Oh Zack!

It has been an extraordinary 12 months for the Greens under Polanski: shooting up from 12% in voting intention polls last October, to 21% at the beginning of the year, when it won the Gorton & Denton by-election, before gravity (and some of Polanski’s past) brought the party’s ratings back down to 11% as the 2026 conference kicked off.

Amongst Polanski’s missteps was his stance on the Golders Green attack which turned off countless potential voters, but after Burnham’s enthronement in July and Starmer’s “I’ll never resign my seat” departure, Polanski announced he would fight the contest for Starmer’s old St Pancras & Holborn constituency. Surprise.

That by-election, due to be held on Thursday, 8^th October, had to be the basis of Polanski’s pitch at conference, although he could not actually mention this contest under broadcasters’ interpretations of election rules. He did his best to appeal to its voters by opening his speech with a lengthy passage focusing on rent costs and intergenerational unfairness: “Young families are being forced to choose between moving out of the cities they love, or giving up on ever having kids.” Railing against the “powerful vested interests of developers and big landlords” was an obvious pitch to the urban, educated, 30-something professionals he needs to win in St Pancras (although who actually lives in Holborn is a mystery.)

After housing came migration and transgender issues (“our people”) including the applause line for the RNLI’s determined work to fish asylum seekers out of the Channel. Then Polanski moved on to the other great driver of Green gains: Gaza. He declared himself ‘vindicated’ by Ed Miliband’s sanctions on the Israeli settlements in the West Bank and attacked the policing of Palestinian protestors at Labour conference.

The loudest cheer of the entire speech came when he declared “Drop the charges, end the genocide, de-proscribe Palestine Action.” Chants of “Free, Free Palestine” echoed around the hall as Polanski basked in the applause. The Greens’ attempt to redefine Zionism as racism seems bound to infantilise potential adherents of this obviously bone-headed determination to ignore both history and basic reason: Zionism is a nationalist movement that supports the development and protection of a Jewish nation in its ancestral homeland, the Land of Israel it is explicitly tied to a state level support quite separate from a racially-based campaign, Greens should read more history.

Only then did the climate merit a brief walk-on part, with the Green party leader referencing the summer heat wave. Zack, although keen to remain the exclusive focus of the spotlight did mention a series of measures by Green MPs Ellie Chowns and Adrian Ramsay which the government had been forced to respond to. “Vote Green and watch Labour move” was the much-repeated line. However, it would not take a particularly logical 7-year-old to understand that this line might help in any and all upcoming by-election campaigns, but will effectively spike the guns of any more significant General Election platform.

That line, however, underscored the Greens’ obvious long-term structural weakness: conceding that they remain the significantly smaller of the two left-wing parties and a much less interesting potential coalition partner than the LibDems. Polanski’s line consigns the Greens to only exist as a pressure group to force Labour leftwards until the next General Election, at which point it will return to electoral irrelevance. This line will help in Holborn & St Pancras next week obvs, but drastically self-limits the Green’s ambitions for the next General Election.

Today’s speech by Polanski targeted the wrong challenge. In focusing on a strategy designed to bolster his (apparently evaporating) Holborn & St Pancras vote, he lost the opportunity to set out the party’s stall to contest for the Hard Left vote at the next General Election. This is increasingly the hallmark of Polanski’s leadership: miss the real opportunity in a desperate attempt to make a splash in the next by-election. This is not far-sighted.

On a more youth-focused note, deputy leader Mothin Ali announced a new Green Party commitment to offer a guarantee of a 2-year job within 4 months of leaving education or training, with the government paying half the cost of salaries. Ali argued that this policy would reduce spending on welfare and boost tax receipts from employment over the long term. No-one seems to have thought about simply reducing the minimum wage for under 25s instead and reversing the significant uprating pushed through since 2024.

Revised on 4th October 2026 to add:

However, on the closing day of the conference on Sunday the Greens outdid themselves by adopting a motion declaring Zionism a form of racism, by 1022 votes to 813. This underlines the relatively small activist base which dominates Green Party policy-setting, but more importantly, also indicates that a majority of these activists are indifferent to the development of an understanding of even quite recent history, current political dynamics, or the actual dangers of extremism.

This performative absurdity by the Greens would be understandable from a student union filled by keffiyeh-wearing virtue signallers, but it is a simple disqualification from consideration as a serious national political force. Enough said.