Zack Polanski has just finished his leader’s speech at the Green party conference in Brighton. It has been an extraordinary 12 months for his party, which shot up like a rocket at the beginning of the year, when it won the Gorton and Denton by-election. But gravity is now taking its toll and Polanski’s ratings have plummeted. His stance on the Golders Green attack in May can be likened to Jeremy Corbyn’s remarks on the Skripal poisonings in 2018, an ill-advised intervention that turned off countless potential voters. After Keir Starmer was succeeded by Andy Burnham in July, Polanski announced he would fight the contest for Starmer’s north London seat. That by-election, due to be held next Thursday, was the basis of Polanski’s pitch this afternoon.
His entire speech could be summed up in four words – ‘Holborn and St Pancras’ – yet, bizarrely, he could not mention the actual constituency
Unfortunately for the Green party leader, broadcast rules mean that he was forced to remove any mention of the seat in his address. His entire speech could be summed up in four words – ‘Holborn and St Pancras’ – yet, bizarrely, he could not mention the actual constituency. He did his best to appeal to its voters though, opening his speech with a lengthy passage focusing on rent costs and intergenerational unfairness. ‘Young families are being forced to choose between moving out of the cities they love or giving up on ever having kids’, he declared. ‘It’s not just the private pain of those impossible choices, it’s what that pain and those choices add up to for this country.’ Railing against the ‘powerful vested interests of developers and big landlords’, it was an obvious pitch to the urban, educated, 30-something professionals he needs to win next Thursday.
After housing came talk of communities, both migrant and transgender, followed by the applause line for the RNLI. Then Polanski moved on to the other great driver of Green gains: Gaza. He declared himself ‘vindicated’ by Ed Miliband’s sanctions on the Israeli settlements in the West Bank and attacked the policing of Palestinian protestors at Labour conference. The loudest cheer of the entire speech came when he declared ‘Drop the charges, end the genocide, deproscribe Palestine Action.’ Chants of ‘Free, free Palestine’ echoed around the hall as Polanski, strutting his head forward like an Essex geezer, basked in the applause. Finally came the climate, with the Green party leader referencing the summer heat wave. He mentioned a series of measures by the likes of MPs Ellie Chowns and Adrian Ramsay which the government had been forced to respond to. ‘Vote Green and watch Labour move’, he declared, repeatedly.
That line, though, underscored the Greens’ very weakness, conceding that, in the centre-left bloc, they remain by far the smaller of the two left-wing parties. Much like Ukip and the Tories in the 2010s, the Greens, for now, exist only to pressure Labour. It was a line clearly designed to appeal in Holborn and St Pancras. In the ongoing campaign, Polanski’s party is trying to argue that one additional Labour MP will not make a difference to Burnham – but a Green MP really will keep him on the leftward path. Most within Labour though are confident of victory, something that would likely further dim Polanski’s star after a summer of negative stories about his past.
Today’s speech by Polanski was something of a missed opportunity. In focusing so heavily on Holborn and St Pancras – a seat he could not even mention by name – there was an opportunity cost in not playing the long game with Burnham. He could have at least pretended to give the new Prime Minister the benefit of the doubt, setting him a series of tests, such as blocking Rosebank development, to demonstrate his progressive credentials. If Burnham failed these tests – as he will surely do on Rosebank – Polanski could then have used this to hammer him. Instead, the overriding focus on next week’s by-election stopped him from taking a shrewder position.
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