Zack Polanski’s Green Party Triggers Absolute Establishment Panic

Right, so for so long the Green party has been regarded as something of a sideshow in politics. The same class that swore Britain would never change and has moved heaven and Earth to make sure it doesn’t, is now watching it happen in real time — not from a protest camp or a think-tank, but in the polls and no doubt soon enough from the ballot box too. Seven weeks after Zack Polanski took over as Green party leader, the Greens are polling ahead of Labour and the Conservatives for the first time in its history. Membership has passed one hundred and fifty thousand. Among under-fifties, they lead outright. And the people who built their careers managing decline are suddenly talking about “statistical anomalies.” It isn’t an anomaly. It’s the first proof that the managed order is losing control — and they know it.
Right, so a national survey has just put the Green Party ahead of both Labour and the Conservatives for the first time ever. The poll from Find Out Now has put the Greens on 17%, ahead of both Tories and Labour on 16% and the Lib Dems on 12%. Reform UK, sadly still benefitting from their head start in things, are on 32%. Among voters under fifty, showing where that Reform base is concentrated though, further polling has shown the Greens now lead. Membership has passed one hundred and fifty thousand and shows no sign of slowing either.
So what followed Polanski’s election and which is ramping up today certainly in light of that incredible poll, the first time they have ever topped the Tories and Labour in a poll, was the sound of a political class trying to smother a fire they haven’t the tools to tackle.
You can see the panic in how fast the spin began. Within hours of that poll showing the Greens ahead, Labour and Conservative sources were downplaying it as just “one poll,” a line repeated across the usual media outlets. And sure it is. But they were still talking about it. The numbers were solid enough to rattle them. And when Bristol council tipped half-Green the same week, after Labour councillor Alsayed Al-Maghrabi crossed the floor, that denial really is wearing thin now. Alsayed Al-Maghrabi had been Labour seven years. He said he joined to fight for fairness and social justice, and left because those values had gone. He named Labour’s refusal to tax wealth and its echoing of Reform UK’s language on immigration. That defection gave the Greens half of Bristol’s seventy council seats. It showed the direction of travel: conscience leaving managed politics for a party prepared to say what people already know.
Zack Polanski didn’t come out of nowhere. He was already a politician on the London Assembly. he won the Green leadership on 2 September and has turned a static movement into a national force in weeks.
And what he has done, what we have all seen has been nothing short of incredible. He’s fluent across every medium — broadcast, long-form, short-form, independent channels. More than sixty interviews in his first days, direct outreach instead of waiting for legacy media to notice, avoiding him like the plague, Laura Kuenssberg running away from interviewing him, Question Time having the screws put on them to have him on.. And he talks in plain language: climate policy tied to wages, rent, bills, and war. That’s what people hear — the connection between the cost of living and who profits from it.
Policy is what’s driving the numbers, its not all about Polanski. The Greens’ economic plan is concrete: tax the rich properly; stop the Bank of England paying billions in interest to commercial banks just for holding reserves; use that money for public services.
Bring water, energy and transport back under public control because privatisation has meant higher prices, failing networks and sewage in rivers.
Tie climate investment to warm homes and local jobs.
Every part of that answers failures the main parties have been calling inevitable, because donors and influence are really running the country.
Polling backs it. YouGov shows clear majorities for taxing wealth and deep frustration with broken public services. The Greens have built directly on that reality. They aren’t selling a dream — they’re describing what people can already see: private monopolies extract, governments enable, the public pays more for less.
Foreign policy is where the difference becomes moral. Back in June the Greens said the Labour government was not just complicit in the Gaza genocide but active participants, and demanded an end to UK arms exports to Israel. That wording is blunt, lawful and specific. No other parliamentary party uses language that direct.
Labour avoids it. The Conservatives ignore it. The Liberal Democrats blur it into nothing. The Greens have made it a principle — British law should apply even when our allies break it. It shouldn’t even be radical, its just upholding international law after all.
Put the policies together and a picture forms: tax wealth, rebuild public ownership, enforce international law.
It’s the basics of a functioning democracy. But in Britain in 2025, saying it out loud is treated as an insurgency.
The under-fifty numbers explain the speed of the shift.
This generation has lived through stagnation: wages frozen, rents tripled, services gutted, tuition debt sold, and housing turned into speculation and objects they can never own. They’ve been told collapse is normal — that the NHS crisis, Gaza, and sewage-filled rivers are unfortunate but unavoidable. It never sounded true, because it never has been. 5th wealthiest economy on Earth, yet poorer nations have all this, so why don’t we? The Greens are the first national party describing it as deliberate policy, not fate. That’s why their message lands.
Labour’s reaction shows how deep the denial runs.
Starmer’s team has ruled out a wealth tax, defended private control of utilities, copied right-wing rhetoric on immigration and refused to challenge Israeli actions. Councillors who joined Labour for moral reasons are leaving because there’s nothing left to defend. Al-Maghrabi’s switch was just the latest headline case. Others have gone too.
The Greens also aren’t rising because someone else fell apart. Your Party right now just seems hell-bent on destroying itself.
Its founders are in legal dispute over membership funds. Zarah Sultana has seemingly been attacking the Greens more than anyone else. To the public it looks horrible, like a party fighting with itself and fighting while the Greens concentrate on getting organised. People who want change are choosing competence over chaos and as a Green I find this incredibly maddening behaviour, because Polanski had set out the case for the benefits of two left wing parties, yet it doesn’t seem Your Party are on the same page. Many of us on both sides of that argument wanted to see these parties work together for the greater good, right now it’s a debate as to whether Your Party can even hold itself together.
Media behaviour exposes how the establishment polices visibility though and this is where the establishment can always rely on their pliant client media.
There were more than twenty-five thousand complaints after the BBC refused to host Polanski on its flagship Sunday morning programme hosted by Laura Kuenssberg, even during Green Party conference while platforming Reform UK. When the BBC finally did get Polanski on, Kuenssberg ran away, leaving it to Victoria Derbyshire to conduct that interview. That’s not editorial judgment; that’s gatekeeping. The pattern is decades old: ignore, then belittle, then smear. But it doesn’t work anymore.
Polanski’s own clips reach hundreds of thousands online. Independent outlets, podcasts and social feeds carry the message the broadcasters try to block.
The institution that once decided who was “serious” has lost that power.
Beneath all this is control — who holds it and who doesn’t.
Britain’s economy is managed for creditors, not communities. Fiscal rules are written to keep markets calm, not homes heated. Foreign policy is written to please allies, even when those allies break international law.
At home, what the public once owned — water, energy, transport — has been stripped for profit. Regulators look the other way or are too toothless to act while bills rise and infrastructure rots.
The Greens are saying enough. Take back what was sold. Stop pumping public money into private finance. Apply the same laws abroad that we claim to live by here.
So in that way, this isn’t radical, it’s a reset.
The system can’t argue with that directly, so it hides behind routine.
Stage one: denial — just one poll. Stage two: dismissal — they’ll never win seats. Stage three: mockery — idealists, populists, single-issue, he’s got crooked teeth for heavens sake!
It’s the same pattern used against every threat to the status quo. The names change; but the script doesn’t and we should all be on to it. We’re all tired of it aren’t we?
Mockery stops working when the numbers keep rising.
Panic is showing in language: every establishment statement now carries inferences of the need for “stability.”
But stability for whom?
For those who own assets, not those who pay rent. For dividends, not wages. We’ve a budget coming up and instead of talk of wealth taxes we’re hearing talk of income tax rises instead. Case in point and we know who Labour serves.
The Greens are challenging that order directly. They’re saying Britain’s wealth should work for its people. That’s the sentence Westminster can’t repeat without choking on it.
First-past-the-post still blocks national breakthrough, though as Reform UK are proving, it’s not insurmountable, just difficult without he over platforming they benefit from.
The 17% of the vote in that latest poll though, shows the Greens moving from 4 seats to 51 though. Still a helluva result, but the Greens are still surging too.
Public opinion already aligns with Green economics.
YouGov data shows majorities for wealth tax and disgust at the decay of public services. Another survey finds people unwilling to pay higher taxes into a system that wastes what it takes.
The Greens’ answer — that the issue is ownership, not spending — fits what people see every day. They understand the maths. It’s the politicians who pretend not to.
Foreign policy remains the hardest line.
Britain continues to licence arms exports to Israel even after the International Court of Justice found plausible grounds for genocide. The Greens demand an end to those licences. That’s a legal position under the Arms Trade Treaty, not a slogan.
They are the only major party saying it outright. For the public watching Gaza in real time, it’s the only position that matches what they can see.
Every other party’s talk of “balance” and “restraint” reads as complicity dressed up as diplomacy and nothing gets done, nothing actually changes.
This is what frightens the establishment.
The Greens are using moral language in a political culture that banned it. They talk about right and wrong, not just cost and benefit.
When a movement links economic fairness with law and justice, it stops playing Westminster’s game.
That’s why the attacks have increased and will increase further I have no doubt — because they threaten to make decency sound normal again.
The media are just waiting for a stumble. Green unity has been exemplary though and we need to keep that. Local government will expose the difference between ideals and delivery, I’m anticipating great things in May so the test will follow from there.
If they maintain that unity and their momentum, the Greens can turn this surge into permanence. If they lose it, the establishment will declare moral politics impossible all over again. So there are important lessons to draw from this.
The real stakes go beyond one party.
If this surge holds, Britain’s managed political order is in danger and I’m all here for it.
The two-party rotation that markets itself as stability already faced a routing at the hands of the far-right, but that’s no longer a seeming certainty. They, along with the rancid Reform UK, could face a permanent alternative with mass membership and clear ethics.
History shows the pattern.
When Labour first broke through a century ago, elites called it chaos then too. Then Labour built the institutions that defined modern Britain, when it was a party still worth something.
The same establishment language is being used now against the Greens — the same fear disguised as laughter.
This time the information gap is gone. People see the change before mainstream editors can decide whether it really exists.
Polanski’s rise played out online in real time, bigger audiences for a party political broadcast than most television shows is crazy, but shows the appetite for change. Party’s talk of change all the time, they know it is what we want, they just repeatedly refuse to keep their word. People don’t see that in Polanski’s Greens.
So here’s what’s verifiable today: membership above 150 000; polling second nationally, albeit thusfar in just one poll; first among under-fifties; councillor defections shifting control in key cities and just the latest in a string of them; a policy set built on wealth tax, public ownership and legal consistency all tied to the party’s founding ethos on climate and environmentalism.
No speculation required. These are facts on the record.
A party that combines moral clarity with competence has entered a system built to prevent both.
So every smear, every exclusion, every sneer is proof of what the establishment fears.
Britain’s rulers are learning what happens when people stop confusing power with merit and start counting outcomes instead.
For decades decisions have been made elsewhere — not at the ballot box based on manifesto pledges, but in boardrooms, in markets, in meetings with donors, in ministries built to manage decline. The Greens are challenging that. They’re saying control belongs where the consequences land, where they’re felt, amongst ordinary people, the likes of you and I.
The media will still call it chaos.
But it’s not.
It’s just accountability.
It's not just the Labour-Tory uniparty have a grievance against the Greens though, Polanski has taken the fight to Reform too, who, just like the establishment patsies they also are, tried on a tabloid smear against Polanski and as so often happens amongst the knuckle-dragging hard of thinking, they tripped over their own fingers and fell flat on their faces over it. Do check out all the details of that story in this video recommendation here as your suggested next watch.
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