Today, Green party members can begin voting for their next party leader – or leaders – as ballots in the leadership contest have now opened. Voting will take place across the month before ballots close on 30 August with the result to be announced on 2 September, just a month before the party heads to Bournemouth for a three-day conference. The choice is between current co-leader Adrian Ramsay who is running on a joint ticket with North Herefordshire MP Ellie Chowns (after Bristol Central MP Carla Denyer announced she wouldn’t be running again) and the party’s current deputy leader Zack Polanski. Yet despite the competitors having worked closely together for years, the race has got off to a pretty disagreeable start.
Ramsay and Polanski were pitted against each other on Iain Dale’s LBC show last week. Over the course of 90 minutes, each made their case for the leadership and quizzed the other on their diverging proposals. Things got frosty when Dale asked Ramsay if he liked his deputy – at which point the co-leader became strangely tongue-tied. In a later hustings, Ramsay went on to compare Polanski to, er, Liz Truss. The Green co-leader worries that Polanski’s proposals will break from a strategy that has in recent years seen the Greens quadruple their seats in Westminster (albeit from one to four), ousting a shadow cabinet member in the process.
Polanski is less bothered about persuading soft Conservative voters to back the environmentalists, and instead has pushed a more radical ‘eco-populism’ campaign using social media platforms and prominent voices on them to help draw people to his cause. While not quite at Nigel Farage levels of TikTok followers, he has 45 times more followers than Ramsay. Left-wing media outlet Novara Media has suggested that the Green party membership has grown by ‘at least 8 per cent’ since Polanski launched his campaign – while the deputy leader himself recently boasted he had secured the backing of election campaign organisers and managers. Yet recent YouGov polling suggests that the Green leadership team remains relatively unknown not just among the wider population, but their own voters – with more than 84 per cent unaware of Ramsay, Chowns or Polanski.
The creation of the as-yet-nameless Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana party also poses identity problems for the environmentalists. Polling has shown that those stuck on whether they should back Corbyn’s group or the Greens have expressed a desire to see the latter outfit become more left-wing than environment-focused. This is where Polanski may win out over Ramsay and Chowns: he is widely seen as being more progressive on culture war issues and has shared social media clips of Corbyn and left-wing commentator Owen Jones heaping praise on him. Where Polanski is open to an electoral pact with the new left-wing party, Ramsay has warned against the Greens becoming a ‘Jeremy Corbyn support act’.
For his part, Jezza has this week ruled out an alliance with the Greens – saying that the group is ‘not a socialist organisation’ – but admitted his new party wouldn’t rule out working with them ‘on social justice issues’. The matter is already dividing those on the left, with some taking aim at James Schneider, the former director of communications for Corbyn’s Labour party, over his support for a left-wing pact with the Greens on the background he is married to Keir Starmer’s press secretary. If there’s one thing on which the left is unrivalled, it’s fighting amongst itself. It certainly seems unlikely that the Green party will emerge from this leadership contest unscathed.
Comments