And then there’s Camden Town, one of the most impenetrably weird neighborhoods in London, with its inequality, its destructive conflagrations, its degrading tourism, its faltering but proud cultural legacy and its obscene threats. I once saw a preacher tussle with a legless man in a wheelchair outside the entrance to the Northern Line. 

To succeed here, a politician must recognize the paradoxes of the constituency, and understand how the area has changed and warped over the years. “Holborn and St Pancras,” wrote the academic Rob Ford recently, “is distinctive on practically every demographic indicator available.” It is full of university students, private renters, young professionals, and residents born abroad.

Did the former prime minister understand these constituents? Keir Starmer held his seat here for 10 years, yet many are glad he has gone. “I was pleased to see the back of the despair, of the hopelessness,” says Millie, a 26-year-old Labour canvasser. “It was sort of like a bad breakup… ‘It’s not you, it’s us’…. You felt bad when it happened, but the whole time you wanted him to leave.”

As a result of Starmer dumping his voters, the people of Holborn and St Pancras find themselves in the middle of a political hinge-point. Today, in their by-election, they get to choose whether Andy Burnham will cement his “new manager bounce” via his candidate, Sagal Abdi-Wali, a former child refugee from Somalia. Or whether Zack Polanski and the Greens can claw back relevance, having snookered themselves after pushing the Labour party Leftwards. George Galloway is supposedly campaigning here, too, for his Workers Party of Great Britain — if not for the constituents. Though nobody knows where he is. Last I checked, he was “in exile” in South Africa. 

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Many people I meet echo Millie. They were annoyed at Starmer for not being present, for undermining Jeremy Corbyn — say what you want about Corbyn, the people half a mile to the west in Islington North have a lasting affection for him — and for abandoning Gaza to unrestrained Israeli aggression. Starmer’s gone now, gone back to his favorite pub in Kentish Town, but some of these issues persist. 

The Holy Land has never been far away in this campaign, or from its streets. And opinions are held passionately on both sides. Both the Greens and the Workers Party of Great Britain are leaning heavily on the issue of Gaza in their literature. Furthermore, there are just over 2,000 Jewish people living in the constituency, according to the 2021 census. They hold various, often competing, views pertaining to Israel and Palestine.

Polanski, himself a Jew, was roundly bollocked at a recent Jewish community hustings in Holborn. He told the room: “Many genocide scholars around the world recognize [the Gaza war] as a genocide and calling it that is not antisemitic.” The room loudly disagreed. But Polanski continued: “In the Jewish community we need to come together to recognize that when we call that antisemitic we are making ourselves, as Jewish people, less safe.” After he finished speaking, amid boos, a woman in the crowd turned to her neighbor and whispered, “And he calls himself a Jew?”

The Green stance on Israel eclipsed their party conference at the weekend, where the membership passed a motion declaring Zionism to be racist. That this is now party policy has angered many, including the chair of Jewish Greens, Vivien Lichtenstein, who is publicly considering leaving the party, and the UK chair of Amnesty International, who has now left.

“I don’t think it’s helpful,” Lichtenstein told the BBC, “and it doesn’t make any difference whatsoever to Palestinians in Gaza who have suffered devastation, orphans left behind, it doesn’t make any difference to Palestinians in the West Bank who are currently suffering, are currently being attacked and killed.” Polanski was conveniently absent for the vote. But his name is inextricably linked to it. 

In a boutique shop in Primrose Hill, I speak to a shopkeeper who makes her feelings clear. “He’s what we call a kapo,” she tells me, describing Polanski. She says she’s experienced antisemitic harassment before, “I’ve had six, six or seven six-foot men circling me and calling me a baby killer.” After that, the conversation pivots to her disdain for the UK immigration system. “I would only vote for [somebody] that actually preferred us to all these inbreds that are coming in… and doesn’t put an alien in a hotel.” She’s planning on voting for Reform. She gets her news from Instagram. 

Given the tenor of the national debate, perhaps it’s not surprising that the canvassers here are keener to talk about housing policy. It’s a terrain that demands excellent local knowledge. But Polanski is not a local and locals can tell. Faduma, 31, is the sort of voter the Greens would traditionally be looking to attract — a young, liberal-minded Muslim woman, moved by the suffering of Gaza, sympathetic to Corbyn and deeply enmeshed with the community via her work at a youth center on Crowndale Road. 

“He’s not from the borough,” Faduma says of the Green Party leader, “I think he’s a great politician, and his promises sound fantastic. But how much is he going to deliver for us if he does win? [He doesn’t] know the community’s needs.” Faduma loves it here. “The second I leave Camden,” she says, “I can feel it.” Likewise, Faduma implicitly knows that Abdi-Wali is a Camden girl. “She understands what’s going on. She knows what’s happening with her constituency.” 

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Few people know the area and its history in such granular detail as Esther Leslie, a professor of political aesthetics and the co-director of the People’s Museum in Somers Town. Leslie is planning to vote Green. “I wouldn’t normally. I’m more of a revolutionary, if one can still say that. [I’m] not that interested in elections… I don’t think [they’ve] got much of a chance, really. I think Labour will walk it.” 

Her tiny museum is only a single room packed with information about local, countercultural legacies and potted histories, detailing, among other things, how the area was transformed in the Twenties by the Magdalen Mission and Britain’s first female surveyor. Together, they established St Pancras Housing Improvement Society and began clearing the slum tenements to make way for new flats, culminating in a ceremonial bonfire during which residents set fire to effigies of cockroaches, rats, bedbugs and fleas. 

Much of the progress made by schemes like this, seems, in Leslie’s view, to be falling away. “The fantastic housing that this [museum] was set up to honor has been allowed to decay… There’s overcrowding, there’s mold, or there’s just vacant buildings that sit empty for years.” According to the Camden New Journal, there were 356 void council properties in the borough; 43 of these were in Camden Town, “including 13 two-bedroom flats, eight three-bedroom flats and three four-bedroom flats standing empty”. It was recently reported by the North West Londoner that “Camden has recorded a 23% increase in rough sleepers in the last year, the biggest proportional rise of any London borough”. 

At the same time, hugely expensive development schemes are rising across the constituency’s four square miles. “The British Library is building this massive commercial tower,” Leslie says, “and underneath it, they’re digging out Crossrail Two Station to link Euston and St Pancras, even though that project has been stopped, but they have to do it in case it comes on-stream again. All of that really impacts people’s lives here.” 

But in some ways, the development has improved the area. It’s certainly made it safer. Walk along the now-pristine dock towards Camden Road, you’re far less likely to get mugged or intimidated or hassled. The water looks nice too: fewer sunken shopping carts. But it has also jettisoned much of the area’s unique character in favor of new-build architectural slop. Camden’s newly-modernized Stables Market appears to have lost something vital, a loss that has substituted sordidness for bland marketability. A few months ago I set out to buy a novelty bong shaped like a gas mask for a friend’s birthday, but couldn’t find one, and felt quietly bereaved.

In the lobby of Camden Goods Yard, a massive, multi-million-pound block of flats is being erected by Berkeley Group. In 2025 the developer told planning inspectors it would “mothball” the site if its appeal to cut the amount of affordable housing in the scheme was unsuccessful. Peering out across the lobby is a portrait of Amy Winehouse. What might she feel about her image being reconstituted as gaudy art for shareholders to barely notice as they carry on shafting the locals over affordable units? Hell, I wonder what Baudrillard would think. 

Down the grotty high street from these £2 million flats is Saint Martin’s Gardens. This park, flecked with gravestones from a previous incarnation as a cemetery, provided the backdrop to John Healy’s unflinching memoir of his time spent homeless among the winos of Camden in the Sixties. “I called it the Grass Arena,” Healy told The Observer, “because, in the parks where the winos congregated, you could never show any weakness.” People still drink there today. On a bench, two young men, Ricky and Ali, are enjoying a lunchtime quarter-bottle of Smirnoff mixed with Sprite, along with a packet of cigarettes. Both grew up here. Both distrust politicians generally but like Andy Burnham. “He seems alright,” Ali says. If they could change one thing about the area, I ask them, what would it be? Ali says housing, but Ricky worries about the empty schools. 

As the sun sinks onto Harlesden and Wembley, I find a gaggle of Green canvassers. Horsia, 66, has dedicated her evening to campaigning for the Greens, even though she wouldn’t vote for them in a general election. “I don’t think he’s Prime Minister material”, she says of Polanski. “He doesn’t always speak in a way that that to me appears to recognize the broad audience that he needs to cultivate and bring along with him.” Horsia is a scientist and is profoundly concerned by the climate crisis. She wants an environmental “purist” in Parliament and thinks Polanski could reliably “back the right propositions”. This is interesting, as Polanski has mostly shrunk away from campaigning on environmental issues in favor of the economic and geopolitical. “He needs to get back on it,” she says, “and I’ll be a real mosquito in his ear if he doesn’t.” 

Before I can ask more, I’m chased off by a press officer with a smile that reads “Go fuck yourself”. This kind of frantic comms control is unusual for the Greens — but they’ve come a long way since 2023, when the party was struggling to maintain relevance and still had two leaders. The party conference that year felt like a school reunion; lots of friendly faces remembering each other from somewhere or other. The upstart Polanski was very on-message when I met him at that conference. But it was hard to tell whether he truly meant any of it, or whether the former actor had simply learned his lines. After all, just five years previously, he had been a vociferous Liberal Democrat. 

So far, Polanski’s stagecraft has served him well. And actors can go a long way in politics: think of Zelensky, Reagan, and Blair. But sticking to the script isn’t always enough, particularly if the script-writing process is member-led and increasingly risk-tolerant. Moreover, the script the members come back with may not care for the people here. They may barely factor in. 

Whatever Polanski’s political lifespan, this fragment of north London will outlast him. In many ways it embodies a vital problem of modern politics, that the everyday is fracturing like a broken mirror. The fragments of Camden and Kentish Town and Holborn and Primrose Hill and Tufnell Park and Somers Town and King’s Cross are all extremely sharp. Sharp enough to cut yourself on if you grasp them crudely. 

The word Zion occurs more than a hundred times in the Hebrew scriptures. In 587 BC, the Babylonians conquered the land of Judah and expelled its people; the psalmist describes their despondency and their yearning for a return home. “By the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept when we remembered Zion.” This lament is a recurrent feature of the Hebrew scriptures. And later, after the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans in 70 AD, the same desire for a return home, to Zion, was the defining feature of what came to be called Judaism. Zionism was not invented in 1895. It is as old as the psalmist, even older.

But the arrival of Christianity did something very particular to our understanding of all religions and has distorted the way we understand words such as Judaism and Zionism. For Christianity, and especially protestant Christianity, religion is essentially a system of belief. So successful has this idea become that it is often impossible for people to understand that a religion can be anything other than a system of belief. Yet to be Jewish is not just about what you believe, it is also about where you come from, where many yearn to return to, who your mother is, what practices you have. For the vast majority of Jews, then, Zionism is not simply a political philosophy that was invented in the years before the First World War. It is a way of life that is fundamentally constitutive of what it is to be Jewish.

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Which is why, in passing a motion that “Zionism is Racism”, the Green Party has done something profoundly wicked. Those who scream “from the river to the sea” — though they probably couldn’t tell you the name of either the river or the sea — have decided to describe the safety that many Jews seek in Israel as a hatred. To condemn Zionism is to seek the destruction of Israel and open Jews up to a danger that has followed them around since forever.

This idea that Zionism is a racist and colonialist enterprise is absurd. The yearning for Zion long predates the Holocaust, but the murder of six million Jews by a European civilization gave that yearning a new urgency. And yes, there were Jews who, before the Second World War, believed that they could make a safe home for themselves in Europe, fearing that Herzl’s new political version of Zionism would destabilize the assimilation into that society they had done so much to build.

My great-grandfather’s brother, Samuel Friedeberg, ran the Princes Road Synagogue in Liverpool. In 1917, his community debated Herzl’s proposal, many worrying that the foundation of a Jewish state would “prejudicially affect the position of such Jews as are members of the British nation”. The motion was defeated 39 votes to 30. The result was a reflection of how safe many well-to-do Jews had come to feel in England, especially during the reign of Queen Victoria. As the then Chief Rabbi of the British Empire, Hermann Adler, put it in 1898: “Our faith teaches us to seek the welfare of the nations under whose protection we dwell, to take part in their national efforts and to work for their success, and to wait silently for the day when the prophets will be fulfilled.”

Adler’s message to Herzl was that he shouldn’t rock the boat. Yet after the Second World War, Jews could no longer count on being protected by European nations. The “nations under whose protection we dwell” no longer protected them, indeed turned against them with diabolical and murderous consequences. Zionism wasn’t revived as a political reality by Herzl; it was revived by the screams of six million souls murdered in Europe. That was real genocide. A Jewish homeland could no longer remain a yearning.

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The state of Israel was founded on 14 May 1948, under the auspices of the United Nations. But Israelis were left fighting for their lives the very next day, for that was when the armies of neighboring Arab nations invaded. And the Israelis have been fighting for their lives ever since, against the Palestine Liberation Organization, against Hamas, and now against a ridiculous cohort of student politicians who like to cosplay as radicals by draping themselves in Palestinian colors and shouting empty words about colonialism — none of which will help the Palestinians.

What might help the Palestinians is a two-state solution, the land divided fairly between Palestinians and Israelis, giving both the right to self-determination. And, to be clear, to believe in a two-state solution is also to be a Zionist, because it is also to allow the Jews a safe space in their ancestral homeland. Zionism isn’t a movement owned by Jewish settlers who want to push Arabs off their land and pull up their olive trees. It also represents the desire of Jews not to be murdered — by Cossacks, by Nazis, by Hamas. A one-state solution would expose them to precisely the kind of murderous reality from which they have long been seeking to escape. If you think I’m being dramatic, recall what happened on 7 October 2023.

I am flying back to Israel later this month with my family so that my wife can add her vote to those seeking to get rid of the wretched Benjamin Netanyahu.She still cares deeply for her home, because human beings are creatures of place, called to care for our places, be it Judah or Jarrow. When Chaim Weizmann was asked by a British politician why the Jewish people insisted on safety in Palestine, rather than someone more convenient, he replied: “That is like asking you why you drove 20 miles to visit your mother last Sunday when there are so many old ladies living in your street.” Place matters. In the Hebrew scriptures, we are creatures of place, called to love and care for our little plot of land, just as Wendell Berry loved and cared for his little bit of Kentucky. This is the real philosophy the Greens should be defending, the fact that we are creatures of the earth. But this means nothing to our current generation of Greens, who are now a dark perversion of what that party was born to defend: our rootedness; our love of place. 

On 10 November 1975, under pressure from heavy KGB propaganda, the United Nations adopted resolution 3379 that “Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination”. Later that day, the Belfast born Israeli Ambassador, Chaim Herzog, stood up and contemptuously ripped the resolution in half. “For us, the Jewish people, this resolution based on hatred, falsehood and arrogance, is devoid of any moral or legal value. For us, the Jewish people, this is no more than a piece of paper and we shall treat it as such.” Sixteen years later, the resolution was revoked.

Today, the accusation Herzog tore apart has returned, dressed in the language of a new generation of radicals. So stuff the Greens, their vacant student posturing, and their cosplaying as Hamas terrorists from the safety of Brighton. Because Zionism is not racism: at its heart is something far older even than the state of Israel. And because today that desire to be safe from the dangerous racism of others has become urgent once again — including, now, from the Greens themselves.

This weekend, the Greens too will host their own conference, a scaled back affair in Brighton. Yet as Polanski’s resolute campaigning suggests, it’s the Holborn and St Pancras by-election, now less than a week away, that truly matters. That shouldn’t surprise anyone, not least because, this year, the great British by-election has re-shaped Westminster. Holborn is the fourth, and all but one, when Nigel Farage triumphed in Clacton against a man dressed as a bin, have been of national importance.

First came Hannah Spencer’s triumph in Gorton and Denton, the only by-election win in the Green Party’s history. Little more than two months later came a similarly strong performance in local elections, with success in London sealing Keir Starmer’s fate. Over the weekend that followed, Polanski emerged as a genuinely national figure, proudly asserting that two-party politics was “dead and buried”.

And so, in June, came Makerfield. More than simply deciding that constituency’s next MP, it was clear from the outset that it would also provide a launchpad for Andy Burnham’s ambitions: first into Parliament and then into Downing Street. Those vacillating members of Labour’s NEC, who had previously blocked the former health secretary from standing in Gorton, now changed tack, their endorsement underscoring how far, and how fast, their party had fallen.

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The Green ascent thus changed the fortunes of both themselves and Labour. Now controlling several London boroughs, a party which boasted a single MP before 2024 had triggered an internal revolution within Government. Yet a cruel irony to those accomplishments would inevitably follow. Polanski’s rise made Labour pursue otherwise unthinkably high-risk measures — measures which now appear to be paying off. No longer facing a moleish bureaucrat for control of the Left, Polanski’s struggle is simply to remain relevant.

Labour are confident of a win in Holborn and St Pancras, and the bookmakers have their candidate, Sagal Abdi-Wali, as the overwhelming favorite. And, to an extent, this makes sense. Camden Labour performed relatively well in May’s local elections, with the Greens failing to break through here as they did in less prosperous places like Harringey, Lambeth and Hackney. Polanski also doesn’t live in the constituency — which counts more than ever in Britain’s hyper-localized politics — as Reform found to their detriment with Matt Goodwin in Gorton and Denton.

Even so, having been to the seat, and spoken to campaigners and voters alike, Labour’s self-assurance does surprise me. As a campaigner, Abdi-Wali seems cagey and lightweight, with Camden Labour operating a “ming vase” strategy lacking the energy that infused the party’s Makerfield victory. Where Burnham was eager to talk to just about anyone in Wigan — from aging Lexiteers to people saying he was complicit in the grooming gangs scandal — Labour in Starmer’s old patch are protective and insular.

And while Burnham is pledging to “end neoliberalism,” Camden Labour — which controls the council, holds the mayoralty and, for now, represents both the borough’s parliamentary constituencies — is going full steam ahead. Among other things, the group is presently selling off a local recycling site, replacing it with one half the size. Their Community Investment Program, meanwhile, is regarded by critics as a giveaway to private developers. Public services, from street cleaning to  waste management, are all outsourced too, with some contracts renewed as recently as last year. Labour’s record at a local level is very much at odds with the rhetoric of its new leader.

Yet if Polanski is fighting hard against a politically exposed opponent — putting in the hard yards to win every vote he can — it’s also clear that his party has no real national message. From what I understand, the Green leader has been submerged listening to the concerns of local residents, from LTNs to parking. But that leaves little space for connecting those street-level worries to a broader set of principles, with Polanski more often reacting to the news cycle than defining it.  A case in point was his defense of the triple lock following Burnham’s speech on Tuesday, with the Green leader asking why Labour was “going after pensioners”. That might make sense — had the Greens themselves not pledged to end the triple lock at the last general election. Hardly Burnham’s conference-hall plea for hope through honesty.

Why, at their zenith, did the Greens take their foot off the pedal? There are many plausible answers, not least that some within the party view their role as being little more than a pressure group pushing Labour left. And so, with Starmer gone, some concluded it was mission accomplished. Then there’s the fact that building an organization in an age of frantic digital activism feels harder than ever, with ideological zeal on social media often masking lace-thin commitments off it.

Perhaps most importantly, though, the party’s core values remain unclear. The Green movement is stronger than ever: people, after all, are far more interested in the work of Friends of the Earth than the Fabian Society. So where were the Green politicians making vertical videos in Wisley this summer, when the Surrey village saw no rain for two months? Or when New Forest businesses were slammed after wildfires deprived them of peak-season tourist trade? Why, when the A31 was closed for almost a fortnight as a result of the flames, wasn’t the party making the case for temporary free train travel as an emergency response? In their defense, the Green leadership might say they were knackered after an extraordinary few months. That carries more than a grain of truth: rapid growth is often exhausting for insurgents. But national politics is utterly relentless, and things always move on. More reason, then, to focus on building an effective organization that transcends the gravitas and personal pull of any single individual.

Amid such frustrations, the Green conference in Brighton feels like a lost opportunity. It could have provided the party with a moment to reflect on a remarkable year, and debate their policy platform moving forward — especially in the very different context of a Burnham premiership. Instead, the party is offering refunds to members who’d paid to attend, but who now want to canvas in London. Holborn and St Pancras matters, of course, and the party is more competitive than many realize, but that also underscores a tendency of the radical Left towards “actionism”: where thinking, debate and theory counts for less than it should. Collective deliberation, and a vibrant intellectual culture, especially offline, are the lifeblood of any party seeking to transform society.

Not that it’s all bad for Polanski and the Greens. For even if it seems unlikely he’ll triumph in Holborn, he could come a close second — something which might end up benefiting both him and Burnham. The former never meaningfully expected to win, after all, and he’ll have built a formidable operation for when he stands (and likely wins) in one of the Hackney seats at the next general election. Making inroads into Labour’s majority, at the very moment that the Government is enjoying a honeymoon with a new leader, would remain an impressive accomplishment, whatever Polanski’s detractors might spin next Friday. As for Burnham, a narrow margin of victory might provide a valuable impetus to change his own party. The remnants of Starmerism would need to be dealt with.

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Yet whatever the tactical result next Thursday, that still leaves the Greens in the same strategic quandary. Are they building an organization, and a movement of their own —  defined by thick offline ties, a vivid intellectual and social life, and local experiments in politics — or are they simply a response, or indeed a symptom, to a collapse in two-party politics? The same question can be posed of Reform, of course, but then it’s rather easier to avoid existential angst when you’re receiving tens of millions of pounds in donations.

For all the enmity between Polanski and Farage it’s clear that, until now, both men thrived in part because they weren’t the big two — with effective strategy often requiring little more than opposition to a moribund “uniparty”. But what happens when one. half of that uniparty, Labour, explicitly admits their complicity in decades of failure, and openly says the country has been on the wrong path “for a long time”? Suddenly, being purely antagonistic no longer works, and can even start to resemble puerility. That the Conservatives won’t do something similar, and admit their own fiascos on austerity, migration and Europe, should perhaps provide succor to Farage and Zia Yusuf.

What, then, should the Greens do? At a national level, they need to determine where they are distinct from Labour, and craft their message and policies accordingly. Clearly a large part of the answer involves climate change. That, after all, remains the basis for a potentially vast coalition: from the Countryfile viewers in the shires to urban graduates who are more likely to watch Gary Stevenson. It’s worth remembering, too, that while the Greens, Reform and Labour all have memberships of less than 300,000, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds boasts over a million. The National Trust, Europe’s largest conservation charity, has a membership five times that.

Secondly, the Greens need to decisively become the party of struggling urbanites. But this means focusing on problems like fly-tipping and quality of life as much as the housing crisis or other immediately Left-coded issues. If Auckland can build a new metro, in a decade no less, why can’t the likes of Leeds and Bristol? Solving problems like that, from supply chain constraints to planning oversight, should be the party’s bread and butter. Britain’s cities are appallingly managed, and the Greens should relentlessly seek to provide answers, even when those aren’t especially ideological. To put it another way, the Greens should be the party most committed to making Britain a more pleasant place to live: advocates for lapwings, but public lidos too. For that to happen, though, Polanski’s team will need to dump the reflexive negativity — instead linking values to policies that forge a national movement, all while being open about the threats and opportunities of a genuine green transition. Yes, some risks will be involved, and yes, any endeavor on such a scale will include mistakes.

There’s another, easier option available to the Greens as well: wait. Wait for Burnham’s honeymoon to end. Wait for the Labour in-fighting to return, as the party’s perennially toxic Right attempts to take back control. That will inevitably happen — not least because it is the Labour Right that still controls the NEC and much of the party bureaucracy. And, when it does, the Greens will be there, an oven-ready alternative for progressive voters. That’s an alluring strategy for Polanski, not least because it isn’t really a strategy at all. “Never interrupt your enemy while he is making a mistake,” Napoleon reputedly said. Fair enough: but, more often than not, that’s a line deployed by people who are simply unsure of what to do. Like the Prime Minister says, real hope comes through honesty. In these fractured times, that’s a line everyone in politics can learn from.

On 8 October, the voters of this North London constituency will judge whether today’s Labour Party, a now tired vehicle born of Edwardian Britain, Methodism and industrial trade unionism, is still worth a punt against the siren calls of the radical Greens, who are offering “eco-populism”, festival aesthetics, youthful vigor and politics-by-meme. The result is likely to set the contours of Burnhamism over the years ahead, shaping the malleable politics of the new PM.

It marks a pivotal moment for both Burnham and his rival Zack Polanski: a contest over the viability of the Labour Party and its traditional hegemony over Left politics. It is freighted with expectations. Can Burnham reunite the Left’s broken voter coalition and reverse the precipitous decline stewarded by Starmer? Or will Polanski prove that his party’s poll surge can be translated into parliamentary seats, a first step on his path to “replace Labour” as the dominant Left force in British politics. Failure for either would be a humiliation: whatever the result, one man’s whole political raison d’etre will be deeply undermined, their respective coalitions left more fragile than ever.

For all his painfully awkward dilettantism, Zack Polanski has managed to turn the Greens from a kooky fringe outfit into a viable electoral force. Party membership has more than tripled to over 200,000 over the past year. As much as the march of Farageism across northern England saw off Starmer’s premiership, the Greens’ success in Gorton and Denton signaled to Labour MPs that his entire project was done for. It had failed to win back the disaffected postindustrial working class, and birthed a heightened national-populist insurgency — while simultaneously taking a sledgehammer to the Left coalition that won Starmer the 2024 election.

Part of that coalition found shelter in the warm embrace of the Greens, which briefly overtook Labour in the polls earlier this year, before settling more recently in the low double figures. That ceiling may well be down to Polanski himself and his enthusiasm for social media stunts. He has retweeted posts questioning the use of non-lethal force against an armed Islamist, mid-rampage in Golders Green, and reposted an image suggesting Nigel Farage should be guillotined. Nor is it easy to forget — or forgive — his mortifying history of promising to hypnotize women’s breasts bigger.

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Still, news of Polanskism’s early demise is greatly exaggerated, principally expressed as wishful thinking, and crucially missing the point: the Greens don’t need to appeal to the median voter, nor do they need to assemble a broad cross-class union of disparate social and cultural-political forces. Rather, their purpose is to energize, articulate and represent the interests of that small but significant portion of voters for whom Polanski’s Bluesky musings are not beyond the pale, but signifiers of superior virtue. Done well, that could be enough to wreck Labour’s prospects of being re-elected.

Altogether, the Green showing in Holborn will confirm whether Labour’s pains are principally superficial — the result of years of uniquely inept leadership under Keir — or structural. A Polanski victory would assert the latter narrative: if even Labour’s most popular politician is powerless in the face of the macro trend, then hope is surely lost. Perhaps, even under new leadership, the rot cannot be stopped; Labour’s decline is the terminal result of tectonic and sociological shifts that have plagued the movement since the decline of Fordist manufacturing. In this reading, Polanskism will flourish in a climate in which broad-based, rooted political projects have given way to mutually suspicious tribal bubbles.

But there is a paradox at the heart of this reading of defeat. For while losing his first by-election would doubtless embarrass Burnham, it would also temper the instinct for a more managerial, orthodox politics. His coalition problem cuts both ways: he needs the Green-curious metropolitan Left just as he does the Reform-curious disaffected working class. Defeat in Holborn would make this conundrum harder, not easier, to manage.

After all, efforts to mitigate the Green surge in North London could require a Leftward shift in all manner of tricky policy areas: not only on Mahmood’s immigration and asylum reforms, but also on North Sea drilling, wealth taxes, and Israel-Palestine. The seat has a decent share of Muslim voters (one in five), as well as stressed young renters in over-priced houseshares and thousands of students: all receptive to the central Green messages of inchoate anti-capitalism and Labour betrayal. The conflict in the Near East, in particular, has become a totemic struggle for the radical Left, the fulcrum upon which all social justice struggles now somehow hinge. For the fresh graduate class, the willingness to eagerly and interminably utter the word “genocide” has become the ultimate political axiom (simply “war crimes” or even “ethnic cleansing” won’t do). So Labour has been smart to select a hijab-wearing former child refugee as its candidate, a welcome reassurance for the Green-curious, for whom these markers of apparent oppressed minority bona fides really do matter. Not that Sagal Abdi-Wali is some tokenistic appointment. She has already been leader of Camden council, and has spent three decades as a well-known “community activist”.

Of course, Holborn is more complicated than just Camden, and not as straightforwardly Green as Hackney. As in much of London, there are pockets of urban deprivation, but the seat’s boundaries stretch to the smart facades of Doughty Street (home to Starmer’s former chambers) and includes the King’s Cross headquarters of Google as well as the homes of established liberal professionals in the Georgian terraces of Kentish Town. This seat is Rest is Politics, but it is also Novara Media. If that causes headaches for both Burnham and Polanski, George Galloway’s Workers’ Party candidature does too, proving attractive to conservative Muslims hoping to give Labour a bloody nose, and to those repelled by the vibes and coding of a party of hyper-liberal urban cool kids (the Greens’ cringeworthy efforts to appeal to Urdu speakers notwithstanding).

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It is certainly true that running a party leader with an energetic local campaign might well turn the usual by-election distortions into massive swings. But even in May’s local elections, the absolute nadir of Starmerism, the Greens found themselves nine points behind Labour, and they will, according to the bookmakers, be relegated to second place in October too.

Still, even second place is no mean feat. Before 2024, the Greens were confined to a single electoral citadel: Brighton. Positioning itself rather smugly as a bastion of middle-class progressives, hedonistic students and New-Age crusties, the Sussex seaside town was practically synonymous with the old Greens. Then, at the last election, the party expanded its seat haul to four: Brighton, of course, and a similarly off-kilter hipster seat in Bristol, but also two true-blue rural constituencies concerned with over-development and nature conservation. This created a strange two-tier Green bloc. On the one hand, the party was for laptop-sticker postgrads; on the other for Countryfile-watching former Tories.

Needless to say, that is a shaky, contradictory political coalition, not unlike Labour’s own. And, under Polanski, the Greens have only looked to add further elements to the mix: northern mill-town biraderi networks, and Islamic migrant communities collectively appalled by Gaza. But Holborn doesn’t fit neatly into the new Green Party’s cultural-political triad: what you might call the Greta-Gaza-Gardener alliance. It is a seat where the Green coalition’s internal contradictions are hard to hide: a constituency of students, renters and professionals for whom Gaza is important, gardens are largely irrelevant, and where clan politics holds less purchase than elsewhere.

Even if Polanski cannot forge his Greta-Gaza-Gardener alliance into a winning vote here, his leadership of the Greens will continue. As long as his loss is respectable, it may even be read as portentous, further eating into Labour’s temporarily rescued Left hegemony. A Labour victory, however, will hand Burnham the argument that his party’s malaise was mainly Starmer’s: and that a mildly Leftward, pub-friendly patter and anti-Thatcher schtick is enough to reunite the Left bloc and hold off Balkanization.

Once in this North London seat, Marx sat at his desk, with Lenin a few years and miles away, and the Fabians busily drafting the machinery of a welfare state that did not yet exist. Today, we have a former hypnotist who can’t stay off his phone, going up against a Labour candidate whose task it is to prove that having a nice-guy leader is enough to stave off secular decline. That this will be enough for one of the candidates to succeed is perhaps the biggest indictment of the politics of our era.

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.

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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.

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“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.

That said, an increasing number of Londoners have decided to live on the water. The Green Party leader, Zack Polanski, made headlines recently when it emerged that he may have failed to pay council tax on his houseboat, moored in East London. People may think Polanski is a typical canal-dweller — and, to some extent, they’d be right. But, on closer inspection, the social constellation on London’s waterways is infinitely more complex.

The capital’s canals have become a strange kind of borderland, part of London, certainly, but nonetheless different from the hyper-corporatized, surveilled cityscape that surrounds them. Perhaps that’s because they were never meant to be lived on. The Victorian canals — which make up most of our manmade waterways — were built by an exploited, maligned class of laborers known as “navvies”, who somehow executed one of the most ambitious civil engineering projects in British history, practically by hand. The navvies toiled, died in their hundreds, so that the canals could transport freight. But then the railways came, and the motorways (also built by navvies) which usurped the canals. They became vestigial, which, with some exceptions, tends to make infrastructure more interesting in the long run.

Today, the canals are busier than at any other time in their history, which would’ve been hard to imagine back in the mid-20th century, when, particularly in big cities, they tended to be filled with shopping-trolleys and associated with crime. 20 years ago, walking along the Hertford Union or Regent’s canal towards Hackney would’ve felt sketchy in a way it no longer does. Back then, canals even had their own serial killers: in London, John Sweeney (“The Canal Killer”) dismembered a sex worker and threw her remains into the Regent’s; in Manchester so many bodies were hauled onto the unlit towpath that a paranoid city had to invent a serial killer via urban legend — “the Manchester pusher”.

In time, though, the canals started becoming associated with boaters rather than corpses. The number of boats on London’s canals increased dramatically during the austerity years since 2012. The bends of the canals make watery loopholes and, if you walk the capital’s towpaths, you’ll speak to people who want to live “off grid”, or in some way escape the manacles of city life, while continuing to benefit from it. These people tend to dislike the Canal & River Trust (CRT).

Unless you’re reading this afloat, the CRT is probably the largest charity that’s never occurred to you. According to the Charity Commission, in 2024 their total income was over £237 million. About half of that comes from property holdings; the CRT has roughly a billion pounds in long-term investment assets. They used to be a government body called British Waterways and, when they broke away in 2012, it amounted to the largest ever transfer of UK state assets into a charity. Now they’re tasked with maintaining the canals, which are expensive, and overseeing its boaters, who can be too.

There are two types of boat dwellers on London’s waterways: “continuous cruisers,” who buy a boat, then pay the CRT a license to use the waterways, provided they move a vague distance (which not everyone does) every two weeks; and people with permanent moorings. In London, permanent moorings can set you back up to £15,000 per year in prime locations, so the majority choose the former category and it’s up to the CRT to make sure they’re keeping to the rules.

“The CRT, for whatever reason, have decided that they don’t want to have this community of boaters living on the canals,” says Jack Saville, a spokesperson for the National Bargee Travellers Association (NBTA), a member-led organisation set up to lobby for the legal rights of continuous cruisers.

The NBTA are unsettled by a 2025 CRT report titled “The Future of Licensing” which, among other things, recommends using compulsory trackers to monitor difficult boaters in congested areas. It also argues the CRT needs the power to employ “reasonable force as a last resort when removing a boat subject to a Court order.”

Saville thinks the rules are fine as they are — but the CRT fears they’re too ambiguous, and that there’s a need to clarify, in official terms, what it means to be a boater, particularly a continuous cruiser. I spent a few days in London trying to clarify this same question in non-official terms. What I found relates right back to my earlier point about the freedoms and unfreedoms of city life. It’s a hideaway, populated by people who wanted to escape things: the housing crisis, or the system, or an expected life. In some cases, they escaped only to find themselves escaping even more things, whether an increased license fee, or a faulty engine, or that bane of London boaters: “The Beneficiary.”

***

Jonesy has always tried to do things differently. He’s hitchhiked the UK, even went a year without a phone. As such, he’s a fairly typical young boater who enjoys building saunas and smoking weed and using his hands. Jonesy took to the waterways four years ago, but didn’t hear about The Beneficiary until last summer. By then, even the CRT were aware of The Beneficiary and sent out a community wide email warning people about him.

It turned out The Beneficiary isn’t an official title — it’s just the odd name someone calls themselves. Going by the CRT’s email, he was “a black male, aged approximately 40-50 years old, short hair with a top knot”, and who “may be in possession of a stolen boat”. Not everyone who exits the urban societal bargain can re-enter quite the same way. According to rumor, which travels fast on the canals, The Beneficiary was the sort of guy who took too many psychedelics in his twenties and later lost his mind.

Jonesy says The Beneficiary had been hurling bricks through the windows of narrowboats and, if the broken window wasn’t addressed within a week, he’d steal the boat and repaint it. Someone told Jonesy that The Beneficiary had stolen the wrong boat, and a posse had been assembled to attack him. No one I spoke with is sure exactly what happened there. According to Jonesy, The Beneficiary now lives in a tent somewhere in Hackney. A number of boats also burned that summer, one in a suspected arson attack — it was a strange time.

If you could create a personality compass for the canals, with “peaceful-gnarly” on the x axis and “good-bad” on the y, tranquil hippies like Jonesy would be somewhere in the middle, and The Beneficiary in the bottom right (“gnarly, bad”). As for the top right corner you’d find the “gnarly, good” Vince. The Beneficiary wouldn’t have gotten far with one of Vince’s boats. “Even if you disarm the tracker,” Vince explains, nursing a tinny, “I’ll send three boys that way, three boys that way!” I like Vince, who flips boats for cash, and has the distinctive, snuffling swagger of a party bloke. I encountered him on the Lee, a canalized river near to Haggerston station.

Algerian Chaoui music plays out of a Bose speaker on the table while we chat shit — literally, in some cases; Vince tells me about the “shatamaran”, who used to float around the canals collecting toilet waste for 20 quid. Apparently the shatamaran-man would always be wasted, always be covered in shit, and always try to embrace upon greeting. “He tells me, ‘put the money in my wife’s account’”, Vince recalls, laughing, “I say, ‘YOU’RE MARRIED?!’”  Vince, by contrast, is not married. He’s a quarter Indian and keeps a portrait of an ancient Raj-era dignitary which he pretends is his great uncle. “That’s got me in so many girls’ knickers it’s unbelievable.”

Like other boaters, Vince has a strong sense of solidarity. He grew up “poor as fuck”, with nefarious friends. One of his boats, which he’d previously fitted with speakers and ferried to carnival, is being turned into a traveling gallery. A photographer by trade, Vince wants to use it to exhibit photography by impoverished East London kids, ferry it across the city and repeat the process with their West London counterparts. Vince has noticed the potential of the canals, as a non-place where culture can be mobile. He also has the tenacity of poverty but the free spirit of a posh girl. “When I became a teenager,” he explains, “I started dating posh girls… these people have no boundaries, I wanted to start thinking like them.”

There are posh girls on the canals too, girls like Octavia Sheepshanks, 32, moved onto the water to take up a bucolic romance. I encounter Sheepshanks on the Little Venice towpath, which cleaves London in two. On one side there are the boutique shops and high-end houses of Warwick Avenue; on the other is the Westway, and the traveler community who live underneath, just five minutes from their local pub, which backs on to Grenfell. Speaking abstractly, you’d find Sheepshanks (“peaceful, good”) in the top-left corner of the compass.

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After sinking about 20 grand on a 38-foot boat called The Yan Tan Tethera, she was supposed to navigate her way up to Cambridge and moor next to her boyfriend. But life has a way of unraveling, and now she’s weathering her first winter on the water alone, drafting a romantic fantasy novel called The Chronochasm.

Sheepshanks moved onto the water for love but stayed for the freedom it grants her. When she first became aquatic, she found a nest of coots under a neighboring boat and everyday a seagull would swoop down, pick up one of the chicks and smash it on a nearby roof. It was traumatic. At boarding school, she recalls, the girls used to hide spiders in her bed. Animals meet on the towpath too.

Octavia does not keep a pet, though maritime animals are common on the canals, especially cats. They venture onto the towpath at night, communing while their owners are asleep. There are dogs too, the largest probably being Baloo, the 92-kilo Central Asian Shepherd who lives with John, a Polish man who floats around East London selling diesel.

Thinking of The Beneficiary, I ask Sheepshanks if she feels safe living alone as a woman on the canals. She answers that she does. She did once arrive home to find a man asleep under her engine cover, but he turned out to be quite apologetic and nice. As most boaters will tell you, you’re much more likely to encounter people illegally renting an Airbnb along the towpath than you are to be robbed. It took me about 45 minutes before I bumped into an Austrian couple renting out a boat which didn’t have a permanent mooring (a cash grab the CRT has tried to police but lacks sufficient resources to do so). Often, boaters don’t like tourists because they don’t know what they’re doing. They also moan about the expensive wide-beams which are too broad for the locks; sometimes people call the locks “twat filters”.

No one moans about Ali, who, as both peaceful and gnarly, somehow sits outside the canal compass. He’s known as the “unofficial mayor” of his stretch of Little Venice. He’s a strange, quiet man who speaks to the fire and was jailed, according to him, in four different countries. “Everything is relative,” he says, “everyone is a victim of his own circumstances, there is no criminal in this world.” In summer, Ali grew strawberries from the roof of his boat and a little girl would always run up and pick them on her way back from school, her grandfather shouting in Greek for her to leave the boats alone and return to the city, where the bargain holds.

Early morning.  

The battlements.

Deprived of sleep, the once Director of Public Prosecutions, now mere Prime Minister, steps out in dread and smells the air. A cold Elsinore-like wind blows in, ruffling the laundered lace collar of his hero shirt. He speaks, knowing no one is listening. ‘The time is out of joint. O, cursed spite that ever I was born to set it right.’

He has my sympathies. Compare the calamitous disorder confronting Hamlet and Keir Starmer and we have to say Hamlet had it easy. A dead father, a wanton mother, a wicked uncle, a ghost at large, and Fortinbras mustering his forces on the Norwegian border – pfft! Mere domestic inconveniences compared with the things rank and gross in nature that Starmer faces every day: the carping of courtiers calling for a brave new world but lacking the bravery to bring one about; irresponsible rivals tickling the sore spots of a confused and rumor-ridden populace; a ruthless commentariat no less divided but equally athirst for blood; voices prophesying war. Fie on’t, ah fie!

Of the external factions aligned against Starmer’s Labour Party in the coming local elections, the most dangerous — to Starmer and the country — are the Greens. Ask how the Greens have transformed themselves in so short a time from a smug but innocuous band of self-marginalizing activists to a smug but menacing army of agitators bent on power, and the answer explains what there is to fear from them. They are not what they until recently purported to be. In the image of their new about-facing leader Zack Polanski, they present a deceptively benign countenance. A party ostensibly for children, with policies of redistribution and fairness, promising goodies (even the naughtiest ones) for everyone, they are only a little less ostensibly a party for Jew haters. Yes, the Greens were always hyper-Gaza-concerned, today they are Gaza besotted.

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Reform has its own obsessions, too, but they are as they describe themselves on the tin. Farage comes over as of-the-turf-turfy and of the saloon-bar-boozy, and makes no attempt to attract voters who don’t like that look. His appeal will fluctuate, as it always has, according to the perceived level of immigrant threat. And yes, that makes the success he might enjoy hard to calculate. But essentially Reformers are old men who stoke one another’s fears. Those fears are by no means all irrational but they are aging. The Greens however are young, which means that whatever there is to fear from them there is to fear for longer. Against that, of course, is the fickleness of youth. Cheered by tens of thousands at Glastonbury but a blink of time ago, Jeremy Corbyn is now pushing “a new kind of politics” — Your Party, it desperately names itself — in company with Zarah Sultana. How the mighty, etc. But Zack Polanski has an advantage over Corbyn, at least when it comes to baiting Jews — he is a Jew himself. And the appeal to the Jew-uncomfortable of an actual Jew who is no less Jew-uncomfortable than they are, is incalculable. Rarely will a Green party candidate forget to rebut all charges of antisemitism with the reassuring lie, “We cannot be antisemitic. Our leader is a Jewish man” — the phenomenon of a Jew-hating Jew being new to voters who are wet behind the ears.

I don’t mind admitting to my own problem with Zack Polanski, over and above my suspicions about people who change their names and seek to make capital out of doing so. Over the centuries, Jews have changed their names from Mordechai to St John in order to join a golf club. That David Paulden should have changed his name to Zack Polanski is harder to understand, unless there was a Polish golf club in north Manchester that wouldn’t otherwise have considered him for membership. Not that the name Paulden immediately conjures up a Jew. The Pauldens — his paternal grandparents — were good friends of my mother and father. We lived next-door to them in Prestwich. I babysat their children, one of whom would have been the not-yet Zack’s father. My own father briefly drove a van for Benny Paulden who owned a small warehouse. My mother ran a fancy goods shop with Ethel Paulden in a rundown precinct in south Manchester. I had a schoolboy crush on her. The four lie close together for all time in a grim Jewish cemetery in Failsworth. I remember them with immense fondness. Modest, generous business people with a sense of humor, relaxedly Jewish. The Pauldens. A nice name, I think, every time I pause before their graves, on the way to visit my parents’.

So why did David Paulden change it? I am not privy to the particular psychology so must accept his explanation that it was a gesture of solidarity with the Jews of the old country. He seems to have taken a while working out who he was. Hence his years as a hypnotist offering to increase the size of a woman’s breasts. Wanting to be loved is as good an explanation as any. And maybe wanting to be taken for a person of high principle. Zack! Well, why not? Z for Zionist, perhaps? Doubt it. Let’s guess it was something more swashbuckling and piratical than that. “A proud Jew”, he has called himself. I wince at the description. What’s wrong with just “Jew”? It’s my experience that people who announce their “proud” adherence to a principle or a faith are usually defectors in waiting. And so it has turned out with this “proud Jew” who shuffles off any residual or complex Zionist or Israel loyalties, any sorrow, any sadness, any hesitancy when it comes to the genocide libel, and only the other day mused aloud that Jews were a little too quick to call out antisemitism while the danger they claim to be facing might be no more than “the perception of unsafety” — this while calling out Islamophobia.

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His callous “perception of unsafety” argument returned to bite him after the stabbings in Golders Green earlier this week. There is no room for antisemitism he remembered to say in the heat of the horror, careful not to lose a vote, but must have worried how those who rejoice in the killing of Jews would respond to such a remark, hence, as I understand it, another volte face, this time attacking the police for their brutal handling of the suspect. Whoever would face in two directions at once, might learn from Polanski né Paulden — how to be a Jew and not a Jew, how to express sympathy and deny it, how to say what you think, unsay it and then say it again, and how to keep everyone naïve enough to believe a single spurious word you say, on side for long enough to vote for you.

It is this transparent falsity cynically manipulating fears and libels and trading shamelessly on the ethnic hostilities of numbers of his supporters, that should concern everyone old enough to cast an intelligent vote. Even those whose identity is flattered by Polanski’s schmoozing should think twice before putting a cross beside his party’s name. Another day, another party, and you will be on the receiving end of equivalent defamations. We don’t need one group of citizens to feel good for a passing minute at the discomfiture of another. 

The time is out of joint. Yes, it’s hard to know how to put it right. But there is one way not to make things worse. We should not throw in our lot with false promisers and flatterers. We worry about the algorithms that enable social media to sell us the lies we already believe. Extreme political parties are learning to do the same. Whoever promises to give you what research tells them you want is not your friend.

In the intervening years, with his bombastic style, and even his body language, Farage contributed to a fundamental reordering of British politics. The Clacton MP is sharp and his enthusiasm for a pint conveys an everyman bonhomie. More profoundly, though, he channels something lying deep within the national psyche: merriment. It’s no surprise, then, that his personality has so easily translated into a huge following on TikTok.

And as his star has risen exponentially, so too has his party’s — on current form, it looks likely to form the next government. All the same, what fueled Farage’s rise may not last forever. Reform’s political brand — like UKIP and the Brexit Party before it — used to be all conviviality and connection, but as the party has expanded, that merriment is increasingly being replaced by something else: whinging.

If anything, Matt Goodwin’s campaign to win the Gorton and Denton by-election was characterized by a complaining doomerism, failing to say much — if anything — that was positive about the seat, let alone the country. This constant focus on national decline undoubtedly bears fruit when building a popular Substack or YouTube channel. But if you’re trying to win over voters who can’t name the Home Secretary, you need something more hopeful. And even four days after his defeat, Goodwin was still at it. Nicknamed “Badloss” by some of his critics, he was relentless in his complaints that Britain’s electoral system was just as bad as Lebanon and Sierra Leone. Not that many people noticed, though. Let’s face it, if you lose by more than 4,000 votes, and proceed to say you were cheated of a deserved win, people are bound to switch off.

Indeed Goodwin’s failure, and Reform’s immediate response — imagine Donald Trump’s conspiratorial “Stop the Steal” campaign delivered with the hamminess of a Carry On film — is all the stranger given the Gorton result was objectively strong for both man and party. Pushing Labour into third anywhere in the north west is no mean feat. Goodwin simply lost to a strong candidate, Hannah Spencer, in a difficult race. So as the smoke cleared in a testing by-election, Reform sounded like losers.

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Spencer, on the other hand, couldn’t have been more different as she shrugged off the negativity thrown her way by both Labour and Reform. A Bolton-born plumber, she focused throughout on bread-and-butter issues: stopping fly-tipping, cleaning up litter, fixing the housing crisis and sprucing up high streets. During the campaign she even completed a plastering qualification. As she stood to deliver her victory speech, focusing less on ideology than daily hardships, Goodwin will have known that these were subjects that would appeal to his target voters: the Greens were no longer the po-faced identitarian liberals who like to tut at your package holiday. At that moment, Reform must have realised that its pitch as the only credible alternative to the uniparty was lost.

But what happened to Reform’s mojo? Whether you blame the veteran Tory influx, Goodwin’s performance anxiety, the outsourcing of strategy to consultants — it is clear that the party has lost its “aura”. This seemed pretty clear when I was canvassing in Gorton, and was repeatedly and politely told by party canvassers that they weren’t permitted to speak to journalists. Nor was Goodwin particularly keen on individual interviews. Yet this is a mass party and, managed correctly, its membership should be its greatest asset. Suddenly, the party machine feels preachy, with a very New Labour feel. Warm ale is out; a pint of control freakery, please.

This relinquishing of authenticity by Reform has started to be reflected in polling. At the weekend, as the Greens announced they had passed 200,000 members in England and Wales for the first time, FindOutNow placed them in second place; on Monday, Lord Ashcroft’s survey put them at third, just three points behind Reform, with almost 90 seats.

Then, on Tuesday morning, came the big one. YouGov — Britain’s most reputable pollster — put them on 21% of the vote and in second place, just behind Reform: five points ahead of both Labour and the Tories. In all likelihood, Reform and the Greens will have more members than Labour come the local elections in May. And, for those looking to dismiss the Greens as a party of students, bohemians and unemployed artists, think again. YouGov gives them a 6% lead over Reform among all Brits under 65.

Given the avalanche of attacks and negative campaigning against the Greens in recent weeks, from both the Right and the center, how is any of this possible? After all, similar attacks paralysed Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour after 2017, and led to a drubbing two years later. Yet Polanski seems to go from strength to strength, leading to panic among some on the Right, with much of Westminster struggling to understand exactly why the Greens are soaring so high.

Traditionally, many of the party’s would-be supporters figured a vote for the party would be a vote for environmentally friendly policies. When Caroline Lucas was the party’s sole representative at Westminster, the Greens were able to push climate-related issues into the political realm in a remarkable way, from fracking to net zero. It only took one MP.

As the party has increased its MPs to four, the modern Greens have made the political weather on everything from renationalization to Gaza. Today, its MPs function as committed campaigners on strongly held policies at a national level — as well as effective constituency representatives at a local one. This understandably appeals to many of those voters disappointed by the traditional parties.

It helps, too, that Green supporters care about such a range of issues — from electoral reform to rewilding beavers to rent caps to closer ties with Europe. Some simply want to exert pressure on the Labour Party to move further Left. This broad, semi-coherent theory of change sees the party as an expression of social movements as much as an electoral vehicle.

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One downside is that the party risks becoming too successful. The uncomfortable truth is that too many first-place finishes mean the Greens will need to offer more than a grab-bag of progressive causes. For now, though, such problems remain in the future. My suspicion is that few Green voters expect Polanski to be the next prime minister. Many may not even want such an outcome, preferring the party to be a junior coalition member in a progressive government. Indeed, when I interviewed Polanski last week, soon after the Gorton and Denton result, he merely expressed an ambition to lead a party of several dozen difficult MPs in Parliament.

This, incidentally, is also why anti-Green scare tactics, from both Labour and the Right, will ultimately fail. It’s easy to make radicalism feel like an existential threat when it risks actually leading a government — as with Corbyn. That isn’t the case with Polanski. Certainly, comparing a by-election win in Manchester with Iran’s Islamic Revolution strikes most Britons as unhinged. In any case, it’s hard to present an organisation as much of a danger when all its MPs can fit in the back of a London cab.

Ironically, this anti-establishment vibe is also what is most winning about Polanski’s Greens. The party and its leader manage to couple radical purpose with fun — which, in a strange way, is reminiscent of Farage at his best. While I had to grab a few hours of sleep after Thursday’s result, Polanski stayed up all night. The following evening, he appeared on The Last Leg, full of verve and enthusiasm. This relentless energy is invaluable in politics.

Tramping around the sodden streets of Levenshulme a few weeks ago, with all those houses proudly displaying Green party placards in their front gardens, it was strikingly obvious that Reform’s success had opened the door to new possibilities for the Left. After all, if we are suddenly predicting that Nigel Farage can go from YouTube to No. 10, something previously viewed as impossible, then what’s so outlandish about the Greens overtaking Labour?

In terms of what is politically possible, Nigel Farage has — again — done more than blow the bloody doors off. Only this time it won’t all be to his own advantage.

But this is about more than internet virality. The displacement of “traditional” Left and Right politics by this louder, more polemical register reflects a reality no one wants to confront head-on: one that self-identified “Greens” used to talk about a great deal but have, under Yookay Mamdani, largely discarded. Namely: the prospect that never-ending growth might, one day, come to an end.

From the radicals of Deep Green Resistance to the less extremist small-farm advocacy of Chris Smaje, the post-growth economics of Tim Jackson or the “collapsonomics” of Dark Mountain, less optimistic environmental advocates always pointed the finger at growth itself, as the real villain of the story. For “degrowthers”, the natural order imposes its own, inherent limits — and these cannot, in the end, be evaded.

But at least, in Britain, degrowth isn’t a vague future threat. It’s a reality, some years in the rear-view mirror. In this unhappy context, Reform and the Greens are insurgent because they embody, respectively, Right- and Left-coded versions of the politics of scarcity. And if the erstwhile environmentalist party seems to be pivoting away from anything hitherto recognizable as environmentalism, this is for the same reason. The actual implications of degrowth are so horrible that even the erstwhile “green” party will do anything it can to keep the lights on a little longer, up to and including cannibalizing everything that’s still remotely green, or indeed pleasant, about the British Isles.

Much has been made of Reform snapping at Starmer’s heels, from the Right. Farage’s party’s membership now outstrips Labour’s: 268,000 to a plummeting Labour membership, now below 250,000. But if Labour are hated by the Right for over-taxing ordinary Brits while failing to protect the borders, They’re also hated from the Left for not taxing enough, and being too fashy about foreigners. Now, especially since the failure of Corbyn’s “Your Party”, Polanski is mopping up those who embrace this view: he’s taken his party membership from 123,000 to 180,000 members since October. News broke on Monday that five Labour councillors in Brent, a Labour heartland, have defected to the Green Party. His thing is working.

How, and why, are these populisms now so, well, popular? Internet virality is a factor: poor Keith-GPT just doesn’t have what it takes to cut through. For viral engagement, in an attention economy, you need something of the carnival barker. You have to be box office. But at the risk of stating the obvious, it’s also the economy, stupid.

As Johnny Ball recently noted, in Britain the economy has been flatlining for almost two decades. After the crash QE bailed out the banks and inflated the price of assets, while Osbornomics deliberately let real-terms wages stagnate. Living standards for normal people haven’t really grown since the crash. For many they have palpably declined. Over the same period, as angry young people often point out, the once-negligible earnings gap between Britain and America has grown into a chasm. The Poles who flocked here to arbitrage the wage differential between our country and theirs in the 00s are all flooding the other way, as their economy booms and ours circles the drain.

This is a problem. For everything from Britain’s housing market to the NHS is predicated on growth. What, then, happens when the music stops? Perhaps the most prescient allegory for this was the 1973 dystopian sci-fi movie Soylent Green. Set in the year 2022, it depicted a world where environmental catastrophe has wrecked the food supply; then, a new source of nutrition is created and distributed, called “Soylent Green”.

Over the course of the movie, the protagonist discovers that Soylent Green is produced by processing the corpses of humans killed via medically assisted suicide, into food for those still alive. It’s a potent metaphor for a society that no longer produces a surplus, and has resorted to maintaining the illusion of vitality by cannibalizing itself.

In Britain, this is already at least figuratively true. (If “Skeletor” Leadbeater gets her way, perhaps it might yet be literally so, as well.) Years of Osbornomic synthetic growth, juiced with financial QE, have been further eked out through what has recently been dubbed “human quantitative easing”: that is, wage suppression via mass low-skilled migration. This was, tacitly, embraced as bipartisan orthodoxy: after Brexit forced Johnson’s Tories to close the EU route for human QE, Johnson averted a painful correction by opening the Commonwealth spigot in its place.

Whatever you think of this decision, it was pragmatic. Britain is so addicted to the high-migration model that short of painful structural change, keeping the Ponzi scheme afloat means Britain really does, as the patrician Left is fond of asserting, “need migrants”. Never mind the sociocultural side-effects or long-term fiscal consequences: these are managed through censorship and two-tier policing, or are simply a problem for some unfortunate future PM.

We should understand Farage’s Reform, and Polanski’s Green Party, as respectively Right-and Left-coded responses to the resulting national tinderbox. I hardly need rehash the obvious link between economic decline, mass migration, and nativism, in driving support for Reform. But it’s perhaps less obvious that Polanski’s call both for increased inward migration and also higher public spending is a response to the same politics of scarcity.

Polanski gestures toward the same observable stagnation, in tirades against the British wealth gap. But he suggests it’s not migrants we should resent, but “the billionaires” who hoover up wealth and leave nothing for the rest. It’s a mistake to blame migrants for our economic woes, he declaimed to rapturous applause at the recent Green Party conference. What’s needed, instead, is what he calls a “politics of hope”.

That seems to mean increased legal pathways for inward migration, allowing asylum-seekers to work immediately, and a fiscal program shaped by modern monetary theory. This unorthodox banking theory argues that currency issuers (of which Britain is one) can’t default on government debt. Opponents retort that this approach creates asset bubbles, while any semblance of government control over inflation is illusory. But for MMT believers, the constraint isn’t debt but national productivity, and governments can and should spend more in order to stimulate productivity.

Put it all together, and you have a response to scarcity that’s coherent, on its own terms — but in a radically different way to that proposed by Farage. Reform’s politics of scarcity promises to save the day by stopping the boats, ending human QE, and restricting benefit entitlements to natives so we can afford to be generous to “our own”. However workable it is in practice, as a program it implies that we can sustain solidarity by narrowing its scope. By contrast, the Green politics of scarcity rests on the hope that we can increase the size of the pie without any need to set boundaries, variously through taking more money from the hated super-rich, plus assorted forms of jiggery-pokery including opening the borders and printing lots more money.

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Both the green and the turquoise versions of this politics of scarcity, in turn, appeal to different public sensibilities; in the vibes-based domain of online politics as self-expression, the Greens are now fittingly identified with “Santa” and Reform with “Scrooge”. But in different ways both gloss over inconvenient demographic challenges. Reform’s program proposes to address demographic change by narrowing the scope of welfare entitlement — but is, at best, hopeful on native population decline. An initiative to bring back British babies is, to say the least, not a short-term solution to a dwindling tax base, and welfare commitments heavily tilted toward pensioners. Conversely, the inflate-everything approach by the Greens has little to say about the already-palpable rise in inter-ethnic hostilities as a consequence of mass migration, save bromides about “hate”, “division”, and those naughty Billionaires.

Nor is this Green program particularly environmentalist. In a recent interview, Polanski remarked blithely that a mere 5% of Britain is built on and hence we can take loads more migrants. Lovers of British biodiversity may wish to look elsewhere for a party likely to represent ecological conservation. For Polanski’s Soylent Green Party, biodiversity is fair game for obliteration, if it keeps growth looking growthy.

The same goes for the issue that’s been the most visceral flashpoint between the old, limits-to-growth Green sensibility and the new Soylent Green one: gender ideology. Trans activism has, in recent years, driven the expulsion from the party of swathes of older Green stalwarts. And this makes sense, when you consider that this cohort was, and often still is, more likely to remember a time when environmentalists believed the core ecocidal issue is a refusal to countenance natural limits.

Greens of this subtype tend to be skeptical of gender ideology, viewing human sex dimorphism as an instance of such limits. By contrast, trans activism is premised on a categorical denial that such limits exist: it is, at heart, a Promethean vision, in which humans can literally be anything we want, given enough technology. The same attitude at scale dismisses the notion of ecological limits; allied to climate concern, it produces “ecomodernists” who see the solution to ecological crisis as pursuing more and better technology.

For this faction, the way forward might be geoengineering, or gene-editing humans, or feeding an ever-growing urban high-rise population with mold grown in vats. Should all else fail and temperatures go on rising, we can jam the whole planetary population into the world’s temperate zones, and somehow persuade everyone not to dissolve into tribal warfare.

This is the “green” paradigm that has now claimed Polanski’s Green Party. It rejects the critique of growth, in favor of every imaginable kind of quantitative easing, and assumes we can solve any problems which arise through more and better technology. Given the party’s authoritarian internal approach to the trans debate, we may reasonably wonder if “technology” would simply mean authoritarian crushing of dissent. If so, that would make Polanski’s Greens everything the Faragist end of the electorate already loathes about Starmer’s Labour party, but on globalist steroids and intentionally without any limiting Principle.

Is there any way out of the self-cannibalizing predicament that produces two such unappealing political programs? I do not know. But if we fail to find one, our choice will be one or the other of these approaches to scarcity: deflationary nativism plus authoritarianism at the borders, or inflationary borderlessness plus authoritarian management of the resulting tribal conflicts.

It is, in other words, a contest over which bit of the dead status quo becomes our Soylent Green. Do we husband scarce resources by grinding up our memories of a Britain that was generous, internationally through foreign aid and domestically through welfare? Or do we pursue growth by shoving the country’s demographic makeup in the blender? Either way, sustaining the social contract means destroying the social contract.

Perhaps it’s for the best, then, that all the anti-growth green doomers were marginalized, by the insurgent Soylent Green Party. No one wants to think about the possibility that they might have been right, about the end of growth. Not even as all of politics is consumed by the question of how — or if — we can live together in its aftermath.

Generosity is fine, the critics therefore concede, if you can afford it: but Britain no longer can. Certainly, that explains the second part of Reeves’s confected metaphor, with the Chancellor sure to offer voters plenty of less pleasant fare alongside a lifted benefit cap. Yet if this balancing act is more about politics than economics, with Reeves and her party running scared by radicals to her Left almost as much as her Right, it does little to deal with the fundamental problems of Britain’s lopsided tax system: one where median earners pay surprisingly little, and receive rather a lot in return.

Perhaps the first question to ask here is: why now? Why grapple with something as controversial as the benefit cap, especially as the Chancellor faces relentless scrutiny to find taxpayer value? And why increase welfare spending, having drawn such attention to the need to reduce it? Just 16 months ago, seven Labour rebels lost the whip after voting for an amendment calling to end the benefit cap. Then, such a position was dismissed as asinine posturing by the leadership. Now, it lies at the core of a make-or-break budget.

So what gives? Any explanation must begin with the increasingly omnipresent Zack Polanski. The Greens have polled above Labour several times, with one pollster, FindOutNow, even putting them in second place. According to a recent survey by YouGov, meanwhile, Polanski would be the next prime minister if only under 50s were eligible to vote. However readily his critics’ rebukes spring forth — such as the assertion that the Greens are only favored by “woke” undergraduates — the fact is that Polanski is clearly galvanizing much of the country’s working-age population: including much of Labour’s urban base.

If local elections earlier this year represented a national breakthrough for Reform, it is plausible that elections next May — in Scotland and Wales as well as England — offer a similar springboard for the Greens. On the doorstep right now, Labour canvassers have vanishingly little to entice their supporters, even among those willing to personally embrace higher taxes. Scrapping the two-child benefit cap immediately remedies that: it’s the political equivalent of the Bat Signal for those who voted Labour in 2024, but are now tempted by other parties of various progressive hues. In its own way, this illustrates the extent of Labour’s desperate predicament: powering the Budget are policies designed to scupper a rival fueled by often vague commitments to anti-austerity, and which anyway has only four MPs.

But removing the two-child cap serves an ancillary function, too, because the Chancellor regards it as a downpayment for future cuts to the welfare bill. It has been consistently reported that Starmer was always more amenable to ditching the cap than Reeves, with Morgan McSweeney, his most senior adviser, aligned with the parsimonious Chancellor. What has changed is that, after failing to deliver £5 billion of welfare cuts in June, Reeves and McSweeney now view the abolition of the cap as a necessary expedient to belt-tightening elsewhere.

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Reeves hinted as much when writing for The Sunday Times over the weekend, emphasizing the need for welfare reform to “ensure it doesn’t pay to be off sick instead of in work”. Rather than adhere to her instincts — means-testing and egg-headed penny-pinching — the Chancellor now seemingly grasps the politics of gradualism. Ditching the cap represents a tactical retreat for Reeves. Ditching the cap represents a tactical retreat for Reeves. But as Macaulay once wrote about conservatives embracing reform to preserve what they cherish most, the Chancellor intends to increase welfare spending now only to cut it later. It’s not an incoherent strategy given the political capital the Chancellor stands to gain among defiant backbenchers. Without them, the Government has no working majority, and no meaningful reforms can be passed at all — something as important to the bond markets as economic growth.

How Reeves will fund her other spending commitments — from increases to the defense budget to freezing rail fares and much higher infrastructure spending — remains unclear. Until a fortnight ago, the Government’s preferred option was the first increase to the basic rate of tax since James Callaghan’s premiership in the Seventies. But that has since been replaced with a range of smaller, piecemeal measures. One is the touted introduction of a mansion tax on properties worth over £2 million. Significant tweaks to inheritance tax could help too. Other measures might include changing the rules on VAT for taxi fares, and a raid on pension savings. The Exchequer’s central pillar, though, remains freezing income-tax thresholds: something now expected to continue through to 2030.

For all the criticism Reeves faces, her spending priorities are more sensible than those of her predecessors. Jeremy Hunt sounded like a cheerful fantasist when, as Chancellor, with the country’s borrowing costs soaring, he talked of scrapping employee national insurance contributions altogether. Reeves, whatever her faults, is less prone to breezy hyperbole. Not only has the Government backed Sizewell C; it has also allocated £2.5 billion towards research and development for nuclear fusion. At the spring spending review, the Chancellor promised a total of £113 billion in new capital investment for homes, transport and energy. Though far from perfect, the orientation of this government, despite its bludgeoning by much of the media, is more long term than anything we’ve seen over the last 15 years.

But while an emphasis beyond day-to-day media cycles is a welcome change, how the Government intends to raise more revenue still rests on a fatal mistake. Reeves has so far dismissed a wealth tax — an increasingly global cause championed by everyone from Gary Stevenson and Zohran Mamdani to the French economist Gabriel Zucman. Yet while senior Labour figures have publicly dismissed such a move, it is, nevertheless, the affluent they intend to hit for more tax. The thing is, many of them aren’t that rich.

So permit me to say something that might surprise you. Alongside some of the necessary tax rises announced by Reeves, and a potential wealth tax, we need to get serious about higher taxes for those on median incomes — which at the time of writing is £39,000 for someone in full-time work. And before you accuse me of anything, I should add: that includes me.

Over the weekend, the Financial Times’s John Burn-Murdoch reflected on how Britain has the most “progressive” tax system of any advanced economy. While 45% of top earners’ salaries now go towards taxes and social contributions, that figure falls to just 29% among average workers. Burn-Murdoch compares Britain’s 16-point “top-to-middle” gap to Scandinavia, where it is just 12 points. In the Nordic social democracies, everyone pays tax at a “moderately high rate”. In the UK, on the other hand, high-income earners are taxed like Danes, while those on average incomes more closely resemble Americans. Reeves has, so far, completely neglected this fact — one presumes out of political necessity. While understandable, the truth is that national renewal, an ambition so often invoked by this government, is impossible without accepting change is needed.

Take the personal allowance, the threshold at which one starts paying income tax. In Britain, this is £12,570 (approximately €14,000), a higher figure than anywhere else in Europe. In Sweden, conversely, income tax kicks in at €2,000. In Denmark, it’s just shy of €7,000. Even in France, you start paying at €11,500. It was the Cameron-Osborne duo that really shifted the dial on this side of the Channel, with the tax allowance going from £6,500 in 2010 to £10,000 by the end of the coalition. Like the pensions triple lock, that move received gushing praise from much of the media at the time — “tanks on Labour’s lawn” and so on. And yet it has inflicted extraordinary damage on the country’s long-term fiscal position.

That these tensions are rarely touched on in our political debate reflects the interests of both the Left and Right. Similar to their promise to reduce immigration — only to raise numbers to record highs — the Tories have substantially increased taxes on the previously prosperous burgher class over the last 14 years. The Left, meanwhile, is understandably hostile to the idea that middle-income earners, a constituency they have tried to woo amid Tory collapse in recent years, should be paying more tax.

Yet perhaps the hour of reckoning has arrived. High inequality is bad, not least because people on lower incomes have a higher marginal propensity to spend. And it’s true that we mistakenly tax labor more than capital — a historic error in the context of runaway property prices over the last 30 years. The last Liberal prime minister, Herbert Asquith, was wise enough to observe the iniquity of such a state of affairs more than a century ago. Shamefully, his modern successors don’t share such sagacity.

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But it’s also the case that Britain will be unable to correct its varied problems, from under-investment in public transport to private ownership of energy and water, without more tax from a range of sources. A more civilized public realm; re-funding local authorities; addressing the crisis of elderly care; scrapping tuition fees for nursing and engineering students — none of this will be cheap. But there’s little alternative if the country wishes to remain a stable, pleasant place to live or start a business. Until the Chancellor makes that admission, and bases her spending commitments on broader tax rises for median earners, every budget will feel unfairly punitive on those earning even modestly above the average. Increasingly, they will look to move elsewhere. Worry less, then, about the high-profile departure of Lakshmi Mittal than the industrious deputy headteacher, or the ambitious medical graduate. They are happy to pay their taxes, provided the system is fair and the benefits are clear. Presently, neither feels especially true.

Labour are often fearful of speaking in grand terms. Decisive action is even less forthcoming. And yet, as with the ongoing debate around national identity, precisely that is needed on tax and the role of the state. People wish to be protected by the Government, and to be proud of where they live. To a large extent, such desires transcend the old binaries of Left and Right. But neither is possible with a defunded police force, a packed prison estate and local government having meager resources beyond elderly care. What Reeves should do, then, is sell a vision of the country, an exciting one at that — and then explain how she’ll pay for it.

Starmer wasn’t the only member of Labour’s front bench to cheer on a declining membership. In an interview six months earlier, Rachel Reeves actively welcomed the loss of certain supporters. “Membership in my constituency is falling and that’s a good thing,” the Leeds MP told the Financial Times. Those who were leaving the party, said Reeves, “never shared our values”.

Today, less than 18 months after Labour’s general election triumph, those statements already feel like relics of a bygone era. Labour is failing to balance its books this year, and is battling to properly resource next May’s local council elections. On Tuesday, UnHerd asked the party whether Reform now has a larger membership. The party’s press office referred to the figure of 333,235 that was published at the end of 2024. That figure was reported in February to have dropped to 309,000. By now, it is highly likely that Reform’s surging membership, at a self-reported 265,000 or so, has either overtaken Labour’s or will do so imminently.

As Labour’s membership and funding contract, so is its wider support — to a more severe extent than senior politicians are publicly acknowledging. Last week’s Senedd election in Caerphilly, a constituency which has voted for a Labour MP every time since 1918, was won by Plaid Cymru. The Labour candidate, thumped by Reform, didn’t even come second. Wes Streeting, the Health Secretary, compared that defeat to the Hartlepool by-election in 2021, where the Tories snatched what had for generations been a Labour stronghold, declaring it “rock bottom”. But such a comparison is wholly inadequate. After all, in 2019 Labour retained Hartlepool only because the Leave vote was split between the Brexit Party and the Tories. The south of Wales is a whole other matter.

What is more, coming back from what just happened in the Valleys is immeasurably harder. In that Hartlepool defeat, Labour finished second. Last week, by contrast, they gained just 11% of the vote. There’s much to suggest that the fate of Welsh Labour at the next general election could resemble that of its Scottish sister party in 2015. Wipeout.

It is always easy for political journalists to become breathless about events such as these. The attention economy constantly demands new twists and turns in public life: a perpetual churn of new figureheads and takes. But to underscore quite how bizarre British politics has become, consider this. Not only might Reform have more members than Labour, and not only are Welsh nationalists winning in places Labour have held since universal male suffrage, but there are now national polls putting the Green Party on a higher share of the vote than a Labour government — one that commands a larger majority than Margaret Thatcher ever enjoyed.

For now it is just one pollster, FindOutNow, that has Zack Polanski’s party in third. But that reflects a wider shift in the party’s performance in the seven weeks since he was elected leader. On Monday, a poll by Lord Ashcroft had the Greens on 17%, a solitary point behind both Labour and the Tories. YouGov, often viewed as the gold standard in British polling, now has the party on 16%, with Labour’s 17% its worst on record. According to that same poll, the Greens now lead Labour, and Reform, among those under 50. Among the young, specifically those aged 18 to 24, the Greens now have almost twice Labour’s vote share. Votes at 16 may ultimately harm Starmer’s re-election efforts more than it helps them.

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These are not figures that befit a party in government. But Keir Starmer’s view of power has long been that only one of two parties matter in British politics. As long as the Tories were neutralized, the thinking went, he would remain in Number 10. But in less than two years, that logic has shattered. Labour are threatened not only to their right by Reform, particularly on issues like immigration and law and order, but to their left as well. Since Polanski won the leadership, the Green Party’s membership has doubled: it now stands at more than 150,000, and has even surpassed the Tories. There is a non-trivial chance that, before next May’s local elections, Britain’s two largest parties will be Reform and the Greens. For all the naysaying of pundits in London, who often argue for an inverse correlation between electoral success and membership size, the membership surges matter. More members doesn’t just mean more activists, but more direct debits too. Money is critical if you want to seriously contest Westminster politics.

Besides members, and money, Reform and the Greens are also led by two of the most effective politicians in England. Both Farage and Polanski excel in the modern media environment, where chat shows matter as much as political interviews, and vertical social video draws more eyeballs than any appearance on Newsnight. One of Polanski’s videos, with the title “Let’s Make Hope Normal Again”, has been viewed almost 12 million times on X.

The two men might agree on little regarding policy, but in one key respect they are similar. Both, according to the thinking of political scientist Paolo Gerbaudo, are “hyperleaders” — more similar to President Trump and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez than Kemi Badenoch or Keir Starmer. Hyperleaders enjoy strong personal recognition, which arguably supersedes that of their parties. They leverage unmediated digital relationships, speaking directly to their audience: Farage has GB News, Polanski a podcast. Both present themselves as authentic outsiders to the political class. And despite the superficiality of digital media, both have real substance on matters of policy. You know what Farage thinks about immigration, or Polanski on taxing the super-rich. But what are Badenoch’s or Starmer’s views? As much as anything else, the hyper-leadership of both Farage and Polanski serves to make the leaders of the Big Two appear almost insincere. Both Labour and the Conservatives increasingly look like Diet Coke versions of everything they claim to be. The real problem for Starmer is that Polanski is saying many of the things he himself asserted while in opposition, whether it’s on the virtues of industrial action or the case for public ownership. It’s just that Polanski seems to mean it.

For all the talk of a grim Budget in November, next May will be the deciding moment for Starmer’s premiership. Besides a likely drubbing in both Wales and Scotland, all of London’s 32 boroughs will choose councilors. It’s increasingly plausible that Polanski’s party won’t just pick up wards in the capital, something which is now close to certain, but become the largest party in one or more councils. It will be in those authorities where the Greens perform best — most likely Hackney, Lambeth and Southwark — that they will subsequently select as leading targets for the next general election.

But even if May is an unprecedented nadir for Starmer, it could be just the beginning of the party’s woes as growing success for electoral rivals, Left and Right, leads to a wave of defections at a local level. Ideological alignment is part of that, certainly, but in many cases they will simply stand a better chance of re-election if they jump ship. Others could face the choice of defecting to the Greens, or being blocked from re-selection if they are too critical of the Starmer leadership. (This happens every year, under a range of pretexts.) That cascades upwards too: would Clive Lewis, Olivia Blake or John McDonnell rather join the Greens or be blocked from standing again? For a post-ideological politician like Starmer, what keeps the show on the road is the adhesive of power. Take that away, and the wheels come off.

Confronted with electoral doom-mongering, Labour supporters are now arguing that the wipeout in Caerphilly was a result of tactical voting designed to keep out Reform. To an extent that is true: Green and Liberal Democrat voters flocked to Plaid Cymru’s Lindsay Whittle last week, with both parties losing their deposit. What is more, that is precisely what happened in elections to the French legislature last year. Despite coming first in the popular vote in the first round, the National Rally ultimately finished third. Senior people in Reform are savvy enough to know something similar might await them. Even Tom Watson, Labour’s former deputy leader, recently declared that the country is heading for a “Stop Farage” election. Stop Corbyn, stop Brexit — and now stop Reform. It begs a question: what is the Labour Right, of which Watson is a standard-bearer, actually for?

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More importantly for the party, though, is that leaning into a progressive alliance, and hoisting a banner proclaiming “stop Farage”, may actually accelerate Labour’s demise. That narrative might work if you are the leading progressive force. And yet for Labour in Wales, and Scotland, that appears to no longer be the case. London, and other parts of England, might not be far behind — especially after next May. It’s a dangerous game for Starmer’s party, played on fine margins. Get it right and you remain in power. Get it wrong, and you kill the idea that Labour is the default choice for progressive voters. Labour’s willingness to jettison members might soon look like naïveté.

It may be a platitude among Labour circles, but it is nevertheless true: Labour only wins as a broad coalition. That was the case with Clement Attlee, Harold Wilson and Tony Blair — a man who even came to an accommodation with Ken Livingstone as the Mayor of London. Starmer, who, uniquely as leader, wanted a smaller party, appears incapable of such sagacity. In Britain, general trends at a global level, of center-left parties fragmenting and failing to adapt, have now converged with the particular: a small-minded man incapable of building alliances.

In small “c” conservative Britain — until recently a beacon of political stability, its majoritarian voting system shoring up a stable two-party system — the Greens were always something of an oddity. In the national imagination, the party was long held as the natural political home of England’s eccentrics. David Icke was once its most eloquent spokesperson, while its supporters were a prickly thicket of New Age mavericks, vegan allotment-tenders, long-haired CNDers, and middle-class utopians talking earnestly about “the Gaia hypothesis”.

But a shift has taken place. As far back as the 2000s, the disappointments of New Labour led some of Blair’s Left-liberal voters to seek out supposedly kinder political pastures. Under Caroline Lucas, the Greens positioned themselves as a more professionalized outfit, the paragons of a woolly but more robust progressivism. These efforts paid off, with the Greens securing their first MP in 2010 and turning Brighton into their very own citadel of social liberalism.

Since then, the Brexit conflagration has accelerated the realignment of our politics, melting our once-solid class-based voter blocs into air. Old divides have been smashed apart and remade, while Britain’s class system, and related debates on the political economy, are increasingly interpreted through the prism of a tribalistic culture war. This is based less on policies or worldviews than on something more immaterial: the stuff of cultural-political signifiers, of semiotic coding, of vibes. Indeed, this vibes-based politics is a symptom of our age, a populist moment intensifying as we approach our third decade of stagnation, and one in which savvy political entrepreneurs can thrive by exploiting voter volatility, omnipresent cynicism and a radical dealignment of party loyalties.

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The Greens, in this world of signs and signifiers, are now thoroughly Left-coded. And, of course, they’re middle-class-coded, too: whatever Polanski’s radical rhetoric, old visions of homemade vegan flapjacks and quixotic People’s Vote marches die hard.

A former actor, hypnotist and Lib Dem, Polanski seems to understand the contemporary moment better than most, and he’s set about changing the Green Party vibe, radically. Before he assumed the leadership, the Greens’ vague liberal and ideological quietism allowed them to position themselves as big tent ecologists, appealing to several demographics at once. In 2024, this relative vagueness propelled the party to a record number of seats, winning in trendy Bristol and Brighton, as well as Waveney Valley and North Herefordshire, a pair of constituencies in the formerly True Blue countryside.

These rural seats are not full of right-on “Watermelon” radicals: green on the outside and red on the inside. Rather, the Greens took the shires by conducting highly localized campaigns blending pro-conservation and anti-development messaging, promoting their Nimby-ish opposition to new housing and (of all things) electricity pylons. Far from attempting to hoover support from a disaffected Left, leaflets were aimed at wealthy, home-owning Boomers who voted for David Cameron, love Countryfile, and care as much for saving barn owls as they do about actually achieving net zero.

All this stands in contrast to the projection of Green politics in their urban redoubts. Here, the Millennial-graduate laptop class occupies overpriced coffeeshops in gentrifying, multicultural enclaves, and they have swallowed the new religion of Gaza, Greta and gender politics wholesale. This is a Green vibe far more congruent with Polanski’s new vision of “eco-populism”, pumped out across social media posts and podcasts with rising and frantic frequency. There are no qualms here about wealth taxes, or open-borders signaling. There’s clear Corbyn-Sultana-adjacency, but without the Trotskyist infighting. Polanski is happy to borrow from other parties too, notably mimicking Reform’s slick, well-produced communications.

In other ways, clearly, the Greens are no fans of the turquoise tide — Polanski has taken to dismissing Nigel Farage as a fascist at any given opportunity. Given these hardening ideological stances, the rural seats won on Nimby, conservationist tickets will inevitably be vulnerable at the next election. For Polanski, the trade-off is that the Greens will likely challenge Labour in far more urban cosmopolitan constituencies — from Bristol and Brighton to London, where the party came second in 18 seats.

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As in the Blair era, then, the continued disappointments of Labourism are fueling the rise of alternatives. Among a certain demographic — some Muslim communities, yes, but also among young, semi-aware scrollers harvesting their geopolitical views from TikTok and Instagram reels — Starmer isn’t merely a let-down: he’s borderline genocidal. He’s implementing “austerity” and he’s refusing to “tax the rich”. He’s pandering to fascism by promising lower net migration, and he’s spreading bigotry by supporting the prioritization of biological sex over subjective gender identity.

And with Your Party’s launch looking like a damp squib, Polanski is presiding over an explosion in Green membership, doubling their numbers by setting himself up as the polar opposite of Starmer, Farage and “this sort of thing”. Prominent Corbynistas are throwing in their lot with him too. And if those exploding membership figures weren’t enough, YouGov’s national polling has the party on a record 15% support, just five points shy of Labour. There’s every chance, on current trends, that Polanski could seriously challenge and even supplant Labour’s status as the party of the large metropoles.

But where will “eco-populism” leave the British political landscape, especially now those safe two-party certainties feel like a relic of another age? It’s clear that a Green surge would be a disaster for Labour, as it faces losses to the anti-migrant Right in Red Wall marginals on the one hand, and hemorrhages support in ultra-progressive cities on the other.

Any yet Starmer’s losses would not necessarily be Polanski’s gains. In Caerphilly, certainly, the Greens were accused of taking much-needed votes from Plaid Cymru and therefore helping Reform. Their effect nationally will be broadly similar, wrecking Labour’s hopes as they ease the path to a historic majority for insurgent Farageism. That’d be quite an irony, and surely recompense for that one time Nigel voted Green.

Whatever happens in 2029, though, Polanski’s rise is just as important for what it says about the state of progressive ideology in modern Britain. For the Left, coalescing around the Greens would be a final abnegation of their historic mission to represent the labor interest, the voice of working-class people politically. There are working-class Green voters, no doubt, and significant swathes of its city-based electorate struggle in low-paying jobs and live in insecure, rented accommodation. Yet in the Britain of vibes, the party still oozes bourgeois-bohemian signifiers from every pore; materially speaking, it’s Reform leading the way among C2DEs, the skilled and unskilled manual workers in non-degree occupations. Today’s very real working-class revolt is not taking place under a Green banner.

Without any organic connection to the trade-union movement, the Green pivot to an inchoate Left-populism disguises a tendency towards neo-Malthusianism, perhaps even reaction. Rather than a forward march, the abandonment of the traditional labor movement in favor of an eco-populist roadshow led by a former Lib Dem feels like a capitulation, a recognition that the era of a confident Left, forming broad, cross-class coalitions, is over. The rise of Polanski represents a retreat into the comfort zones of what the French economist Thomas Piketty has identified as the Brahmin Left. In the Greens’ warm embrace, progressives will be unburdened by having to deal with the views of the actually existing working class, and having been relegated from any proximity to the levers of state will be able to breezily adopt all manner of high-status positions without conceding to inconvenient reality.

Viewing the decline of mass civic institutions, mass culture and the nation-state, the late Marxist literary critic Fredric Jameson identified a condition of postmodern cultural fragmentation. That cultural fragmentation is complete, and the political arena has been transformed away from its old, 20th-century model. No longer do two great historic monoliths battle for the affections of the median voter in a handful of swing seats. The old institutional power of the Beeb, the Lobby, and the top-down legacy media, with their reasonable tones and cozy fireside chats, has given way to an infinitely disordered information age, one buttressing a political implosion of the electorate into disparate and mutually opposed segments.

Polanski’s Green surge is symptomatic of this broader trend — the splitting and re-splitting of the electorate into hostile tribes in permanent flux. Since Brexit, our political complexion has, paradoxically, become more European, with half-a-dozen parties catering to smaller voter-blocs, vying to be noticed in a saturated attention economy. Secessionists, the eco-Left, and the populist Right, as well as the old liberals, now bustle along with the traditional parties of the center-right and center-left, frightened shadows of their former selves. First-past-the-post wasn’t designed for this: but if our creaking electoral institutions are edging towards collapse, that’s also changing how politics ultimately feels. Electoral support, after all, is no longer about triangulation, about broadening a message through moderation, but about sincerity, playing to the base, and never, ever apologizing. The old world, in short, is dead, and vibes are in, and the Greens are happy to make organic hay.

Two decades of consensus on green policy, shared by Britain’s governing classes and to some extent its public, is currently unraveling. A recent YouGov survey found flagging support for Net Zero, the government’s commitment to decarbonize the British economy by 2050 or sooner, with a quarter of voters now saying that the dangers of climate change have been overstated. It may be, as Labour’s zealous energy secretary Ed Miliband argues, that Britain’s climate debate is being polarized along American lines; but it clearly matters that material sacrifices demanded by green measures, which were long a question of principle, are now starting to be felt in people’s lives. At any rate, the Reform Party, who will potentially form the next government, are determined to scrap what its deputy leader Richard Tice calls “net stupid zero”, and the Conservatives are now following suit, with Kemi Badenoch this week pledging to repeal the Climate Change Act.

Even Labour is wavering. Miliband’s green policies are beginning to look like a political liability. The party faces pressure from its trade union supporters over job losses at closed oil and gas facilities, while energy costs for both homes and businesses remain painfully high. All the while, anger continues to mount at the difficulty of building anything under exacting environmental regulations.

The rest of the world has shown scant regard for Britain’s delusional bid at “climate leadership”. America and China continue to burn fossil fuels on a scale that dwarfs anything in our own industrial past. Donald Trump is dismantling the Biden climate agenda and railing against Europe’s green policies. In August, a proposed treaty to limit global plastic production failed to materialize, and now a draft report by the International Energy Agency suggests that, far from reaching “peak oil” this decade as previously hoped, the current trajectory will see global oil and gas demand still rising in 2050. The apparent futility of Britain’s climate mission must also be sapping the public’s support.

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These developments have barely registered in Polanski’s publicity drive since becoming leader. Instead, the former Lib Dem council candidate has established himself as a darling of the Corbynite Left. One of his first moves was to support the police for sending five armed officers to arrest Irish comedian Graham Linehan for his comments about “trans-identified males”. In interviews and on his own podcast, “climate emergency” is merely one ill-defined theme in a familiar repertoire of wealth taxes, colonialism, and the looming threat of fascism. Among the issues occupying the Greens in the lead up to their conference are legal action and protest by former members who say they were purged their gender-critical views.

The Green Party, in other words, has ceased to be an organization dedicated to environmental campaigning and policy, at precisely the time when such an organization is needed most. In fact, just 16% of those who would consider voting Green see the environment as the top issue facing the country.

How did we get here? The root of the problem is that, during this century, environmental politics has split into two parts: an establishment strand, and a protest strand. The establishment strand is comprised of the methods by which governments and large firms have tried to mitigate environmental damage. It is a bureaucratic affair, focusing on carbon budgets, regulations, and the allocation of capital to green technologies and energy sources. The protest strand, by contrast, is just what it sounds like: direct action demanding that governments go harder and faster to save the planet, whether in the form of climate marches or guerrilla campaigns by groups such as Just Stop Oil.

The result of this division is that, while environmentalism has maintained a high public profile, its political base has eroded. Neither strand has really bothered to involve a broader public in debating the goals and means of green policies. Nor have they properly considered the resentment those policies invite, whether through growing energy bills or the constant creep of restrictive rules.  Environmental politics ought to help us keep sight of one of the most profound questions a modern society faces: how can we prevent our way of life from ruining the world we are handing on to future generations — its landscapes, waterways, and fast-diminishing wealth of natural life? Instead, it has become a byword for stifling bureaucracy on the one hand, and for a facile politics of gesture on the other.

Unmoored from the lives of its citizens, the environmentalism of Britain’s establishment has drifted into a realm of fantasy targets and unworkable edicts. Nothing shows this better than the adoption of Net Zero goals in 2019. As Professor Helen Thompson has noted, the legislation passed through parliament with “little contest in the dying days of Theresa May’s government, when the country was still politically consumed with the question of whether the UK would actually leave the EU”. Our political system was paralyzed, our politicians unable to agree about anything, yet they still committed to “reinventing modern civilization… within less than three decades”. There was neither the technology existent to realize these ambitions, nor a plausible route to the green industrial boom promised by May, by Boris Johnson, and now by Miliband.

Instead, Net Zero policy has contributed to the on-going deindustrialization of the country through exceptionally high electricity prices. Moreover, a rush to install wind and solar before the grid has been updated means that we have problems not just with inconsistent supply, but with oversupply, so that we will pay an estimated £1 billion this year to prevent windfarms from generating too much electricity. This strategy, or lack thereof, risks discrediting the entire project of decarbonization, as does the failure to explain why Britain must shoulder these costs when other countries do not. It is becoming apparent that an additive approach — building up renewable sources as well as some domestic oil and gas — will be more politically sustainable, and may be more effective as well. Energy is so important to a modern economy that, with more of it, we could develop our own cleaner industries, rather than relying on dirty ones overseas, and could ultimately invest more in green tech and infrastructure.

The unpalatable nature of such compromises has helped to push the environmental movement, and the Green Party specifically, onto the more comfortable terrain of protest. As one Green member recently tried to remind his leadership, the party has grown over the years through patient advocacy and attention to local issues. Yet the “hyperpolitics” of the past decade, with its online activism and public demonstrations, has taken its toll. Greta Thunberg’s graduation from climate heroine to Palestine campaigner is emblematic of how green politics has been submerged in a wider protest agenda. Now an exodus of progressives from the post-Corbyn Labour party, combined with the longing for a charismatic populism on the Left to match Nigel Farage, is creating a party that is green only as an afterthought. But if the cause is too diffuse, its appeal is too narrow. Research into the Green membership has found that it is concentrated in London and the southeast of England, that 88% are Remainers, and that almost all identify as Left-wing.

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Obviously an environmental movement can be based in a critique of society, and even a spirit of revolt — love of the natural world usually involves some degree of disillusionment with modernity — but in the past, this has taken diverse and colorful forms. During the Twenties and Thirties, the so-called “muck and mystery” movement, led by reactionary and fascist-sympathizing British landowners, combined organic agriculture with Morris dancing and festivals celebrating an imagined ancient English culture. In the Seventies and Eighties, meanwhile, New Age hippies dabbled in Tipi communes, Native American cultural practices, and pagan ceremonies at Stonehenge — culminating in a brutal clash with police at the 1985 “Battle of Beanfield”.

Such mysticism, while it inevitably veers into the ridiculous, represents something that would serve today’s green movement better than an emotive attachment to politics: a sense of wonder at, and direct connection with, the natural world. Focusing on nature not just in an abstract global sense, but in a concrete, local one, can paradoxically appeal to a much broader base of people, of different temperaments and outlooks.

This may sit uneasily with the practical purview of environmental politics, which demands a careful understanding of economic webs spanning the world, as well as the mundane technical systems which make our societies function. But that is precisely what makes this problem so difficult. An effective environmental movement must be at once romantic and rational, global and local, radical and conservative, and above all, capable of incorporating many types of people. With that in mind, and looking again at the Greens today, we might conclude that political parties are probably the wrong mechanism for this challenge altogether.