When I joined the Scottish Green party in 2001, the Greens had around 6,000 members across their three UK parties (in Scotland, England and Wales, and Northern Ireland). Recently, roughly the same number joined in one day. In England and Wales alone, The Green party has overtaken the Tories with a record 150,000 members – two and a half times the number it had when Zack Polanski announced he was running for leader in May.

Much credit for this membership explosion goes to Polanski, with his easy charisma, willingness to embrace controversy and clear, leftwing messaging.

But this “eco-populism”, though represented by Polanski, did not begin with him. Polanski is the conclusion of a much longer story: the story of how the Greens became an explicitly leftwing party.

From People to Ecology to Green.

“Most of our ideas are the opposite of the rat race view of things,” declared the Manifesto for Survival, published in 1974 by the People party, the predecessor to the Green party. “We shall aim at a society in which basic needs are met, but sheer luxuries will be hard to obtain.”

Founded by a group of four friends in Coventry two years earlier, People proposed a 100% tax on income or profits above certain levels, radical land reform, a universal basic income and nuclear disarmament. But because of a belief that “overpopulation” was partly to blame for the climate crisis, the People party also proposed strict immigration controls. It won around 4,500 votes across seven seats in 1974 – nothing to sniff at.

People was on the left, in that opposed capitalism and favoureddemocratic control of the economy. But it wasn’t of the left. Its founders came from a middle-class, Tory-ish milieu (one was a former Tory councillor), and their Malthusian instincts had a distinctly conservative inflexion. Their focus wasn’t on overthrowing capitalism to advance the interests of the working class, but on adapting it to ensure human survival in the face of both climate collapse and nuclear annihilation.

In the 1970s, participants in the 1968 leftwing protest movement that swept the globe began founding Green parties, especially in Europe. People soon absorbed many of these 68ers, and shifted leftward as a result. In 1975, it changed its name to “the Ecology party”. Partly, this was to highlight its environmentalism; partly, it was a metaphor for the interconnection between issues. “Ecology is the science of relationships,” party historian and former principal speaker Derek Wall told me. The first “Green surge” came a few years later in the 1979 elections, when Ecology managed to stand enough candidates to qualify for an election broadcast, and its membership briefly swelled from about 500 to 5,000 (though this soon fell back).

For many of the 68ers, the problem with the traditional left, the communist and socialist parties and trade unions, wasn’t its critique of capitalism, but that it was too macho, statist and insufficiently environmentalist. In the 1980 and 90s, the Ecology party supported the miners’ strike and demanded unilateral nuclear disarmament. In 1981, Wall recalls, the Marxist historian and leading anti-nuclear campaigner EP Thompson spoke at the party’s conference.

In 1985, Ecology changed its name to the Green party, to reflect the success of the German Greens which, while younger, had managed to succeed because of the country’s system of proportional representation and its large anti-nuclear movement. It also inherited the names of its two main factions from the German Greens: the “realos” (realists), who wanted professionalism, structure, modernisation and electoralism; and the “fundis” (fundamentalists), who were more anarchist, and generally opposed having a leader. Wall was a prominent fundi, Caroline Lucas a realo.

In the late 1980s, with concern about environmental issues like the hole in the ozone layer soaring, and all three main parties in crisis, people flocked to the Greens. The party won 15% in the 1989 European elections, and attracted a new wave of members – the second Green surge. But the party lacked the capacity to absorb that energy: legend has it that there weren’t the staff to open the envelopes and pay in the cheques. The party also suffered when the famous football pundit David Icke joined, rapidly became its most prominent figure and then began to publicly engage in bizarre conspiracy thinking, losing the party the credibility it had won in 1989.

In the 1990s, many party activists drifted into the anarchist-inflected squatter, raver, anti-roads and anti-poll tax movements. Others preferred electoralism, though they didn’t get many votes. The realo-fundi split opened wider, producing some bitterness and navel-gazing, which meant the party generally floundered.

In the context of the post-cold war era, many Green members rejected the label of socialist. By the time I joined in 2001, the prevailing idea that the party should consider axes other than class – gender, race, sexuality, geography – often mutated into an allergy to talking about class at all. This was partly symptomatic of the anti-ideological policy-wonkery endemic to progressive politics in the 90s and 00s; people would come to leftwing conclusions about the specific issue they looked at without putting them into a leftwing framework. That was about to change once more.

A little less (climate) conversation.

I was part of a relatively small generation of millennial Greens who joined during the noughties – in my case, inspired by the anti-globalisation movement, climate change concerns and the election of a Green to the first Scottish parliament in 1999 (Greens got 7 MSPs in 2003, driving a mini-surge in membership here). Our generation soon found each other and realised we didn’t fit neatly into any existing faction. We were realos – we wore suits to conferences and voted to have a leader rather than two “principal speakers” in a bitter 2007 referendum – but in common with many of the fundis, we were socialists.

Together, we new Young Greens developed a shared analysis of the party’s problems and set about solving them, through internal democratic structures; by getting jobs in the party or with its growing number of elected reps; by getting elected as councillors; and through online debate (a group of us founded the website Bright Green explicitly for this purpose).

Our prescriptions for the party were as follows. First, we needed to talk less about climate breakdown. Although most of us were climate activists, environmentalism was the one thing people already knew about the Greens. Plus, you couldn’t solve the climate crisis without changing the economic system, which was ruining voters’ lives as well as the planet.

This meant we needed messages rooted in people’s material concerns. I often said to fellow members, “We believe our policies would make most people’s lives better, but we almost never tell them that.” Siân Berry’s 2008 London mayoral campaign, with its slogan “A Green London is a more affordable London”, was a clear step forward.

In Oxford, where I lived at the time, we ran council campaigns in 2012, 2013 and 2014 focused on opposing care cuts and defending migrants’ rights from already-rising Faragism, and won seats off Labour, which was seen as too timid. Nationally, the party started training council candidates to survey voters about their concerns, then write their leaflets with Green plans to solve them: not hiding radical policies, but talking about them in ways relevant to people’s everyday worries.

Second, we felt that we needed to be clearer about being leftwing. Until perhaps 2010, some Greens would say that the party was not left or right, but “forward”. These people generally had a politics that was instinctively progressive but lacked an analysis of power. Our generation was explicitly leftwing, and felt that saying so was important for winning elections: people don’t vote for you if they don’t know what you stand for.

Many older Greens disagreed with us. They had imbibed that post-cold war, Blairite common sense that it was impossible to win elections while admitting that you wanted to nationalise things and tax the rich. Socialist principles should be given a veneer of green acceptability. As Berry told me, “A lot of Greens – not me, though, and not [former party leader] Caroline Lucas – were definitely nervous to say we were socialists before Natalie [Bennett]’s leadership.”

We pointed to polling that showed that socialist ideas were, in fact, massively popular. Centrists had plenty of other parties, and in any case, the rightwing press saw through attempts to hide leftist principles behind environmentalist policies, denouncing those who attempted to do so as “watermelons”: green on the outside, red in the middle. With Natalie Bennett, such ideological coyness began to wane.

At the party’s 2012 conference – Bennett’s first as leader – she pitched the party clearly to the left of Labour’s mealy-mouthed position on austerity. In her conference speech, she called on members to “ask not what the trade unions can do for us. Ask what we can do for the trade unions.” Bennett spent her time as leader setting out a radical, anti-neoliberal, anti-austerity economic agenda, one that spoke to a post-2008 mood.

At the same conference, I proposed a policy, originally penned by Peter Tatchell, supporting the right of workers to buy out their company and turn it into a co-op. It passed overwhelmingly.

Even more radical things were afoot at York University, whose Green society, led by the now-journalist Josiah Mortimer, proposed to constitutionally redefine the Green party as “a party of social and environmental justice, which supports a radical transformation of society for the benefit of all, and for the planet as a whole.” The proposal passed with 70% of the vote. To me, the proposal represented an even younger generation of Greens who had been involved in the 2010 student protests and had joined the party in large part because of newly elected Green MP Caroline Lucas’s strong opposition to tuition fee hikes and austerity.

Clive Lord, one of the original members of People, and a key opponent of the changes we instigated, was furious, calling me and others proposing changes “pirates” who “have boarded, and are fighting for control of the ship.”

Where our grouping was often attacked for being watermelons, the other side published a newsletter called “the kiwi and the lime” – green all the way through, not just on the outside (people even pointed to a third grouping, “mangos”: green on the outside, yellow/liberal in the middle).

Goodbye, cranks and wonks.

Another big victory had come a few years earlier: there had been a load of vestigial anti-science hippy nonsense still in party policy: support for homoeopathy, opposition to stem cell research and the like, which the media (understandably) liked to highlight. Most of that was expunged in an epic debate at the Green party of England and Wales’ spring conference in 2010, just in time for the general election. The cultural shift from the scepticism about technology and “men-in-white-coats” of the anti-nuclear generation to the pro-science rationalism of the climate generation was complete.

Yet to us, being proudly left didn’t just mean abandoning crankery. It also meant embracing intersectionalism: migrants’, LGBTQ+ and disabled people’s rights. While the party was generally already strong in these areas, it retained a Malthusianism. The organisation Population Matters, which had campaigned against Syrian refugees being allowed into the country (though it has since softened such policies), regularly held events at Green party conferences, for example. At the 2013 conference, one of our Young Green crew, Sebastian Power, took on the organisation in a well-attended debate, setting out clearly how neo-Malthusianism functions to shift blame from rich to poor, white to black, men to women. While the organisation does still try to engage with the party, its ideas are much more marginal and rarely go unchallenged.

And it also meant building a better analysis of power. Peter McColl, a prominent member of the Scottish Greens from our generation, remembers that from around 2005-2015, the Greens were full of people obsessed with one specific magic bullet policy. Some were good – basic income, proportional representation, contraction and convergence – others less so – tradable carbon credits, for example. This wonkish obsession with policy without an analysis of power was a hangover of that aforementioned anti-ideological period between the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the banks, when history supposedly ended. (It’s telling that Polanski’s most powerful interventions generally aren’t about specific policies, even though his wealth tax proposal is very popular; instead, they tend to come when he points out power dynamics, such as billionaires trying to blame migrants for the country’s problems, or the rightwing media attacking him.)

Most of us felt the party needed to be bolder. Many Green press officers and functionaries seemed to fear the party’s more radical policies. There was, among many, an assumption that being attacked by the tabloids was a bad thing. We generally felt – as Polanski has proven – that winding up the Mail is a great way to rally support from progressives. I often repeated the mantra that for Greens, the choice was between being controversial or being ignored. The party tended to prefer the latter. This caution, combined with the party’s connection to the peace movement and consensus-based Quakerism, and a generalised middle-class niceness, produced a manner which was useful on doorsteps, but drowned in media fistfights.

The changes that took the party to where it is today were partly driven by our generation of Young Greens

Partly, it was driven by three women – Berry, Bennett and Lucas – who, between them, took the party on a journey leftward through the 2010s.

Hail, Lucas.

Lucas was an MEP from 1999 (when Labour introduced proportional representation for European elections), then the first Green MP from 2010-24, and until recently was by far the party’s most prominent figure. In 2008, she co-authored the original Green New Deal report, which ensured that environmentalists didn’t greet the financial crash by supporting austerity as a de-growth measure (as some whispered at the time) but instead demanded the massive spending needed to transition to a zero-carbon economy. After Lucas was elected an MP, she became a prominent critic of austerity and led opposition to Cameron’s NHS privatisation.

At some point around 2015, I remember an interviewer saying to Lucas that her ideas sounded suspiciously like socialism. She responded that the Greens are “proud of our socialist principles”. I punched the air in celebration. Around the same time, I was asked by Green Left to run a workshop on “eco-socialism”, which Lucas attended. At the end, she said something like: “Isn’t this just what Green politics is?” Like Polanski, she didn’t see any need to centre the word socialism, but wouldn’t deny it if asked. “We always saw Caroline Lucas as an ally,” Mortimer told me.

Most Green members who joined before the recent Polanski surge joined for Lucas and the leftwing, feminist politics she expressed. The few who complained hers weren’t true Green politics, which, they thought, focused on population control and degrowth, would get funny looks. Lucas, with Bennett and Berry, laid the foundation of the current surge.

By 2014-15, all three of the UK’s Green parties were clearly, proudly leftwing. In Scotland, the independence referendum offered the Scottish Greens a chance to present a vision for the country, producing an eightfold growth in its membership. In England and Wales, party leader Natalie Bennett toured the country, holding town hall meetings, setting out a similarly broad vision and finding widespread yearning for a left radicalism beyond the stifling two-party system and firmly to the left of Ed Miliband’s Labour. Green membership across the UK skyrocketed from around 15,000 at the start of 2014 to more than 70,000 by the summer of 2015.

Many of these new members soon left for Labour to support the Corbyn project that began later that year; others, like me, remained members but became less involved. But many others remained active. As Naranee Ruthra-Rajan, who joined the Greens in 2009 “because of support for public services”, went on to co-chair her local party with Polanski in 2019, then to run his leadership campaign, said to me: “I’d already found my party.” She liked Corbyn, she said, but “having witnessed how Labour operate[d] close at hand, it didn’t appeal.”

Navigating Corbynism.

2015-20 was a difficult period for the party, partly because of its odd relationship with Corbynism. Most Greens agreed with the leader of the Labour party more than most Labour MPs did, and repeatedly proposed electoral pacts with Corbyn’s Labour, but were rebuffed. Partly, it was difficult because many members left to join Labour, causing a financial crisis in the party.

Partly, it was a tough time because Brexit forced the party into awkward semi-alliances with the pro-EU half of the establishment. As Berry recalled: “We did have some weird allies around that time – the pro-European centrists and centre-right – it did rather create a whole different set of alignments. It didn’t stop us complaining mad about austerity the whole time though, but it was what the media focused on.”.

One niche Greens found was that Corbyn’s Labour had failed to spot a growing radicalism in rural England, driven in large part by rampant development. The explosion of environmental activism across Europe in 2019 – epitomised by the rise of Greta Thunberg and the foundation of Extinction Rebellion – meant that support for the Green party started to grow again, with some astonishing success in local and European elections.

If there have been struggles for the party in the last five years, they have been less over policy, and more over tone. One slightly thornier issue has been how to deal with transphobes. A small group of gender-critical obsessives was, for too long, allowed to disrupt the party, whose cultural connection to the consensual peace movement made it too slow to expel people. Eventually, generally younger members got elected to the right committees and drew clear lines: gender-critical beliefs are permitted, but transphobic behaviour isn’t. In 2024, one gender-critical former Green ran as an independent, and many of her allies campaigned for her against the Green candidate, so they were expelled – ridding the party, to the relief of many, of some of its most outspokenly gender-critical members.

Many pundits missed the extraordinary growth the party went through in this period. In 2018, there were around 200 Green councillors across the UK. Now, that’s nearly 900. This isn’t just because of Labour running to the right under Starmer, though that has been vital. It is also the product of the 2015 Green surge, which Berry described to me as “Natalie’s legacy. Sure, there was a post-surge, Corbyn-inspired loss of around 25,000 members, but the floor it landed on – around 42,000 members – was much bigger than the 14,000-ish it had had at the start of 2014. Green election guru Chris Williams was able to set to work and, once Starmer replaced Corbyn, membership began to grow again, hitting 58,000 at the end of 2024. Partly, this growth reflected our generation growing up: I first met Williams in 2005 at a European Young Greens event in Barcelona. He’s part of a group of Green millennials who spent their 20s perfecting the art of ground campaigning. By their 30s, they’d nailed it.

Part of that success came in the 2021 London Assembly election, when the party won three seats (it had been stuck on two for years). The third assemblyperson was a relatively new party member, who had rapidly become a prominent organiser in the city and a skilled media performer: Zack Polanski.

That summer, the party’s co-leaders, Berry and Jonathan Bartley, resigned; Berry told me she couldn’t accept the party’s failure to stop transphobia in its ranks. In the resulting by-election, then-deputy leader Amelia Womack – a key member of our generation of (by now no longer young) Greens – and climate activist Tam Omond teamed up to replace them, proposing the party adopt a bolder communications style and focus on growing its membership and thus capacity. They were beaten by Carla Denyer and Adrian Ramsay, whose pitch was that they were candidates in two of the party’s target candidates for the next Westminster election, and the additional profile would help them win. To me, this felt like a strategy of “keep your heads down and organise around elections” versus one of “get into the media discourse”. While I favoured the Womack/Omond pitch, Ramsay/Denyer was clearly successful.

When Womack stood down as deputy leader the following year, Polanski won the election to replace her, with Tyrone Scott – now a War on Want staff member, who ran on an “environmental, social and racial justice” manifesto and an emphasis on community organising – coming second, and gender-critical former deputy leader Shahrar Ali third. Scott was the candidate most associated with the left of the party, Polanski expressed roughly its mainstream. He still does.

In May 2024, Bennett took me for lunch in the House of Lords. I asked her how many of the Greens’ four target seats the party would win. She was astonishingly confident of getting all four. I walked out of parliament and up Whitehall in hammering rain. There was a crowd of journalists outside 10 Downing Street; “Things Can Only Get Better” was blaring on a sound system. The general election was being called, and Bennett was soon proven right. With four MPs, the party’s growth continued. But many felt, with Labour’s popularity collapsing, a huge opportunity was being missed. The leaders were busy learning to be MPs when the party needed someone to rally support outside Westminster’s stifling walls. Denyer seemed to agree and announced she was standing down as co-leader to focus on being an MP. Ramsay announced he was planning to re-stand – now with his fellow rural MP Ellie Chowns. And so did the deputy leader – Zack Polanski, to the surprise of no one who was paying attention.

The debate between Chowns, Ramsay and Polanski generally focused not on policy – they all support a clearly leftwing prospectus – but on tone.

The Ramsay-Chowns strategy was built on the one which had won them their constituencies – two of the rural areas where Greens had managed to bed in when Labour missed their growing radicalism (accelerated by the “race for space” during the Covid-19 pandemic): the sort of consensual, de-polarising language and tone you would use when having a conversation with someone outside their home, and which both are clearly skilled at. At the core of this approach is a radical analysis of the media: the left, however loud it shouts, will never win an argument mediated by the billionaire-owned press, and so needs to make itself sound more like your neighbour, not shoving their politics in your face, but gently talking you round to their position over tea and a biscuit. One of their most prominent supporters, Rupert Read, also articulates another angle: “People are fed up with being polarised,” he said to me just before the party’s recent conference. He worries about the democratic damage done by stoking anger.

Polanski’s eco-populism, on the other hand, felt to me like a term to sum up the arguments many of us had been making over the years: the party needed to be more willing to embrace conflict and the attention it brings, and more rooted in people’s material needs. The Greens shouldn’t fear channelling anger at the inequality ripping our society apart, Polanski implied. The fact that 85% of members supported him in the leadership election showed that this had become the mainstream view in the party.

From the perspective of many on the left, the Greens have only recently become a clearly leftwing force. While there’s some truth to this, there’s another way to tell this story. The rightwing media generally avoided criticising Corbyn for his desire to tax the rich and renationalise things, instead focusing on his supposed failure to bow sufficiently deeply to the Queen, because it understood that leftist economics were, and are, popular. The same outlets always tried to force the Greens into a little box marked “eco” because they didn’t want to talk about the party’s socialist ideas, for the same reasons. Through relentless focus, embrace of conflict and general charisma, Polanski has triggered the tabloids into a “reds under the beds” panic, which has communicated his message for him.

And the left has changed, too: the criticisms Greens had in the 1980s about machismo, homophobia and environmentalism no longer generally apply. There is a small crowd you could put in a bloc with George Galloway’s Workers party. But beyond that, the intersectional ecologism of early Greens and the socialism of working-class movements have blended into a broadly eco-socialist common sense across a large swathe of the left across Europe. In the UK, that’s finding expression in the Greens.

For many longstanding party members, the last month has been profoundly moving. The 100,000 new joiners don’t feel like gate-crashers. It feels more like they booked a massive hall for their birthday and invited the whole community. At first, just a trickle of close friends showed up. Then, enough to make it not embarrassing. And now, at ten to midnight, thousands of people have flooded in, with music and hope and cheer. The party is just getting started.

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