The turmoil in British politics offers an unprecedented opportunity to the Green party, writes Ros Taylor – though with just four MPs and a culture of local activism rather than big-picture policy thinking, it has a lot of work to do.
Few people would have predicted that the Epstein scandal could bring down Keir Starmer. As an austere former Director of Public Prosecutions who never met the paedophile financier and whom no one seriously accuses of corruption or sleaze, the British prime minister is an unlikely victim of this revolting story. Yet on 4 February it emerged that Starmer was aware that Peter Mandelson, whom he subsequently appointed as US ambassador, had stayed in touch with Jeffrey Epstein after this conviction for trafficking underage girls.
Starmer says Mandelson lied to him, assuring him he ‘barely knew’ Epstein, and that he sacked the ambassador when the true extent of their relationship emerged. But it is unclear why the very strict ‘developed vetting’ process (which no politician gets to see) failed to pick up Mandelson’s continued friendship with the paedophile. Commentators blame Starmer’s mercurial advisor, Morgan McSweeney, for persuading him that only a man close to Epstein would be able to build an affinity with Donald Trump.
By itself, this poor judgment might not have threatened Starmer’s premiership. But it comes at a time when Labour MPs are increasingly despairing about his ability to connect with the public and breathe life into an extremely unpopular government. Support for the populist right Reform party is hovering around 30 percent, and Labour is expected to do badly in a by-election in Gorton and Denton at the end of February. In normal times, this would be a safe Labour seat.
All this turmoil – and the continuing unpopularity of the Conservative party – presents extraordinary opportunities for Britain’s insurgent parties. As things stand, Reform could win the next election. But the Greens could also make significant gains.
The path to coalition?
Gorton and Denton exemplifies Labour’s problems. When its MP stood down last month, Andy Burnham, the Labour mayor of Manchester – who has made no secret of his ambition to replace Starmer – wanted to stand. Had he won, it would have enabled him to challenge the PM for the leadership. The party executive blocked him. Now the seat looks like a race between Reform, who are fielding a former university academic turned anti-immigration activist, and the Greens, whose candidate is a plumber and local councillor.
Mancunians who want to keep Reform out will look to vote tactically for the left-winger most likely to win. Given Labour’s unpopularity, this is likely to be a Green. The party has enjoyed a surge in membership and media attention since it elected a new leader, Zack Polanski, last autumn.
Polanski has shallow roots in the party – he tried to stand as a Liberal Democrat candidate before quitting to join the Greens – but he is an adept communicator on social media, and has raised the party’s profile with an emphasis on fairness, social justice and principled attacks on Starmer. He particularly appeals to younger voters who hoped a Labour government would be more radical and are bored and disillusioned by the prime minister.
These voters might have been tempted by Your Party, which was launched by the former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and a young MP, Zarah Sultana, but it has struggled to gain any traction amid factional squabbling. Polanski therefore has the radical left field to himself. But it would take an almost unimaginable surge in popularity to hand the Greens the keys to Number 10 Downing Street, especially as their supporters tend to be concentrated in small, urban constituencies or wealthy rural areas, where the Lib Dems are more likely to win.
But could the Greens join a coalition of left-leaning parties? That is far more thinkable – they were in a power-sharing agreement with the Scottish National Party in Edinburgh until two years ago. That wouldn’t happen if Starmer were still in office. Polanski has said he would never work with him. But a more left-leaning leader, such as Burnham, would be a far more appealing prospect. “We want to build a mass movement,” Polanski told me last summer. “Pluralism runs throughout my politics and always has.”
With no background in economics or law, the subjects senior British politicians tend to have studied – his degree was in drama – Polanski is coming under increasing scrutiny, not all of it sympathetic. Rory Stewart, the co-host of Britain’s most popular politics podcast The Rest is Politics recently ridiculed his ideas about the economy (“a very, very out there vision”). Alarming a former Conservative MP did little to harm Polanski among his supporters. But the Greens need more thought-out policies.
That is why a new Green-aligned thinktank, Verdant, is launching in the spring. Led by James Meadway, a former adviser to John O’Donnell, who was shadow chancellor under Corbyn, it has a potential Burnham premiership in mind. “What Andy Burnham has talked about it quite close to what Zack Polanski is talking about, but we would be looking at the policy – policies that are credible and workable,” he says. The Marxian economist Ha-Joon Chang is advising the thinktank.
Fresh policies needed
What might those policies look like? Decarbonisation is an obvious priority for the Greens, but this is an area where Labour has already made the running, and the Greens’ locally-driven politics has not lent itself to big thinking about renewables. Adaptation to the changing climate may be more of a priority. Run-down public spaces continue to blight the UK, and Burnham is a champion of devolution and taking public services back into public control: his political philosophy is sometimes called ‘Manchesterism’. Meadway is keen on wealth taxes but has distanced himself from the Modern Monetary Theory that some leftist economists endorse, and which Polanski has alluded to in interviews.
When it comes to foreign policy, the challenge is particularly acute. Green voters and members tend to be strongly pro-Palestinian and anti-Trump, but those positions do not add up to a coherent stance on the Russian threat. Polanski himself has been sceptical about the merits of NATO membership, pointing out that the United States is an unreliable participant and calling for US forces to be expelled from British bases. But in the Green party the leader’s position can diverge from party policy.
As the party gets bigger – it now has over 190,000 members – policymaking will become more complex, especially since the Greens have a highly democratic constitution and any member can join a Policy Working Group. It will also need to raise more money, though in October was still wondering how to spend £4m in donations. The party has quite a strict donations policy that excludes, for example, any company involved in intensive farming, selling meat or building roads.
The slow death of the Conservatives
Meanwhile, whatever happened to Britain’s oldest and historically most successful party? The Conservatives’ share of the vote has not been above 20 percent in any poll since May 2025. The party has tried to win back voters who have switched to Reform by talking tough on immigration, but they prefer the outspoken and untested Nigel Farage. Every few days a prominent Tory defects to Farage’s party. A couple of moderate Tories recently tried to nudge the party back to the centre, but leader Kemi Badenoch made it clear she had no intention of changing course.
At this point, the best the Conservatives can hope for is to govern in coalition with Reform, serving under Prime Minister Farage – and even that looks optimistic. Concerned that Reform increasingly resembles a retirement home for failed Tories, Farage has set a deadline of 7 May for unhappy Conservatives to defect. That is also the date of the next set of local elections. Without a remarkable change in his fortunes, Keir Starmer may not survive beyond the spring. The Greens will be hoping his successor is popular enough to keep the left in power – but not so popular that they can win a general election outright.
The views and opinions in this article do not necessarily reflect those of the Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung European Union | Global Dialogue.
