The latest poll from More in Common shows support for the Green Party falling by three points to 10%. BMG, Ipsos and JL Partners show similarly sharp declines. While this isn’t supported by every pollster, averages produced by Electoral Calculus and Election Maps UK show a distinct downturn in Green support.

In the run-up to the local elections last month, the party and its leader Zack Polanski were the subject of a run of negative news stories. That, however, did not stop the Greens from making a net gain of 441 councilors and taking control of five councils, including three London boroughs. If the air is now leaking from the Green balloon, we need to look for something that’s happened since the local elections. And in that regard there’s a very obvious culprit: the upcoming Makerfield by-election.

The Green Party campaign there got off to a bad start when its first candidate, just hours after being announced, withdrew from the contest over social media posts in which he labeled arson attacks on ambulances in London a “false flag” operation. Then there was a spectacularly unhelpful intervention from former Green leader Caroline Lucas, who urged her party to stand aside to give Andy Burnham a clear run against Reform UK.

Of course, the Greens can’t always win the “progressive primary” — that is, the informal competition to be recognized as the “Stop Reform” party. This worked for them in Gorton and Denton, but elsewhere tactical voting has favored other Left-of-center parties. Makerfield, however, poses a much bigger danger: marginalization not just in one constituency, but almost all of them.

It’s a mistake to regard Polanski as the Nigel Farage of the Left. Farage first became Ukip leader in 2006 and has 20 years of hard slog behind him. Polanski hasn’t even had one year as a party leader, and the rise of the Greens to major-party status has been astonishingly rapid. On the principle of easy come, easy go, their gains are vulnerable to the next progressive-sounding candidate to come along. Right now, that’s Burnham.

The Mayor of Greater Manchester has sold himself to his party as a radical. He’s dangled the prospect of taking key assets, such as the water industry, back into public ownership and loosening the constraints of the international money markets on Government action. Inevitably, he’s already had to backtrack on some of those hints. On immigration, he’s had to tack to the Right to placate the culturally conservative Makerfield electorate. But that won’t matter if Burnham beats Reform in one of its target seats. He’d be the new hope for the Left, and Polanski would be yesterday’s news. In those circumstances, expect further Green losses to Labour.

It wouldn’t be the first time that the Green position has deflated. At the 2015 general election, the party won a then-record 3.8% of the vote. But, just two years later, its support more than halved as Left-wing voters flocked to Jeremy Corbyn’s banner. One might therefore conclude that the Green vote is vulnerable, but a distinction should be drawn between the party’s short-term and long-term prospects.

The Green advantage among younger voters — women in particular — is overwhelming. Crucially, the factors driving younger voters toward the populist Left are hardwired into the economic status quo: spiraling student debt, worsening job prospects, and a housing market designed to bleed them dry to the benefit of landlords. Without a rescue plan for members of this lost generation, the economic scarring effects will remain with them as they get older — and thus so will their resentment against the status quo.

The question, then, is not whether a growing proportion of the electorate will vote for anti-system parties, but why on Earth wouldn’t they? Of course, it may be that Burnham has a grand plan to change these fundamentals and kill off the Greens for good, but that’s pretty hard to believe.

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Peter Franklin is Associate Editor of UnHerd. He was previously a policy advisor and speechwriter on environmental and social issues.

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