Details
It was on the outskirts of Manchester, England's de-facto second city and home of Oasis, the Happy Mondays and the Guardian, where the Greens really arrived. On a cold February morning, I was one of hundreds posting leaflets through doors at 6am, reminding Green supporters to turn out and vote. This was a by-election, and it was a three-way fight between Labour, who'd held the seat for decades; Nigel Farage’s Reform, a right-wing populist party riding high in the polls; and the Green Party — who until recently had just one seat in Parliament, and are now battling to displace Labour as Britain’s party of the left.
A Green Landslide in Greater Manchester
Gorton and Denton is a strange constituency. Geographically stretched for an urban seat, a good two hours walk from end to end, and with two very different centres. Gorton in the east is a mixed neighbourhood home to a large Bangladeshi population, rows of redbrick terrace houses, plenty of students, and some well-to-do professionals in the leafy Edwardian streets right by Levenshulme station. Denton in the west is what you would call Greater Manchester, one of the many former industrial towns folded into the city's boundaries, with a different make-up and way of life: whiter, older, home-owning, and inclined to look at the city with a little fear and trepidation.
The central divides in British political sociology, urban and non-urban, young and old, diverse and monocultural, all in one seat. In the end, the Greens won comfortably, stacking up votes in Gorton and exceeding expectations in Denton. They flooded the constituency with thousands of volunteers to canvas for Hannah Spencer, a long-time member and local plumber, turning former Labour strongholds into an ocean of green and reducing Labour's signage game to banners on boarded up buildings, put there by the landlord, and posters in estate agents' windows. A blunt signal of who Labour answers to in Manchester.
Now that we’re in the midst of a drawn-out Labour leadership coronation it is a good moment to ask where the Green populist surge came from, and whether they have what it takes to become Britain’s first eco-socialist party.
Ever since Zack Polanski, a former actor and self-styled eco-populist, won the leadership of the Greens in September 2025, they have been on a wild ride: from 7% at the last general election to roughly 15% in the polls, from just under 60,000 members to 230,000. Polanski's relentless energy, and his knack for talking about migration, the super-wealthy and unjust foreign wars in a way that is principled and direct, has finally got the party noticed by a media class who were determined to ignore them.
Gorton and Denton was their first big electoral test. Could they beat Labour and Reform on the ground, and translate all that attention into votes? The answer was a resounding yes. And now that we’re in the midst of a drawn-out Labour leadership coronation — where Andy Burnham, former Mayor of Manchester and now MP for Makerfield is likely to be Prime Minister by late July — it is a good moment to ask where the Green populist surge came from, and whether they have what it takes to become Britain’s first eco-socialist party.
Don’t Let the Door Hit You on the Way Out
“If you don't like the changes that we've made, I say the door is open, and you can leave." That was Keir Starmer's message to the Labour left in 2023, a little over three years after winning the leadership election on a platform of nationalising key industries, abolishing tuition fees, a £28 billion Green New Deal and defending migrants' rights.
He went back on all of it — his ‘ten pledges’ were just a cynical ploy to become the besuited successor to Jeremy Corbyn — and declared war with the left instead: expelling Jeremy Corbyn, suspending a swathe of left-wing MPs, kicking left-wing ministers out of the shadow cabinet and encouraging socialist members to leave.
Driven by his chief of staff Morgan McSweeney and personnel from the party's right, the counter-revolution set out to undo what Corbynism had achieved in Labour, chiefly by demoralising the hundreds of thousands who'd joined in Corbyn's wake. The aim was a return to the technocratic Labour party of the Blairite 2000s, run by its elected representatives, not a mass party of the working class capable of more fundamental transformation.
And they were quite successful. Membership dropped from nearly 500,000 to around 300,000; parliamentary selections were stitched up for Starmer loyalists; and the leadership rules were rewritten to hand MPs more power and keep a properly left-wing candidate off the ballot. But the win wasn't total. Andy Burnham, Labour's likely next leader, is soft-left rather than hard-right, while Wes Streeting, the Blairite heir apparent, polls a lowly 4% among the membership.
Britain’s first-past-the-post, winner-takes-all system herds voters and members into big tent parties out of electoral expediency, keeping a lid on more radical currents both on the left and the right.
Chasing the left out of the party had consequences, precisely because it resolved none of Britain’s underlying problems. Low growth, productivity and an increasingly privatised state has produced decades of falling living standards and worsening public services, now on a par with much of Eastern Europe. Add in a climate-shocked and geopolitically driven cost-of-living crisis; unaffordable housing; a stagnating jobs market; a mass crisis of loneliness; and a full-throated embrace of neoliberalism unmatched outside of Chile and the USA — and some kind of reaction was inevitable.
In a country with a communist tradition or a proportional voting system, you'd expect the left flank of a right-turning social democratic party to simply decamp to the party of the left. But Britain’s first-past-the-post, winner-takes-all system herds voters and members into big tent parties out of electoral expediency, keeping a lid on more radical currents both on the left and the right.
At least, that was the case until 2024. In the last general election Labour won a huge majority of seats but with just 34% of the vote — a historic low. The Greens tripled their tally, winning in Bristol, Brighton, Waveney Valley and North Herefordshire. And for the first time in British electoral history, independent candidates won in heavily Muslim areas on a cost-of-living and pro-Gaza ticket. Reform broke through too, winning five seats in post-industrial and impoverished coastal towns such as Clacton, Boston and Skegness, and Great Yarmouth.
Since then, the old "two-and-a-half party" system — where Labour and the Conservatives dominate, and the Liberal Democrats win 30-50 seats in London and the South West — has fallen apart. Reform has overtaken the Tories on the right, regularly topping the polls by holding together the Boris Johnson coalition of older non-graduates in post-industrial towns and wealthy Tories in the rural south. Restore Britain — a white-nationalist, far-right, hyper-online party with just one MP — is polling up to 10%, signal-boosted by Elon Musk. The slightly directionless Liberal Democrats still hold their ground in the wealthy rural south. And the Greens have gotten close to equaling Labour’s polling numbers, assembling a coalition of inner-urban graduates, the economically precarious, working-class Muslims and some rural voters in Suffolk and the home counties.
Five or six parties, then, compete under a system that punishes vote-splitting and richly rewards whichever party is marginally ahead. On current polls, Reform will win a healthy majority at the next election. A few points' swing and everything could change.
From Malthusian Roots to the Progressive Left
The Green Party was originally founded as PEOPLE, in 1973 by four friends in Coventry, against the backdrop of the environmental movements of the 1960s and 1970s. The party has always had a streak of radicalism, with a 100% income tax for high earners, a universal basic income and nuclear disarmament all part of their founding manifesto. However, as Adam Ramsay makes clear, PEOPLE was fundamentally a party of surviving ecological collapse, not for advancing the working class or overthrowing capitalism. This explains their inclusion of strict controls on immigration, driven by Malthusian fears of overpopulation.
As the party became a home for post-'68 student radicals and social-movement activists put off by Labour’s statist rigidity, they developed the same divide experienced by the German Greens, between the Realos — suited electoralists who wanted to professionalise — and the Fundis, anarchist-inflected movement activists more interested in direct action.
The Realos won out. Since the early 2000s the Greens have primarily been an electoral party, chasing councillors and parliamentary seats, winning their first in Brighton with Caroline Lucas. But professionalisation didn't mean moderation. Successive waves of activists from the alter-globalisation movement and the 2010 student revolt which culminated in Natalie Bennett's election as leader in 2012, pushed the party leftward, pioneering the Green New Deal years before Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez picked it up, and driving membership to 67,000 by 2015.
Corbyn’s election as Labour leader in 2015 arrested the Greens' development, however. Members left to join Labour, and the party spent a difficult half-decade failing to agree electoral pacts and getting dragged into centrist Remain coalitions. Now, with the left’s marginalisation in Labour and the depressing failure of Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana’s breakaway Your Party — attracting 800,000 signups at inception, yet sinking into complete irrelevance through spectacular leadership infighting — it's the Greens who are positioned again to take up the mantle of the left. How much of that enthusiasm will be absorbed by an Andy Burnham-led Labour Party, flirting with some limited forms of public ownership and state investment, remains to be seen.
Can the Greens Become an Eco-Socialist Party?
Much ink has been spilled about whether the Greens can truly become an eco-socialist party, however you might define it. Some take issue with Polanski's eco-populism, arguing it's ideologically confused and cut loose from any socialist grounding. And then there’s the question of Polanski's socialist pedigree: he was a Liberal Democrat until 2017, and a Corbyn critic after that. Others doubt that a historically middle class party — most of its founders were professionals and many of its MPs still carry a middle-class sensibility, preferring reasoned argument and wonkish policy to naming enemies and power relations — can ever unite the working class.
But organisations do change, especially one whose membership has grown by more than 400%, a recomposition more radical than Corbyn ever achieved inside Labour. These new members are climate radicalised students; graduate renters working service-sector jobs; millennials struggling to start families; working-class Muslims driven out of Labour over Palestine, and post-Extinction Rebellion climate radicals, concerned about parched farmland and food security. It’s messy and chaotic, as all coalitions are. It’s also suspiciously similar to the base of Europe’s other insurgent left parties, such as La France Insoumise and Die Linke: graduates, renters, and the urban, multiracial working class.
Unlike the Labour Party, with its turgid factionalism and entrenched right-wing bureaucracy, the Green Party is shockingly collegiate, welcoming and free of stitch-ups and patronage networks. The commitment to democracy and inclusion seems genuine — often to a fault, with member-led policy committees inadvertantly tying Polanski’s hands on issues such as nationalisation of key industries.
It’s true that the Greens have never had Labour’s organic link to the trade union movement. But that link, undermined by shrinking, low-participation, service unions dominated by bureaucracies often out of sync with rank and file members, no longer guarantees a working class Labour vote. Starmer’s core support now sits with comfortable, upper-middle class professionals, with union members and the economically precarious shifting to the Greens or Reform.
As trade unionism has become a “minority pursuit”, as left economist James Meadway puts it, and the self-employed make up a growing share of the electorate, perhaps a party with petit-bourgeois origins is oddly well placed to unite a recomposed working class — bringing together unionised, public-sector workers, the teachers and nurses, with the self-employed plumbers and hairdresser Polanski felt so at ease highlighting in his viral videos and his 2025 Green Party conference speech.
Another reason for optimism is Greens Organise, an explicitly eco-socialist tendency within the Green Party that has thousands of paying members, which aims to build a "diverse working class" base for the Green Party and avoid the "electoral assimilation" undergone by Greens across Europe. GO, as they’re known, walk a fine line: building eco-socialist capacity without triggering a factional arms race and blowing up the internal unity that is one of the party’s greatest assets. Their capacity and impact over the next few years will be a deciding factor.
Much also hangs on the next crop of parliamentary candidates — specifically who gets selected in the fifty or so target seats. An eco-populist common sense now runs through the membership, channeled by Polanski. But several MPs, most obviously Ellie Chowns and Adrian Ramsay, are of the liberal old guard and would be quite happy to turn back the clock. If the new members can make themselves felt in key selections — ideally borrowing from La France Insoumise and deliberately lifting working-class movement candidates onto the ballot — the party's long-term future looks a lot more eco-socialist, not least because Polanski's successor will probably be drawn from the parliamentary party.
Finally, there’s the question of community rootedness: whether the Greens can embed themselves in communities, through organising outside of elections, and using state power to build independent working class power, will be an eco-socicalist test. The absence of associational and communal life breeds the paranoia, cynicism and mistrust upon which right-wing projects feed; any eco-socialist project has to build power and organisation to counter this.
There are some promising signs. The ‘green corridor’ of London councils elected this year, running from Walthamstow in the north east to Lambeth in the south west, have plans to set up independent tenants' and food co-ops on every estate in Hackney, and launch "Popular Asset Commissions" that will democratise how council assets are used and budgeted in Haringey. The test will be whether these councils, along with the socialist Aspire council in Tower Hamlets, can act as a bloc to build socialist power from below: supporting a new network of left social centres modelled on Pelican House in Tower Hamlets, for example, or staffing and coordinating anti-raids networks across boroughs and refusing to work with the Metropolitan Police to deport migrants.
Stuck between Labour, a social democratic party more resistant to transformation than the Greens, and a socialist left that failed to get its act together, the Greens might just be our best bet.
For local branches there are also plenty of options. Direct-action litter-picks, already the territory of outfits like River Roding Trust, are an obvious start — showing, Zohran Mamdani-style, that the Greens can fix the small things in the here and now. More ambitious are open-to-all community canteens, perhaps modeled on the state-sponsored British Restaurants of the post-war years: communal, cross-class, cross-culture spaces to eat and socialise in the midst of a cost of living crisis and an epidemic of loneliness.
Perhaps the strongest objection to the Greens' eco-socialist aspirations is that there are few examples of liberal or social democratic parties becoming avowedly socialist ones. Podemos, La France Insoumise and Sumar were populist breaks from existing left formations; the Belgian Workers' Party grew into a mass party from Maoist origins; Die Linke and Syriza were coalitions of extra-parliamentary groups and former communist parties. But stuck between Labour, a social democratic party more resistant to transformation than the Greens, and a socialist left that failed to get its act together in Your Party, the Greens — with its huge surge of new members and democratic party structures — might just be our best bet.
