagulated into slabs, before being chopped up, packaged, and pasteurised. All these steps require a lot of carbon dioxide-emitting energy.

More from this author

Oat milk is killing the planet

By John Lewis-Stempel

The amount of soybeans grown in the UK is negligible (3,000 tons in 2019: our isles are insufficiently warm for the crop), meaning the soybeans imported for any national tofu-maker come with enough travel miles to get them from Japan, say, or the US. The Tofoo Co. might come over all artisanal  — their tofu is made “int Yorkshire”, as they declare on their website — but the raw product is shipped from Canada and Italy.

Then you have the packaging. Tofu is sloppy, wet stuff, invariably sold wrapped in thick plastic you could use as kids’ shoes at the beach. Selflessly, your author, in the interests of “method research”, ate 200g of Bjorg smoked tofu; the plastic packing weighed 10g, actually measurable on analogue kitchen scales.

The Tofoo Co., meanwhile, earnestly informs us: “We don’t pack ours in a ready meal tray in water (the only other way we know tofu can be packed) as we think thermoforming gives a MUCH BETTER, less soggy product, that is ready to eat.” (Amusing, no? They admit tofu is inevtiably soggy, even if you can get less soggy versions.) But “thermoform packaging”, lovely as it sounds, is plastic, and plastic is derived from fossil fuels. The production process involves heating plastic until it is pliable — can you imagine the kilowats of energy required? And extraordinarily, you cannot recycle Tofoo’s wrapping.

Despite all this, if you run “tofu” through the BBC’s climate change food calculator, you will be informed that your “personal consumption” accounts for 12kg to your annual greenhouse gas emissions, on the basis of two servings a week. Two servings of beef come out at a whopping 604 kg per year. A clear win for tofu? Well, no.

The BBC calculator is based on work by Oxford-based environmentalist scientist, Joseph Poore. He who appeared in a promo for the “Go Vegan for Lent” campaign, organised by pressure group Million Dollar Vegan. Poore’s claims to have calculated the universal carbon footprint of an entire food type based on air miles and packaging, as well as production, are nonsensical: it is impossible to do so, given the diversity of packaging and the global nature of distribution. (Were your onions loose and local, or from Spain wrapped in a nylon net?)

Worse, climate change calculators based on crude protein or calories, such as the BBC’s, are flawed in a way that would be amusing if the consequences were not tragic. Tofu has a seemingly respectable 10g of protein per 100g — but not all protein is equal. For humans, soy protein is less digestible than meat protein. In other words, you have to eat proportionately more tofu to get the same protein allowance. Tofu also has significantly less riboflavin, niacin, pantothenic acid, vitamin B6 and vitamin B12 than meat. To make up these deficiencies, tofu-eaters have to either take supplements, or eat additional food — both of which produce greenhouse gases. The Vegan Society, for instance, encourages any breastfeeding meat-free mothers to take supplements of B12, iodine, vitamin D and omega-3, as well as to increase their calcium intake.

Suggested reading

Brexit is a betrayal of Britain's farmers

By James Rebanks

The deficiencies of tofu go beyond its nutritional value. The stuff is tasteless: although venerated by vegans, in classic Asian dishes such as Mapo tofu, the tofu is actually mixed with meat in the hope it will imbibe meat’s tastiness. Tofu is used as filler. Nobody ever said: “I could murder a nice juicy lump of tofu.” The result of this tastelessness is that consumers in the US throw away 30.5% of all tofu purchased; this food waste increases its environmental impact by a whopping 43.9%. The figure for meat thrown away is 20%.

By now you may understand why the Rothamsted Institute’s Dr Graham McAuliffe, an expert on modelling the environmental impacts of food over their lifecycle, has concluded that:

“If you look at tofu, which is processed so there is more energy going into its production, when you correct for the fact that the protein in it is not as digestible compared to the meat-based products, you can see that it could actually have a higher global warming potential than any of the monogastric animals. To get the same amount of protein, tofu is worse.”

On and on goes the list of tofu’s environmental sins. While it is true that most soy grown in Brazil goes to animal feed, some makes its slippery way into the human food chain, and thus into tofu — so add deforestation of the Amazon to that list. If you’re eating it in the UK, tofu from the tree-felled Amazon would cost you double the amount of CO₂ than chicken farmed on these isles.

According to the dear old BBC food calculator, “even the most climate-friendly meat options still produce more greenhouse gases than vegetarian protein sources”. The same lie is broadcast by groupthink governments and the vested interests of the Big Vegan food industry. It’s a lie because you can buy meat from a grass-based, carbon-neutral provider. Indeed, you can buy meat from farmers who, due to sensitive, sustainable pasture management, are sinking more carbon dioxide than their operations emit. You can buy meat wrapped in paper from a butcher, meat which comes from a carbon-neutral factory.

Also, cows produce manure, which feeds insects: an organic, outdoor cow feeds more than 2 million insects a year, dramatically aiding biodiversity as well as the soil. Manure can reduce, or even eliminate, the need for artificial fertiliser, which is responsible for no less than 2.1% of global GHG emissions. Most soy, meanwhile, is chemically drenched. Indeed, the story of contemporary soy production is the biography of agri-business giant Monsanto and its patented, controversial weed-killers.

Suggested reading

The truth about eco-fascism

By Paul Kingsnorth

Back in the mid-Nineties, Monsanto’s chemists genetically engineered soy to be immune to sprayings from Roundup, a herbicide supplied by… Monsanto. The Roundup Ready soybean could effectively only be grown with applications of the company’s glyphosate weed-killer. However, weeds being weeds proved resistant to Roundup. So in 2015, Monsanto began producing soybean seeds, branded “Roundup Ready Xtend”, engineered to tolerate dosings of both glyphosate and another chemical, dicamba.

Let’s be clear: genetically modified soy, specifically developed to withstand one Earth-polluting chemical, was sprayed, when yield dwindled, with another Earth-polluting chemical. Anything sprayed with both Roundup and dicamba certainly died — including soy not grown from Monsanto-supplied beans. Farmers not using them soon discovered such was the drift from the volatile dicamba that if they were within half a mile of other farmers using it, their crop was impacted.

According to the US Environmental Protection Agency, there were 3,300 dicamba “incidents” in 2019 alone. Faced with a choice of no crop or Monsanto crop, US soy farmers shifted en masse to being Monsanto clients. The report of the US Center for Food Safety on soy, Monsanto, and the “dicamba debacle” makes for sobering reading:

“Sprayed in large quantities over-the-top of resistant crops in the summertime heat, dicamba vaporised and drifted long distances to cause enormous damage across the landscape… Pesticide expert Andrew Thostenson of North Dakota State University said it was unlike anything that ‘has ever happened in the history of pesticide use in this country’.”

Today, around 94% of the world’s soy is genetically engineered, mostly to be resistant to Monsanto’s Roundup. Alas, as Roundup’s efficacy diminishes, the more it gets sprayed; soybean farmers are currently doubling glyphosate applications per season. Soybeans produced on commercial farms in the USA, Brazil and Argentina accumulate an estimated 2,500–10,000 metric tonnes of glyphosate per year. The adverse effects of glyphosate and dicamba on the environment only begin with the destruction of soil microflora, bee colonies, and aquatic organisms.

Anybody who believes that tofu is a green alternative to meat has no idea how industrialised soybean farming works. Anybody who believes it has a light carbon footprint needs to look again. The soybean is the most environmentally dangerous agricultural crop in the world, and the production of tofu is a drain on our precious resources. The thermoform packets of tofu on the shelf of your local supermarket ought to come served with a warning: this product is harmful to the Earth’s health.

We’ve stolen your land, they say, and we’re very sorry about this terrible injustice — but we’ll keep it all the same. Similarly, when purveyors of political discourse claim that America is now a white supremacist or even Nazi state — as in this response to the Rittenhouse verdict — you wonder why they aren’t urgently fleeing to some safer location, or at the very least organising some kind of underground armed resistance movement. People say all kinds of wild things, but if they don’t follow through on the logic of their claims, then it’s very hard to actually believe them.

A similar dynamic is observable in terms of climate change discourse, particularly with the Extinction Rebellion movement and its offshoot, Insulate Britain. Both their activists and spokespeople make the most alarming claims about the imminent end of civilisation, perhaps within the next couple of decades. But their revealed preferences don’t seem to match the intensity of their predictions. 

Personally, if I genuinely believed that Britain was going to become a post-apocalyptic wasteland within the next twenty years, I wouldn’t be campaigning for the Government to retrofit British houses with insulation: I’d be selling everything and fleeing to the hills in a desperate effort to keep my family alive. And yet they don’t. I have friends who go on XR demonstrations, and repeat their most apocalyptic prophecies, yet show no inclination of altering their middle-class lives in London: their revealed preferences therefore cast great doubt on their stated beliefs.

More from this author

This is how civilisations collapse

By Aris Roussinos

It seems that, with climate change in particular, there are only two modes of thought for most people: either nothing will change at all, or everything is about to collapse in horrible and world-destroying ways. There is a more obvious conclusion that people seem resistant to thinking about: that things will change, in many ways for the worse, but life will go on. As the Green philosopher Rupert Read asks: “why do we find it so hard to think about a world where the climate has changed massively, veering between ‘it won’t make much difference, everything is going to be fine’ to ‘it’s the apocalypse, the end of the world, there’s nothing we can do’, but refusing to think about the awful, but more middling realities?” 

It would seem more productive, then, instead of continuing with the path of climate change mitigation — which is probably now too late to succeed — or of giving everything up for lost, to instead focus popular attention on adaptation: on making the best of a situation we cannot change, but which is far from an apocalypse, at least for the UK. 

The issue at hand is that Britain is responsible for a mere 1% of global carbon emissions, so that even if we achieved Net Zero tomorrow, nothing will change in terms of arresting climate change. China’s increase in coal production this autumn alone is already greater than Britain’s total carbon emissions: halting this process is, in the real world, almost entirely out of our hands. 

But if we can’t change what is about to happen, we can at least prepare for it. If you read the Climate Change Commission’s risk assessment for the rest of the century, it assumes that Britain’s temperature will rise by two degrees by 2100, in the worst scenario as much as four degrees. Such an outcome will be disastrous for much of the world’s population, and I am not dismissing the gravity of the situation for billions of guiltless people.

But I live in Britain, and for Britain having a similar climate to central France will not be the end of the world — but we should start planning for it now. Just as no-one now starves their families in solidarity with the hungry of the Global South, it is absurd and irresponsible to not plan a resilient and comfortable near future for our own country out of fatalism or an inchoate sense of global solidarity.

More from this author

Inside Insulate Britain

By Aris Roussinos

A rise of two degrees will return Britain to its climate during the Roman Warm Period, when an admittedly lower level of civilisation functioned perfectly well. The risk assessment highlights the risk of flooding in low-lying areas, the risk of drought in summer, and the risks of disruption to international trade. But its observations are all, with sufficient planning and adaptation, perfectly manageable. It even observes that there are opportunities as well as risks, and promotes a vast expansion of vineyards on British soil, which with appropriate planning could become a £50 million annual industry. In just such a way, if the British government cannot change what is about to happen, it can at least start shaping the inevitable near future in ways that are beneficial for this country. And by doing so, and by being seen to act as if they believe what they claim to believe, the Government is far more likely to convince people about the inevitability of climate change.

To understand why, consider the early days of the Covid crisis. When governments and newspapers were dismissing the severity of the coming pandemic, I was convinced to take it seriously by witnessing friends stockpiling masks (while we were being assured they were useless and even harmful) and laying in stores of food and other essential goods in case of trade disruption. Seeing people whose opinions you respect take a potential crisis seriously, and planning how to navigate the changed world that comes with it, is a convincing signal that you should take action yourself. It means far more than hearing the government warn about doom on the horizon and then doing absolutely nothing — like closing the borders — to mitigate against it. Deeds are convincing in a way words are not.

In the same way, I personally take climate change seriously. I believe in the predictions of the vast majority of the world’s scientists, and thinking through the potential outcomes of such a world-changing process, I am planning how to adapt my lifestyle to best manage what is seemingly inevitable. In the New Year, barring some unforeseen eventuality, I will sell my house and buy a smallholding somewhere hilly (and so at less risk of flooding than the coastal town where I currently live) and with enough land that I can ensure my family’s food supply in case of trade disruption or rising prices. Already, in suburban Kent, we produce our own eggs and grow our own vegetables, but I want to be self-sufficient in meat and milk, beer and cider, clean drinking water and bread. (I intend to document our progress in this column.) 

It’s a way of living some are calling Doomer Optimism: I don’t believe that society will collapse within my lifetime, or that starvation will soon stalk the land. But I do think there’s a strong possibility that the cost of living will become significantly higher within the next two decades or so, just as the after effects of Covid are now manifesting, to such a degree that it makes sense to rethink my family’s way of living now to ensure a decent future quality of life in the years ahead. 

Suggested reading

I can't escape my eco-anxiety

By Henry Wismayer

The question here isn’t one of survival in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, but of ensuring an atmosphere of comfort and plenty in a likely world of consumption taxes and restrictions brought in through poorly-thought out climate change mitigation efforts, the intervention of corporate interests, and occasional disruptions to international trade. The current discourse around radically limiting food consumption presents such a dystopian and wildly unattractive future that it is no wonder people reject it, especially when it does nothing to address the over-consumption of the world’s richest. I will not, as they say, live in the pod, and I will not eat bugs, and neither should you. We should demand better, and there are alternative futures. 

But first we need to show that we’re tackling the problem seriously. As Rupert Read remarks in the recent book Deep Adaptation, “every time we are seen to be preparing for possible/likely hard times ahead… we are making it possible for people and politics to start to really face climate reality.” As he observes, if you act as if you mean what you say you believe, people will believe you. If you don’t, they won’t. In this way, Read argues, “it is a political act to act as if collapse is possible”, even if you don’t believe it is likely, just as you still install fire alarms even if you don’t believe your house will imminently burn down.

As with individuals, so with government. The Government’s push for Net Zero is expending a great deal of political capital on a mitigation effort that, whatever its moral worth, will do nothing to alter the risk of climate change one way or another. In doing so, it is alienating many people who appreciate, even if only subliminally, the vast disjunct between what the Government claims is about to happen, and its broader actions. If the threat is so real, people naturally think, why isn’t the nation mobilising to deal with the coming effects? The narrow focus on Net Zero, along with the attempt to prioritise individual, essentially meaningless mitigation efforts like eating less meat, is at this stage wildly counterproductive. 

Instead, the Government should, like my family, say that they can’t change what is coming, but that we can at least adapt to it now so that the wrench is less painful when it comes. What would that mean on a national level? If we accept that flooding is likely on Britain’s most productive agricultural land in East Anglia, we should be planning to open up currently marginal hill pasture for crops to ensure a more stable food supply. What would that look like? It would probably be less mechanised, and smaller scale, simply due to the topography: so we should be relearning how to manage such a mid-20th century form of agriculture at sufficient cumulative scale, which we are currently not doing.

Suggested reading

Climate change is no catastrophe

By Michael Shellenberger

If the Thames floodplain is at risk of occasional but devastating flooding, not from the sea but from built-over inland rivers, we should discourage building in flat estuarine land — as insurers are already warning — and instead rezone hilly land in London’s outer suburbs for housebuilding, as well as improving London’s overwhelmed Victorian drainage infrastructure. 

If the Government is incapable of building HS2 properly, it is surely poorly-equipped to deal with the amount of adjustment that will be necessary to maintain currently functional levels of infrastructure. We should be making railtracks more resilient to flooding, building viaducts where necessary and digging new water features and marshlands to absorb sudden deposits of water. We should be overhauling our water supply to minimise the risk of drought and prevent avoidable water losses through leaky pipes. We should be pedestrianising and planting trees in cities now to make them cool and shady in twenty or thirty years time, and building clean new transport infrastructure to take the place of cars. We should be building more houses, relaxing planning restrictions for family homes in the countryside so that more people are affordably able to take control of their personal family food supply. If we claim that disasters are on the horizon, yet do not build up the infrastructure now to cope with them, why should anyone take these claims seriously?

There is a great deal of ingenuity in this country only now being focussed on technologies such as nuclear fusion, which may soon provide clean sources of almost limitless energy, or on fast electric aeroplanes and capacious electric airships, which may be better used for freight than for human transport. The medium term may be uncomfortable, but the long-term future may be very good indeed, if only for Britain. 

To manage this will take a certain frontier spirit, a willingness to make the best of and thrive in a harder situation than we are accustomed to. Instead of prophesying doom and then doing nothing about it, we should be imagining a positive vision of what a Britain adapted to climate change would look like: a country of high-speed trains hurtling across tall viaducts between new hill towns, with lush vineyards overlooking the broad new wetlands on what was once farmland. It is not too late to make the Britain of the near future not just liveable, but an improvement on what we have now. Life will go on: it is our duty to make it as comfortable and prosperous as possible, not just as individuals, but as a nation.

Like countless other precocious teenagers before me, I waited until university to rebel against “the system”. Then, for about two years, I dedicated every Saturday and dozens of other evenings to sitting, cross-legged, in a circle in the centre of Cambridge, discussing the end of the world. Climate change, after all, was the issue of our time. Forget the petty squabbles and internecine conflicts of the Left — the revolution would be green, not red.

While I jumped from one political identity to the next — Social Democrat, Corbyn loyalist, Anarcho-Syndicalist, Bookchinite Social Ecologist, Trotskyist — there was a single constant: to defeat the forces of capital, Leftism needed to be centred around sustainability. Climate change was one crisis capitalism couldn’t overcome: it had an extinction date.

It is difficult for me to separate how much of my political certainty was a product of the Left-wing populism that electrified campus politics, and how much was born from youthful arrogance. Either way, I was convinced we were the only ones left to protect the working classes against the forces of reaction. So it stung to have them reject us for what we were: jumped-up students looking out for our own interests.

Still, I enjoyed being a “radical”. I would walk around campus brandishing my own Little Green Book. Entitled Make Rojava Great Again, it was a hilariously delusional manifesto influenced by Murray Bookchin, and attempted to explain how a small, anarchist-in-name-only Kurdish commune was the future for global Leftism. The irony that Rojava was only able to exist thanks to the imperialist interventionism of the Global American Empire in Syria was, of course, lost on me and my comrades.

Suggested reading

Jim Crow returns to California

By Joel Kotkin

It was amid this revolutionary fervour that I was introduced to Extinction Rebellion (XR). They were, at the time, a relatively unknown collection of old-school conservationists, ageing animal rights campaigners and credentialed academics who seemed utterly clueless in comparison with our own more militant group, Zero Carbon. Before one meeting between our two respective groups — we had planned to discuss the importance of racial justice — several XR members started shouting at us for failing to have brought chairs. They were, it quickly transpired, simply too old to sit crossed-legged in a circle like us students.

My comrades and I used to chuckle over photos from their rallies, full of middle-aged, middle-class hippies who looked as if they had wandered off from a People’s Vote protest. That this raggedy group would go on to become the most influential face of environmental activism was inconceivable three years ago.

As for their ideas and strategies, they were even easier to mock. How exactly did they expect to build a popular front against “extractivist” climate-plundering while simultaneously irritating ordinary people with their thoughtless disruption? Where was their consideration of class? How dare they cloak themselves in the language of revolution despite clearly posing no actual threat to the regime.

Yet there remained a tacit understanding that we were on the same side. We shared meeting rooms, supported their direct actions and invited them along to our own. Our memberships became increasingly blurred, with the next intake of freshers often touting loyalty to both Zero Carbon and XR.

Suggested reading

Who would kill children to save the planet?

By Tom Chivers

I became friends with XR true believers, kindly old activists who would cook me vegan chilli and explain how I could safely chain myself to a fence or gate. Their provincialism was charming; while we enlightened radicals understood the need to destroy bourgeois capitalism, they simply wanted Cambridgeshire local council to declare a “climate emergency”.

But then, during a Zero Carbon protest at the 2019 Oxford-Cambridge boat race, also my 19^th birthday, it all unravelled. Our plan had been to protest the universities’ decision not to divest from fossil fuels. We were, though, quickly caught by a pair of very patient police officers, who humoured our Bolshevik playacting for a while. But then, I watched in dismay as my comrades started complaining about police brutality, crowding around the officers and shoving phone cameras in their face.

The sight of their ridiculously exaggerated outrage quelled my revolutionary zeal. There we were, wearing straw boaters, planning to drop a banner over Hammersmith Bridge and set off a few flares for… what? Was this what we were all along: pantomime activists? We were no better than the XR hippies singing outside the Cambridgeshire County Council office; worse, actually, because we weren’t even having fun.

Samuel Biagetti has described the dynamic inherent within modern Leftist politics as that of a parent and child, with liberal elders viewing young activists as juvenile and subordinate. I saw then what he meant. My comrades and I thought we could radicalise our XR mentors; in reality, they had merely been indulging our silly fantasies. They knew that, eventually, we would learn to give up the pretence of Marxist revolution and accept the inevitability of reform.

So I left eco-activism for good. Better to be reviled as a reactionary traitor than have to live with the humiliating realisation that I essentially held the same politics of my parents. And there is nothing rebellious about XR. Just look at Roger Hallam, who co-founded the movement after studying for a PhD in civil disobedience at King’s College London. His thesis was that mass outbreaks of civil unrest — like those seen in the last few weeks in central London — are the best way to force governments to act. “Extinction Rebellion” is therefore a misnomer: the group doesn’t want to overthrow the system, but to petition it.

Suggested reading

The dangerous naivety of Green anti-vaxxers

By Ian Birrell

Liberal democracy isn’t going to solve the climate crisis. The same conditions that triggered the climate collapse will persist, and no amount of performative anti-capitalism will remedy that. XR’s rallies over the past week have seemed little more than narcissistic spectacle, a way for well-meaning people to gather and feel righteous and alive for a few hours.

Just as my comrades and I lacked any substance beneath our vague faith in the power of “revolution”, there is nothing hiding beneath their costumes. They have achieved the platonic ideal of liberal protest — all style, no substance.

It would, of course, be all too easy to laugh at them, were it not for the gnawing realisation that their warnings contain an element of truth. It is too late. This really is the last gasp of the old regime. And there they are: dancing as the world burns.

Trees have inexplicably, unaccountably, become the magic wooden bullet for all environmental ills. Anxious about flooding? Well, forget dredging rivers or digging up the suburban concrete drive, just plant a tree. Anxious about the climate effect of your  cheap plane ticket to Thailand? No worries mate, pay a bit extra to get some minion down on Earth to stick a tree in a hole. Trying to win a general election? Commit your manifesto to trees, trees, trees. Oh Jeremy Corbyn at his last tilt at Number 10 pledged that a Labour government would plant two billion — billion — trees by 2040. Or, half of Wales, planted up at commercial density.

The electorate read this as “magic money trees” and shied in the polling booth, though Boris’s government, itself not lacking in amour aboreal (or indeed in the discovery of theurgic trees that fruit GBP), has committed itself to planting a whopping 75,000 acres of trees annually until 2025. The Green Recovery Challenge Fund — effectively an arm of DEFRA — last week allocated almost £40m to 68 projects to plant more than 800,000 trees, including 10,000 trees at 50 NHS sites and 12 “tiny forests” the size of a badminton court in urban areas.

Suggested reading

Stop planting more trees!

By Peter Franklin

Everyone is at it, this tree-planting palliative. I do mean everyone. The Committee on Climate Change (CCC) has decreed that we in the UK need to stick into the ground 90-120 million trees a year between now and 2050 to achieve carbon neutrality. Craft beer company Brewdog has grabbed 2,000 acres of Scottish highland to plant a million trees. The National Trust is on the band wagon; Britain’s largest private landowner has promised to insert 20 million trees into its land over the next decade. The Woodland Trust, meanwhile,  has launched an Emergency Tree Plan. Not enough trees yet? Danish clothing magnate Anders Holch Povlsen and his wife Anne, who own over 200,000 acres of Scotland, are removing sheep and deer across their estates to allow more native woodland. 

Aye, and there’s the first rub. Quite aside from the Povlsens’ self-entitled decision about how to use their land (HG Wells’ Dr Thoreau would have enjoyed their droit de dicatator), the Danish duo’s re-treeing is removing a chunk of land from food production. Sheep and deer are rather good at providing meals from the uplands for us poor humans. Haunch of venison, anybody? Kebab? Num num. 

But tried eating oak leaves? Fir cones?

It all starts to add up, this public and private tree-planting. What remains is the simple arithmetic of farming, because humans, damn them, will eat: abstract land from food production, and you are left with either a lot of food miles from importing enough to keep your population alive, or the intensification of agriculture — with all the associated pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, molluscicides — on the remaining land. It gets worse. If we are not getting protein from an Aberdeen Angus cow up a glen, it is likely we are getting it from a soya bean grown in the Amazon on what was once primary rainforest.

Suggested reading

How to save British farming (and the countryside)

By John Lewis-Stempel

Make no mistake as you read this: the land is already under demand to produce more, more, and then more food. As long as a decade ago, the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation warned that the global population would increase by 34% by 2050, to 9.1 billion. It added that “in order to feed this larger, more urban and richer population, food production … must increase by 70%”. 

Brilliant, eh? The trees planted in order to save us from climate change … will kill us by starving us. 

The sanctification of trees is curious. They are hailed as carbon sequestors, but so is the grassland on which cows mosey and munch. (The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, by the way, had deduced that methane from Britain’s ruminants is not causing further global warming.) Trees are lauded as increasers of biodiversity, the lament of our British naturalists being that we only have 13% tree cover and the European Union has 40%. (Continental Europe is always lovely and good isn’t it?) But have these naturalists ever been to the Black Forest? Poland? The Landes region of France? The lot of them, vast tracts of silence and desolation. 

I spend part of my year bang next door to a 5,000 acre forest in France. The parts of it le forestier are able to manage — by chopping and pruning trees to let in the light — are wonderful for wildlife, and nightingales sing there, but the larger unworked regions are dense, dark and conquered by invasive bramble.

So, there is the second rub. Treeland is not intrinsically better for nature. To be cruelly honest, my neighbour Philippe’s chemical corn fields have more wildlife than than most of our neighbouring natural forest. 

Undeterred by such freely available trans-European evidence, the Rewilding Britain pressure group of Britain reported this week that it wants native woodland to regenerate through the natural dispersal of seeds. Unfortunately, without a management plan — and I looked in the small print in vain for such — this is a recipe for an immense soundless mausoleum propped up by wooden pillars. 

More from this author

Factory farming will kill us all

By John Lewis-Stempel

I know. It goes against the grain, but if we do have to have trees for biodiversity they need to managed, not left to their own darkening devices. Trees are hegemonic. Unchecked, trees would take over the world and place it under their shadow. 

Now for the next and third rub, prompted by the clan chief on the Isle of Skye, Hugh MacLeod, deciding recently he needed to go wild and reforest 572 acres of his  Scottish  outcrop (that sense of territorial entitlement again) courtesy of a handy £1 million grant from the EU and Holyrood. According to chief MacLeod the island’s lack of tree cover is “not natural.”

Neither, I suggest, is living in a castle. If you want “natural”, Hugh Magnus MacLeod of MacLeod, try a cave as your abode. 

Mark my words: such reforesting is the thin end of the re-wilding wedge. Macleod has already signalled his intention to reintroduce beaver. The wolf and lynx will follow, and Skye will become a rewilded theme park, with the food — no longer produced locally, of course, because all the shepherds will have been transformed into tourist guides — coming over the sea on a bonny, smoky, diesel-engined boat. 

Britain is an agricultural country. It has been farmed since the Neolithic period, and today’s open landscape would be absolutely recognisable to an Anglo-Saxon. These isles’ celebrated “quilt-pattern” of fields and hedges is the work of people, the result of agri-culture, and is not to be lightly thrown aside, or forested over. The farmed countryside is “the past speaking dear” as the Poet Laureate John Masefield once put it. It is heritage. 

Take the Lake District, beloved of  that other great pastoral poet, Wordsworth. The hills of Cumbria were revealed into glory from their scrubby oak and rowan shroud by the farmer’s iron axe and the gnashing teeth of his/her sheep. And well done them. 

Suggested reading

Let loose the lynx!

By Tom Chivers

Really, why vaunt “natural”? Some of the best places for the wild things are actually human made — meaning, the farmed environment. A traditional hay meadow may  easily contain 30 plant species per square metre. The overwhelming majority of ponds in the British countryside — and there are few things better for the bugs, birds and beasties than a mere — were dug by the farmers of yore. Now there’s an idea for mass government funding: restoring Britain’s ponds. 

That rasping sound? Me grinding my farmer’s axe. The carbon-sequestering benefits of planting trees are frequently hyped yet rarely weighed against what existed there before — such as peaty moorland burnt regularly to renew the heather. Peatland is a particularly efficacious carbon sink. 

In fact, the tree-planting proposals put forward by some conservation organisations will actually annihilate precious ecosystems. The reforesting map drawn up by Friends of the Earth and Terra Sulis marks out as suitable land the rough pastures of the North Pennines and Yorkshire Dales. Er, these farmed and thus awful “artificial” habitats are critically important for the iconic, red-listed curlew, lapwing, grey partridge and black grouse. 

Not much of a deal, is it — if, instead of the cry of  the curlew, we have the hiss of wind through the needles of a Sitka spruce? 

Trees are lovely, but to propose them as the one and only eco-solution is false premise. And false promise.

Green mayors who captured a series of French cities in June — Lyon, Bordeaux, Marseille, Tours, Poitiers — have caused consternation in recent days with a series of self-righteous, or frankly priggish, announcements and decisions.

The mayor of Bordeaux, Pierre Hurmic, has cancelled the €60,000 budget for the 20-metre-high Christmas tree that usually decorates the city centre each winter. He disapproves of “dead trees”, he said. “They are not at all our concept of vegetabalisation.”

The mayor of Lyon, Grégory Doucet, attacked the country’s favourite sporting event, the Tour de France, as absurdly over-commercialised, grossly polluting and “macho”. The Socialist mayor of Rennes, Nathalie Appéré, bowed to her Green allies in the city council and withdrew an application to host a stage of the great bike race next year.

Meanwhile several of the Green mayors have opposed government plans for a rapid roll-out of a fifth generation, super-fast internet network in France. Eric Piolle, the second-term mayor of Grenoble — rumoured to be considering a Green run for the presidency in 2022 — described 5G in July as “useful only for watching porn movies in high definition on your mobile phone in a lift.”

More from this author

Didier Raoult: the man whose Covid 'cure' went viral

By John Lichfield

The Greens’ criticism may, or may not, be justified. The Tour de France, for instance, is indeed a carbon-generating carnival of plastic largesse with a terrible doping record; it is also a much-loved symbol of French unity and variety — an international sporting event which literally comes “down your way”. Either way, these are scarcely the kind of pressing local issues which French voters expect their mayors to address.

The gesture politics has annoyed some of their Green colleagues, including the national leader of the Europe Écologie Les Verts (EELV) party, Yannick Jadot (another 2022 presidential hopeful). He said this week that he was “tired of these insults” against the French people and the “popular” classes. “There is a kind of class contempt here which is absolutely unbearable,” he argued.

It seems that the French people agree with him. Green support in the polls has dropped rapidly, and according to an Odoxa poll, positive opinions of the EELV party have fallen by 14 points to 43%. Over 70% of French people say they disapprove of Green attacks on Christmas trees; 68% dislike Green attacks on the Tour de France.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way. In the second round of this year’s municipal elections (delayed until June because of the pandemic) there was an eco-surge. The Greens leaped from the control of one city — Grenoble — to running nine of France’s biggest towns, either alone or in alliance with the Left. Five big cities — Marseille, Lyon, Bordeaux, Grenoble and Strasbourg — went Green, as did four large towns: Annecy, Besançon, Poitiers and Tours. The EELV party (alone or in alliance with the Left) now has 36 mayors out of 35,000; it represents 2.8% of French citizens. The Green Wave, it was suggested, could impede President Emmanuel Macron’s run for a second presidential term in 18 months’ time.

Those who have followed the twists and turns of personal and tribal hatreds within French eco-politics doubted whether the Green victories would prove recyclable in 2022 — but few imagined that Les Verts would begin to shrivel and fade so soon.

Suggested reading

Is this what a Green world would look like?

By Stephen Pollard

And yet it’s worth remembering that the Green Wave was only made possible by a collapse in nationwide turn-out. The surge occurred only in big and medium towns, in economically thriving places with a large population of young, professional and educated voters. They have many local problems but they have been sheltered from the difficulties facing rural and outer suburban France, which generated the Yellow Vest movement in 2018. In these struggling areas, the Greens scarcely exist as an electoral force.

Moreover the Green surge may come more from votes against something than votes for something, and an alienation from mainstream politics. Urban support for the traditional centre-Right and centre-Left parties has collapsed  (although the centre-Right still dominates in smaller towns). While Emmanuel Macron has failed miserably to build a centrist, grass-roots political movement — a fact illustrated again this week by his La République En Marche party’s lamentable performance in six parliamentary by-elections.

Still, the Green surge — however lucky or accidental — offered the EELV party an opportunity to prove that it had matured politically. Would it be capable of balancing ecological issues and good municipal government? Could it match its commitment to the environment with pragmatism about contradictions in human nature (Let us be without sinful pollution, Oh Lord, but not yet)? The party leader Yannick Jadot promised that the new mayors would bring “an ecology targeted on solid achievements, an ecology of action.”

In some towns — such as Tours and Bordeaux — this has meant plans to drive out, or limit, private cars  on the model already adopted by the Socialist but Green-allied mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo. This has brought angry local opposition but also much local support.

Suggested reading

Will rural France recover from Covid?

By John Lewis-Stempel

What has been missing so far — as Jadot admits — is any sign that the Green mayors have new answers, or any answers, to France’s urgent urban problems. What of the separation of  towns from their encircling, racially-divided housing estates? What of violence; distrust of the police; the cost of city centre housing; uneven health care provision? Jadot said this week:

“We should be finding answers to the fears of French people and their need for protection of all kinds — security, health, social as well as environmental. We need ecological policies which inspire, not those which push people away.”

Nevertheless, some French Greens and pro-Green commentators defend the mayors’ pronouncements on ideological grounds. The hour is growing late, they say. Global warming advances apace. Electric shocks to consumer culture are needed. Christmas trees (though a symbol of the renewal and permanence of life for centuries) are dispensable.

Others suggest that the Green wave of 2020 is damaging the cause by expending its political capital on unnecessary targets. They are alienating moderate voters by revealing  their ideological closeness to — and electoral dependance on — the hard Left.

Frédéric Says, a political commentator on France Culture radio, says that the newly-elected mayors are still in campaigning, not governing, mode. They had not expected to win in June. They have no proper programme for municipal government. To prove they have not been instantly corrupted by power — “that the sash of office is not a dog-chain” — they are parading provocative and divisive ideas.

An even harsher view is taken by Daniel Cohn-Bendit, the Franco-German leader of the May 1968 French student revolt, converted to green, pro-European politics and now semi-retired. He accuses the new Green mayors of not only ideological absolutism but a kind of eco-phariseeism. “Their attitude to sport symbolises their ideology,” he said. “For them, the world is in a mess. It is ruined. They are therefore terrified of joy — of taking pleasure in anything.”

Suggested reading

How the tide turned against the Greens

By John Kampfner

Macron smells green blood. Last week he publicly mocked France’s “Class of 2020” Green mayors. He said that they wanted to impose an “Amish” and “oil lamp” economy in the 21^st century. He said that they were “taking the French for idiots” by attacking the country’s “art de vivre (art of living).”

The President needs to be careful, all the same. He is himself walking a green tightrope. He has declared ecology to be the “fight of the century,” and demanded a much greener approach to government in the remainder of his term — including directing 30% of France’s €100bn post-Covid recovery plan to ecologically-friendly investments. To win re-election in 2022, the President has to hold onto his support in the traditional electorate of the centre-Right, which is often impatient with or dismissive of environmental arguments.  He also needs to appeal — in the second round at least — to the Greens’ mostly young, urban supporters. Some of them rather like the idea of an “Amish” economy.

In other words, the Green controversies of recent days may be ridiculous but they are also significant — and not just in France. They offer a burlesque preview of more important twenty-first century collisions to come. How to balance ecological pressures and economic imperatives? How to square western life-styles and climate change? How to replace the traditional politics of something-more with a new politics of something-less?

The French Greens were handed an accidental opportunity to prove that they are a fully-functioning, rounded, all-weather force in practical politics. They have been given a chance to adjust their sincere beliefs to the ragged edges of the real world. It is too early to judge them fully, but the first signs are not good. They have failed to make the leap from shouting to governing. They have proved just as attracted as most of the “old” politicians to the politics of the surface and the gesture.

The big losers have been the populists, people who came to power on the basis of easy slogans, half-truths or untruths, and divisive pitches: Jair Bolsonaro, Donald Trump and Boris Johnson. Bombast and bluster only get you so far when tackling a virus. Contrast them with steady, sturdy Angela Merkel. Written off as past her sell-by date only a couple of months ago, the German Chancellor has seen her once-beleaguered Christian Democrats surging ahead.

The keyword is competence, and that gives rise to the question: does competence equal centrism? According to this theory, voters around the world flirted with democracy disrupters, but when confronted with a global crisis, they appear to be retreating to the comfort of the familiar.

More from this author

There's life yet in the Polish populists

By John Kampfner

The evidence points in this direction, but it is not conclusive. Germany is the clearest case. One recent poll suggests that Merkel’s CDU and its Bavarian sister party, the CSU, have climbed back up to a combined 40%, its highest for many years. If they maintain those kinds of numbers, they would romp home at the next election, due by September 2021, and dominate the next coalition.

For Merkel, whether or not she stands down as she has promised, that would mark an extraordinary turnaround and a vindication of her style of leadership. The far-right AfD is falling back sharply. The far-left Die Linke too.

What is most fascinating is the fate of the Greens. At the start of 2020 the Greens were being mooted as shoo-ins for the next government, possibly even leading it. Their two co-leaders, Robert Habeck and Annaleena Baerbock, were being mooted as the possible next chancellor. A job share, even? Habeck was eulogised in Foreign Policy magazine as Germany’s answer to Emmanuel Macron. Now this seems a fanciful notion — not because either has done anything wrong. Indeed, one might assume that the tide would be turning in their favour.

It has become axiomatic to declare that Covid-19 has changed us all. Nothing will be the same again, even after the step-by-step opening up of societies. We have become more risk averse. We have come to value the slower values of life. We have suddenly become appreciative of birdsong. Who needs a beach holiday or a long-haul business trip when you have your back garden and Zoom?

Suggested reading

Is this what a Green world would look like?

By Stephen Pollard

These assumptions are based on precarious foundations. We have — at least until now — stayed at home because of a combination of government rule by fiat and individual risk assessment. We have not thought further ahead than that.

Will overall policy-making for our post-Covid future require (or reflect) radical and sustainable changes to behaviour? In a paper for the World Economic Forum, Emily Kirsch, a renewable energy entrepreneur, writes:

“Some have written about the silver lining of coronavirus, arguing that the current drop in emissions and air pollution should be celebrated — but this drop is a direct function of the halting of economic and social activities, and does not represent the liveable future that we need to build.”

“Suggesting that short-term coronavirus-related emissions reductions are ‘good for climate change’,” she adds, “sends a false message that human thriving and economic activity are incompatible with reducing emissions”.

Past crises suggest that populations play catch-up once they feel they are over the worst. For example, much is made of the consequences of the financial crash of 2007-08, but emissions actually fell only by 450 million tonnes (around 1%), which is a much smaller drop than the aftermath of the Second World War, and also during the recessions of the early 1980s and 90s.

Instead, we conformed to the classic V-curve, an immediate plunge followed quickly by a similar surge. Spending and consuming shot straight back up once confidence (and income) returned. Even if Covid-19 produces a U-curve, in which economies stay at the bottom for longer before eventually returning to health, will the final stage of the recovery look different to what came before?

Suggested reading

The 'green crap' lessons of 2013

By James Kirkup

According to forecasts, global emissions are projected to go down by approximately 4-8% this year. The extent of the challenge the world faces with the climate emergency is such that that level of reduction will be needed every year for the next 30 years in order for the net-zero carbon emissions target to be reached by 2050. Even then, such a consistent transformation in the way we lead our lives would only succeed in keeping the temperature rise below 1.5°C.

The trouble is we don’t want to be locked up any more. We will certainly appreciate more cycle lanes and many city authorities, including London’s mayor, are using the crisis to fast track such plans. That is a long-term trend driven both by our consciences and by state action (making car driving ever slower, more expensive and more unpleasant). We might fly less, taking the train more or relying on stay-cations. But aviation accounts for no more than 3% of total emissions. We might eat less meat, particularly beef… it all helps.

But something different will be needed that many people will say they are unwilling to bear. As the Economist put it: “The pandemic is not, as some say, ‘nature’s reset’. Such thinking easily slips into the misanthropy that can lead environmentalists to see people themselves as the problem.”

One of the problems of the Green movement is its cultural associations. Attendance at Extinction Rebellion protests or Greta Thunberg rallies has in some quarters become just one more virtue signal. In an essay in The National Interest, the academic and author Anatol Lieven argues that climate change denial has become “a cultural marker of conservative identity”, particularly in the United States during the dystopian era of Trump:

“These Republican prejudices have been exacerbated by the way in which the Left has loaded onto the agenda of fighting climate change economic, political and cultural issues that are either irrelevant to climate change or directly opposed to action: the abolition (as opposed to reform) of capitalism, and a whole rag bag of identity politics and demands for minority ‘empowerment’.”

Lieven calls for environmentalism to be recast as a national, patriotic issue: in other words, sugar the pill to win red necks over to the cause. To a degree he is right. The green agenda needs to be broadened, to include folk who choose not to associate themselves with “green issues”.

To a degree that’s already happening. Germany’s Greens have extended their reach beyond metropolitans to include traditional more socially conservative voters in small towns and villages, particularly in Bavaria. Austria, too, where the Greens are in government. What they share with the urban hipsters is an antipathy towards globalisation and a yearning for a slower and more traditional way of life.

Suggested reading

Should we let the aviation industry die?

By Peter Franklin

Local, in this case, does mean global. Confining Green issues to the nation state is to miss the point. International collaboration is the only sensible means of tackling the climate emergency — just as a failure to coordinate the global response to Covid-19 exacerbated the problems the world is facing.

Will voters be more amenable to making the necessary huge changes to their lives needed to tackle not just this crisis, but the one lurking a few down the road? Will they, in practical terms, accept a fiscal system that punishes hypermobility and a social value system in which “excessive” consumer durables are regarded as unacceptable? Will they stay at home more and buy less — not because they are forced to, as now, but out of choice?

In theoretical terms, are they more amenable to a different kind of capitalism and consumerism? Have they moved beyond the era when Gordon Brown told people that shopping was a patriotic duty? They might, possibly, but it will need a particularly deft set of politicians around the world to convince them that the traumas of 2020 were not a one-off. And it is likely that those politicians may not come from the newer order of parties, but from the old established mainstream: safety-first people better trusted to introduce radical policies.

Throughout all of this, we learned a great deal about the current state of politics: that national populism has consolidated as a political force, that Green movements are gradually becoming more significant, that social democracy remains stuck in a state of crisis, that Europe’s political systems are continuing to fragment and that Brexit is now definitely going to happen.

Underneath all of this, we also learned some other things; that for millions of voters around the world feelings of cultural insecurity continue to matter as much as feelings of economic insecurity; that centre-Right parties such as Britain’s Conservatives or Austria’s People’s Party are starting to adapt far more effectively than Left-wing parties to this new political era; and that the Left still does not appear to have much of an answer to its fragmenting electorate.

Against this backdrop, then, what might 2020 have in store for us? Here are a few predictions to see us through.

First, starting here in Britain I predict that Boris Johnson and the Conservative Party will enjoy a lengthy honeymoon period. With the largest Conservative majority since 1987, Prime Minister Johnson will inevitably pass his Withdrawal Agreement Bill. Aside from formalising Brexit this will allow him to claim with credibility to have honoured the result of the 2016 Referendum, as well as his 2019 promise to “Get Brexit Done”. It will also leave Johnson as the only Conservative leader to have truly triumphed over the Europe question, an issue that dogged all of his predecessors.

This year will also allow us to see how Johnson and his party plan to hold together an electorate that looks and feels fundamentally different from that which elected David Cameron in 2010 and 2015.

More from this author

Brexit has exposed our education apartheid

By Matthew Goodwin

Johnson’s following is older, more working-class, less well educated, heavily white and more socially conservative. This is why I predict some big, bold offers on immigration reform, crime, spending on infrastructure and other investment for the (non-London) regions. Expect lots of pictures and speeches outside the capital.

With a big majority, I also predict that this generation of Conservatives will want to go much further than their predecessors in pushing back against a “soft Left” bias that runs across much of Britain’s education sector and media. There is no point in winning a battle over Brexit if your party is simultaneously losing the longer-term war over culture.

Meanwhile, Remain will inevitably drift into Re-Join. Not only will this be a harder movement to sustain but it will also be one that will soon run out of steam. Babyboomers will struggle to turn pro-Remain sentiment into a viable political project, especially when the much younger Generation Z are far more concerned about the issue of climate change. There will be a hardcore of diehard Remainers continuing to rally around podcasts and Twitter Land but this will be a fringe movement, nothing more. More Brits will identify openly as “European” but this will not translate into any significant political change.

Labour, which just sunk to its lowest number of seats since 1935, will struggle to regroup this year. Corbynism has been removed as one possible reply to the wider crisis facing social democracy in Europe, as well as to questions that are being asked in the United States about where next for the Democrats. Economic populism, it turns out, is not as popular as many people think. It will also lose every time when presented with a centre-Right leader who is willing to lean Left on the economy while leaning Right on culture and identity. That too contains a message for the United States as it begins to gear up for November.

More from this author

How to understand the rise of national populism

By Matthew Goodwin

Labour’s sudden rush into a leadership debate, the lack of any serious self-reflection on its defeat, the unimpressive opening statements of the leadership contenders and the deeper structural problems within its electorate all point to a long and slow walk through the wilderness rather than a quick recovery. Local elections in the spring of 2020 will likely add to this challenging year.

Look ahead at 2020, and when it comes to populism all eyes will be on the United States where I think, on balance, that Donald Trump will probably be re-elected.

There is certainly a lot running against the incumbent. His path to winning the electoral college remains narrow and his approval ratings are weak, especially when seen in historical perspective. In fact, his ratings are the lowest in any election year since Gerald Ford in 1976 (who went on to lose to Jimmy Carter).

But there is also a lot going for Trump, too. Among his core groups of voters — evangelicals, committed Republicans and the working class — his ratings are far stronger. And the Democrats have, at least in my view, so far shown little understanding about why Trump was elected in the first place or what they might say to win back key chunks of his electorate. Mobilising minorities and committed leftist activists will not be enough.

Then comes the narrative; Trump actually has a lot to say to voters. You might not like what he has to say but on the American economy, standing up to China, working to defend national borders and clamping down on terrorism and gang violence he does have a story to tell. What, in contrast, is the Democrat narrative? I’m not really sure. On top of this, we knew that Trump had a lot of negatives in 2015 and he still won.

Suggested reading

Can the Tories cling on to the Red Wall?

By David Jeffery

Europe’s national populists will continue their current success after their best year yet, when this disruptive political family went on to win its largest number of seats in the European Parliament. In Britain over 2019, Nigel Farage continued to pile pressure on the main parties via the Brexit Party, whose call for an Australian-based immigration points system and more work on tackling regional inequalities would later be adopted by Boris Johnson’s Conservatives.

Elsewhere, new parties broke through; Forum for Democracy at municipal elections in the Netherlands and, more significantly, Vox at national elections in Spain. While In Italy, Matteo Salvini and the Lega lost power but won a record number of seats in the European Parliament and continue to enjoy healthy leads in the polls. Flemish Interest in Belgium won a new record share of the vote while the Alternative for Germany advanced at state elections in Saxony, Brandenburg and Thuringia. In Poland, Law and Justice won their largest share of the vote on record.

Rather than weakening, national populism has consolidated and, as we head into a new decade, looks set to remain as a permanent force on the landscape, particularly as Europe’s political systems continue to fragment.

One final thing to watch out for in 2020 are the shifting political alliances. Boris Johnson is interesting because of the way in which he is seeking to usher in or revive a different brand of conservatism, which has seen his party forge an alliance-of-sorts with the left-behind working class — but this is not the only new alliance to keep eyes on.

At the recent election in Austria, the Greens enjoyed their strongest ever result but then proceeded to join a coalition government with the centre-Right People’s Party. And, interestingly, while they have introduced new environment taxes, the Greens have also signed up to some pretty hardline positions on immigration and integration; supporting measures to crack down on illegal migration, to curb “political Islam”, including the banning of headscarves for under-14-year-olds, and introducing preventative custody for individuals who are considered a risk to security but have committed no crime.

All of this is a reminder of the fact that, just because Green movements are doing a little bit better than in the past, that does not necessarily signal the return of a nice, fluffy brand of social liberalism. On the contrary, on the all-important questions about identity and culture much of Europe continues to drift further to the right, in response not only to national populism but also to the public mood. I see few reasons why that will change in 2020.

Centre-ground politicians have accepted that some kind of action, more radical than any that has been implemented so far, has become urgently necessary. Everyone but the most stubborn climate denialists realises that an unprecedented change is taking place in the world that humans have inhabited throughout their history.

At the same time, as T.S. Eliot wrote in Four Quartets, “humankind cannot bear very much reality”, and thinking on the subject is increasingly delusional. A by-product of worldwide industrialisation based on fossil fuels, the shift that is underway was set in motion by human beings. It does not follow however that humans can stop it.

As climate scientists have pointed out, global warming will continue for hundreds or thousands of years after its proximate causes have been removed. The demands made by Extinction Rebellion – net zero carbon emissions for the UK by 2025, for example – are impossibly draconian. But even if they could be enforced, they would make little impact on greenhouse gases worldwide, or prevent the climate disruption that is already baked into the system. Green movements at the present time are expressions of magical thinking – attempts to ignore and escape reality, rather than understand and adapt to it.

Suggested reading

Liberalism: the other God that failed

By John Gray

One of the realities Green thinking passes over is geopolitics. Consider the fashionable idea that the world – or at least the capitalist West – should stop burning fossil fuels. From an environmental point of view, this may be highly desirable — even though it will not arrest disruptive climate change. In geopolitical terms, it is a recipe for global upheaval. Some of the world’s most pivotal states depend on fossil fuels for their existence. Saudi Arabia would collapse without the revenues the kingdom receives from the oil market. Iran and Russia rely on high oil prices for much of their national income. For all of these countries, abruptly ending the consumption of fossil fuels would mean a massive drop in living standards and large-scale political disruption. All the better, Greens may say – these are hardly desirable regimes.

But it would be folly to assume that what emerged would be any better. The Saudi kingdom would fragment or be replaced by a more radical Islamist regime. An impoverished Russia could well be more belligerent and adventurist in its foreign and defence policies. With Iran starved of income from fossil fuels and no prospect of revenues being resumed, any prospect of democratic transformation in the country would diminish not increase. Regime change induced by Green policies is no more likely to work than regime change imposed by military force.

Another reality disregarded in Green thinking is 20th-century history. Climate protests such as Extinction Rebellion are spin-offs from the anti-globalisation movements of a decade or so ago, and like them they believe contemporary western capitalism is dysfunctional and headed for history’s scrap heap. In this they are right. A global free market was always a fanciful project, and the rickety structure of debt-financed asset prices and escalating trade rivalries is fragile. Another credit crunch on the scale of that in 2007-8 would most likely destroy it.

Suggested reading

Trust conservatives to save the planet

By Giles Fraser

That does not mean a socialist economy will do any better in protecting the environment. The worst ecological catastrophes of the last century occurred in the former Soviet Union and Maoist China, where – under the influence of a Marxian ideology in which the natural world must be “humanised” – the natural world was damaged and degraded more than in any western country.

Among these assaults on the environment was one of the fastest decimations of another animal species in history. Fifty years ago, around 180,000 whales disappeared from the waters around the Soviet Union. In an extraordinary environmental rampage that was covered up at the time and for decades later, the Soviet whaling industry killed off the mammals simply in order to meet production targets required by the five-year plans.

Barely 30% of the whales that were slaughtered were put to any economic use. Ships would regularly return with rotting whales that could not be used for food. Meeting the five-year plan depended only on how many whales were killed. Crews that failed to meet the quotas were punished with demotions and firings, while those that exceeded what the plan demanded received bonuses. Other than crews that met or surpassed the quotas, no one profited from the massacre. Some types of whale were driven to the edge of extinction, and the effects of the system on whale populations continue today.

Of course, Greens will tell you they want an economic system different from a state socialist command economy. But how this new system would work has never been made clear, and in practice their demands amount to little more than what they call ‘sustainable development’. The trouble is that Green proposals involve a drop in material living standards for large numbers of people, and any such fall will be unsustainable in political terms.

Macron’s tax on petrol fuelled the rise of the gilets jaunes in France, while the principal beneficiary of Hilary Clinton’s election pledge to shut down the coal industry has been Donald Trump. When Green policies impose heavy costs on the poor and the working majority – as they often do – the result is a popular blowback.

Suggested reading

You're reaping what you sowed, liberals

By John Gray

In theoretical terms, the solution to the environmental crisis is what John Stuart Mill in his prescient Principles of Political Economy (1848) called a stationary-state economy – one in which technical progress is used not to expand production and consumption but to increase leisure and the quality of life. The trouble is that a zero-growth economy is politically impossible. Populist backlash and geopolitical upheaval will derail any transition to a stationary state.

Lying behind these obstacles is another reality that has been excluded from current thinking. Despite much talk about declining fertility in many countries, human population growth continues to be the root cause of the mass extinction that is in progress. Species are vanishing on a vast scale because their habitats are disappearing, and the chief reason for this is human expansion. It may be true that population growth will level off later this century somewhere around nine or 10 billion. By that point, however, the biosphere will have been gutted. If human numbers then fall, it will be in a world that has been hideously impoverished.

Interestingly, Mill foresaw this prospect when he envisioned the stationary state in the book. There is “not much satisfaction”, he wrote:

…in contemplating the world with nothing left to the spontaneous activity of nature; with every rood of land brought into cultivation, which is capable of growing food for human beings; every flowery waste or natural pasture ploughed up; all quadrupeds or birds not domesticated for man’s use exterminated as his rivals for food, every hedgerow or superfluous tree rooted out, and scarcely a place left where a wild shrub or flower could grow without being eradicated as a weed in the name of improved agriculture. If the earth must lose that great portion of its pleasantness which it owes to things that the unlimited increase of wealth and population must extirpate from it, for the mere purpose of a larger but not a better or a happier population, I sincerely hope, for the sake of posterity, that they will be content to be stationary, long before necessity compels them to it”.

Over 170 years later, there is no prospect of anyone being content to be stationary. Nothing in the current climate of ideas is as unpopular as Mill’s neo-Malthusianism. True, he linked it with female emancipation, even spending a night in prison for the crime of distributing pamphlets on birth-control to working-class women. But for liberals today that hardly excuses what they condemn as Mill’s dark misanthropy in preferring a world with a small population and large tracts of wilderness over one choked and desolated by billions of struggling human beings.

It is at this point that the extinction crisis looms into view. The industrial economy will not accept limits on growth because the civilisation it serves has rejected any constraints on what it can achieve. The fact that an objective is impossible to realise is, according to current attitudes, no reason not to attempt it. Quite the opposite, in fact. Impossible dreams – so we are told by countless secular sermonisers – are what make humans unique and special. In this modern religion, accepting any final limits on human power is the worst sin. As a corollary, magical thinking – which rests on a belief in the omnipotence of the human will – is obligatory.

Surviving the climate crisis is not an inherently unrealisable goal. What it requires is not sustainable development but something more like what James Lovelock in his book A Rough Ride to the Future (2014) has called “sustainable retreat”. Using the most advanced technologies, including nuclear as well as solar energy, and abandoning farming in favour of synthetic means of food production, the still growing human population could be fed without making further intolerable demands on the planet. High-intensity urban living could enable rewilding of land that had been vacated. Resources would be focused on building defences against the shift in climate that will occur whatever now humans do. Hubristic dreams of “saving the planet” would be replaced by thinking how to adapt to living with a planet that humans have destabilised. If humans do not adjust, the planet will reduce them to smaller numbers or consign them to extinction.

A programme of this kind is the opposite of that proposed by Greens. It is also profoundly uncongenial to the prevailing culture. A consequence of the decline of religion is a parallel decline in the idea that the natural world imposes any limits on human will. Rather than humans being seen as one animal among many, the dominant species at the present time but like all others in having no secure tenure on the Earth, they have been encouraged to see themselves as having the power over nature of the God in which they no longer believe. If God did not make the world, humankind can – and should – remake it in its own image. That is the basis on which our supposedly secular civilisation stands, and it is also the ultimate source of the extinction crisis.

Suggested reading

Deluded liberals can't keep clinging to a dead idea

By John Gray

In these circumstances, any programme based on the fact that humans face unstoppable climate change will be condemned as despairing fatalism. For a civilisation that prides itself on its devotion to science this is a curious attitude. Science aims to formulate universal laws that are independent of human beliefs and values. If these laws deflate our hopes and ambitions, so be it. If the point of the exercise is objective truth, subjective emotions must be set aside. So must faith, religious or otherwise. If we are to believe its ideologues, science is an inquiry into the natural world of which the human animal is an integral part. In fact, science has become a channel for the belief – inherited from monotheism –  that humankind can transcend the natural world.

The paradox of today’s Green movements is that they promote this anthropocentric religion. The extinction crisis can be mitigated only by turning our minds to deal with reality. But realistic thinking is almost extinct.