Until recently, leaders of the Green Party in England and Wales feared being ignored. Now, it seems, the incumbent fears too much of the opposite.
Zack Polanski, who has overseen an explosion in support for the Greens since he became party leader seven months ago, walks on to the lawn at Stonebridge Gardens in Hackney, northeast London, flanked by a man-mountain, a burly close protection officer.
As well as the rise in support, there has also been a surge in enmity. Such is the price of political fame in today’s divided, restive, perpetually uneasy Britain.
Polanski (43) is the latest It Boy of British politics. Under his leadership, his resurgent party is riding high in national opinion polls and it is now seeking to nail down second place in voter support behind only Reform UK led by Nigel Farage.
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In local elections on May 7th, the Greens threaten to swamp the Labour Party in its final bastion, London. The party also expects gains elsewhere in England and Wales, where there’s a devolved parliamentary vote (the Scottish Greens is a separate party).
Meanwhile, the energetic Polanski, who has emerged as among the most fluid talkers in British politics, has pinched Jeremy Corbyn’s personal mantle as undisputed leader of the radical left by trumpeting his brash new brand of “ecopopulism”.
Yet his recent dizzying ascent to national relevance in Britain means Polanski has also attracted the frenzied ire of the UK’s notoriously vituperative right-leaning press.
In the past few days alone, the Spectator magazine said the party under his leadership is “mad, bad and dangerous”. The Daily Telegraph said his regime is “Stalin with a nose ring” (up-close observation confirms Polanski does not, in fact, have a nose ring).
Even the New Statesman, the bible of Britain’s intellectual left, pondered on Tuesday whether Polanski was now leading a populist party that is the “Reform of the left”.
Does he care what any of them say about him?
“It’s the biggest compliment you could ever imagine,” Polanski tells The Irish Times on the Stonebridge Gardens lawn, where he has arranged to meet a handful of foreign journalists. He says he is not surprised that UK media want to “attack and destroy” him.
“I’m not scared,” he says. “I have truth and communities on my side.”
Meanwhile, Polanski’s critics argue that his political promises are based on a populist laundry list of economic wishful thinking while, it has also been alleged, his party has been infiltrated by cranks such as anti-Semites.
It all seems very redolent of the Corbyn mania of a decade ago, but with a Green hue this time around instead of simply red.
There are anomalies that are hard to fathom in Polanski’s precipitous political rise.
A former actor and hypnotherapist from Manchester, he is a gay Jewish man whose party is nonetheless gobbling up Labour’s traditional support among socially-conservative British Muslims. His co-deputy leader is Leeds councillor Mothin Ali.
That shift was on full display in February during the Gorton & Denton byelection in Manchester, which the Green Party won – its first ever Westminster byelection victory – with a stunning surge in support from voters of Kashmiri and Bengali descent.
Here’s another: from the UK prime minister Keir Starmer down, Westminster is obsessed with talk about Polanski. Yet he has never even come close to being elected to parliament. He ran only once, in 2019, when he garnered barely 1,000 votes. That was four years after he defected to the Greens from the Liberal Democrats.
The Greens have five MPs, but Polanski is a member of the London Assembly, the elected body whose role is mainly concerned with scrutinising the London mayor, Sadiq Khan. The assembly is not holding elections next month and Polanski is not running for any national office himself. His party, however, is on the verge of a big breakthrough.
A recent Ipsos poll suggested 49 per cent of Londoners were considering voting Green, compared to 44 per cent for Labour. Keiran Pedley of Ipsos predicted a “sea of Green” across the 32 council boroughs of the English capital.
The party could take effective control of councils from Hackney, where Polanski is based, to Camden and possibly even Corbyn’s back garden of Islington.
Party membership has almost quadrupled to about 225,000 since Polanski became leader. It has gone from single digits to at least 17 per cent in most polls.
But what does its leader, the new left-wing demi-god Polanski, really believe in?
In person, he seems surprisingly nervy and a touch less charismatic than expected. It is only when Polanski starts speaking to you that you get a sense of his energy: it’s all in the eyes.
When Polanski speaks to a person, he holds their gaze intently for minutes at a time, barely even blinking. It is disarming but also strangely intriguing.
Most people will look away here or there while talking, even momentarily. Not Polanski. He connects one-on-one to whomever he is engaging with, and shuts out everything and everybody else.
He says if he had his way, Britain would rejoin the European Union “when conditions are right” although he insists he is not a slavish ideological fan of the bloc.
Some of his economic positions, however, are hard to reconcile and seem conflicting.
As he riffs on the Stonebridge lawn, Polanski appears to criticise some of Labour’s tax rises such as the hike in National Insurance. But he also calls for more public investment – yet paid for by whom?
“There’s plenty of money. But it’s money going to millionaires and billionaires and foreign investors.”
He suggests UK rent controls would “save the average family £3,000 per year” which would put a total of “£17 billion back in the British economy”.
That seems far-fetched at best. Even in the unlikely event that price controls did save UK renters £17 billion, it would just transfer money from landlords and investors. There would be no actual new money in the UK economy, as he has suggested, and it might even mean less capital for housing investment.
As fluid as Polanski can be, he makes occasional factual errors that suggest he doesn’t always have a full grip on knotty issues.
For example, while criticising UK prime minister Keir Starmer for targeting him over national security while “bringing Peter Mandelson into the heart of government,” Polanski says the now-toxic former ambassador to Washington was “a man with links to Chinese firms such as Global Counsel”.
This is muddled thinking. Global Counsel was a UK lobbying firm set up by Mandelson.
He coos over a comparison by one European journalist that Polanski is similar to Zohran Mamdani, the new mayor of New York.
“That is pretty lovely. It’s an honour to be compared with [Mamdani],” he says. Polanski cites the New Yorker’s embrace of “sewer socialism”, which is about the left winning elections by focusing on small issues (like good sewers) that improve everyday lives.
“I’d probably call it sidewalk socialism. It’s important to have big visions. But what people really want to know is if you can deal with the day-to-day stuff first – bins, potholes, libraries. That gives people the trust that you can do the big things, like tackle the climate crisis or make sure you do wealth redistribution.”
This takes him to the heart of what his “ecopopulism” movement is about. Essentially, it is an emphasis shift from environmental green issues to socialist red ones.
“If people are worried about putting food on the table or heat in their homes, it’s very difficult to get them to be concerned about anything else, including the climate crisis. Rather than talking about climate first, I think we need to talk about the cost of living crisis first. I’m not going to keep going on about the thing [climate] people trust us on already. I want to make sure we win trust on other issues.”
Later in the conversation, Polanski is asked what would be the top three things he’d do if he was running the UK Government. He cites ending homelessness, introducing a wealth tax and bringing in a proportional representation voting system.
Only after this does he add a fourth issue to his top three: “Finally, I would take action on climate change.”
Polanski believes wealth inequality is “destroying this country [Britain].”
He tries to fend off attacks on the Greens defence policy, traditionally an electoral weak spot for it in Britain, a country increasingly convinced it is on a path to war with Russia. He says he is not advocating for the UK to leave the Nato military alliance “immediately – but Nato is a difficult conversation”.
He says his Nato policy doesn’t matter anyway because, he insists, US president Donald Trump is already wrecking the alliance anyway.
“Let’s have a sensible, credible conversation right now about what an alternative [to Nato] looks like.”
Polanski suggests, for Britain, that means closer military co-operation with other European countries, which, he says, is increasingly the position of Starmer.
“I feel vindicated. When I became leader eight months ago, [Starmer] went to the dispatch box in parliament, talking about me as some sort of national security threat. He’s now moving to my position.”
On who is a greater threat, Trump or Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Polanski notes that, while both are very bad, he has never heard Putin threatening “genocide, to wipe out a civilisation as Trump recently did to Iranians”. Starmer’s courting of Trump concerns him, he says.
Polanski, as a Jewish man, is outspoken in his criticism of Israel for its actions in Palestine, including in Gaza, where he believes it has perpetrated a genocide.
This has opened him up to accusations of being soft on anti-Semitism. British newspapers have reported on several Green candidates who, it is alleged, have made anti-Semitic remarks. Polanski won’t get into specific disciplinary cases but he acknowledges some were anti-Semitic, but others were just “critical of Israel”.
He says anti-Semitism is “deeply personal” to him as a Jewish man and he acknowledges many Jewish people living in London are afraid, and this is unacceptable. But he suggests a debate needs to be had over where their fears are real or “perception”.
This has sparked fury from some in Britain’s Jewish community, who have experienced an undeniable rise in anti-Semitic attacks, such as ambulance fire bombings in London and stabbings at a Manchester synagogue.
Polanski has also faced scorn in the British media over a Sun story from years ago when he was a hypnotherapist. He was said to have agreed to hypnotise a woman reporter who attended his clinic into believing she had bigger breasts.
“Sure, it was weird and it was embarrassing for me when it happened. But I apologised. I think the British public realise that people make mistakes.”
He warns burgeoning radical political movements such as his own against political mistakes, such as becoming too close to the system they are trying to reform.
“Make sure that as you gain more power, status and members that you never become absorbed into the establishment.”
As he walks off into the spring sunshine to continue the day campaigning, Polanski’s man-mountain minder is joined by a second protection officer who, clearly, had been waiting unseen in the park in advance of his arrival.
Was this hitherto unnoticed man there to discreetly observe what awaited Polanski?
Political life has come fast at the Green leader. But he’s clearly learning on his feet.
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