Green shoots?

With the world of politics seeming to descend into even more of a shitshow by the day, the election of Zack Polanski as leader of the Green Party has been a rare source of positivity.

As George Monbiot argued in his Guardian column, Labour's utter failure to challenge Reform and indeed infuriating and indefensible persistence in pandering to the right have opened the way for the Greens to gain significant ground - most obviously, by having the courage that Labour lack and calling out capital as the cause of the country's woes, rather than immigration. (You could add to that list Brexit and ideologically motivated austerity cuts - the former something else that Labour seem terrified of criticising, and the latter something they seem content to perpetuate.)

Personally speaking, I welcome a Green Party leader who is bold and outspoken - even if, as one friend in the know pointed out, Polanski might need to work harder on having readymade responses to the inevitable scornful ripostes. There also appears to be some concern that he may undermine the painstaking, conciliatory work that the Greens did to steal a pair of rural seats from the Tories.

But ultimately party members gave him overwhelming support, and I too want someone saying the things that are currently going unsaid (even if that seems provocative in some quarters) and standing up to Reform's inflammatory and racist rhetoric. What's more, as Monbiot points out, Polanski's election doesn't signal a change in direction for the party; on the contrary, the manifesto is already established, but now has someone willing to shout more loudly about it.

Not for the first time, I find myself wanting to buy into Monbiot's optimism - on his logic, the stage certainly does seem set for the Greens to come on strong. But he's been wrong before, left red-faced as a naive idealist. In the early days of lockdown in 2020, he prematurely celebrated "the unexpectedly thrilling and transformative force of mutual aid" and confidently declared that "there are no neoliberals in a pandemic" - only to file a piece a few months later blasting the Tories for capitalising on the situation and lining the pockets of their pals. His concluding claim in this latest article - that the Greens may "contribute to what could prove to be, in 2029, the greatest electoral reset in our modern history" - veers into characteristically hyperbolic territory.

Still, it's something to cling to, isn't it? And we sure as hell need that.