“First they ignore you,” warned trade union organiser Nicholas Klein over a century ago at a conference of garment workers in Baltimore, Maryland. “Then they ridicule you. And then they attack you and want to burn you. Then they build monuments to you.”
Having been largely ignored for most of the last decade, with the election of ‘eco-populist’ Zack Polanski last year the Green Party advanced to the ‘ridicule’ phase of Klein’s formulation; until recently most of the attacks against him were flippant, focusing on
an article published over a decade ago while he was working as a therapist, in which it was reported that he offered a service to enlarge women’s breasts using hypnotherapy.
But in recent weeks, the media’s attacks on Polanski began to shift in tenor and tone. It is hardly surprising; the party poses an increasingly credible threat to a settlement carefully built by the UK’s 1% – and protected by the likes of Labour, the Conservatives and now Reform – in which ordinary families struggle to get by as the profits from their labour flow ever upwards into the coffers of the wealthy.
The Green Party’s fifth and newest MP, Hannah Spencer, spoke of just that in the early hours of this morning after winning the Gorton and Denton seat from Labour at a by-election. She will now enter Westminster as Parliament’s only plumber/plasterer, a stunning victory that has already been described as a “watershed moment in British politics” and “the death knell for Labour’s status as the pre-eminent party of the left”.
“Talk to anyone here and they will tell you,” said Spencer. “[Talk to] the people who work hard but can’t put food on the table, can’t get their kids school uniforms, can’t put their heating on. Can’t live off the pension they’ve worked hard to save for. Can’t even begin to dream about ever having a holiday, ever. Because life has changed. Instead of working for a nice life, we’re working to line the pockets of billionaires. We are being bled dry, and I don’t think it’s extreme or radical to think working hard should get you a nice life.”
While Spencer was on stage in Greater Manchester, I was speaking to a Green Party staffer about the victory and what comes next. Like so many on the British left, they came of age as an activist in the Jeremy Corbyn years of the late 2010s, and learned some hard lessons in the process.
After weeks of relentless campaigning, the Greens’ victory has more than earned the party’s activists a bit of optimism. But there is an awareness, too, of the battles to come. “It really does feel like 2017, anything feels possible. Which means that just like in 2017, the attacks are going to get 10x more nasty, dishonest and relentless,” they said.
This could be seen even before the party secured victory in Gorton and Denton. Writing in the Daily Mail the day before polls opened, columnist Sarah Vine described Polanski as “the biggest creep in British politics”.
Vine then took to X to compare the only Jewish leader of a major political party in this country to Adolf Hitler, sharing one of Polanski’s posts about the Israeli genocide in Gaza with the comment: “I always wondered to myself how Hitler managed to persuade the German people to turn against the Jews. If you tell enough lies and spread enough poison, eventually people will start believing them. Hateful, divisive little man.”
“Polanski’s Green cult is luring Britain’s youth,” screeched the Telegraph on polling day. A few days earlier, the same publication suggested the Green leader had “exposed the despicable cruelty of his party” after he suggested that whether or not he supported a motion on whether Zionism is a form of racism, which was put forward by some of the party’s grassroots activists for debate at its spring conference, would depend on the definition of Zionism.
On the ground as well as in the papers and on the airwaves, this was a campaign wrought with dirty tricks. But the racist briefings and fake tactical voting sites reportedly deployed by Labour in Manchester will soon look very tame compared to what the political establishment will throw at the Green Party now that it has proven itself a viable challenger to the status quo.
We have seen this playbook before. When he was first elected to lead Labour in 2015, the British press cast Corbyn as a largely benign eccentric, pottering around in his allotment, espousing an outdated politics. He could safely be ignored, so the thinking went, once he had been played out for a few laughs.
It was only later, after his party almost won power in 2017 on an auti-austerity, pro-nationalisation platform, that the establishment changed tack entirely. It attacked Corbyn with more venom than perhaps any single figure in British political history. It sought to burn him, and succeeded. It is a testament to how effectively the British left was brought down that now, a single by-election victory almost a decade later, feels like its most significant moment since. But a victory is a victory is a victory, and this one offers hope.
Like Corbyn’s Labour before it, Polanski’s Green Party says they want to build a politics that shifts the balance of power back toward the majority and restores for the British people a settlement that, at the very least, means that working hard, in whatever form that takes, does afford a good life.
If any cause in politics is worth fighting for, it is surely this one, and the forces arrayed against them by the corporate, political and media elite will certainly provide a fight. Victory, much less any monument to it, is far from assured. But in bloodying the noses of the Labour government and Nigel Farage’s Reform in a single night, the Greens have struck a good first blow.
