These are tough times for the Green Party. It’s sliding in the polls, Zack Polanski lost in the Holborn and St Pancras by-election, Andy Burnham has ruled out an electoral pact, and on Thursday Labour called on Green councilors to disavow the Zionism is Racism motion passed at the party’s conference. Beneath all this, a civil war is breaking out between the current leadership and Caroline Lucas, who represents the party’s old guard.

Lucas is a two-time former leader, the first ever Green MP and the person who’s done more than anyone else to bring the party into the mainstream. So when she criticized the Zionism is Racism motion — and Polanski’s poor leadership on the issue — she was heard.

The controversy is symptomatic of a deeper split between the environmentally-focused “heritage Greens” and the new alliance of secular Leftists and Muslim radicals who have rather more to say about Palestine than pollution. It was this latter group that got Polanski elected leader last year.

Lucas has emphatically denied reports that she and her allies are now trying to oust Polanski. But according to WhatsApp messages seen by the Telegraph, a group of Green activists is out to get her. The current leadership would be well advised to stop that particular witch hunt, but for her part Lucas needs to accept that the heritage Greens have permanently lost control.

There’s no point pretending that the conference vote on the Zionism is Racism motion was unrepresentative of the party as it is now. According to polling for Opinium, 56% of all Green Party voters agree with the anti-Zionist motion, 31% are undecided and just 13% opposed. That stands in contrast to the public as a whole, where the split is 16% in favor, 49% undecided, and 35% against. Every other party’s voters, including Labour’s, are more against than for. So, this isn’t just another issue for the contemporary Green Party — it is the defining issue.

Of course, the same was true of the Corbynite faction of the Labour Party, and look what happened to them. The Greens, however, lack the top-down power structures that would allow a sane leadership to clean house. It’s no wonder that so many exiled Corbynites chose to make the Green Party their new home. Foolishly, the heritage Greens let them in.

So the question that Lucas and others must ask themselves is whether they can live with what their party has become. They might hope that the party’s current decline in the polls will lead to Polanski’s fall when his position comes up for re-election next year. But there’s no guarantee that his replacement won’t be even further removed from the Green Party’s roots.

As the largest Left-of-Labour party, the Greens are still well positioned to benefit from a bursting of the Burnham bubble, which could be caused by a financial crisis that forces the Government to cut spending, or a foreign policy crisis which leads to a military response. The hard Left isn’t going to let go of this convenient vehicle for its ambitions.

So what should the heritage Greens do now? The answer is simple: leave and found a new party truer to the original cause. In France, Germany and elsewhere in Europe, the main Green party and main party of the hard-Left are separate entities. It would, of course, be galling to leave behind an institution that one has nurtured over decades to a bunch of usurpers. But, then again, that is the cost of open borders.

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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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