And then there’s Camden Town, one of the most impenetrably weird neighborhoods in London, with its inequality, its destructive conflagrations, its degrading tourism, its faltering but proud cultural legacy and its obscene threats. I once saw a preacher tussle with a legless man in a wheelchair outside the entrance to the Northern Line. 

To succeed here, a politician must recognize the paradoxes of the constituency, and understand how the area has changed and warped over the years. “Holborn and St Pancras,” wrote the academic Rob Ford recently, “is distinctive on practically every demographic indicator available.” It is full of university students, private renters, young professionals, and residents born abroad.

Did the former prime minister understand these constituents? Keir Starmer held his seat here for 10 years, yet many are glad he has gone. “I was pleased to see the back of the despair, of the hopelessness,” says Millie, a 26-year-old Labour canvasser. “It was sort of like a bad breakup… ‘It’s not you, it’s us’…. You felt bad when it happened, but the whole time you wanted him to leave.”

As a result of Starmer dumping his voters, the people of Holborn and St Pancras find themselves in the middle of a political hinge-point. Today, in their by-election, they get to choose whether Andy Burnham will cement his “new manager bounce” via his candidate, Sagal Abdi-Wali, a former child refugee from Somalia. Or whether Zack Polanski and the Greens can claw back relevance, having snookered themselves after pushing the Labour party Leftwards. George Galloway is supposedly campaigning here, too, for his Workers Party of Great Britain — if not for the constituents. Though nobody knows where he is. Last I checked, he was “in exile” in South Africa. 

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Many people I meet echo Millie. They were annoyed at Starmer for not being present, for undermining Jeremy Corbyn — say what you want about Corbyn, the people half a mile to the west in Islington North have a lasting affection for him — and for abandoning Gaza to unrestrained Israeli aggression. Starmer’s gone now, gone back to his favorite pub in Kentish Town, but some of these issues persist. 

The Holy Land has never been far away in this campaign, or from its streets. And opinions are held passionately on both sides. Both the Greens and the Workers Party of Great Britain are leaning heavily on the issue of Gaza in their literature. Furthermore, there are just over 2,000 Jewish people living in the constituency, according to the 2021 census. They hold various, often competing, views pertaining to Israel and Palestine.

Polanski, himself a Jew, was roundly bollocked at a recent Jewish community hustings in Holborn. He told the room: “Many genocide scholars around the world recognize [the Gaza war] as a genocide and calling it that is not antisemitic.” The room loudly disagreed. But Polanski continued: “In the Jewish community we need to come together to recognize that when we call that antisemitic we are making ourselves, as Jewish people, less safe.” After he finished speaking, amid boos, a woman in the crowd turned to her neighbor and whispered, “And he calls himself a Jew?”

The Green stance on Israel eclipsed their party conference at the weekend, where the membership passed a motion declaring Zionism to be racist. That this is now party policy has angered many, including the chair of Jewish Greens, Vivien Lichtenstein, who is publicly considering leaving the party, and the UK chair of Amnesty International, who has now left.

“I don’t think it’s helpful,” Lichtenstein told the BBC, “and it doesn’t make any difference whatsoever to Palestinians in Gaza who have suffered devastation, orphans left behind, it doesn’t make any difference to Palestinians in the West Bank who are currently suffering, are currently being attacked and killed.” Polanski was conveniently absent for the vote. But his name is inextricably linked to it. 

In a boutique shop in Primrose Hill, I speak to a shopkeeper who makes her feelings clear. “He’s what we call a kapo,” she tells me, describing Polanski. She says she’s experienced antisemitic harassment before, “I’ve had six, six or seven six-foot men circling me and calling me a baby killer.” After that, the conversation pivots to her disdain for the UK immigration system. “I would only vote for [somebody] that actually preferred us to all these inbreds that are coming in… and doesn’t put an alien in a hotel.” She’s planning on voting for Reform. She gets her news from Instagram. 

Given the tenor of the national debate, perhaps it’s not surprising that the canvassers here are keener to talk about housing policy. It’s a terrain that demands excellent local knowledge. But Polanski is not a local and locals can tell. Faduma, 31, is the sort of voter the Greens would traditionally be looking to attract — a young, liberal-minded Muslim woman, moved by the suffering of Gaza, sympathetic to Corbyn and deeply enmeshed with the community via her work at a youth center on Crowndale Road. 

“He’s not from the borough,” Faduma says of the Green Party leader, “I think he’s a great politician, and his promises sound fantastic. But how much is he going to deliver for us if he does win? [He doesn’t] know the community’s needs.” Faduma loves it here. “The second I leave Camden,” she says, “I can feel it.” Likewise, Faduma implicitly knows that Abdi-Wali is a Camden girl. “She understands what’s going on. She knows what’s happening with her constituency.” 

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Few people know the area and its history in such granular detail as Esther Leslie, a professor of political aesthetics and the co-director of the People’s Museum in Somers Town. Leslie is planning to vote Green. “I wouldn’t normally. I’m more of a revolutionary, if one can still say that. [I’m] not that interested in elections… I don’t think [they’ve] got much of a chance, really. I think Labour will walk it.” 

Her tiny museum is only a single room packed with information about local, countercultural legacies and potted histories, detailing, among other things, how the area was transformed in the Twenties by the Magdalen Mission and Britain’s first female surveyor. Together, they established St Pancras Housing Improvement Society and began clearing the slum tenements to make way for new flats, culminating in a ceremonial bonfire during which residents set fire to effigies of cockroaches, rats, bedbugs and fleas. 

Much of the progress made by schemes like this, seems, in Leslie’s view, to be falling away. “The fantastic housing that this [museum] was set up to honor has been allowed to decay… There’s overcrowding, there’s mold, or there’s just vacant buildings that sit empty for years.” According to the Camden New Journal, there were 356 void council properties in the borough; 43 of these were in Camden Town, “including 13 two-bedroom flats, eight three-bedroom flats and three four-bedroom flats standing empty”. It was recently reported by the North West Londoner that “Camden has recorded a 23% increase in rough sleepers in the last year, the biggest proportional rise of any London borough”. 

At the same time, hugely expensive development schemes are rising across the constituency’s four square miles. “The British Library is building this massive commercial tower,” Leslie says, “and underneath it, they’re digging out Crossrail Two Station to link Euston and St Pancras, even though that project has been stopped, but they have to do it in case it comes on-stream again. All of that really impacts people’s lives here.” 

But in some ways, the development has improved the area. It’s certainly made it safer. Walk along the now-pristine dock towards Camden Road, you’re far less likely to get mugged or intimidated or hassled. The water looks nice too: fewer sunken shopping carts. But it has also jettisoned much of the area’s unique character in favor of new-build architectural slop. Camden’s newly-modernized Stables Market appears to have lost something vital, a loss that has substituted sordidness for bland marketability. A few months ago I set out to buy a novelty bong shaped like a gas mask for a friend’s birthday, but couldn’t find one, and felt quietly bereaved.

In the lobby of Camden Goods Yard, a massive, multi-million-pound block of flats is being erected by Berkeley Group. In 2025 the developer told planning inspectors it would “mothball” the site if its appeal to cut the amount of affordable housing in the scheme was unsuccessful. Peering out across the lobby is a portrait of Amy Winehouse. What might she feel about her image being reconstituted as gaudy art for shareholders to barely notice as they carry on shafting the locals over affordable units? Hell, I wonder what Baudrillard would think. 

Down the grotty high street from these £2 million flats is Saint Martin’s Gardens. This park, flecked with gravestones from a previous incarnation as a cemetery, provided the backdrop to John Healy’s unflinching memoir of his time spent homeless among the winos of Camden in the Sixties. “I called it the Grass Arena,” Healy told The Observer, “because, in the parks where the winos congregated, you could never show any weakness.” People still drink there today. On a bench, two young men, Ricky and Ali, are enjoying a lunchtime quarter-bottle of Smirnoff mixed with Sprite, along with a packet of cigarettes. Both grew up here. Both distrust politicians generally but like Andy Burnham. “He seems alright,” Ali says. If they could change one thing about the area, I ask them, what would it be? Ali says housing, but Ricky worries about the empty schools. 

As the sun sinks onto Harlesden and Wembley, I find a gaggle of Green canvassers. Horsia, 66, has dedicated her evening to campaigning for the Greens, even though she wouldn’t vote for them in a general election. “I don’t think he’s Prime Minister material”, she says of Polanski. “He doesn’t always speak in a way that that to me appears to recognize the broad audience that he needs to cultivate and bring along with him.” Horsia is a scientist and is profoundly concerned by the climate crisis. She wants an environmental “purist” in Parliament and thinks Polanski could reliably “back the right propositions”. This is interesting, as Polanski has mostly shrunk away from campaigning on environmental issues in favor of the economic and geopolitical. “He needs to get back on it,” she says, “and I’ll be a real mosquito in his ear if he doesn’t.” 

Before I can ask more, I’m chased off by a press officer with a smile that reads “Go fuck yourself”. This kind of frantic comms control is unusual for the Greens — but they’ve come a long way since 2023, when the party was struggling to maintain relevance and still had two leaders. The party conference that year felt like a school reunion; lots of friendly faces remembering each other from somewhere or other. The upstart Polanski was very on-message when I met him at that conference. But it was hard to tell whether he truly meant any of it, or whether the former actor had simply learned his lines. After all, just five years previously, he had been a vociferous Liberal Democrat. 

So far, Polanski’s stagecraft has served him well. And actors can go a long way in politics: think of Zelensky, Reagan, and Blair. But sticking to the script isn’t always enough, particularly if the script-writing process is member-led and increasingly risk-tolerant. Moreover, the script the members come back with may not care for the people here. They may barely factor in. 

Whatever Polanski’s political lifespan, this fragment of north London will outlast him. In many ways it embodies a vital problem of modern politics, that the everyday is fracturing like a broken mirror. The fragments of Camden and Kentish Town and Holborn and Primrose Hill and Tufnell Park and Somers Town and King’s Cross are all extremely sharp. Sharp enough to cut yourself on if you grasp them crudely. 

The word Zion occurs more than a hundred times in the Hebrew scriptures. In 587 BC, the Babylonians conquered the land of Judah and expelled its people; the psalmist describes their despondency and their yearning for a return home. “By the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept when we remembered Zion.” This lament is a recurrent feature of the Hebrew scriptures. And later, after the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans in 70 AD, the same desire for a return home, to Zion, was the defining feature of what came to be called Judaism. Zionism was not invented in 1895. It is as old as the psalmist, even older.

But the arrival of Christianity did something very particular to our understanding of all religions and has distorted the way we understand words such as Judaism and Zionism. For Christianity, and especially protestant Christianity, religion is essentially a system of belief. So successful has this idea become that it is often impossible for people to understand that a religion can be anything other than a system of belief. Yet to be Jewish is not just about what you believe, it is also about where you come from, where many yearn to return to, who your mother is, what practices you have. For the vast majority of Jews, then, Zionism is not simply a political philosophy that was invented in the years before the First World War. It is a way of life that is fundamentally constitutive of what it is to be Jewish.

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Which is why, in passing a motion that “Zionism is Racism”, the Green Party has done something profoundly wicked. Those who scream “from the river to the sea” — though they probably couldn’t tell you the name of either the river or the sea — have decided to describe the safety that many Jews seek in Israel as a hatred. To condemn Zionism is to seek the destruction of Israel and open Jews up to a danger that has followed them around since forever.

This idea that Zionism is a racist and colonialist enterprise is absurd. The yearning for Zion long predates the Holocaust, but the murder of six million Jews by a European civilization gave that yearning a new urgency. And yes, there were Jews who, before the Second World War, believed that they could make a safe home for themselves in Europe, fearing that Herzl’s new political version of Zionism would destabilize the assimilation into that society they had done so much to build.

My great-grandfather’s brother, Samuel Friedeberg, ran the Princes Road Synagogue in Liverpool. In 1917, his community debated Herzl’s proposal, many worrying that the foundation of a Jewish state would “prejudicially affect the position of such Jews as are members of the British nation”. The motion was defeated 39 votes to 30. The result was a reflection of how safe many well-to-do Jews had come to feel in England, especially during the reign of Queen Victoria. As the then Chief Rabbi of the British Empire, Hermann Adler, put it in 1898: “Our faith teaches us to seek the welfare of the nations under whose protection we dwell, to take part in their national efforts and to work for their success, and to wait silently for the day when the prophets will be fulfilled.”

Adler’s message to Herzl was that he shouldn’t rock the boat. Yet after the Second World War, Jews could no longer count on being protected by European nations. The “nations under whose protection we dwell” no longer protected them, indeed turned against them with diabolical and murderous consequences. Zionism wasn’t revived as a political reality by Herzl; it was revived by the screams of six million souls murdered in Europe. That was real genocide. A Jewish homeland could no longer remain a yearning.

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The state of Israel was founded on 14 May 1948, under the auspices of the United Nations. But Israelis were left fighting for their lives the very next day, for that was when the armies of neighboring Arab nations invaded. And the Israelis have been fighting for their lives ever since, against the Palestine Liberation Organization, against Hamas, and now against a ridiculous cohort of student politicians who like to cosplay as radicals by draping themselves in Palestinian colors and shouting empty words about colonialism — none of which will help the Palestinians.

What might help the Palestinians is a two-state solution, the land divided fairly between Palestinians and Israelis, giving both the right to self-determination. And, to be clear, to believe in a two-state solution is also to be a Zionist, because it is also to allow the Jews a safe space in their ancestral homeland. Zionism isn’t a movement owned by Jewish settlers who want to push Arabs off their land and pull up their olive trees. It also represents the desire of Jews not to be murdered — by Cossacks, by Nazis, by Hamas. A one-state solution would expose them to precisely the kind of murderous reality from which they have long been seeking to escape. If you think I’m being dramatic, recall what happened on 7 October 2023.

I am flying back to Israel later this month with my family so that my wife can add her vote to those seeking to get rid of the wretched Benjamin Netanyahu.She still cares deeply for her home, because human beings are creatures of place, called to care for our places, be it Judah or Jarrow. When Chaim Weizmann was asked by a British politician why the Jewish people insisted on safety in Palestine, rather than someone more convenient, he replied: “That is like asking you why you drove 20 miles to visit your mother last Sunday when there are so many old ladies living in your street.” Place matters. In the Hebrew scriptures, we are creatures of place, called to love and care for our little plot of land, just as Wendell Berry loved and cared for his little bit of Kentucky. This is the real philosophy the Greens should be defending, the fact that we are creatures of the earth. But this means nothing to our current generation of Greens, who are now a dark perversion of what that party was born to defend: our rootedness; our love of place. 

On 10 November 1975, under pressure from heavy KGB propaganda, the United Nations adopted resolution 3379 that “Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination”. Later that day, the Belfast born Israeli Ambassador, Chaim Herzog, stood up and contemptuously ripped the resolution in half. “For us, the Jewish people, this resolution based on hatred, falsehood and arrogance, is devoid of any moral or legal value. For us, the Jewish people, this is no more than a piece of paper and we shall treat it as such.” Sixteen years later, the resolution was revoked.

Today, the accusation Herzog tore apart has returned, dressed in the language of a new generation of radicals. So stuff the Greens, their vacant student posturing, and their cosplaying as Hamas terrorists from the safety of Brighton. Because Zionism is not racism: at its heart is something far older even than the state of Israel. And because today that desire to be safe from the dangerous racism of others has become urgent once again — including, now, from the Greens themselves.

This weekend, the Greens too will host their own conference, a scaled back affair in Brighton. Yet as Polanski’s resolute campaigning suggests, it’s the Holborn and St Pancras by-election, now less than a week away, that truly matters. That shouldn’t surprise anyone, not least because, this year, the great British by-election has re-shaped Westminster. Holborn is the fourth, and all but one, when Nigel Farage triumphed in Clacton against a man dressed as a bin, have been of national importance.

First came Hannah Spencer’s triumph in Gorton and Denton, the only by-election win in the Green Party’s history. Little more than two months later came a similarly strong performance in local elections, with success in London sealing Keir Starmer’s fate. Over the weekend that followed, Polanski emerged as a genuinely national figure, proudly asserting that two-party politics was “dead and buried”.

And so, in June, came Makerfield. More than simply deciding that constituency’s next MP, it was clear from the outset that it would also provide a launchpad for Andy Burnham’s ambitions: first into Parliament and then into Downing Street. Those vacillating members of Labour’s NEC, who had previously blocked the former health secretary from standing in Gorton, now changed tack, their endorsement underscoring how far, and how fast, their party had fallen.

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The Green ascent thus changed the fortunes of both themselves and Labour. Now controlling several London boroughs, a party which boasted a single MP before 2024 had triggered an internal revolution within Government. Yet a cruel irony to those accomplishments would inevitably follow. Polanski’s rise made Labour pursue otherwise unthinkably high-risk measures — measures which now appear to be paying off. No longer facing a moleish bureaucrat for control of the Left, Polanski’s struggle is simply to remain relevant.

Labour are confident of a win in Holborn and St Pancras, and the bookmakers have their candidate, Sagal Abdi-Wali, as the overwhelming favorite. And, to an extent, this makes sense. Camden Labour performed relatively well in May’s local elections, with the Greens failing to break through here as they did in less prosperous places like Harringey, Lambeth and Hackney. Polanski also doesn’t live in the constituency — which counts more than ever in Britain’s hyper-localized politics — as Reform found to their detriment with Matt Goodwin in Gorton and Denton.

Even so, having been to the seat, and spoken to campaigners and voters alike, Labour’s self-assurance does surprise me. As a campaigner, Abdi-Wali seems cagey and lightweight, with Camden Labour operating a “ming vase” strategy lacking the energy that infused the party’s Makerfield victory. Where Burnham was eager to talk to just about anyone in Wigan — from aging Lexiteers to people saying he was complicit in the grooming gangs scandal — Labour in Starmer’s old patch are protective and insular.

And while Burnham is pledging to “end neoliberalism,” Camden Labour — which controls the council, holds the mayoralty and, for now, represents both the borough’s parliamentary constituencies — is going full steam ahead. Among other things, the group is presently selling off a local recycling site, replacing it with one half the size. Their Community Investment Program, meanwhile, is regarded by critics as a giveaway to private developers. Public services, from street cleaning to  waste management, are all outsourced too, with some contracts renewed as recently as last year. Labour’s record at a local level is very much at odds with the rhetoric of its new leader.

Yet if Polanski is fighting hard against a politically exposed opponent — putting in the hard yards to win every vote he can — it’s also clear that his party has no real national message. From what I understand, the Green leader has been submerged listening to the concerns of local residents, from LTNs to parking. But that leaves little space for connecting those street-level worries to a broader set of principles, with Polanski more often reacting to the news cycle than defining it.  A case in point was his defense of the triple lock following Burnham’s speech on Tuesday, with the Green leader asking why Labour was “going after pensioners”. That might make sense — had the Greens themselves not pledged to end the triple lock at the last general election. Hardly Burnham’s conference-hall plea for hope through honesty.

Why, at their zenith, did the Greens take their foot off the pedal? There are many plausible answers, not least that some within the party view their role as being little more than a pressure group pushing Labour left. And so, with Starmer gone, some concluded it was mission accomplished. Then there’s the fact that building an organization in an age of frantic digital activism feels harder than ever, with ideological zeal on social media often masking lace-thin commitments off it.

Perhaps most importantly, though, the party’s core values remain unclear. The Green movement is stronger than ever: people, after all, are far more interested in the work of Friends of the Earth than the Fabian Society. So where were the Green politicians making vertical videos in Wisley this summer, when the Surrey village saw no rain for two months? Or when New Forest businesses were slammed after wildfires deprived them of peak-season tourist trade? Why, when the A31 was closed for almost a fortnight as a result of the flames, wasn’t the party making the case for temporary free train travel as an emergency response? In their defense, the Green leadership might say they were knackered after an extraordinary few months. That carries more than a grain of truth: rapid growth is often exhausting for insurgents. But national politics is utterly relentless, and things always move on. More reason, then, to focus on building an effective organization that transcends the gravitas and personal pull of any single individual.

Amid such frustrations, the Green conference in Brighton feels like a lost opportunity. It could have provided the party with a moment to reflect on a remarkable year, and debate their policy platform moving forward — especially in the very different context of a Burnham premiership. Instead, the party is offering refunds to members who’d paid to attend, but who now want to canvas in London. Holborn and St Pancras matters, of course, and the party is more competitive than many realize, but that also underscores a tendency of the radical Left towards “actionism”: where thinking, debate and theory counts for less than it should. Collective deliberation, and a vibrant intellectual culture, especially offline, are the lifeblood of any party seeking to transform society.

Not that it’s all bad for Polanski and the Greens. For even if it seems unlikely he’ll triumph in Holborn, he could come a close second — something which might end up benefiting both him and Burnham. The former never meaningfully expected to win, after all, and he’ll have built a formidable operation for when he stands (and likely wins) in one of the Hackney seats at the next general election. Making inroads into Labour’s majority, at the very moment that the Government is enjoying a honeymoon with a new leader, would remain an impressive accomplishment, whatever Polanski’s detractors might spin next Friday. As for Burnham, a narrow margin of victory might provide a valuable impetus to change his own party. The remnants of Starmerism would need to be dealt with.

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Yet whatever the tactical result next Thursday, that still leaves the Greens in the same strategic quandary. Are they building an organization, and a movement of their own —  defined by thick offline ties, a vivid intellectual and social life, and local experiments in politics — or are they simply a response, or indeed a symptom, to a collapse in two-party politics? The same question can be posed of Reform, of course, but then it’s rather easier to avoid existential angst when you’re receiving tens of millions of pounds in donations.

For all the enmity between Polanski and Farage it’s clear that, until now, both men thrived in part because they weren’t the big two — with effective strategy often requiring little more than opposition to a moribund “uniparty”. But what happens when one. half of that uniparty, Labour, explicitly admits their complicity in decades of failure, and openly says the country has been on the wrong path “for a long time”? Suddenly, being purely antagonistic no longer works, and can even start to resemble puerility. That the Conservatives won’t do something similar, and admit their own fiascos on austerity, migration and Europe, should perhaps provide succor to Farage and Zia Yusuf.

What, then, should the Greens do? At a national level, they need to determine where they are distinct from Labour, and craft their message and policies accordingly. Clearly a large part of the answer involves climate change. That, after all, remains the basis for a potentially vast coalition: from the Countryfile viewers in the shires to urban graduates who are more likely to watch Gary Stevenson. It’s worth remembering, too, that while the Greens, Reform and Labour all have memberships of less than 300,000, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds boasts over a million. The National Trust, Europe’s largest conservation charity, has a membership five times that.

Secondly, the Greens need to decisively become the party of struggling urbanites. But this means focusing on problems like fly-tipping and quality of life as much as the housing crisis or other immediately Left-coded issues. If Auckland can build a new metro, in a decade no less, why can’t the likes of Leeds and Bristol? Solving problems like that, from supply chain constraints to planning oversight, should be the party’s bread and butter. Britain’s cities are appallingly managed, and the Greens should relentlessly seek to provide answers, even when those aren’t especially ideological. To put it another way, the Greens should be the party most committed to making Britain a more pleasant place to live: advocates for lapwings, but public lidos too. For that to happen, though, Polanski’s team will need to dump the reflexive negativity — instead linking values to policies that forge a national movement, all while being open about the threats and opportunities of a genuine green transition. Yes, some risks will be involved, and yes, any endeavor on such a scale will include mistakes.

There’s another, easier option available to the Greens as well: wait. Wait for Burnham’s honeymoon to end. Wait for the Labour in-fighting to return, as the party’s perennially toxic Right attempts to take back control. That will inevitably happen — not least because it is the Labour Right that still controls the NEC and much of the party bureaucracy. And, when it does, the Greens will be there, an oven-ready alternative for progressive voters. That’s an alluring strategy for Polanski, not least because it isn’t really a strategy at all. “Never interrupt your enemy while he is making a mistake,” Napoleon reputedly said. Fair enough: but, more often than not, that’s a line deployed by people who are simply unsure of what to do. Like the Prime Minister says, real hope comes through honesty. In these fractured times, that’s a line everyone in politics can learn from.

Even if it is about to rain, the damage has been done — with Britain’s arable harvest set to fall to a record low. No wonder the country’s most famous farmer, Jeremy Clarkson, has changed his mind on climate change. Wildfires offer a visceral intensity that other expressions of extreme weather do not. A hosepipe ban might be frustrating, but it isn’t potentially fatal (except for your much-loved begonias). In the South, an ongoing blaze in the New Forest has hammered local businesses, killed a great many ground-nesting birds, and is set to shut down the A31 for a fortnight. That’d kill businesses across the south if it extended to the bank holiday. 

And while that fire was largely unnoticed by the rest of the country, what really grabbed people’s attention was the blaze that engulfed whole streets in Stourbridge, razing almost 40 homes. Well, that and the national emergency alert sent to millions of phones warning of a “very high risk of wildfires nationally”. A major fire, which could kill many people, looked entirely plausible. Contributing to that heightened sense of panic was the fact that that two separate trains — both in the south of England — were derailed, with 20 people injured in one. While neither incident is yet to be attributed to the weather, high temperatures seem the most likely explanation. 

Water shortages, fires, critical infrastructure starting to buckle: it’s like a checklist for the early stages of climate-induced breakdown. Gradually, and then all at once, it has become clear we aren’t prepared for the world now coming into view. Least of all our politicians.

The politics of climate, for obvious reasons, dovetails with that of energy. In spite of their loathing for one another, deep greens and climate-skeptic capitalists agree on one thing: energy abundance cannot exist in a world without fossil fuels. In the short term, we can’t have both decarbonization while using more energy than ever. Thus, at the same time that Burnham is expected to respond to unprecedented heat and drought, others are saying he must grant licenses to the Jackdaw and Rosebank sites in the North Sea. The electorate wants competing things too: to respond to climate change — a recent YouGov poll showed 74% of the public care about the issue — but for that response to have a minimal impact on daily life.

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In the long term, energy abundance and decarbonization could go hand-in-hand — certainly if you include nuclear energy and hydrogen — but even an optimist such as myself will acknowledge a rapid transition will inevitably include delays, gaffes and mistakes.

Burnham has to navigate all this, not least because here — perhaps uniquely — Reform and the Greens believe they can snatch votes away from him. Until recently, both Zack Polanski and Nigel Farage have been playing national politics on easy mode, given that with Keir Starmer, they were up against the very archetype of a machine politician. But Burnham is a far more able opponent: a specialist in parasocial relations and political guerrilla warfare. Nonetheless, on climate issues, when it come to the Greens, and on energy and the cost of living with Reform, Labour still appears unsteady. The Prime Minister’s tactics-first approach won’t suffice. 

And the stakes are high. A key pillar of Burnham’s political project is to remove the Greens as a threat and make his party the electoral default for progressives once more. Should he fail, Reform would have a decent chance of winning a Westminster majority — a prospect that, owing to an embarrassing summer for Farage and his party, is currently underpriced. We should not forget that the reason Labour put forward Burnham for the Makerfield seat, where he won his fateful byelection, is that the Greens’ Hannah Spencer had won the Gorton and Denton by-election in February — from which Burnham had been barred from standing. A huge part of our now PM’s pitch was his ability to win back Green voters — a task that became existential for Labour after May’s local elections. 

And yet, however canny Burnham might be — and no matter how far his approval ratings diverge from Polanski’s — further climate-related disruption could see the Greens bounce back. It’s even possible that the party could scale new heights if the issue were to continue to grow in salience: something which does not seem unlikely as another heatwave is predicted for September. While Polanski has successfully expanded his party’s political offer beyond the environment and social justice, championing Gaza and the cost of living crisis, climate remains its bread and butter. At the start of August, after all, Polanski declared that climate change is the biggest threat to the UK since the Second World War. Naturally, his critics responded with rolled eyes and snorts, but even if you don’t think such rhetoric matches the reality, there are people who do. And it’s those people — some of whom voted Labour in 2024 — that Polanski wants to reach. 

Perhaps next time, borrowing from the social media-friendly tactics of the PM, Polanski will make a similar assertion, only in front of a smoldering woodland, or a fire-ravaged Dunwich Heath. And when the floods inevitably come in the winter, perhaps he’ll make like Farage and don a Barbour and Hunter wellies. Climate change — and the attendant increasingly chaotic weather patterns — means the Greens will remain a national political force. That undermines a central plank of Burnhamism: that Labour can re-hegemonize the Left vote. 

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The intensity of this summer’s weather also presents problems for Farage. Certainly, he’ll find it increasingly difficult to present “environmental issues” as a fringe obsession when Britain is literally burning. “This is just the weather now,” is how an electrician I recently spoke to put it, fresh from installing his own air-con. Farage’s outriders know there’s little upside in demonizing such people, even if the puritanical Greens may equally struggle to win over a public increasingly enthusiastic for the joys of air conditioning. 

And as the weather changes, views on climate change will do too. Right now, Farage disputes the science, and Badenoch rejects Net Zero, but there could soon come a time when both feel they have no choice but to explore other emission-reduction policies, from electric cars to nuclear power stations. In any case, don’t be surprised if figures from both Reform and the Tories start to lean into conservation issues: a kind of Countryfile centrism where Reform wax lyrical about painted lady butterflies, and domestic food supply chains, as a stand-in for fossil-fuel emissions. Equally, expect the conversation around North Sea drilling to focus on granting a license to the Jackdaw site, rather than Rosebank, which is larger. Calls to open fracking sites, or re-open coal mines, could also abate. 

Meanwhile, if things keep getting hotter, the next general election could be preceded by a catastrophic weather event. Imagine having to fight for votes with parts of the country beset by flame and drought. 

Burnham is likable, and is perhaps the most normal prime minister in living memory, something discernible from his encyclopedic knowledge of Bristol City football club. His t-shirted, everyman bonhomie makes people feel good about themselves, an invaluable commodity for a politician. But can he also deliver strategic thinking on energy security and climate change? In a moment of great disruption, football-coach charm won’t be sufficient. In the long Nineties, politicians could get by on charisma and effective media management. But that moment has gone, and isn’t coming back. 

Much of the subsequent “post-match analysis” has not understood the magnitude of this shift, so we’ve decided to debunk some of the local elections myths you are going to hear on repeat over the coming week.

Myth #1: Labour should be relieved it wasn’t worse

The loss of 1,200+ seats is, amazingly, being recast as a surprisingly good result for Labour. Our internal estimates of how England would have voted if the whole country were up for election puts Reform on 28% of the vote, followed by the Conservatives on 20%, with Labour on 18%, the Greens on 17%, and the Liberal Democrats on 15%. Compared with the 2024 general election, there is no local authority in England where Labour did not lose ground.

There is, then, a very real possibility that in an England-wide election, Labour would finish behind both Reform and the Conservatives (and possibly the Greens), while being wiped out in Wales and pushed into third place in Scotland. In no reasonable world could a governing party failing to finish in the top two of any of Britain’s constituent countries be seen as anything other than catastrophic.

Myth #2: The Liberal Democrats should be thrilled

While the Liberal Democrats gained some seats in this election, our modeling shows its vote share has barely changed since the 2024 general election. Once the country’s natural third party, it has failed to capitalize on electoral fragmentation to anything like the extent of Reform or the Greens. It may have seemed like the party best-placed to capture Labour voters deserting the government — no longer.

Liberal Democrat leader Ed Davey is one of the clear victims of this new era of conviction politics. Polling consistently shows that the public’s feelings towards Davey are more muted compared with feelings towards either Nigel Farage or Zack Polanski — so while Davey is less polarizing, he is also less galvanizing. This week, a poll from Deltapoll put the Lib Dems on just 9% of the vote, down 3 points on the 2024 general election.

At a time when voters are fed up with the two main parties, this is a bad result.

Myth #3: Reform has peaked

The idea that Reform support has dropped since the 2025 locals, popular in some circles on social media, is not supported by the data. Our projected national vote share sees Reform more or less equal with its 2025 level. It may be true to say it has plateaued, but if so it is still several points above its rivals. Under first-past-the-post, that is enough to deliver a landslide of seats.

It is notable that the one area where Reform did lose ground is in Norfolk, where it faced 11 candidates from Rupert Lowe’s Great Yarmouth First, though Lowe’s local popularity means this challenge is unlikely to materialize nationwide.

Myth #4: Reform and Green gains were driven by turnout and tactical voting

In England’s first experiment with five-party politics on Thursday, tactical voting was barely a factor. Since the polls closed on Thursday, we’ve spoken to 2,000 voters in parts of England where elections were held. When we asked voters to describe in their own words why they voted the way they did, fewer than 1-in-10 raised tactical voting as a consideration.

Reform’s resilience cannot be attributed to differential turnout. One of the most telling findings from our poll is the general election vote intention among people who did not vote on Thursday, in which Reform is ahead on 24% of the vote.

Myth #5: The rise of populist parties is down to a protest vote

There is no consolation to be found for the Labour government in the notion that this is a midterm “protest vote”. Our analysis finds that both Reform and the Greens have the highest levels of voter retention between the local election vote and voters’ stated general election vote intention. Of those who voted Reform on Thursday, 85% said they would do so again at a general election, closely followed by the Greens on 83%. There is simply no evidence to suggest that the electorate voting in Reform councilors would be uncomfortable with the prospect of Nigel Farage in No. 10.

The data are clear: the continued success of Reform and the Greens cannot be attributed to tactical voting, differential turnout, or mid-term crankiness on behalf of the electorate. Instead, we are witnessing a systematic consolidation of support for these insurgent parties among their respective bases. We ran regression analysis on the wards which have already reported results while writing this piece, and found that the largest demographic drivers of constituency swing for the Greens and Reform were the exact same demographics which predicted their previous strength. In other words, Reform and the Greens are locking in ever-increasing shares of their potential support bases, rather than making inroads into unfamiliar territory.

Myth #6: The scale of Labour’s losses is down to small margins

Now that five-party politics has truly arrived, one consequence is that margins of victory in elections are narrowing. Most contests are now won by candidates with less than half of the votes. Unfortunately for Labour, there is no solace to be taken in this trend either: it is their victories which were the narrowest of all in Thursday’s elections. In contrast, where Reform won, they won comfortably.

These are not protest votes. They are not tactical votes. They are not merely a reflection of turnout differentials, or the vagaries of local elections taking place in unrepresentative areas of the country. What we are seeing across the country is a genuine increase and consolidation in support for the two insurgent populist wings in British politics. Around 45% of voters would have backed Reform or the Greens if these elections were replicated England-wide, rivaling the total of the three establishment parties.

This, then, was the first proper test of how Britain’s quixotic, first-past-the-post electoral system would hold up under the weight of five parties. It is clearly already beginning to feel the strain. Our modeling suggests that if these results were replicated at a general election, Reform would comfortably win the most seats, but still fall just short of a majority.

Given the increasingly chaotic and distorted nature of our elections, this five-party system may not last for long. But those hoping for a return to two-party politics should be careful what they wish for. If Britain enters a new era of dominance by two parties, there is no guarantee that those parties will be Labour or the Conservatives.

In the intervening years, with his bombastic style, and even his body language, Farage contributed to a fundamental reordering of British politics. The Clacton MP is sharp and his enthusiasm for a pint conveys an everyman bonhomie. More profoundly, though, he channels something lying deep within the national psyche: merriment. It’s no surprise, then, that his personality has so easily translated into a huge following on TikTok.

And as his star has risen exponentially, so too has his party’s — on current form, it looks likely to form the next government. All the same, what fueled Farage’s rise may not last forever. Reform’s political brand — like UKIP and the Brexit Party before it — used to be all conviviality and connection, but as the party has expanded, that merriment is increasingly being replaced by something else: whinging.

If anything, Matt Goodwin’s campaign to win the Gorton and Denton by-election was characterized by a complaining doomerism, failing to say much — if anything — that was positive about the seat, let alone the country. This constant focus on national decline undoubtedly bears fruit when building a popular Substack or YouTube channel. But if you’re trying to win over voters who can’t name the Home Secretary, you need something more hopeful. And even four days after his defeat, Goodwin was still at it. Nicknamed “Badloss” by some of his critics, he was relentless in his complaints that Britain’s electoral system was just as bad as Lebanon and Sierra Leone. Not that many people noticed, though. Let’s face it, if you lose by more than 4,000 votes, and proceed to say you were cheated of a deserved win, people are bound to switch off.

Indeed Goodwin’s failure, and Reform’s immediate response — imagine Donald Trump’s conspiratorial “Stop the Steal” campaign delivered with the hamminess of a Carry On film — is all the stranger given the Gorton result was objectively strong for both man and party. Pushing Labour into third anywhere in the north west is no mean feat. Goodwin simply lost to a strong candidate, Hannah Spencer, in a difficult race. So as the smoke cleared in a testing by-election, Reform sounded like losers.

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Spencer, on the other hand, couldn’t have been more different as she shrugged off the negativity thrown her way by both Labour and Reform. A Bolton-born plumber, she focused throughout on bread-and-butter issues: stopping fly-tipping, cleaning up litter, fixing the housing crisis and sprucing up high streets. During the campaign she even completed a plastering qualification. As she stood to deliver her victory speech, focusing less on ideology than daily hardships, Goodwin will have known that these were subjects that would appeal to his target voters: the Greens were no longer the po-faced identitarian liberals who like to tut at your package holiday. At that moment, Reform must have realised that its pitch as the only credible alternative to the uniparty was lost.

But what happened to Reform’s mojo? Whether you blame the veteran Tory influx, Goodwin’s performance anxiety, the outsourcing of strategy to consultants — it is clear that the party has lost its “aura”. This seemed pretty clear when I was canvassing in Gorton, and was repeatedly and politely told by party canvassers that they weren’t permitted to speak to journalists. Nor was Goodwin particularly keen on individual interviews. Yet this is a mass party and, managed correctly, its membership should be its greatest asset. Suddenly, the party machine feels preachy, with a very New Labour feel. Warm ale is out; a pint of control freakery, please.

This relinquishing of authenticity by Reform has started to be reflected in polling. At the weekend, as the Greens announced they had passed 200,000 members in England and Wales for the first time, FindOutNow placed them in second place; on Monday, Lord Ashcroft’s survey put them at third, just three points behind Reform, with almost 90 seats.

Then, on Tuesday morning, came the big one. YouGov — Britain’s most reputable pollster — put them on 21% of the vote and in second place, just behind Reform: five points ahead of both Labour and the Tories. In all likelihood, Reform and the Greens will have more members than Labour come the local elections in May. And, for those looking to dismiss the Greens as a party of students, bohemians and unemployed artists, think again. YouGov gives them a 6% lead over Reform among all Brits under 65.

Given the avalanche of attacks and negative campaigning against the Greens in recent weeks, from both the Right and the center, how is any of this possible? After all, similar attacks paralysed Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour after 2017, and led to a drubbing two years later. Yet Polanski seems to go from strength to strength, leading to panic among some on the Right, with much of Westminster struggling to understand exactly why the Greens are soaring so high.

Traditionally, many of the party’s would-be supporters figured a vote for the party would be a vote for environmentally friendly policies. When Caroline Lucas was the party’s sole representative at Westminster, the Greens were able to push climate-related issues into the political realm in a remarkable way, from fracking to net zero. It only took one MP.

As the party has increased its MPs to four, the modern Greens have made the political weather on everything from renationalization to Gaza. Today, its MPs function as committed campaigners on strongly held policies at a national level — as well as effective constituency representatives at a local one. This understandably appeals to many of those voters disappointed by the traditional parties.

It helps, too, that Green supporters care about such a range of issues — from electoral reform to rewilding beavers to rent caps to closer ties with Europe. Some simply want to exert pressure on the Labour Party to move further Left. This broad, semi-coherent theory of change sees the party as an expression of social movements as much as an electoral vehicle.

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One downside is that the party risks becoming too successful. The uncomfortable truth is that too many first-place finishes mean the Greens will need to offer more than a grab-bag of progressive causes. For now, though, such problems remain in the future. My suspicion is that few Green voters expect Polanski to be the next prime minister. Many may not even want such an outcome, preferring the party to be a junior coalition member in a progressive government. Indeed, when I interviewed Polanski last week, soon after the Gorton and Denton result, he merely expressed an ambition to lead a party of several dozen difficult MPs in Parliament.

This, incidentally, is also why anti-Green scare tactics, from both Labour and the Right, will ultimately fail. It’s easy to make radicalism feel like an existential threat when it risks actually leading a government — as with Corbyn. That isn’t the case with Polanski. Certainly, comparing a by-election win in Manchester with Iran’s Islamic Revolution strikes most Britons as unhinged. In any case, it’s hard to present an organisation as much of a danger when all its MPs can fit in the back of a London cab.

Ironically, this anti-establishment vibe is also what is most winning about Polanski’s Greens. The party and its leader manage to couple radical purpose with fun — which, in a strange way, is reminiscent of Farage at his best. While I had to grab a few hours of sleep after Thursday’s result, Polanski stayed up all night. The following evening, he appeared on The Last Leg, full of verve and enthusiasm. This relentless energy is invaluable in politics.

Tramping around the sodden streets of Levenshulme a few weeks ago, with all those houses proudly displaying Green party placards in their front gardens, it was strikingly obvious that Reform’s success had opened the door to new possibilities for the Left. After all, if we are suddenly predicting that Nigel Farage can go from YouTube to No. 10, something previously viewed as impossible, then what’s so outlandish about the Greens overtaking Labour?

In terms of what is politically possible, Nigel Farage has — again — done more than blow the bloody doors off. Only this time it won’t all be to his own advantage.

In the same way, the emerging narrative that the Green Party’s Gorton and Denton by-election victory marks the emergence of a new, “sectarian” Britain does not seem quite correct. The existence of South Asian Muslim voting blocs is not a new development. Rather, the novelty is their accelerating abandonment of the Labour Party which once took their votes for granted — corralled through the clan and family patronage systems co-opted by Labour’s Northern England machine politics. But the political contest in Gorton and Denton, a matter of simple demographic arithmetic, was fundamentally one tipped by ethnic rather than religious mobilization: it was no more sectarian than, in Northern Ireland, Sinn Féin are devout Catholics, or the Shankill Protestant Boys Flute Band are devoted practitioners of quiet Bible study.

Indeed, there is little in the Gorton and Denton result to dissuade adherents of the Ulsterisation thesis of British political development from the theory. As the Manchester Evening News observes, the constituency is a highly segregated one, with 96% of residents in Denton East and Denton West self-describing in the 2021 Census as “White” — an awkward category, in this instance largely coterminous with ethnic British and Irish ethnic identity — declining to a low of 85% in Denton North. In the western half of the constituency, on the other hand, only 6% of residents in Victoria are white, and only 8% in Levenshulme North: a lower percentage, it may be noted, than of Catholics in Belfast’s proverbially Ulster Loyalist Shankill Road ward. At least in Northern Ireland the fact that elections are won in the census rather than the voting booth is open and taken for granted: in Britain, cultural taboos forbid such accurate depiction of reality. The Gorton and Denton by-election, given the polarized electoral map of its constituents, may just as accurately be termed the Gorton versus Denton by-election, in which Gorton proved the victor.

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Zack Polanski’s pre-election claim that “the public have moved on” from immigration was therefore disingenuous: his Green victory was built on the foundation of historic South Asian immigration in a constituency highly segregated along ethnic lines, in an election novel only for the increasingly overt nature of the ethnic mobilization and counter-mobilization now becoming the stuff of modern British politics. As Abubakr Nanabawa, the organizer of the Muslim Vote pressure group — which in this election backed the Greens “to block Reform, and to end Labour’s assumption that our communities can be ignored, disrespected, and still counted as automatic” — observed, this was to be an election decided by demographic heft, in a “constituency, with 76,000 potential voters, approximately 26% of whom are Muslims… split demographically into the Gorton side, which is more ethnically diverse, and Denton, which is more white working class,” in the latter of which the “the Right-wing Reform party has made inroads”. As Nanabawa pointed out back in 2024, “political parties and candidates ignore the concerns and priorities of Muslim voters at their peril, for their sway will only continue to grow, shaping the trajectory of British democracy” — a prediction also made, openly or implicitly, by Reform, as a threat rather than a promise, and as a means to mobilize the dwindling ethnic majority.

Ascribing the process to Muslim sectarianism thus obscures the nature of the ethnic mobilization now in play among Reform just as much as the Greens: as pre-election Opinium polling revealed, among white voters, Reform dominated the contest, with a vote share approximating that of the Greens and Labour combined. Indeed, at 57% of the population, the proportion of white voters in Gorton and Denton exactly matches that projected for the UK as whole by 2050. If the political maps of Britain are increasingly ethnic ones, then we can expect future elections to proceed accordingly, if in less binary form than Northern England. The rise of the Greens and Reform each now accelerate that of the other. The speed and extent of demographic change means that the collapse of the former mass parties of 20th-century Britain now appears baked in, even if neither the Greens nor Reform is likely to remain the ultimate protagonists of British political contest.

Against this argument, the writer John Merrick, one of the more astute Leftist  critics of the Right’s increasingly ethnic framing of British politics, dismisses the observation that the Palestine flag has become a marker of South Asian Muslim ethnic mobilization by remarking that objecting to Israel’s war on Gaza is not solely a Muslim concern. Indeed, he accuses those who have made this observation, particularly me, of attempting to “to lay the blame on specific ethnic groups” for what he terms the “widespread sense of alienation among often young British Muslims”. In that revulsion to the Gaza war is not solely a matter for South Asian Muslims, he is correct. Yet if Green strategy were merely a matter of principled internationalist politics, rather than of appealing to narrow ethnic loyalties, one struggles to imagine why the party should also wave the Pakistani flag in its campaigning, or release Urdu-language videos linking Starmer to India’s President Modi. Both are simply overt examples of ethnic Pakistani political mobilization, which, partly through willed ideological blindness and partly through mercenary electoral calculations, the Left chooses not to examine too closely. It is permissible, indeed electorally necessary, for progressives to engage in such open ethnic organizing: yet it remains taboo for them to remark upon it.

Free from such squeamishness, the Green Party’s Deputy Leader, Mothin Ali, is closer to the mark in noting that Matt Goodwin’s campaigning materials made repeated references to the defense of “Christian” identity, in what Ali termed “something that is quite sectarian that is harking back to those troubles [sic] in Ireland”. This is simply the Ulsterization thesis correctly observed, and applied for political gain, by the Green Party. Gorton and Denton was historic in that it was one of the first mainland British elections to be fought along near-overtly ethnic lines. Like Labour, the Greens mobilized white progressives and South Asian Muslims together against what they portrayed as Reform’s dangerous identitarian politics. As a national spectacle rather than a local campaign, specific political goals took a backseat to “keeping out Reform”, a party whose perception as one focused on narrow ethnic British interests is the unspoken context of all the Labour and Green rhetoric of “hope against hate” and “unity against division”. This is simply ethnic politics for a political system unwilling to name what it has become. Having lost both British Muslims and the white working class, Labour is at least now free to condemn their respective political manifestations.

Certainly, ecological issues no longer seem matters of particular interest to the Green Party, a development that appears to have passed Labour by. The pivot of the election was better understood by Jeremy Corbyn, announcing the need to vote Green to “defeat Reform, defeat the fascists and the racists”, which, translated out of Leftspeak, means parties addressing ethnic British voters and their collective interests as openly as the Greens so effectively did for their own new voters. In this, given the legal restrictions and political taboos against overt ethnic mobilization of the British electoral majority, progressives currently possess the upper hand, permitted to engage in open ethnic pandering while condemning the same approach for their Right-wing rivals. How long either of these political norms, a relic of Britain’s stable Nineties demographics, can last will determine the politics of the coming years. The radicalizing effect of the “Boriswave” and of the dispersal of boat migrants among parts of Britain previously unaffected by mass migration, causing race riots in Middlesbrough and protest marches in deep Middle England, lay in disrupting the unspoken, indeed accelerating ethnic segregation of provincial British life. What was hitherto politely implicit is increasingly becoming the central matter of Westminster politics.

For now, in any case, the Green coalition has proved a winning one. Yet, as Your Party has found in its struggle balancing narrow ideological zealots on the one hand, and British Muslims on the other, the alliance of young white progressives and South Asian Muslims is an inherently unstable one on matters other than defeating the Right in elections. It is, simply, a marriage of polling convenience rather than a political philosophy. All the internal contradictions displayed by Labour’s marriage of soft-Left social progressives attempting to represent religious social conservatives is true of both Your Party and the Greens, with each now possessing a far narrower electoral base than Labour at its height, given the near-wholesale defection of the white working class to Reform. Cannibalizing the Labour vote in urban districts containing a specific demographic cocktail of white progressives and South Asian Muslims is a strategy with a ceiling: one that can certainly topple Labour as the dominant party of the Left, but is unlikely to deliver the country.

Yet Reform, too, suffer from their own unstable electoral coalition, of white working-class Labour defectors, married to interventionist economic policies, and its largely Thatcherite lower-middle and middle-class voter base stretching inland from the party’s Eastern England Saxon Shore. If they are to sweep the country, in a political context increasingly shaped by ethnic mobilization, then it is ethnic British voters as a whole, including Liberal Democrats in their tacitly homogenous enclaves, to whom they will have to appeal. Doing so may be a harder task than winning the Red Wall, though further Green success, now that the collapse of the two mass parties of a vanished Britain appears certain, may yet work in Reform’s favor: it is risky to assume that in a direct contest between the two, the wavering British center will ultimately choose the Greens.

Certainly, the “sectarianism” discourse now apparent from political commentators who would shudder to be associated with Reform hints at a growing disquiet with the Greens’ open courting of ethnic bloc votes. Yet it is really no different, in its essential form, to the same process that once worked for Labour, to the absurd ethnic pandering of Tory politicians like Bob Blackman to the Hindu nationalist vote, or indeed to the claim by Zack Polanski, in his previous Liberal Democrat incarnation, that a vote for the Lib Dems is “a vote for Israel and a vote for Judaism”. The Greens have not advanced any particularly religious policies, and are unlikely to do so, given the fragile nature of their electoral coalition. If the issue is that British Muslim voters, of mostly South Asian origin, are an increasingly important electoral bloc, then the issue with which centrist commentators are increasingly perturbed is one of demographic change itself, rather than its second-order religious accretions. In just the same way, Reform’s recent pledge to forbid the conversion of disused churches into mosques is not a matter of bringing them back into Christian usage but of preventing their passing into the hands of the demographic “Other”: the issue is an ethnic rather than religious one, with religion functioning as a barely euphemistic marker. The charge of “sectarianism”, Greens are correct to observe, is here merely a dog-whistle for British politics increasingly centering around the questions posed by demographic changes which centrists are unwilling to otherwise notice, let alone navigate.

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By Jonny Ball

The reshaping of Westminster politics into a battleground between the party of limitless open borders on the one hand, and of mass deportations on the other, will make overt what British political taboos still barely manage to keep implicit. If Reform are the Conservative Party’s DUP, a populist party cannibalizing the mainstream conservative vote on ethnic lines, then, even in the months since I first wrote about mainland Britain’s Ulsterization, Reform have already found in Restore its TUV, an even more Rightward challenger which may, as demographic anxieties proceed, eventually come to cannibalize its vote. The Green victory in Gorton and Denton accelerates Labour’s demise, but Reform’s strong second showing — and the demographic patterns underlying it — should be of at least equal note to Westminster commentators, who would be better examining the country like anthropologists than psephologists.

Rather than civil war, as darkly hinted at by Danny Kruger should Reform fail to win office, the more likely outcome is simply the formalization of voting along ethnic lines in highly segregated communities, and the consequent foregrounding of symbolic politics — of flags and monuments and the jealous rivalry over communal space — in areas where the two politically opposing voting blocs about each other. Gorton and Denton, a demographic bellwether for all Britain, acts as a crystal ball in which our near future can be divined. Both the Greens and Reform are able, for now, to ride the polarization of their supporters into Westminster. But for both the risk, as these dynamics accelerate, is that each of their new voter bases may soon enough outgrow them. It may not be the form of politics the parties of the Westminster center would wish for, but it is the one they have gifted us, before they finally shuffle off the stage.

But this is about more than internet virality. The displacement of “traditional” Left and Right politics by this louder, more polemical register reflects a reality no one wants to confront head-on: one that self-identified “Greens” used to talk about a great deal but have, under Yookay Mamdani, largely discarded. Namely: the prospect that never-ending growth might, one day, come to an end.

From the radicals of Deep Green Resistance to the less extremist small-farm advocacy of Chris Smaje, the post-growth economics of Tim Jackson or the “collapsonomics” of Dark Mountain, less optimistic environmental advocates always pointed the finger at growth itself, as the real villain of the story. For “degrowthers”, the natural order imposes its own, inherent limits — and these cannot, in the end, be evaded.

But at least, in Britain, degrowth isn’t a vague future threat. It’s a reality, some years in the rear-view mirror. In this unhappy context, Reform and the Greens are insurgent because they embody, respectively, Right- and Left-coded versions of the politics of scarcity. And if the erstwhile environmentalist party seems to be pivoting away from anything hitherto recognizable as environmentalism, this is for the same reason. The actual implications of degrowth are so horrible that even the erstwhile “green” party will do anything it can to keep the lights on a little longer, up to and including cannibalizing everything that’s still remotely green, or indeed pleasant, about the British Isles.

Much has been made of Reform snapping at Starmer’s heels, from the Right. Farage’s party’s membership now outstrips Labour’s: 268,000 to a plummeting Labour membership, now below 250,000. But if Labour are hated by the Right for over-taxing ordinary Brits while failing to protect the borders, They’re also hated from the Left for not taxing enough, and being too fashy about foreigners. Now, especially since the failure of Corbyn’s “Your Party”, Polanski is mopping up those who embrace this view: he’s taken his party membership from 123,000 to 180,000 members since October. News broke on Monday that five Labour councillors in Brent, a Labour heartland, have defected to the Green Party. His thing is working.

How, and why, are these populisms now so, well, popular? Internet virality is a factor: poor Keith-GPT just doesn’t have what it takes to cut through. For viral engagement, in an attention economy, you need something of the carnival barker. You have to be box office. But at the risk of stating the obvious, it’s also the economy, stupid.

As Johnny Ball recently noted, in Britain the economy has been flatlining for almost two decades. After the crash QE bailed out the banks and inflated the price of assets, while Osbornomics deliberately let real-terms wages stagnate. Living standards for normal people haven’t really grown since the crash. For many they have palpably declined. Over the same period, as angry young people often point out, the once-negligible earnings gap between Britain and America has grown into a chasm. The Poles who flocked here to arbitrage the wage differential between our country and theirs in the 00s are all flooding the other way, as their economy booms and ours circles the drain.

This is a problem. For everything from Britain’s housing market to the NHS is predicated on growth. What, then, happens when the music stops? Perhaps the most prescient allegory for this was the 1973 dystopian sci-fi movie Soylent Green. Set in the year 2022, it depicted a world where environmental catastrophe has wrecked the food supply; then, a new source of nutrition is created and distributed, called “Soylent Green”.

Over the course of the movie, the protagonist discovers that Soylent Green is produced by processing the corpses of humans killed via medically assisted suicide, into food for those still alive. It’s a potent metaphor for a society that no longer produces a surplus, and has resorted to maintaining the illusion of vitality by cannibalizing itself.

In Britain, this is already at least figuratively true. (If “Skeletor” Leadbeater gets her way, perhaps it might yet be literally so, as well.) Years of Osbornomic synthetic growth, juiced with financial QE, have been further eked out through what has recently been dubbed “human quantitative easing”: that is, wage suppression via mass low-skilled migration. This was, tacitly, embraced as bipartisan orthodoxy: after Brexit forced Johnson’s Tories to close the EU route for human QE, Johnson averted a painful correction by opening the Commonwealth spigot in its place.

Whatever you think of this decision, it was pragmatic. Britain is so addicted to the high-migration model that short of painful structural change, keeping the Ponzi scheme afloat means Britain really does, as the patrician Left is fond of asserting, “need migrants”. Never mind the sociocultural side-effects or long-term fiscal consequences: these are managed through censorship and two-tier policing, or are simply a problem for some unfortunate future PM.

We should understand Farage’s Reform, and Polanski’s Green Party, as respectively Right-and Left-coded responses to the resulting national tinderbox. I hardly need rehash the obvious link between economic decline, mass migration, and nativism, in driving support for Reform. But it’s perhaps less obvious that Polanski’s call both for increased inward migration and also higher public spending is a response to the same politics of scarcity.

Polanski gestures toward the same observable stagnation, in tirades against the British wealth gap. But he suggests it’s not migrants we should resent, but “the billionaires” who hoover up wealth and leave nothing for the rest. It’s a mistake to blame migrants for our economic woes, he declaimed to rapturous applause at the recent Green Party conference. What’s needed, instead, is what he calls a “politics of hope”.

That seems to mean increased legal pathways for inward migration, allowing asylum-seekers to work immediately, and a fiscal program shaped by modern monetary theory. This unorthodox banking theory argues that currency issuers (of which Britain is one) can’t default on government debt. Opponents retort that this approach creates asset bubbles, while any semblance of government control over inflation is illusory. But for MMT believers, the constraint isn’t debt but national productivity, and governments can and should spend more in order to stimulate productivity.

Put it all together, and you have a response to scarcity that’s coherent, on its own terms — but in a radically different way to that proposed by Farage. Reform’s politics of scarcity promises to save the day by stopping the boats, ending human QE, and restricting benefit entitlements to natives so we can afford to be generous to “our own”. However workable it is in practice, as a program it implies that we can sustain solidarity by narrowing its scope. By contrast, the Green politics of scarcity rests on the hope that we can increase the size of the pie without any need to set boundaries, variously through taking more money from the hated super-rich, plus assorted forms of jiggery-pokery including opening the borders and printing lots more money.

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Why the Great Reset failed

By Mary Harrington

Both the green and the turquoise versions of this politics of scarcity, in turn, appeal to different public sensibilities; in the vibes-based domain of online politics as self-expression, the Greens are now fittingly identified with “Santa” and Reform with “Scrooge”. But in different ways both gloss over inconvenient demographic challenges. Reform’s program proposes to address demographic change by narrowing the scope of welfare entitlement — but is, at best, hopeful on native population decline. An initiative to bring back British babies is, to say the least, not a short-term solution to a dwindling tax base, and welfare commitments heavily tilted toward pensioners. Conversely, the inflate-everything approach by the Greens has little to say about the already-palpable rise in inter-ethnic hostilities as a consequence of mass migration, save bromides about “hate”, “division”, and those naughty Billionaires.

Nor is this Green program particularly environmentalist. In a recent interview, Polanski remarked blithely that a mere 5% of Britain is built on and hence we can take loads more migrants. Lovers of British biodiversity may wish to look elsewhere for a party likely to represent ecological conservation. For Polanski’s Soylent Green Party, biodiversity is fair game for obliteration, if it keeps growth looking growthy.

The same goes for the issue that’s been the most visceral flashpoint between the old, limits-to-growth Green sensibility and the new Soylent Green one: gender ideology. Trans activism has, in recent years, driven the expulsion from the party of swathes of older Green stalwarts. And this makes sense, when you consider that this cohort was, and often still is, more likely to remember a time when environmentalists believed the core ecocidal issue is a refusal to countenance natural limits.

Greens of this subtype tend to be skeptical of gender ideology, viewing human sex dimorphism as an instance of such limits. By contrast, trans activism is premised on a categorical denial that such limits exist: it is, at heart, a Promethean vision, in which humans can literally be anything we want, given enough technology. The same attitude at scale dismisses the notion of ecological limits; allied to climate concern, it produces “ecomodernists” who see the solution to ecological crisis as pursuing more and better technology.

For this faction, the way forward might be geoengineering, or gene-editing humans, or feeding an ever-growing urban high-rise population with mold grown in vats. Should all else fail and temperatures go on rising, we can jam the whole planetary population into the world’s temperate zones, and somehow persuade everyone not to dissolve into tribal warfare.

This is the “green” paradigm that has now claimed Polanski’s Green Party. It rejects the critique of growth, in favor of every imaginable kind of quantitative easing, and assumes we can solve any problems which arise through more and better technology. Given the party’s authoritarian internal approach to the trans debate, we may reasonably wonder if “technology” would simply mean authoritarian crushing of dissent. If so, that would make Polanski’s Greens everything the Faragist end of the electorate already loathes about Starmer’s Labour party, but on globalist steroids and intentionally without any limiting Principle.

Is there any way out of the self-cannibalizing predicament that produces two such unappealing political programs? I do not know. But if we fail to find one, our choice will be one or the other of these approaches to scarcity: deflationary nativism plus authoritarianism at the borders, or inflationary borderlessness plus authoritarian management of the resulting tribal conflicts.

It is, in other words, a contest over which bit of the dead status quo becomes our Soylent Green. Do we husband scarce resources by grinding up our memories of a Britain that was generous, internationally through foreign aid and domestically through welfare? Or do we pursue growth by shoving the country’s demographic makeup in the blender? Either way, sustaining the social contract means destroying the social contract.

Perhaps it’s for the best, then, that all the anti-growth green doomers were marginalized, by the insurgent Soylent Green Party. No one wants to think about the possibility that they might have been right, about the end of growth. Not even as all of politics is consumed by the question of how — or if — we can live together in its aftermath.

Generosity is fine, the critics therefore concede, if you can afford it: but Britain no longer can. Certainly, that explains the second part of Reeves’s confected metaphor, with the Chancellor sure to offer voters plenty of less pleasant fare alongside a lifted benefit cap. Yet if this balancing act is more about politics than economics, with Reeves and her party running scared by radicals to her Left almost as much as her Right, it does little to deal with the fundamental problems of Britain’s lopsided tax system: one where median earners pay surprisingly little, and receive rather a lot in return.

Perhaps the first question to ask here is: why now? Why grapple with something as controversial as the benefit cap, especially as the Chancellor faces relentless scrutiny to find taxpayer value? And why increase welfare spending, having drawn such attention to the need to reduce it? Just 16 months ago, seven Labour rebels lost the whip after voting for an amendment calling to end the benefit cap. Then, such a position was dismissed as asinine posturing by the leadership. Now, it lies at the core of a make-or-break budget.

So what gives? Any explanation must begin with the increasingly omnipresent Zack Polanski. The Greens have polled above Labour several times, with one pollster, FindOutNow, even putting them in second place. According to a recent survey by YouGov, meanwhile, Polanski would be the next prime minister if only under 50s were eligible to vote. However readily his critics’ rebukes spring forth — such as the assertion that the Greens are only favored by “woke” undergraduates — the fact is that Polanski is clearly galvanizing much of the country’s working-age population: including much of Labour’s urban base.

If local elections earlier this year represented a national breakthrough for Reform, it is plausible that elections next May — in Scotland and Wales as well as England — offer a similar springboard for the Greens. On the doorstep right now, Labour canvassers have vanishingly little to entice their supporters, even among those willing to personally embrace higher taxes. Scrapping the two-child benefit cap immediately remedies that: it’s the political equivalent of the Bat Signal for those who voted Labour in 2024, but are now tempted by other parties of various progressive hues. In its own way, this illustrates the extent of Labour’s desperate predicament: powering the Budget are policies designed to scupper a rival fueled by often vague commitments to anti-austerity, and which anyway has only four MPs.

But removing the two-child cap serves an ancillary function, too, because the Chancellor regards it as a downpayment for future cuts to the welfare bill. It has been consistently reported that Starmer was always more amenable to ditching the cap than Reeves, with Morgan McSweeney, his most senior adviser, aligned with the parsimonious Chancellor. What has changed is that, after failing to deliver £5 billion of welfare cuts in June, Reeves and McSweeney now view the abolition of the cap as a necessary expedient to belt-tightening elsewhere.

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Reeves hinted as much when writing for The Sunday Times over the weekend, emphasizing the need for welfare reform to “ensure it doesn’t pay to be off sick instead of in work”. Rather than adhere to her instincts — means-testing and egg-headed penny-pinching — the Chancellor now seemingly grasps the politics of gradualism. Ditching the cap represents a tactical retreat for Reeves. Ditching the cap represents a tactical retreat for Reeves. But as Macaulay once wrote about conservatives embracing reform to preserve what they cherish most, the Chancellor intends to increase welfare spending now only to cut it later. It’s not an incoherent strategy given the political capital the Chancellor stands to gain among defiant backbenchers. Without them, the Government has no working majority, and no meaningful reforms can be passed at all — something as important to the bond markets as economic growth.

How Reeves will fund her other spending commitments — from increases to the defense budget to freezing rail fares and much higher infrastructure spending — remains unclear. Until a fortnight ago, the Government’s preferred option was the first increase to the basic rate of tax since James Callaghan’s premiership in the Seventies. But that has since been replaced with a range of smaller, piecemeal measures. One is the touted introduction of a mansion tax on properties worth over £2 million. Significant tweaks to inheritance tax could help too. Other measures might include changing the rules on VAT for taxi fares, and a raid on pension savings. The Exchequer’s central pillar, though, remains freezing income-tax thresholds: something now expected to continue through to 2030.

For all the criticism Reeves faces, her spending priorities are more sensible than those of her predecessors. Jeremy Hunt sounded like a cheerful fantasist when, as Chancellor, with the country’s borrowing costs soaring, he talked of scrapping employee national insurance contributions altogether. Reeves, whatever her faults, is less prone to breezy hyperbole. Not only has the Government backed Sizewell C; it has also allocated £2.5 billion towards research and development for nuclear fusion. At the spring spending review, the Chancellor promised a total of £113 billion in new capital investment for homes, transport and energy. Though far from perfect, the orientation of this government, despite its bludgeoning by much of the media, is more long term than anything we’ve seen over the last 15 years.

But while an emphasis beyond day-to-day media cycles is a welcome change, how the Government intends to raise more revenue still rests on a fatal mistake. Reeves has so far dismissed a wealth tax — an increasingly global cause championed by everyone from Gary Stevenson and Zohran Mamdani to the French economist Gabriel Zucman. Yet while senior Labour figures have publicly dismissed such a move, it is, nevertheless, the affluent they intend to hit for more tax. The thing is, many of them aren’t that rich.

So permit me to say something that might surprise you. Alongside some of the necessary tax rises announced by Reeves, and a potential wealth tax, we need to get serious about higher taxes for those on median incomes — which at the time of writing is £39,000 for someone in full-time work. And before you accuse me of anything, I should add: that includes me.

Over the weekend, the Financial Times’s John Burn-Murdoch reflected on how Britain has the most “progressive” tax system of any advanced economy. While 45% of top earners’ salaries now go towards taxes and social contributions, that figure falls to just 29% among average workers. Burn-Murdoch compares Britain’s 16-point “top-to-middle” gap to Scandinavia, where it is just 12 points. In the Nordic social democracies, everyone pays tax at a “moderately high rate”. In the UK, on the other hand, high-income earners are taxed like Danes, while those on average incomes more closely resemble Americans. Reeves has, so far, completely neglected this fact — one presumes out of political necessity. While understandable, the truth is that national renewal, an ambition so often invoked by this government, is impossible without accepting change is needed.

Take the personal allowance, the threshold at which one starts paying income tax. In Britain, this is £12,570 (approximately €14,000), a higher figure than anywhere else in Europe. In Sweden, conversely, income tax kicks in at €2,000. In Denmark, it’s just shy of €7,000. Even in France, you start paying at €11,500. It was the Cameron-Osborne duo that really shifted the dial on this side of the Channel, with the tax allowance going from £6,500 in 2010 to £10,000 by the end of the coalition. Like the pensions triple lock, that move received gushing praise from much of the media at the time — “tanks on Labour’s lawn” and so on. And yet it has inflicted extraordinary damage on the country’s long-term fiscal position.

That these tensions are rarely touched on in our political debate reflects the interests of both the Left and Right. Similar to their promise to reduce immigration — only to raise numbers to record highs — the Tories have substantially increased taxes on the previously prosperous burgher class over the last 14 years. The Left, meanwhile, is understandably hostile to the idea that middle-income earners, a constituency they have tried to woo amid Tory collapse in recent years, should be paying more tax.

Yet perhaps the hour of reckoning has arrived. High inequality is bad, not least because people on lower incomes have a higher marginal propensity to spend. And it’s true that we mistakenly tax labor more than capital — a historic error in the context of runaway property prices over the last 30 years. The last Liberal prime minister, Herbert Asquith, was wise enough to observe the iniquity of such a state of affairs more than a century ago. Shamefully, his modern successors don’t share such sagacity.

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But it’s also the case that Britain will be unable to correct its varied problems, from under-investment in public transport to private ownership of energy and water, without more tax from a range of sources. A more civilized public realm; re-funding local authorities; addressing the crisis of elderly care; scrapping tuition fees for nursing and engineering students — none of this will be cheap. But there’s little alternative if the country wishes to remain a stable, pleasant place to live or start a business. Until the Chancellor makes that admission, and bases her spending commitments on broader tax rises for median earners, every budget will feel unfairly punitive on those earning even modestly above the average. Increasingly, they will look to move elsewhere. Worry less, then, about the high-profile departure of Lakshmi Mittal than the industrious deputy headteacher, or the ambitious medical graduate. They are happy to pay their taxes, provided the system is fair and the benefits are clear. Presently, neither feels especially true.

Labour are often fearful of speaking in grand terms. Decisive action is even less forthcoming. And yet, as with the ongoing debate around national identity, precisely that is needed on tax and the role of the state. People wish to be protected by the Government, and to be proud of where they live. To a large extent, such desires transcend the old binaries of Left and Right. But neither is possible with a defunded police force, a packed prison estate and local government having meager resources beyond elderly care. What Reeves should do, then, is sell a vision of the country, an exciting one at that — and then explain how she’ll pay for it.

In small “c” conservative Britain — until recently a beacon of political stability, its majoritarian voting system shoring up a stable two-party system — the Greens were always something of an oddity. In the national imagination, the party was long held as the natural political home of England’s eccentrics. David Icke was once its most eloquent spokesperson, while its supporters were a prickly thicket of New Age mavericks, vegan allotment-tenders, long-haired CNDers, and middle-class utopians talking earnestly about “the Gaia hypothesis”.

But a shift has taken place. As far back as the 2000s, the disappointments of New Labour led some of Blair’s Left-liberal voters to seek out supposedly kinder political pastures. Under Caroline Lucas, the Greens positioned themselves as a more professionalized outfit, the paragons of a woolly but more robust progressivism. These efforts paid off, with the Greens securing their first MP in 2010 and turning Brighton into their very own citadel of social liberalism.

Since then, the Brexit conflagration has accelerated the realignment of our politics, melting our once-solid class-based voter blocs into air. Old divides have been smashed apart and remade, while Britain’s class system, and related debates on the political economy, are increasingly interpreted through the prism of a tribalistic culture war. This is based less on policies or worldviews than on something more immaterial: the stuff of cultural-political signifiers, of semiotic coding, of vibes. Indeed, this vibes-based politics is a symptom of our age, a populist moment intensifying as we approach our third decade of stagnation, and one in which savvy political entrepreneurs can thrive by exploiting voter volatility, omnipresent cynicism and a radical dealignment of party loyalties.

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The twilight of the millennial socialists

By Jonny Ball

The Greens, in this world of signs and signifiers, are now thoroughly Left-coded. And, of course, they’re middle-class-coded, too: whatever Polanski’s radical rhetoric, old visions of homemade vegan flapjacks and quixotic People’s Vote marches die hard.

A former actor, hypnotist and Lib Dem, Polanski seems to understand the contemporary moment better than most, and he’s set about changing the Green Party vibe, radically. Before he assumed the leadership, the Greens’ vague liberal and ideological quietism allowed them to position themselves as big tent ecologists, appealing to several demographics at once. In 2024, this relative vagueness propelled the party to a record number of seats, winning in trendy Bristol and Brighton, as well as Waveney Valley and North Herefordshire, a pair of constituencies in the formerly True Blue countryside.

These rural seats are not full of right-on “Watermelon” radicals: green on the outside and red on the inside. Rather, the Greens took the shires by conducting highly localized campaigns blending pro-conservation and anti-development messaging, promoting their Nimby-ish opposition to new housing and (of all things) electricity pylons. Far from attempting to hoover support from a disaffected Left, leaflets were aimed at wealthy, home-owning Boomers who voted for David Cameron, love Countryfile, and care as much for saving barn owls as they do about actually achieving net zero.

All this stands in contrast to the projection of Green politics in their urban redoubts. Here, the Millennial-graduate laptop class occupies overpriced coffeeshops in gentrifying, multicultural enclaves, and they have swallowed the new religion of Gaza, Greta and gender politics wholesale. This is a Green vibe far more congruent with Polanski’s new vision of “eco-populism”, pumped out across social media posts and podcasts with rising and frantic frequency. There are no qualms here about wealth taxes, or open-borders signaling. There’s clear Corbyn-Sultana-adjacency, but without the Trotskyist infighting. Polanski is happy to borrow from other parties too, notably mimicking Reform’s slick, well-produced communications.

In other ways, clearly, the Greens are no fans of the turquoise tide — Polanski has taken to dismissing Nigel Farage as a fascist at any given opportunity. Given these hardening ideological stances, the rural seats won on Nimby, conservationist tickets will inevitably be vulnerable at the next election. For Polanski, the trade-off is that the Greens will likely challenge Labour in far more urban cosmopolitan constituencies — from Bristol and Brighton to London, where the party came second in 18 seats.

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As in the Blair era, then, the continued disappointments of Labourism are fueling the rise of alternatives. Among a certain demographic — some Muslim communities, yes, but also among young, semi-aware scrollers harvesting their geopolitical views from TikTok and Instagram reels — Starmer isn’t merely a let-down: he’s borderline genocidal. He’s implementing “austerity” and he’s refusing to “tax the rich”. He’s pandering to fascism by promising lower net migration, and he’s spreading bigotry by supporting the prioritization of biological sex over subjective gender identity.

And with Your Party’s launch looking like a damp squib, Polanski is presiding over an explosion in Green membership, doubling their numbers by setting himself up as the polar opposite of Starmer, Farage and “this sort of thing”. Prominent Corbynistas are throwing in their lot with him too. And if those exploding membership figures weren’t enough, YouGov’s national polling has the party on a record 15% support, just five points shy of Labour. There’s every chance, on current trends, that Polanski could seriously challenge and even supplant Labour’s status as the party of the large metropoles.

But where will “eco-populism” leave the British political landscape, especially now those safe two-party certainties feel like a relic of another age? It’s clear that a Green surge would be a disaster for Labour, as it faces losses to the anti-migrant Right in Red Wall marginals on the one hand, and hemorrhages support in ultra-progressive cities on the other.

Any yet Starmer’s losses would not necessarily be Polanski’s gains. In Caerphilly, certainly, the Greens were accused of taking much-needed votes from Plaid Cymru and therefore helping Reform. Their effect nationally will be broadly similar, wrecking Labour’s hopes as they ease the path to a historic majority for insurgent Farageism. That’d be quite an irony, and surely recompense for that one time Nigel voted Green.

Whatever happens in 2029, though, Polanski’s rise is just as important for what it says about the state of progressive ideology in modern Britain. For the Left, coalescing around the Greens would be a final abnegation of their historic mission to represent the labor interest, the voice of working-class people politically. There are working-class Green voters, no doubt, and significant swathes of its city-based electorate struggle in low-paying jobs and live in insecure, rented accommodation. Yet in the Britain of vibes, the party still oozes bourgeois-bohemian signifiers from every pore; materially speaking, it’s Reform leading the way among C2DEs, the skilled and unskilled manual workers in non-degree occupations. Today’s very real working-class revolt is not taking place under a Green banner.

Without any organic connection to the trade-union movement, the Green pivot to an inchoate Left-populism disguises a tendency towards neo-Malthusianism, perhaps even reaction. Rather than a forward march, the abandonment of the traditional labor movement in favor of an eco-populist roadshow led by a former Lib Dem feels like a capitulation, a recognition that the era of a confident Left, forming broad, cross-class coalitions, is over. The rise of Polanski represents a retreat into the comfort zones of what the French economist Thomas Piketty has identified as the Brahmin Left. In the Greens’ warm embrace, progressives will be unburdened by having to deal with the views of the actually existing working class, and having been relegated from any proximity to the levers of state will be able to breezily adopt all manner of high-status positions without conceding to inconvenient reality.

Viewing the decline of mass civic institutions, mass culture and the nation-state, the late Marxist literary critic Fredric Jameson identified a condition of postmodern cultural fragmentation. That cultural fragmentation is complete, and the political arena has been transformed away from its old, 20th-century model. No longer do two great historic monoliths battle for the affections of the median voter in a handful of swing seats. The old institutional power of the Beeb, the Lobby, and the top-down legacy media, with their reasonable tones and cozy fireside chats, has given way to an infinitely disordered information age, one buttressing a political implosion of the electorate into disparate and mutually opposed segments.

Polanski’s Green surge is symptomatic of this broader trend — the splitting and re-splitting of the electorate into hostile tribes in permanent flux. Since Brexit, our political complexion has, paradoxically, become more European, with half-a-dozen parties catering to smaller voter-blocs, vying to be noticed in a saturated attention economy. Secessionists, the eco-Left, and the populist Right, as well as the old liberals, now bustle along with the traditional parties of the center-right and center-left, frightened shadows of their former selves. First-past-the-post wasn’t designed for this: but if our creaking electoral institutions are edging towards collapse, that’s also changing how politics ultimately feels. Electoral support, after all, is no longer about triangulation, about broadening a message through moderation, but about sincerity, playing to the base, and never, ever apologizing. The old world, in short, is dead, and vibes are in, and the Greens are happy to make organic hay.

Two decades of consensus on green policy, shared by Britain’s governing classes and to some extent its public, is currently unraveling. A recent YouGov survey found flagging support for Net Zero, the government’s commitment to decarbonize the British economy by 2050 or sooner, with a quarter of voters now saying that the dangers of climate change have been overstated. It may be, as Labour’s zealous energy secretary Ed Miliband argues, that Britain’s climate debate is being polarized along American lines; but it clearly matters that material sacrifices demanded by green measures, which were long a question of principle, are now starting to be felt in people’s lives. At any rate, the Reform Party, who will potentially form the next government, are determined to scrap what its deputy leader Richard Tice calls “net stupid zero”, and the Conservatives are now following suit, with Kemi Badenoch this week pledging to repeal the Climate Change Act.

Even Labour is wavering. Miliband’s green policies are beginning to look like a political liability. The party faces pressure from its trade union supporters over job losses at closed oil and gas facilities, while energy costs for both homes and businesses remain painfully high. All the while, anger continues to mount at the difficulty of building anything under exacting environmental regulations.

The rest of the world has shown scant regard for Britain’s delusional bid at “climate leadership”. America and China continue to burn fossil fuels on a scale that dwarfs anything in our own industrial past. Donald Trump is dismantling the Biden climate agenda and railing against Europe’s green policies. In August, a proposed treaty to limit global plastic production failed to materialize, and now a draft report by the International Energy Agency suggests that, far from reaching “peak oil” this decade as previously hoped, the current trajectory will see global oil and gas demand still rising in 2050. The apparent futility of Britain’s climate mission must also be sapping the public’s support.

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These developments have barely registered in Polanski’s publicity drive since becoming leader. Instead, the former Lib Dem council candidate has established himself as a darling of the Corbynite Left. One of his first moves was to support the police for sending five armed officers to arrest Irish comedian Graham Linehan for his comments about “trans-identified males”. In interviews and on his own podcast, “climate emergency” is merely one ill-defined theme in a familiar repertoire of wealth taxes, colonialism, and the looming threat of fascism. Among the issues occupying the Greens in the lead up to their conference are legal action and protest by former members who say they were purged their gender-critical views.

The Green Party, in other words, has ceased to be an organization dedicated to environmental campaigning and policy, at precisely the time when such an organization is needed most. In fact, just 16% of those who would consider voting Green see the environment as the top issue facing the country.

How did we get here? The root of the problem is that, during this century, environmental politics has split into two parts: an establishment strand, and a protest strand. The establishment strand is comprised of the methods by which governments and large firms have tried to mitigate environmental damage. It is a bureaucratic affair, focusing on carbon budgets, regulations, and the allocation of capital to green technologies and energy sources. The protest strand, by contrast, is just what it sounds like: direct action demanding that governments go harder and faster to save the planet, whether in the form of climate marches or guerrilla campaigns by groups such as Just Stop Oil.

The result of this division is that, while environmentalism has maintained a high public profile, its political base has eroded. Neither strand has really bothered to involve a broader public in debating the goals and means of green policies. Nor have they properly considered the resentment those policies invite, whether through growing energy bills or the constant creep of restrictive rules.  Environmental politics ought to help us keep sight of one of the most profound questions a modern society faces: how can we prevent our way of life from ruining the world we are handing on to future generations — its landscapes, waterways, and fast-diminishing wealth of natural life? Instead, it has become a byword for stifling bureaucracy on the one hand, and for a facile politics of gesture on the other.

Unmoored from the lives of its citizens, the environmentalism of Britain’s establishment has drifted into a realm of fantasy targets and unworkable edicts. Nothing shows this better than the adoption of Net Zero goals in 2019. As Professor Helen Thompson has noted, the legislation passed through parliament with “little contest in the dying days of Theresa May’s government, when the country was still politically consumed with the question of whether the UK would actually leave the EU”. Our political system was paralyzed, our politicians unable to agree about anything, yet they still committed to “reinventing modern civilization… within less than three decades”. There was neither the technology existent to realize these ambitions, nor a plausible route to the green industrial boom promised by May, by Boris Johnson, and now by Miliband.

Instead, Net Zero policy has contributed to the on-going deindustrialization of the country through exceptionally high electricity prices. Moreover, a rush to install wind and solar before the grid has been updated means that we have problems not just with inconsistent supply, but with oversupply, so that we will pay an estimated £1 billion this year to prevent windfarms from generating too much electricity. This strategy, or lack thereof, risks discrediting the entire project of decarbonization, as does the failure to explain why Britain must shoulder these costs when other countries do not. It is becoming apparent that an additive approach — building up renewable sources as well as some domestic oil and gas — will be more politically sustainable, and may be more effective as well. Energy is so important to a modern economy that, with more of it, we could develop our own cleaner industries, rather than relying on dirty ones overseas, and could ultimately invest more in green tech and infrastructure.

The unpalatable nature of such compromises has helped to push the environmental movement, and the Green Party specifically, onto the more comfortable terrain of protest. As one Green member recently tried to remind his leadership, the party has grown over the years through patient advocacy and attention to local issues. Yet the “hyperpolitics” of the past decade, with its online activism and public demonstrations, has taken its toll. Greta Thunberg’s graduation from climate heroine to Palestine campaigner is emblematic of how green politics has been submerged in a wider protest agenda. Now an exodus of progressives from the post-Corbyn Labour party, combined with the longing for a charismatic populism on the Left to match Nigel Farage, is creating a party that is green only as an afterthought. But if the cause is too diffuse, its appeal is too narrow. Research into the Green membership has found that it is concentrated in London and the southeast of England, that 88% are Remainers, and that almost all identify as Left-wing.

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Obviously an environmental movement can be based in a critique of society, and even a spirit of revolt — love of the natural world usually involves some degree of disillusionment with modernity — but in the past, this has taken diverse and colorful forms. During the Twenties and Thirties, the so-called “muck and mystery” movement, led by reactionary and fascist-sympathizing British landowners, combined organic agriculture with Morris dancing and festivals celebrating an imagined ancient English culture. In the Seventies and Eighties, meanwhile, New Age hippies dabbled in Tipi communes, Native American cultural practices, and pagan ceremonies at Stonehenge — culminating in a brutal clash with police at the 1985 “Battle of Beanfield”.

Such mysticism, while it inevitably veers into the ridiculous, represents something that would serve today’s green movement better than an emotive attachment to politics: a sense of wonder at, and direct connection with, the natural world. Focusing on nature not just in an abstract global sense, but in a concrete, local one, can paradoxically appeal to a much broader base of people, of different temperaments and outlooks.

This may sit uneasily with the practical purview of environmental politics, which demands a careful understanding of economic webs spanning the world, as well as the mundane technical systems which make our societies function. But that is precisely what makes this problem so difficult. An effective environmental movement must be at once romantic and rational, global and local, radical and conservative, and above all, capable of incorporating many types of people. With that in mind, and looking again at the Greens today, we might conclude that political parties are probably the wrong mechanism for this challenge altogether.

Local elections are traditionally an opportunity for upset, rebellion and protest. And in May, when the voters of Conservative metroland (from Tunbridge Wells and Tandridge, to Nuneaton and Bedworth) go the polls, the Greens will be hoping to repeat the gains of last year, when they established pluralities and majorities in the councils of Mid-Suffolk, East Suffolk, Babergh and the Forest of Dean. Of course, this was amid a general wave of anti-Conservative feeling. But these results were distinct. The Green Party, once the preserve of the bohemian bourgeoisie, holed up in university enclaves such as Brighton and Bristol, has managed a startling prison break, vaulting fences and stiles to advance across the fields of Tory England.

Whether these victories stick is an open question. But safe seats are only safe until they aren’t, and the last time dozens of Tory strongholds swung, in 1997, they never returned to the Conservative fold. There have been numerous theories to explain this metamorphosis: Nimbyism, short-lived protest voting, disaffection at the cost-of-living crisis, strategic localism, and a genuine slippage from Conservative conservationism to Green ecologism. But, while the Greens have recently been associated with a younger urban electorate concerned about housing, social liberalism and technological acceleration towards net-zero, the party always contained a “small is beautiful”, Little England wing. An older block that prioritises “green space”, local control, local public transport and responsive administration.

To understand the true colours of this countryside revolt, I head out to Mid-Suffolk, the first local authority the Greens have ever governed by majority control. Arriving in the market town of Stowmarket, I am greeted at the station by three of the district’s Green councillors, Teresa Davis, Colin Lay and James Patchett. In their chinos, desert boots, tattersall shirts and gilets, none stands out as a typical Green. All are former Conservatives with backgrounds in the military, farming, and charities: the lieutenants of Suffolk’s Burkean platoons. They show me around Stowmarket, from the Union Jacks adorning the Victorian high street, to the large and prosperous new estates patched onto its exterior. This was a bedrock of Conservative support in 2019. And nothing about the town speaks to a Green Party positioning itself towards an exodus of disgruntled millennial Corbynites from Labour, as some have suggested. Patchett admits that: “We’re almost the opposite [of young and professional]. If you look at the people who are in the local Green Party, who come to the meetings, well… we, in our forties, are the young ones.”

Stowmarket, still the centre for Suffolk farming communities in the outlying areas, is now also something of a dormitory town, with trains running to London in just over an hour. On the outskirts of the town lies the Orwellian-sounding “Gateway 14”, a vast freeport made up of huge distribution and logistics warehouses, the product of the Conservative’s attempts at a national industrial policy and “levelling up” in the area. Many residents grumble about the development, occasionally caveating with the need for “jobs for the young”. And this isn’t the only controversial infrastructure project in the region: Green Party support has also surged in East Suffolk, where Government plans to extend nuclear power capacity with Sizewell C have been met with stiff resistance.

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Davis, Lay and Patchett deny that the Green Party surge in Suffolk comes down to Nimbyism, though they do allow that the pace of development targets from Whitehall has caused resistance. And speaking of the freeport, Lay offers little to ameliorate stereotypes of campaigners with a proprietorial attitude towards their surroundings, and a scorn for anything concrete or new: “There were a lot of objections to the project from the local people who live on the farms because their view used to be of rolling hills towards Stowmarket — now you’ve got a view of Suffolk’s biggest shed.”

It also seems that the pressures of the renewable energy transition, through developments such as solar farms, are, counterintuitively, pushing farmers and rural voters towards the Green Party. “We just had three solar farm applications go through planning,” says Patchett. “We’re obviously not against solar power. But we are against solar in inappropriate places. If developers are taking rich, fertile farming land and wanting to build solar farms on it — then we’re opposed to that.” The Green councillors justify working in opposition to certain green energy developments, because “one, the residents don’t want it and, two, these fields are the wrong place to put it”.

It seems odd that the Greens would be the best party to vocalise these niggles. Why have Davis, Lay and Patchett clustered there rather than in the party most associated with their perspective? “I don’t think the Conservatives have an identity you can get behind. We’re all disillusioned Conservatives, aren’t we? The first time I voted Green was four years ago, I always used to be Blue,” says Davis. Lay puts the Tory conversion to Green politics down to multiple factors, with the issue of competence looming large: “I think [the Truss debacle] reinforced what a lot of people were already thinking and gave them permission to say no — enough is enough.”

Their attempts to convert the surrounding areas have been boosted by recent events. All the Stowmarket Greens have set about capturing the conservationist and bucolic streak within Tory voters that has been alienated by Rishi Sunak’s Net Zero U-turn. “You’d knock on the door of a big detached house. You’d 100% know they were a Conservative voter. They’d have lovely big gardens. They admit to voting Conservative,” says Patchett, “You’d then ask them their views. ‘We like the environment, we like nature. We believe in all these things as well.’ That’s how we are flipping Conservative voters.”

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Despite the Stowmarket councillors’ insistence that the Green surge wasn’t down to a protest vote, others see their local victories more pragmatically. One Ipswich resident says they switched from Blue to Green because, “Tories aren’t really Tory anymore. Labour is the above with red ties and barely any real point of distinction. Green is a good protest vote.” Although they do concede that: “I wouldn’t [vote] the same at a general election.”

However, the often dismissed question of building continues to rear its head. Geri Silverstone, a political consultant who has worked closely on Green political issues, tells me the party’s eastern surge is down to infrastructure pressures rather than a wholesale abandonment of the Conservatives. “It’s a reaction to development,” he says. “Those Suffolk districts have been under the cosh to meet government targets. There’s been a backlash from their residents. These areas are predominately 50+ years old and that’s why you’re seeing a movement from traditional Conservative voters to the Greens. It’s an alternative — they think this is a party that’s going to say no.”

Up the coast, in the small, Georgian town of Halesworth, I test this theory out on Green Party co-leader Adrian Ramsay and local councillor Toby Hammond, who were analysing river water connected to run-off sewage plants. Ramsay also puts the Green swing primarily down to local alienation. But he admits that the Greens have been pursuing a different politics in Suffolk from the one they might in urban enclaves: “You’re going to see a very different style of Green politics in rural Suffolk than you’re going to see in Brighton, certainly. The leader of Mid-Suffolk is a farmer who is very pro-farming. We’re less tied up with some of the more fringe issues discussed elsewhere.”

To scrape beneath the competing rhetoric, I went looking for Green converts at what used to be called “the Conservative Party at prayer” — a local Anglican Church hosting an environmental panel. The event was attended by the Bishop of St Edmundsbury, Thérèse Coffey (then-Secretary for the Environment), Green Party activists, Ramsay and Conservative Councillor Richard Rout. The congregation: a grey sea of fashionably dressed parishioners. I was probably the only person under 30, and one of five under 40. A pensioner, dressed in fashionable workwear, sidled up to me and joked that “Coffey doesn’t know what she’s in for”, and there was an audible grumble as she entered the church.

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Various stalls lining the church outlined local concerns, everything from newts and birds, to the greatly disliked plan to run a series of pylons from Norwich to Tilbury to connect an offshore windfarm to the national grid. There were few — Green, Conservative or other — willing to make any kind of case for the potential efficacy of the pylon plan. No one, politician nor voter, mentioned that the cost-of-living and climate crisis, alongside energy security and Net Zero goals, might warrant speed over caution.

Outside, a tall man in a tweed suit, with a voice like Laurence Olivier, identified himself to me as former Conservative Councillor Michael Gower. “I’m a Tory Green! Don’t you believe it,” he bellowed. After asking him what “Tory Greenism” consisted of, Gower told me it’s “about doing things on the ground. I’ve been planting trees and testing water quality. Tories are local activists! We don’t like Sizewell C, and we don’t like the onshoring of wind turbines!” But, after he’d finished, I was none the wiser. Was he a green Conservative or a conservative Green? Was there any difference? How did an objection to onshore wind farms square with his professed environmentalism?

If Suffolk is anything to judge by, the “Green revolt” seems to be powered by those with the wealth and time to force a change in local politics. Rather than a national movement, it will remain a narrow phenomenon, both generationally and geographically, unless it can reach beyond its established confines. Because elsewhere in Halesworth, life goes on.  Young farmers, builders, and tradespeople gather in the pub, easily ignoring rural England’s debate over the future of the nation. The young sink pints, murmuring the politics of dark complaint, while receiving no echo in the church just yards away.

But something went wrong. In fact, it appears that the exact opposite has happened. The Greens have been eclipsed by the far-Right they were supposed to counter: the Greens are currently polling at 13%, while the far-Right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) has seen its popularity soar to 20%. Since last summer’s high of 23-24%, the German Greens have plummeted ten points in the polls. And in Bremen last month, they saw their worst regional election result in the northern state in over 20 years.

The poor showing in the north-western city is symbolically significant: it was there that the party entered a state parliament for the first time, in 1979, as the Bremen Green List. And while Germany’s smallest state is not considered a bellwether, the loss is a reminder that the party remains deeply unpopular with vast swaths of the poor and working class. In Bremen, fears that the Greens’ climate policies will inflict harm on Germany’s industrial base are felt especially acutely: when the city’s powerful shipbuilding industry collapsed in successive waves in the Eighties and Nineties, tens of thousands of workers lost their jobs. The end of the Cold War compounded the devastation, as the city-state’s booming defence industry was subject to dramatic cuts.

To this day, Bremen has not recovered. The current unemployment rate stands at 11.4% — about twice the national average and the highest in Germany. One in four people is at risk of poverty. While the Greens have paid lip service to voters’s economic concerns, claiming that climate-friendly policies need not “come at the expense of social justice”, many are unconvinced. It is not difficult to see why. One of the Greens’s most controversial plans, which will probably come into force next year, will phase out old oil and gas heating systems, replacing them with climate-friendly heat pumps. The process is expected to cost up to €13,000 per household.

The Greens have always been perceived — rightly or wrongly — as a party of privilege. In 1979, the US ambassador to West Germany, Walter J. Stoessel J, described party members as “unpolitical dreamers, mellow lifestylers, counter-culture, anti-nuclear, anti-technology, back to nature romantics with a few cynical leftists thrown in for good measure”. He also noted that they “drew most of their supporters from the urban areas, specifically from well-educated middle and upper-middle class voters under 30”.

In its earliest days, the party was comprised largely of young militants. The Green movement emerged out of the tear gas and violence of the 1968 student revolt. It was virulently opposed to prevailing social norms, which they understood as not only inherently oppressive, but also key to understanding their parents’ submission to Nazism: “authoritarian” social structures, embodied by both the state and the family, could explain why the previous generation had so tragically failed to resist. The Greens concluded that society could inoculate itself against the resurgence of fascism through the deliberate destruction of social taboos.

This line of thinking led the young Greens down a dark path. The protests of 1968 had revived interest in the works of Freud disciple Wilhelm Reich, who described the supposed links between authoritarian submission and sexual repression. In his book Mass Psychology of Fascism, he wrote: “Suppression of the natural sexuality in the child makes the child apprehensive, shy, obedient, afraid of authority, ‘good’ and ‘adjusted’ in the authoritarian sense … it paralyses the rebellious force.” Influenced by these works, early Green party members pushed for the removal of the two sections of Germany’s penal code that criminalised sex between adults and children.

There were also visible manifestations of paedophile activism during the Eighties. “Paedosexual” rights groups showed up at Green Party events in Nuremberg, bringing with them street children housed at the Indianerkommune. About a decade ago, the Greens ordered an investigation into the party’s past involvement with pro-paedophilia groups and child sexual abuse. During the investigation, it was discovered that the influence of paedophiles on the party was much stronger than previously thought — and that for a brief period in the mid-Eighties, the Greens “practically served as the parliamentary arm of the paedophile movement”. In November 2014, the party held a press conference, at which leaders apologised to the victims of sexual abuse.

It was a long, strange trip for the Greens from the tear-gas choked streets of 1968 to the Reichstag. But in 1998, the party at last entered national government as part of Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder’s “third way” coalition. Power would quickly render them unrecognisable: within a year, the pacifist party was breaking the post-WWII German taboo of going to war.

The Greens occupied the foreign ministry then, and at its helm was Joschka Fischer, the leading figure of the party’s “Realo” wing – the realistic, more mainstream segment of the party that was amenable to compromise with established parties. The Realos clashed with the “Fundis” — party fundamentalists who believed that the Greens should never abandon their founding principles. This internal clash reached a zenith in 1999 with the Kosovo War. While Fischer supported participation in the Nato intervention on humanitarian grounds, the Fundis were wary about Germany bombing a city that the Nazis had attacked 58 years previously. After a bitter debate, Fischer’s Realos won out. The Green Party forever abandoned its pacifism, and Germany its unofficial prohibition on war.

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Schroeder and the Greens presided over an increasingly unpopular “neoliberal shock-therapy programme”, and in 2005, they were voted out. The Greens were in opposition for 16 years until 2021, when they returned to power with their strongest ever electoral showing. The party took about 14% of the vote in the federal election, and became part of the “traffic-light coalition”. The Greens had five key ministries, with party leader Annalena Baerbock becoming minister of foreign affairs, while her co-leader Robert Habeck became minister of economic affairs and climate action. They promised a new clean politics, uncomplicated by the baggage of the two major parties.

But it soon became clear that Greens can be as dirty as anyone else. This spring’s “best-man affair” revealed that Habeck’s state secretary, Patrick Graichen, had helped get the best man at his wedding appointed head of the state-owned German Energy Agency (Dena). Further investigation revealed that Graichen had also approved government funding for a climate protection project that his sister had worked on. A few days after the Greens were defeated in Bremen, Graichen resigned. He had been a major player in Germany’s decarbonisation efforts; his resignation signalled another stinging defeat. The scandal has also hurt Habeck’s popularity. In September 2022, 57% of Germans polled said Habeck was doing his job well; when asked the same question last month, that number had fallen to 39%.

More worrying for the party, however, is that their climate policies are increasingly unpopular. According to one Allensbach survey, 80% of Germans are opposed to the plan to phase out fossil fuel heating systems next year. Some say that voters are fatigued by the back-to-back shocks of Covid and the war in Ukraine, and are therefore reluctant to accept more dramatic transformations to their way of life. Indeed, the current conditions in Europe are not fertile ground for the Greens: recent academic research has shown that Green parties are most successful in good economic times. Meanwhile, far-Right ones thrive in times of crisis, and the Greens have provided them with plenty of fodder. The AfD have characterised the party’s environmental policies as “climate hysteria” and “eco-dictatorship” — aiming both to mobilise “climate sceptical” voters against the Greens and fuel polarisation against the issue.

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But the Greens are also under fire from their activist base for abandoning some of their own signature policies. After Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the German government scrambled to end its dependence on Russian gas. This entailed making compromises on coal and nuclear power. But for climate activists, the biggest betrayal was the Greens’s “backroom deal” with the German multinational energy firm RWE, which allowed for the razing of Lutzerath to make way for a coal mine. Well-publicised protests and activist occupation of the town followed; Greta Thunberg was even detained there by German police. Adding insult to injury, a long-time aide to the Green party leader took a job as chief lobbyist with RWE.

These days, it seems that the only thing the Greens will not compromise on is war, sometimes out-hawking Washington in their rhetoric. Critics have characterised Baerbock’s tenure as foreign minister as undiplomatic, even hostile to diplomacy; her defenders more charitably describe her approach as “straight talking”. In her opposition to peace negotiations, she is also opposed to German public opinion. Last month, a YouGov poll commissioned by DPA revealed that 55% of Germans now favour peace negotiations to end the war in Ukraine; only 28% are against them. Furthermore, 54% of Germans are against inviting Ukraine to join Nato; only 27% support it. Meanwhile, the AfD have defined themselves in opposition to the Greens on the war in Ukraine, fashioning themselves as Germany’s “peace party”. AfD MP Petr Bystron claims that the party’s popularity surged in the polls immediately after the unveiling of their peace plan. Indeed, with their denunciations of BlackRock and American arms companies, AfD sound a lot like the Greens of yesteryear.

Keen observers note that AfD’s appropriation of peacenik rhetoric is a clever smokescreen for a worryingly pro-Russian agenda. Some media reports allege that Bystron recently made a secret trip to Belarus. Nevertheless, supporters of the Green’s foreign policy will eventually have to contend with the mounting public opposition to their current approach, beyond labelling critics Putinists or unwitting dupes of Russian propaganda. Opposition to uncompromising German militarism predates Putin, let alone Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, by many decades — and no one should understand it better than the formerly pacifist party.

In the failure of the party that was supposed to lead the “green wave” across Europe, there lies a lesson for environmentalists everywhere. Green parties cannot succeed unless they shake their associations with liberal privilege; from today’s vantage point, they seem like a luxury from better times. The public has roundly rejected the naïve idea that the Greens are “outsiders” charting a new, exciting kind of politics. Instead, voters see them as part of politics as usual, even if their machinations are hidden behind pretty verbiage and green paint. Far from embodying a hopeful, unifying message for Europe, then, Germany’s Green dream is out of reach for too many; in fact, it looks like little more than the right to purchase a clear conscience while demanding that the poor subsidise it.

1. The Red Wall hasn’t finished falling down

At the last election the Conservatives won fifty seats from Labour across Wales, the Midlands and the North of England. These make up the famous “Red Wall” — or at least that section of it that turned blue.

For what’s less appreciated is just how much of it is still standing. We’re not talking the odd fragment here and there — but a significant proportion of Labour’s remaining MPs.

Up until last week, Hartlepool was number 44 on a list of likely Tory targets for the next general election (i.e. those requiring the smallest swings to turn blue). So, in theory, 43 seats are more winnable than Hartlepool was. Of those, 36 are held by Labour, 28 of them in the North and Midlands.

For what it’s worth, number 43 on the list is Rotherham. In last week’s local elections, the Tories went from zero seats on Rotherham Borough Council to twenty in a single bound. If that’s anything to go by, the fall of the Red Wall is only half-way through.

2. Millennials might not ride to the rescue

Labour’s first priority shouldn’t be to win back the Red Wall, but to save what’s left of it. And yet unbelievably they’re being distracted from this most basic of tasks by the prospect of gains along the “Blue Wall”: Conservative-held seats in the South where younger, university-educated voters are trending Left.

As Ed West wrote on UnHerd this week, long-term generational shifts should certainly worry the Tories. But Labour ought to worry too. The party’s extreme dependence on younger voters is not a strength, but a vulnerability. Not only do young people have a habit of growing up and changing their minds, there’s a lot the Conservatives could do to win them over.

3. The Green Party 

Even if the Tories persist in abandoning the young to the Left, there’s no guarantee that the Left means Labour.

Last week, the Green Party demonstrated that it is capable of taking seats off all the main parties. Its biggest breakthrough though came in Bristol, where the Greens took an astonishing thirteen seats from Labour. Sheffield produced another astonishing result, in which the Greens gained five seats and Labour lost its majority.

In a general election, this could mean the Greens breaking out of their Brighton bastion to give Caroline Lucas some company in Parliament. A more dangerous scenario is one in which English Greens follow the lead of their German counterparts to become the middle-class Left-wing party”. This would deny Labour the new “Blue Wall” voters they need to offset their losses elsewhere. A Green surge could prove fatal.

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4. Non-white voters can’t be taken for granted

Labour still dominates the ethnic minority vote. It’s a key reason why the party keeps on piling up massive majorities in the most urban constituencies — especially in London.

But no one likes to be taken for granted; Starmer can’t assume that this will continue.

It is, for instance, going to be increasingly hard to sustain the image of the Tories as an exclusively white party. The Cabinet already includes Rishi Sunak, Priti Patel, Alok Sharma and Kwasi Kwarteng. By the next election they could be joined by Sajid Javid, James Cleverly and Kemi Badenoch (who would be the first black female MP to achieve Cabinet rank).

An ethnically-diverse Cabinet is not in itself a reason why non-white voters should vote Conservative. But it does explode an “argument” for why they should not — i.e. the insinuation that the Tories are irredeemably racist.

5. The boundary review

After years of delay, the much-delayed review of constituency boundaries should be finished by July 2023 — after which, in the subsequent general election, the Conservatives will almost certainly gain seats, while Labour and the other opposition parties lose them.

It’s hard to tell how many until we get the new map — but it’s not unreasonable to suppose a Tory gain of ten seats and an opposition loss of about the same number.

That, of course, would increase the government’s notional majority from eighty to a hundred. Good luck overturning that in one go.

6. A post-Covid boost

Getting the boundary review done by summer 2023 would allow an autumn election in the same year.

And it is highly likely the Government will want to go to the country during a Goldilocks period for the British economy: early enough for the post-Covid boom still to be felt, but late enough to get strategic investments in Red Wall constituencies underway. The Tories, in effect, will only look stronger. Boris Johnson would love to spend the campaign posing in a hard hat, new infrastructure rising up behind him.

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7. A Labour Party civil war

And yet Labour’s real problem might be in the foreground.

The first shots in Labour’s impending civil war were fired over the weekend, as the Shadow Cabinet reshuffle descended into chaos.

But worse could be to come. Compared to Jeremy Corbyn’s first year as leader — in which most of the shadow Cabinet resigned and there was a second leadership contest — Starmer has had an easy ride.

Now, do you suppose that’s because the Corbynites have meekly accepted their fate — or because they’ve been waiting for their moment?

I suspect Starmer is about to find out.

8. A Labour stalemate

There is an alternative to civil war, but it’s worse.

The Corbynites never makes their move; the Starmerites never hit back. So nothing is resolved, nothing decided. Nothing of interest happens at all — or is even said for fear of provoking the other side.

There was talk of appointing Yvette Cooper and Hillary Benn to the shadow cabinet — not unbearably exciting, I’ll grant you — but Starmer couldn’t even make that happen. If nothing else, an Opposition should capture the imagination, but this lot just gather dust.

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9. The threat of Scottish independence

Another nightmare scenario for the Labour Party lurks north of the border: a second referendum on Scottish independence.

The 2014 referendum was a catastrophe for Labour — wiping out its most reliable stronghold. A second referendum would cause further damage. It’s not that there are many Scottish Labour MPs left to lose (it has just one). Rather the danger this time is of an English backlash, which is overwhelmingly likely to benefit the Conservatives. And there’s always the possibility that the Nats will win. Without Scotland’s MPs, the Tories could strengthen their grip on Westminster.

10. Don’t bank on a two-party system

Britain’s two-party system has been in place for so long, we’ve come to see it as a feature of our constitution. But it isn’t.

Just because we’re accustomed to alternating spells of centre-left and centre-right government it doesn’t mean that things have to be that way. In other democracies, one party can hold power, barely interrupted, for decades upon end. Consider Sweden, for instance, or Japan. Britain too could end with a permanent party of government — and it won’t be Labour.

The idea that “the world doesn’t owe you a living” is a Right-wing sentiment that the Left has always resisted. But that doesn’t stop it from being true.

But even if we seem to have collectively decided that The Donald was a political blip, best consigned to the dustbin of history, his utterances live on. In 2015, before he was even elected, Trump declared that the US needed “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on”. His statement was met with horror at the time. Today, though, it’s not just become a meme, but also mutated into a form of political debate.

Last week, in response to Sarah Everard’s murder, Green Party peer Baroness Jones of Moulscoomb called for men to be subjected to a curfew after 6pm. Baroness Jones argued that this would “make women a lot safer” and reduce “discrimination of all kinds”. Effectively, then, she was proposing a total and complete lockdown of men until we can figure out what’s going on. The Welsh First Minister Mark Drakeford then made noises about the “dramatic action” needed to mitigate a “crisis”, and how his government would be “prepared to consider all measures”.

The proposal itself excited much discussion in the usual places, despite (or perhaps due to) having so many self-evident shortcomings as a policy. Baroness Jones herself has since admitted that the idea was “not an entirely serious suggestion”, while Drakeford was forced to clarify that Wales was not in fact considering a curfew on men.

But even if the bien-pensant world has agreed to pretend that Trump never happened, there’s something startlingly Trumpian about seeing elected UK politicians floating obviously absurd policy proposals. As the former President’s enemies never tired of pointing out, his utterances often bore only a glancing relation to reality. His detractors were infuriated by this, as well as by the way his supporters didn’t seem to care. But it’s possible that they were missing the point, because communication is by no means always about reality.

Many everyday exchanges are what linguistics experts call “phatic communication”. This is better known as small talk: utterances that don’t convey factual information, such as “the milk is in the fridge”, but rather establish a mood. Utterances such as “Good morning” or “Lovely weather we’ve been having” are less about the morning or the weather than about conveying the message “I’m here and I’m friendly”.

Trump’s distinctive contribution to modern politics was his expert deployment of something like phatic communication in a political context. That is, statements that delivered a kind of mood music, with some relation to policy issues, but which usually did little to alter the facts on the ground.

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For example, consider his assertion on February 28, 2020 that “one day, it’s like a miracle – [Covid] will disappear.” More than a year (and a new President) later, this hasn’t happened; the assertion only makes sense if understood as a piece of wishful thinking, aimed at conjuring a feeling of positivity about reality reordering itself in accordance with Trump’s desires. I think of this as “phatic politics”: a kind of willingness, despite the reality, to say whatever will convey a mood that feels appropriate, or is likely to achieve the desired effect, in a given moment — regardless of the facts on the ground.

In January last year, just before Covid struck, Eitan Hirsh drew a distinction between politics and “political hobbyists”. Politics, in Hirsh’s formulation, is about making things happen, such as the Suffragettes’s campaign for the female franchise, or a local group fundraising for a new community centre. Hirsh characterises political hobbyists, on the other hand, as predominantly white male graduates, who consume politics as a form of entertainment without themselves being involved in any concrete effort to bring about substantive change.

The style of phatic politics I’ve just described was Trump’s signature presidential style, but it’s typical of all hobbyist consumers of politics — because it implies that there is no real connection between what you say about real life and life itself. In Trump’s case, the slippery relationship between utterance and reality was complicated by his actually being the US President; but for most political hobbyists, there really isn’t much connection between the policies they advocate and those which are adopted by governments. This frees hobbyists to treat policy as a vehicle for self-expression. It means you can call for paedo-hanging or male curfews with impunity, as a way of conveying how strongly you feel about a subject — for the simple reason that your ideas will never be implemented.

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Over the last year, this style of politics has become so widespread that we’re now witnessing its group manifestation: phatic protest. That is, public demonstrations that often convey deeply felt emotion, but without a specific policy aim in mind.

Both the death of George Floyd and that of Sarah Everard have triggered such inchoate responses. Both events were, of course, deplorable. They both implicated police officers — precisely the citizens charged with ensuring public order and safety — and prompted a sense that the very structures of social order are institutionally hostile to a particular identity group. And in both cases, horror at an unjust death has fed a groundswell of public anger at this perceived injustice.

But also, in both cases, the outcry has been as formless as it has been sincere. After all, it’s all too easy to agree that the world treats specific groups unjustly, and feel deep anger about this, while remaining unsure what specifically we should do about it. And in the absence of any consensus on what we should do, we’ve seen the rise of phatic protest; that is, political engagement oriented more toward expressing a feeling than demanding policy change.

In the vacuum left by this uncertainty over what exactly we can do about something as endemic as violence against women, or the seemingly intractable issue of racial injustice, we’ve seen huge sums of money raised seemingly overnight by crowdfunding websites. Black Lives Matter raised more than $90 million in 2020, while Reclaim These Streets raised over £500,000 in just a few days, despite providing little information about fundraisers’s identities or how the money will be spent.

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I have no reason to suspect that the motives of Reclaim These Streets are anything but decent. But it is still startling to see half a million pounds raised in a matter of days by people who don’t even put their names on the crowdfunding website. And this sense of powerful grassroots energy in search of an organisational focus points to the most troubling feature of phatic protest: how vulnerable it is to being hijacked.

The initial outrage at racialised police brutality last summer rapidly became a vector for activists seeking to abolish prisons, capitalism and the nuclear family. Similarly, while Reclaim These Streets seems to be organised by local councillors and other women local to the Clapham area, rumours are swirling about Antifa infiltrating at the Clapham Common vigil.

It’s hard to be sure, but it’s at least possible that someone who takes an “ACAB” (All Cops Are Bastards) placard to a candlelit vigil for a recent murder victim didn’t have mourning a horrible death uppermost on their mind. The next day, a protest was organised by Sisters Uncut, an existing group affiliated with broadly the same political agenda as the one which has colonised BLM — that is, to abolish prisons, undermine capitalism and so on. (I call this the Dismantle Everything lobby.)

By its leaderless, heavily emotional and agenda-less nature, then, phatic protest attracts would-be revolutionary vanguards who do have specific policies they want to bring about — even if these are at odds with whatever has prompted the mass outbreak of public feeling. It is not obvious, for example, how defunding the police would improve women’s safety in public; but as night follows day, Dismantle Everything has already suggested that doing so would be a helpful response to the Sarah Everard vigil.

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Why aren't we at it like rabbits?

By Mary Harrington

Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that our politics has come so adrift from any sense that we might actually effect political change through activism. After all, we’ve spent the last year cut off from social contact, on the receiving end of unprecedented and authoritarian public laws, wondering what our distant leaders will foist on us next. It’s no wonder, then, that so many of us have given up on political agency in favour of political hobbyism, and that political activism over the last year has focused more on emotion and symbolic action — taking a knee, clapping for carers, leaving flowers — rather than substantive change. For if there’s a unifying subtext to phatic policy, it’s a sense of powerlessness: wishful thinking as a substitute for action.

But if we’re to recover a sense of political agency and democratic participation, that’s going to mean weaning ourselves off political hobbyism. In other words, less clicktivism, less arguing over Westminster court politics and instead grounding ourselves in reality. If you’re horrified by women’s lack of safety, you would do better to join the council to push for better street lighting, or help out at a local women’s refuge, than to pretend that wildly authoritarian policy kite-flying by C-list politicians is an adequate response to profound systemic issues.

Until we make this adjustment, we’ll continue to only stir ourselves from our online torpor for diffuse, emotive public protests over intractable problems. And as long as this remains true, mass politics will achieve nothing more constructive than rolling out the red carpet for Dismantle Everything.

There is still a faded Friends of the Earth “Nuclear Power— No Thanks” logo painted on a property near my home, a slogan that exemplified this sentiment. I also struggled to share their concern with genetically modified crops, particularly if they could help feed impoverished people on our planet.

Now climate change has pushed Green issues firmly back up the political agenda. Yet a new poll has revealed a strange quirk: some people inspired by scientific evidence to fight against climate change do not seem to trust Covid-19 vaccines created by other scientists to save society in a pandemic.

This curio comes from a new Oxford University survey that found a sharp rise in the number of Britons saying they are “very likely” to be vaccinated, with about nine in ten willing to have the jab. There are, however, still some pockets of concern, driven by age, ethnicity, income — and political affiliation. It is hardly surprising there was most hesitancy among supporters of the antediluvian anti-lockdown Reform Party founded by Nigel Farage. But the study also detected significant scepticism among voters backing the Green Party, who are at least 14% less likely to accept the jab than people supporting the Tories, Labour, Liberal Democrats or Scottish National Party.

Such scepticism is another depressing indication of the breakdown in trust between citizens and the institutions that shape lives. And this matters since a successful vaccination policy — and escape from this dystopian nightmare — relies on mass inoculation to minimise the potential host bodies for the wretched virus to infect. So why would nearly one in four people identifying with Green politics be so mistrustful — and what does this mean for the environmental lobby?

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Perhaps the findings merely prove that there is some truth to that hoary old stereotype of hippy environmentalists, besotted with their healing crystals and hooked on the absurdity of homeopathy. Such folk clearly still lurk in the undergrowth of the Green movement. These are the sort of people fixated by “natural” remedies, forgetting that Mother Nature can be such a deadly force; bear in mind that measles was the biggest killer of children under five in Africa until the arrival of vaccinations. One Green MP in New Zealand even advocated use of homeopathic medicines in the 2014 West African ebola epidemic.

In Britain, the Green Party has long been dogged by anti-science views. Its solitary MP Caroline Lucas has admitted using homeopathy and once signed a parliamentary motion in support of such treatments, while Natalie Bennett, her successor as leader, insisted the bogus medicines had a place in the NHS. Meanwhile, its 2019 election manifesto argued rightly that the science is clear on climate change, yet dismissed nuclear power as a “distraction” from renewable energies. It also demanded a moratorium on production and import of GM foods. So while misguidedly saying Britain should ramp up aid spending under a “moral imperative” to “alleviate suffering”, they ignored how science ensures rising global populations have fed themselves through advances in farming.

Crucially, Green voters are more likely to be young — another group showing greater hesitancy over Covid injections since the virus is more lethal to older people — and sceptical of a capitalist system they see as destroying the planet.

Ben Ansell, the professor of Comparative Democratic Institutions at Oxford who led the study, told me he found that Greens responded in a similar style to other opposition party voters in their verdicts on government performance, rollout of vaccines and in deference to scientists (unlike Farage’s fan club, who are suspicious of experts). But they had less faith in government scientific advisers and were more wary of the regulatory system. “This may be down to mistrust of Big Pharma rather than scientists in general,” he said.

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It is all too easy for lack of trust — in the authorities, in capitalism, in experts — to tip over into scepticism over vaccines. Jill Stein, the US Green Party’s presidential candidate in 2016, sparked worry over her ambivalent vaccine stance after saying people had “real questions” over side-effects. Michèle Rivasi, deputy leader of the French Greens and a former Greenpeace chief, attracted controversy after issuing an invitation to Andrew Wakefield, the British doctor struck off for his discredited paper linking the MMR jab to autism. She has called also for an end to the “quasi-religious” cult of vaccination.

During the pandemic, there have been concerns in Australia over anti-vaxxers infecting the Greens after data found an overlap between low immunisation rates and high levels of party support. “There certainly are people who hold concerning views about vaccination,” said Sarah Hanson-Young, a senator for the party. “To those people I say we are a party of science, we are a party of evidence, and we are a party of making sure the community is looked after. The public health response needs to be underscored by science.”

She is right. One leading British activist argued to me there is a generational divide between younger supporters — who have strong faith in science since it has informed their deep-held views on importance of climate issues — and the remaining vestiges of an old guard who were alarmed by issues such as GM crops and nuclear power. Yet both sides seem to coalesce around antipathy to capitalism, evidenced by their shock troops of Extinction Rebellion, despite its crucial importance in the climate change battle.

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Behind these issues of scepticism over science and capitalism lies a profound question for the party, one which I first came across in my post-graduate study days. My journalism thesis pondered if Green politics might take off in Britain, which felt prescient when the Green Party surged to 15% vote share in the 1989 European elections. Yet my conclusion was negative. First, I thought the party unlikely to thrive in our two-party system, since mainstream rivals would simply shift positions if Green issues became embedded in the electorate. Second, behind the media-friendly face of Sir Jonathon Porritt, the Green Party’s best-known figure at the time, I saw too many hardliners and obsessives to permit the sort of compromises needed to gain or even influence power.

Sure enough, the impressive surge soon turned out to be a blip as the party slid back in polls. It still struggles with this internal conflict: is it serious about changing the world or content to remain a fringe force, stuffed with too many cranks, conspiracy theorists and loopy ideas to be taken very seriously? Only last week, one of the party’s two peers called for a curfew on men after 6pm in response to Sarah Everard’s death. Baroness Jenny Jones told the Lords that this “will make women much safer, and discrimination of all kinds would be lessened”. Perhaps she may be right. But her draconian solution is not likely to be an election-winning proposal with at least half the electorate, let alone underline their credentials as serious political players amid the soul-searching over women’s safety.

Ultimately this is a party divided between “watermelons” (green skins but red in the middle) and the more pragmatic “mangoes” (green exteriors but yellow, like Liberal Democrats, in the middle) — as seen so disastrously in the splits when it won its first big local authority in Brighton. This has long been the problem for Green politics, even in Europe where it has made more advances by capturing major cities and participating in governments. Charismatic German leaders claim to have reshaped politics by transcending the left-right divide. But Winnifred Kretschmann, branded the world’s most powerful green politician after running Baden-Württemberg for a decade, had to see off fresh challenge at the weekend from a new party founded by activists who deem him too cosy with big business.

It might feel a long way from an Oxford study on vaccination scepticism to ructions in the politics of a German powerhouse state, but they are linked by a common thread — the difficulty of reconciling people with conflicting outlooks who are united only by their concern for the environment. Climate change has become the third most important issue in this country after health and the economy as Brexit fades in importance, yet the Green Party remains a largely irrelevant force in Britain. Yes, its leading lights have stood firmly in favour of vaccination. But the level of hesitancy in their ranks shows the pressing need for a sharp injection of reality if they really want to shape our nation’s future.

Many businesses have already sent most of their staff home. At some point it seems likely that almost everyone bar essential workers such as healthcare providers will be ordered to work from home. The impact on the economy will be cataclysmic. One forecast, by the respected Centre for Economics and Business Research, suggests that London’s output would fall by £495 million a day for as long as such a state of affairs continued.

Should it last even a week, the CEBR calculates that the London economy would lose £2.4 billion in output. Since the capital is responsible for approximately 20% of the UK’s GDP, this would mean the British economy shrinking by 6% during any lockdown. No wonder: manufacturing, for example, would simply stop if there are no workers to, as it were, manufacture anything.

You might think that such a scenario would be universally viewed as a disaster. And you would be wrong. Because there is one group — an influential group, whose influence is ever-growing — for whom such a shutdown (albeit not one caused by a pandemic) is not a disaster but a first order policy goal.

I refer, of course, to the Green movement.

The next few weeks will present many challenges, to use the fashionable phraseology. But they will also offer us the chance — force us to have the chance, I should say — to examine the consequences and popularity of many of the policies that mainstream green activists and eco-warriors have been urging us to adopt for decades.

Take travel. On Wednesday President Trump barred all EU flights from entering the US, wiping fortunes off airline shares and pushing the stock market into freefall. But to green activists, this was no disaster but the implementation of the long-cherished goal of ending international air travel.

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Even the Green Party have been politically savvy enough not to dare be open in pushing for a complete end to cross-Atlantic travel, because it would be so unpopular. Their policy statement for last year’s election pledged simply to “reduce the number of journeys made by unsustainable modes of transport, particularly by car and aeroplane” and to “reduce the total distance travelled by reducing journey lengths, particularly by encouraging the development and retention of local facilities”.

It gets even better for the Greens, however. It’s not just President Trump’s administrative fiat on air travel that will road test, as it were, their transport ideals. That policy statement above could hardly be a more precise description of what is about to happen across the country. As we increasingly self-isolate, the number of car journeys will collapse. It will be green heaven.

But travel is merely one limited aspect of the extent to which we are about to test out green ideas. The central mantra of green economics is that local is good and globalisation bad, a belief that runs hand-in-hand with their view that, far from chasing economic growth, we should shrink it and reduce production.

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We’re about to see how this plays out, with an imminent fall in economic growth, devastating for almost everyone — except for the Greens. Because as the party’s “philosophical basis” put it: “Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, society has expected continual increases in material affluence for the people of the world, and has therefore relentlessly pursued the goal of economic growth… The pursuit of economic growth as a force driving over-exploitation of the Earth must cease to be an automatic aim of human societies.”

That might seem vaguely sensible — almost everyone, after all, thinks there is more to life than just economic growth. But the overall Green Party programme for “a fundamental restructuring of the global economy” is proudly designed not merely to reduce growth but to shrink the economy and return us to local subsistence, so that “localisation of trade and economies is therefore a goal of the Green Party.” It wants to reverse “ever increasing trade between ever distant nations”.

As more of us stay home to deal with the coronavirus, so we will begin acting out the Green Party’s plans: “Each country and region should be more self-sufficient… Local supply of goods would be preferred… Policies will be supported which increase small-scale, local community import substitution, rather than export promotion, support local food growing in place of cash crops for the international market…”

If you think I am exaggerating, how about this? The party says it will promote “research and development into products and technologies specifically appropriate for use in the home-based economy; changing planning and building regulations to encourage home based enterprises; providing grants for re-skilling, and for the necessary tools and technology necessary for home-based enterprises.” The Green Party wants us to stay at home and, thanks to coronavirus, they are getting what they want.

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But it’s not just these vague aspirations that show the overlap between green ideas and the impact of coronavirus. There’s also hard cash.

For many freelancers and those with insecure jobs, the most direct impact of the virus beyond the physical consequences will be a loss of income. The government has — in a limited fashion — offered special funding to try to alleviate this. At last December’s election, the Green Party demanded a “Basic Income” of £89 a week.

Their reasoning is that “current dependence on economic growth to cease and allow zero or negative growth to be feasible without individual hardship should this be necessary on the grounds of sustainability”. In other words, if the economy is in free fall because of our policies, don’t worry, here’s some money for you.

The causes may be different, but the logic is the same.

I’m going to take a wild guess and predict that the economic consequences of coronavirus will not be wildly popular. There is no upside. But it’s just possible that, as a result, an economic analysis that suggests collapsing the economy, working from home and putting severe limits on travel might just take a bit of a battering.

Since he took control of the Greens in 2018, they have consolidated themselves as the main party of the centre-Left — and political home of the educated, professional class – making them the most likely coalition partner for the centre-right CDU/CSU in 2021. It is quite conceivable, if the Greens were to end up as the largest party after those federal elections, that Habeck—or even his co-leader Annalena Baerbock — could wear the German Chancellor’s crown

He certainly had an adoring audience of elite young Germans at the LSE, where I saw him speaking last week. The handsome 50-year-old father of four from the northern state of Schleswig-Holstein was a writer and translator (including the poems of Roger McGough and Ted Hughes) before becoming a politician in his late 30s. He has the same relaxed, articulate anti-establishment/establishment manner of a Blair or Macron. You can understand his appeal.

But how come a conservative-green alliance now seems such an uncontroversial possibility in Europe’s most important country? And what problems will such an alliance face in the future?

The new potential alliance is partly a matter of the contingencies of German politics — the further big strides to the centre taken by the Greens in recent years, and the implosion of the Social Democrats as the main party of the centre-Left.

But there is a deeper logic, too, that suggests it might be a historical accident that the green movement in general has hitherto ended up so definitively on the Left. After all, conservative and conservation share the same Latin root, con servare, meaning to protect from loss or harm. And there are many overlaps in the worldview of greens and conservatives: the belief that local is best, small is beautiful, a respect for limits, a belief in what is natural and harmonious, an interest in intergenerational continuity.

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There has also been a kind of policy convergence. On the one hand, environmental priorities have gone mainstream — whether de-carbonising the economy or, in Germany, closing the nuclear industry —and on the other hand, market mechanisms have become an increasingly popular means to green ends.

The Green party itself has certainly travelled a long way since its formation as a radical anti-nuclear, anti-Nato, alternative life-style movement in the early 1980s. It entered the Bundestag with 5.7% of the vote in 1983, but found itself out of step with the rest of the country in the reunification period (its slogan was “Everyone is talking about Germany, we are talking about the weather!”).

It bounced back later in the 1990s, and joined the red-green coalition government of Gerhard Schroder in 1998 (though only on 6.7% of the vote) with Joschka Fischer becoming foreign minister. It has been out of national government since 2005, but has been in 11 out of 16 state-level governments and has seen its support creep up as the Social Democrats have crumbled, hitting a high note of 20% in the 2019 European elections and even outstripping the governing CDU-CSU in some recent opinion polls.

Meanwhile the party, as symbolised by Habeck, has become completely salonfähig (meaning socially acceptable). It is friendly to business, happy with Nato membership and comfortable with the compromises of power. When Habeck and Annalena Baerbock were elected on a joint ticket in 2018, they were embraced, largely uncritically, by almost all of the German media.

This is partly because German politicians have been unusually bland and dull in recent years. There was a thirst for something new —remember how this country fell for Nick Clegg not that long ago? The two Greens are attractive and articulate. Also, their election was the final decisive victory for the moderate wing of a party that has traditionally been divided between “realos” and “fundis”.

At the LSE, Habeck delivered a mish-mash of mainly familiar centre-Left ideas with some nice phrases, for example about how populists offer “not competence but intimacy”, and a welcome acknowledgement, from a progressive politician, of the importance of emotions in politics, albeit in a Hegelian frame  — “recognition is the driver of human history”.

He repeated a story he likes to tell about talking to workers in the dirty, declining industries in the old east Germany (where the Greens do not poll strongly) and prefacing his remarks to them like this: “Before we talk about what comes next, I am going to say thank you to you and your parents for dedicating your life and health to building the old industrial heart of this country.”

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He sees that recognition, respect and status are as much the currency of society, and therefore politics, as money. And he also acknowledges that it is the neglect of these psychological factors in our politics that has been such a blessing for populist parties, who do not make the same mistake.

Fleetingly, it occurred to me as I listened that perhaps there was something to the incongruous idea that not just greens and conservatives but greens and populists are potential bedfellows. Both of them favour attachment to place and want to slow down the machine of liberal modernity. And consider what is happening in Vienna: Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurtz who heads the conservative-green alliance there talks about illegal immigration and climate change being equal threats to the Austrian way of life.

But this kind of rhetorical/policy combination is not going to happen in Germany, which Habeck’s speech really confirmed. Green party members, after all, in Germany and elsewhere in Europe, are more highly educated, and sometimes more affluent, than members of most other parties, and especially populist parties whose members are usually at the bottom of both leagues.

Green party members and voters tend to flourish in the knowledge economy and post-industrial society. They mainly live in mobile metropolitan centres, favour openness, are comfortable with social and ethnic fluidity/uncomfortable with authority and tradition, lack strong group or national attachments and worry about discrimination and equalities of many kinds. Their green politics tends to be abstract and top-down and altruistic — a calling to save the planet. Populist party members and voters are almost exactly the opposite on all scores.

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Habeck wants a politics of recognition in name only. He may like to flatter the people of east Germany with stories of their heroism but he then tramples all over their political intuitions. “It is simply an illusion that things used to be better,” he said to the LSE audience. No doubt an illusion to the young men, and especially women, in the audience en route to upper professional jobs in government, business or NGOs. But according to countless surveys many people in the declining regions and classes of Europe very strongly believe that the past was better than the present for them.

He also likes to play the old Tony Blair tune that Left-Right has been replaced by open-closed. But has Habeck ever met anyone who wants to live in a closed society? I doubt it.

Yet there are plenty of people, no doubt some of them tempted to vote for Germany’s main populist party the Alternative fur Deutschland (AfD), who think that recent forms of openness have not benefited them as much as those who vote for Habeck’s Green party, many of whom have the option of frictionless professional work or study abroad under EU free movement rules.

Like mainstream German politicians of all stripes, his answer to almost all political problems is “more Europe”. He also reproduced the standard cognitive dissonance on this issue in his speech by calling at one moment for more democracy and bringing politics closer to people while a few moments later calling for the European Commission to become a European government, for more majority voting in the EU and for vast areas of policy to be handed over to only very indirectly accountable technocrats.

One area where he does break with the current German orthodoxy is on ending the anti-Keynesian strict limits on budget deficits both in Germany and the EU, but even that has become something of a new consensus in recent months.

In all other respects, he seems to be making the Green party safe for the average liberal-minded CDU voter. Reaching out to the more socially conservative sections of German society is not on the cards. Habeck rejects the old German idea of the Volkspartei a party that represents all sections of society, even if it may be grounded in one class or another. In its place, he wants an alliance party of different sections of society and value groups. Populists are not welcome. And Habeck is one of the loudest voices wanting to exclude the AfD from the political mainstream, even though they have almost 100 seats in the Bundestag.

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Green policy on the environment seems to be mainly a somewhat more radical version of existing German government policy. Though Habeck did speak with great warmth about the Fridays for Future (Extinction Rebellion) movement, and rather chillingly warned of the great dangers ahead if they do not get their way through democratic channels.

How well will this go down with ordinary Germans? Much of the policy, on reducing car use for example, will be a lot more comfortable for affluent Green voters in big cities with efficient public transport, or those able to afford electric cars, than for people in smaller towns and suburbs.

It is hard to see a Gilets Jaunes type movement in Germany coalescing around an increase in petrol taxes. Ordinary Germans worry about climate change too, but if they find that much of the cost of adaptation is falling on them, the love affair with the new Greens could quickly hit a barrier.

By the end of next year, Robert Habeck is highly likely to be grappling with these conservative-green dilemmas as, at the very least, a cabinet minister in Europe’s most powerful country. The progressive establishment in Germany has evidently found a new voice, as his performance at the LSE proved, but one without any discernible new ideas and with the same old intellectual evasions and silences.

Nor is it clear that the Green party as a whole has the personnel or experience to take the next step up to becoming the dominant party, rather than the junior one, in a German coalition. The Green co-leaders have had a long honeymoon but the closer the election looms, the more critical scrutiny they will draw. Despite the rock star appeal of Habeck, it remains to be seen how attractive his party will seem to middle-ground Germans.

Truly, Brexit Derangement Syndrome has reached its peak.

Lucas, the Green MP for Brighton Pavilion, wants to establish a “Cabinet of national unity”, and has invited senior women – and only women – from across the political spectrum to join her cause.

One might have expected that, having announced her plan on the Guardian website– where else? – and been assailed by a barrage of criticism and incredulity in response, Lucas might have had second thoughts. We’ve all had those moments in life when, staring at the ceiling in the wee small hours, we ask ourselves whether we did something that was just a bit too crazy. For instance, after recently calling for every knife sold in the UK to be fitted with a satellite tracking system, the Tory MP Scott Mann promptly – and to his credit – admitted that it was altogether “a bit of a shit idea”. But not Lucas. Instead she took to the airwaves the morning after and doubled-down on her proposal, insisting that only women could be trusted to save the nation and its people from themselves. She did later issue an apology for the fact that her Cabinet of choice included only those with white faces, but not for the original ludicrous idea itself.

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Lucas’s argument goes that women are more able to “reach out” and “co-operate to find solutions” to what she describes as “intractable problems”. That’s because, in her view, “women tend to be less tribal”. This kind of patronising attitude displays an astonishing degree of sexism towards both men and women. It implies that women are less assertive than men, not as competitive, less willing to defend their corner and fight for the beliefs, more deferential and inclined to capitulate for the sake of an easy life. It’s really another way of saying that women are the “fairer sex”. One wonders if the Thatcher era simply passed Lucas by. She almost certainly doesn’t realise that nearly half the nation’s women voted Leave.

I am constantly amazed at how those such as Lucas who shout loudest about ‘diversity’ and ‘inclusivity’ practise so little of what they preach. In this case, she wants a Cabinet that purposely excludes every male member of parliament to be established in an effort to deny the wishes of the winning side in a democratic exercise in which more than 33m voters participated. How tolerant.

It is easy, in the absurdity of the proposal, to lose sight of what this is really about. Essentially, it is the latest desperate salvo in the battle to prevent the result of the referendum from being implemented. “I couldn’t forgive myself if we didn’t try everything to avert the catastrophe of no-deal,” Lucas says. By which she means she couldn’t forgive herself if she didn’t try everything to stop Brexit altogether.

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There were many good reasons not to vote for Theresa May’s Withdrawal Agreement, but if the main fear of MPs such as Lucas, who claim to be respecters of democracy, was genuinely the terrible threat of no-deal, they would surely have voted for May’s deal as the lesser evil. But they didn’t. And we know why. It’s because Lucas and her fellow EU-fanatics hold democracy in contempt. They are furious that the masses voted the ‘wrong’ way, and will stop at nothing to right the wrong. And so they deliberately reinvent a debate that was once Remain versus Leave and turn it into one that is now Remain versus No-Deal, where the latter has replaced Leave as the new doomsday scenario.

As part of this crusade against democracy, they claim that there is no mandate for no-deal, as though leaving the EU without one is an entirely fresh proposition, a game-changer that is illegitimate and does not fall within the purview of the original referendum. Such an outcome would, according to Lucas, amount to a ‘coup’. What nonsense. I don’t know what question appeared on Lucas’s referendum ballot paper, but on my own it was “Remain or Leave”, not “Remain or Leave-But-Only-With-A-Withdrawal-Agreement-That-EU-Leaders-Are-Willing-To-Approve”.

Leaving the EU is what people voted for. That outcome covers leaving both with a deal and without one. To argue that the UK should never leave without a withdrawal agreement is to effectively hand the EU a veto over our departure. Those agitating for such a position should be honest enough to admit it.

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Ultimately, Lucas is part of that cohort of middle-class liberal and cultural elitists who, having become so used to things going their way over recent times, cannot accept that they are no longer in control. These self-described ‘progressives’ and ‘centrists’ talk constantly about the need to ‘change our politics’. But real change isn’t what they seek. Instead, they want a return to the status quo. “I want my country back,” they regularly cry. No doubt. After all, it was a country that worked very well for them. But the downside was that it created an entire class of people who felt shut out, ignored and neglected. Brexit is their revenge.

You might think that, instead of further antagonising these voters, Lucas and co would have the good grace to recognise that it was their brand of politics that caused such disaffection in the first place. But so desperate are they to get their way, they are seemingly prepared to pay any price. Lucas’s proposal for a handpicked anti-Brexit “Cabinet of national unity”, with no popular mandate, would be the surest sign yet that the UK had moved from democracy to technocracy.

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Yet only last month, Lucas was offering us an account of her tour around Leave-voting constituencies. Expressing apparent sympathy with these communities, she wrote: “I have shared feelings of shame, regret and rage at the powerlessness of being routinely ignored and denied a say in the decisions that matter.” It beggars belief that she would then conclude the answer to this regret and rage is to ignore these voters all over again. In truth, the real coup-makers are not those prepared to leave the EU without a withdrawal agreement, but those fighting tooth and nail to crush the popular will.

Lucas won’t get her all-female Cabinet; even her own allies can see that it’s a crackpot proposal. But the fact that it was made at all is a sign of how desperate the attempts of the anti-Brexit fanatics are becoming, and the lengths to which some of them might be prepared to go in their efforts to subvert our democracy.

They must not get their way.