SOMETHING significant is happening on the left of British politics. In September, Zack Polanski swept to victory in the Green Party of England and Wales leadership election. Picking up a staggering 84 per cent of the vote against two of the party’s MPs, Polanski tapped into the membership’s desire for a leader who not only promised to advocate for the party’s radical political programme, but to do so in a way that is compelling and can cut through to the wider public.

Clearly, he’s not just captured the mood of the party members who voted for him. He’s captured the mood of a large section of the public too, bringing thousands of new people into the party and attracting millions of people to vote Green for the first time.

Since Polanski became leader, the number of Green Party members has ballooned to an unprecedented degree. At the time of writing, there are now more than 115,000 paid-up members, well beyond the Liberal Democrats and within touching distance of the Tories. This makes the Greens a genuinely mass membership party for the first time in its history, with an energised activist base ready to begin campaigning to win more elections than ever before.

Alongside this, the last few weeks have also shown a significant shift in the wider public’s attitudes to the party. Repeated opinion polls have shown that support for the Greens is surging. One even had the party level-pegging with Labour at 15 per cent.

This hasn’t come about solely because of Polanski’s emergence as leader — although that certainly appears to have been the catalyst. Rather, there are three key factors at play that have opened the window of opportunity for the Greens.

First, we have to look to the Labour Party. For four years — from 2015 to 2019 — Labour offered a genuine alternative to the neoliberal consensus that has gripped British politics for decades. Under Jeremy Corbyn, there was a broad coalition of left-wing support for that alternative in the general population, spanning from progressives and left-liberals to socialists, who by and large backed Labour.

Now, we see a Labour government under Keir Starmer illustrating it has no intention to rebalance the economy away from the billionaires, no intention to redistribute wealth, no intention to rebuild public services and end the privatisation scan, no intention to unpick the Tories’ racist anti-immigration policies, and no intention to end the punitive nature of the welfare state. Having been elected on a mandate of “change,” Labour has offered little material benefit to the vast majority of the population, and so is undergoing Pasokification at an astonishingly rapid pace.

This has left people crying out for something different. For many months, Reform and Nigel Farage have been the primary beneficiaries of this. But as we have seen across Europe since the financial crash, radical left parties that have offered an alternative which does seek to transform society so it works for the many, rather than the few, can also blossom in this context — and it is this space that the Greens are now clearly occupying.

Second, we need to look at “Your Party.” Even the most die-hard supporters of the new outfit led by Corbyn and Zarah Sultana must recognise that its birth has been chaotic at best and catastrophic at worst. What would have been a natural left-of-Labour vehicle that millions have people could have thrown themselves behind has shown itself so far to be messy, disorganised and plagued with infighting.

As a result, many people on the activist left have drawn a clear conclusion. Why would we hang around to see whether they get their act together when there is already a party with a large membership, increasingly powerful infrastructure and a leader that is articulating a left-populist vision for the country we can get behind? Many of them have already joined the Greens, and if current trends continue, it seems that many more will do so too. The vacuum left by “Your Party” thus far being a damp squib has played a role in driving the surge in Green membership.

Third, and finally, we have to look to the Green Party’s membership — current and historic. Ultimately, while the summer’s leadership election was partly about politics and partly about policy, it was mostly about presentation. That’s because the Green Party — steeped in the tradition of the radical, decentralised social movements that birthed it — is a deeply democratic outfit. Its policy book — vast and sprawling — is debated and decided in full by the rank and file members.

It is Green Party members who have put together its political programme — a programme of bringing all public services into public ownership, substantially increasing the minimum wage, moving towards a four-day working week, mass public investment to address the climate emergency, redistributing wealth and power across the country, and so on and so on. Polanski is certainly an effective advocate of all these things, but he is only able to advocate for them because members have told him to.

There is considerable evidence that the party’s membership is increasingly keen to make this programme yet more radical. In the last year, Greens Organise — a new socialist tendency within the Green Party — has been pushing to orient the Greens towards a form of Green class politics. At the party’s most recent conference, members overwhelmingly agreed a raft of new policies which both go further than the Greens have gone before and speak to the mood of a significant section of the public. A radical housing policy which seeks to remove the need for private landlords through a series of measures, including mass council-house building, is one. Calling for the Israeli Defence Forces to be proscribed as a terrorist organisation is another.

At that conference, it became clear that the Greens have big electoral ambitions and a membership that is fired up and ready to make them a reality. The party is serious about winning its first directly elected mayors next May, and it is serious about getting Greens elected to the Senedd for the first time. What those mayors, what those Senedd members, and indeed what future Green MPs do in office will in large part be determined by the party’s members. Given the surging support for the Green Party in our current moment, socialists have a unique opportunity to shape not just what kind of politics it advocates, but also what kind of politics it implements in various levels of government.

Regular Morning Star readers with long memories will recall that this isn’t the first time I’ve written about the prospect of the Greens being the vehicle for the left and how the next set of elections could be the great leap forward to take the party to the next level. In previous years, those leaps did take place, but they were on a small scale.

This time it feels different. This time, we’re no longer talking about the Greens winning control of one or two councils or coming second in a handful of mayoral elections. This time, we’re talking about a party with a socialist political programme securing mass public support and building towards winning dozens of MPs at the next election. This time, we’re talking about a fundamental shift not just on the left, but in British politics as a whole. And this time, the stakes are much higher — with the disintegration of both the Tories and Labour, the next election could very well be a battle between Farage and Polanski. It’s socialism or barbarism.