Watermelons: the time period used to explain the members of the Inexperienced social gathering of England and Wales who’re inexperienced on the skin and purple on the within. Individuals on this faction are environmentalists, however once you lower them open, they bleed socialist ideologies.
Of the roughly 160,000 those that have flocked to the social gathering since Zack Polanski grew to become chief final 12 months, most are regarded as on this camp, drawn to a political area on the left that they see as vacated by the Labour social gathering.
However the creator of a brand new e-book – The Inexperienced Socialist: Zack Polanski and the Battle for Britain’s Future – says this flavour of Inexperienced is nothing new. “What you’ve received to grasp is that the social gathering has been watermelon for not less than 10 years,” says Russell Warfield, a former social gathering staffer who has labored on election campaigns, together with Polanski’s.
“There’s typically this dichotomy introduced that there’s this ‘actual core’ Inexperienced social gathering who’re these ecologists who actually simply care about conservation of the surroundings, then there’s this new cohort of exhausting leftists,” Warfield says. “Truly, this has been each an natural course of, but additionally one which reaches way more deeply into the previous of the social gathering, the place lots of the basic positions of the social gathering could be traced again to the early Seventies.”
His e-book unpacks the historical past of the social gathering to elucidate how Polanski matches into it, arguing that the chief and his “eco-populist” package deal is just not a departure from Inexperienced custom, however the fruits of a 50-year evolution which has turned the social gathering into the primary electoral pressure on the British left.
Not everybody agrees. In the course of the management election between Polanski and co-runners Adrian Ramsay and Ellie Chowns in 2025, a senior Inexperienced supply described Polanski’s rise as a “hostile takeover”. Even Caroline Lucas, the Greens’ first MP and a former social gathering chief, has stated, when pressed, that she would love him to speak in regards to the surroundings extra.
“It’s simply apparent nonsense,” Warfield says of the hostile takeover remark. “Take a look at the mandate, it was 85%,” he says of Polanski’s landslide management win. “He gained throughout each wing of the social gathering.”
However how inexperienced are the Greens? Since Polanski took over, he has been splashed throughout newspapers and TV screens discussing topics starting from Gaza to wealth taxes – progressive politics, however not essentially or overtly inexperienced.
Warfield responds with a statistic: 34% of voters belief the Greens greater than another social gathering on the surroundings, in line with YouGov polling – the best degree of belief recorded for any social gathering on any problem. “There may be not a voter on this nation, leftwing, rightwing, previous, younger, rural, city, no matter, that doesn’t strongly affiliate the Inexperienced social gathering with taking motion on the surroundings.”
Due to that start line, he argues, the smart transfer ahead was to evolve right into a broader message – one earlier leaders paved the best way for. “The explanation the social gathering exists is in recognition of the truth that simply having a bunch of environmental conservation actions isn’t addressing the foundation political and financial causes of environmental degradation.
“We tried 50 years of that. And it received us to date, however the manifest moments of fabric development have been tied to moments the place we’ve been in a position to be extra aware of the precise political context of the day.”
Warfield factors out that a lot of Polanski’s positions are usually not his alone. Inexperienced social gathering members vote on coverage and the leaders are constitutionally obligation sure to advocate for it. “Take the wealth tax,” Warfield writes. “He didn’t arrive at this coverage personally. A ‘wealth tax’ is known as for as ‘a method of limiting massive accumulations of wealth’ in a Inexperienced social gathering manifesto printed lengthy earlier than Polanski’s management.”
The e-book finds hyperlinks between the social gathering’s previous and current, even in unlikely locations. It’s unavoidable, Warfield writes, that there have been “some distinctly rightwing individuals current on the formation of the Inexperienced social gathering”. The primary key determine was Teddy Goldsmith, an environmentalist a part of a well-known Tory household. His writings fashioned key texts for Individuals, the political social gathering from which the fashionable Greens descend.
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However even Goldsmith – whose “deep ecology” philosophy leaned into Malthusian considerations about human inhabitants and misanthropic views that blamed humanity as a monolith for ecological degradation – shares threads with Polanski’s Greens, Warfield says. Each share the golden Inexperienced rule that infinite financial progress and infinite extraction are inconceivable on a planet with finite sources. Each reject the concept that capitalism can merely keep on with enterprise as standard, inexperienced or in any other case.
Because the social gathering has shifted in the direction of social ecology through the years, Warfield says Polanski’s eco-socialism merely represents a contemporary evolution: arguing that capitalism and the 1% – not all of humanity – are the foundation reason for environmental destruction.
However Polanski’s tenure has additionally introduced controversies. There was his criticism of the police response to the Golders Inexperienced assault, which the Met commissioner, Mark Rowley, referred to as “inaccurate and misinformed”. There was the false declare he was a British Crimson Cross spokesperson and the sharing of a photograph of a person with a T-shirt exhibiting a guillotine and the phrase “we’re solely planning for Nigel”, a reference to Nigel Farage. YouGov polling exhibits Polanski’s approval ranking has slumped since he grew to become chief, whereas Inexperienced voting intention has dropped from 21% of the citizens in March to 11% this month.
Ought to the social gathering take Polanski’s social media away? “Golders Inexperienced was a misstep,” says Warfield. “However what you don’t wish to do is to get to a state of affairs the place each put up wants double tick signoff from totally different members of employees and you’ll’t simply let Zack have interaction with social media in the best way that enables him to reap the political factors of authenticity.”
Polanski was criticised for his refusal to apologise for sharing the Farage guillotine image. “Reform have been making an attempt to goad him into apologising for incitement to homicide,” Warfield says. “When you do this, you legitimise the declare that they’re making. I believe there’s lots of power in not succumbing to the strain of taking part in that recreation.”
On 8 October, Polanski will contest the Holborn and St Pancras byelection after Keir Starmer introduced his resolution to vacate the seat. Warfield thinks Polanski can win. “You may vote Labour once more and also you get one other backbencher who’s one amongst actually a whole lot of Labour MPs and that doesn’t make a lot distinction to something,” he says. “Or you may put a extremely distinguished, independently minded Inexperienced in there and proceed to place strain on the Burnham mission from its left.”