“There’s a sense that the Greens seem to think that this is their time”
The journalist Owen Jones has said that the Green Party can become a mass party of the left under Zack Polanski’s leadership. He made the comments in an interview with Left Foot Forward at this year’s Green Party conference in Bournemouth.
Jones was attending the conference to film a video for his YouTube channel and to appear on a live recording of Polanski’s podcast in front of an audience of hundreds of Green Party members.
Asked what he made of the conference and the conversations he’d had, Jones told Left Foot Forward: “There’s a sense that the Greens seem to think that this is their time”, before adding: “Now I think we’ve had over a year of Labour and they’ve been so catastrophic on their own terms and on the left’s terms that it’s such an open goal – I think – for the Greens. And I think wedded to that now they’ve got a clear leadership pitch.”
He went on to say: “They’ve got to build on it, and they won’t have the media building them in the way they did Farage and all the rest of it – but I think people here feel re-energised and optimistic because the circumstances are obviously much more promising for the Greens, a lot of people who voted for Labour last time are just disgusted by what they’ve been given, and now they’ve got a leader that’s got the potential to have cut-through.”
Asked whether these conditions meant that the Greens had the potential to become a mass party of the left, Jones made clear that Polanski’s election as leader opens this possibility. He told Left Foot Forward: “Well they are a mass party already in that their membership is now bigger than the Lib Dems. And obviously Zack Polanski won a mandate of 85 per cent on the basis of positioning [the Greens] as a left-wing party, which they weren’t completely. The danger with the Greens before was they were a bit Lib Demmy.”
He then added that Polanski “won a mandate – ironically given he’s a former Lib Dem – on de-Lib Demifying, making them a clear eco-populist, socialist [party] with radical policies, so I think there is a definitive shift there.”
Jones is not a member of the Green Party and has called for there to be a ‘popular front in the form of an electoral pact between the Greens and the new party being formed by Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana, provisionally named ‘Your Party’. This would be designed to maximise the left’s influence after the next general election and to counter the rise of Nigel Farage and Reform.
Speaking to Left Foot Forward on the idea of an electoral alliance between the Greens and ‘Your Party’, Jones said: “Your Party need to obviously get their act together and then I would hope – obviously – they would have to do an electoral pact.”
Jones didn’t just argue for an agreement between these two parties, however. He also called for the Greens not to stand against left wing Labour MPs and candidates.
He told Left Foot Forward: “People should not stand against John McDonnell”, before adding: “Richard Burgon, Clive Lewis, Nadia Whittome – they’re still there and they’re socialists, and obviously I see them as part of that popular front and I would not advocate the left standing against them, but I would imagine the Green Party probably will. But in that constituency I would vote for John McDonnell. I would vote for the Labour candidate in those circumstances. I would vote for left-wing Labour candidates – there’s not that many of them, but I would still vote for them.”
Jones is nonetheless crystal clear that any ‘popular front’ to stop Farage could not include the Labour Party as a whole in its current iteration, and was – as usual – damning in his critique of Keir Starmer’s leadership. He told Left Foot Forward: “The Keir Starmer Labour Party is a morally bankrupt, morally disgraced outfit which has supported genocide – the crime of crimes – and facilitated a genocide, as well as raiding the rhetoric and policies of the far-right, led by a man who has no principle, no vision, no obvious moral code whatsoever, and also someone who wanted to be prime minister for the hell of it and we can see where that particular strategy has landed him and the country and his political party – it’s been a disaster.
“And also, they regard the left as illegitimate. They hate the left more than they hate the right and that’s very obviously clear. And they’ve used the state machinery to crush people who stand against genocide by mass arresting people. So they’re not part of the popular front, that’s not part of the popular front.”
Chris Jarvis is head of strategy and development at Left Foot Forward
Image credit: Jwslubbock – Creative Commons
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