The following is a post made by Sandy Irvine on Facebook on 5th May 2025 that explains why Zack Polanski is not a Green.
There is a drive to cement the ‘degreening’ of the Green Party. Thus, there is a big splash in today’s ‘Guardian’ that announces that the current deputy leader, Zack Polanski, will seek to be the new co-leader. Already, a de facto campaign group’ ‘Greens Organise’, provides the network to boost his plan. People on that list clearly sing from the same song sheet, repeating his rhetoric such as “not punching down”. If he is successful, it will be the final rupture with a truly distinctive and uniquely pertinent tradition that goes back to the 1972 ‘Limits to Growth’ Report and ‘Blueprint for Survival’, indeed long before. Green: What Does It Mean?’ presentation
Zack Polanski is a major agent of the ‘identity politics’ incursion into the party. Thus, he made it clear that he wants to drive out from the Green Party all those dissent from the core Identitarian mantra that “trans women are women and trans men are men”
He was strongly against the findings of the Cass Review, e.g. https://x.com/ZackPolanski/status/1866844546253934749
True, he will make genuflections about ‘climate action’ but, basically, he totally lacks any grasp of political ecology. His politics are more those of Corbynism but with added doses of the anti-science of extremist ‘transgenderism’ and self-ID.
His utterances are full of empty rhetoric about “change”, “hope” and “compassion”. He promises “bold leadership”. He channels former Tory leader Theresa May in explaining that “bold means bold” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jm1_B57wxgU
Everything in his view is the fault of the -super-rich. Inequality, he says, is at the “heart” of all our problem. There is some truth in this.
Yet, as a good many posts below instance, far more are caused by what might be called the “tragedy of commonplace decisions”, the cumulatively negative consequences of a myriad small choices made every day by millions of people. No exploitation, unfairness or oppression is involved. Individual intentions are not malign but in toto the effects are.
At the same time, equality is no guarantee of sustainability. Countries with much lower levels of inequality than the UK have been environmentally destructive:
https://www.reuters.com/…/norway-awards-53-stakes…/…
https://www.theguardian.com/…/net-loss-the-high-price…
https://blogs.helsinki.fi/…/lost-voices-how-mining-in…/
Like so many of his ilk, Polanski adds the word ‘justice’ to words such as ’climate’ but, in practice, it means that the focus is firmly on social, not ecological, relations. Clearly, common decency says we cannot accept that people starve, lack water, not have a roof over their heads, or go without other basics. Yet it is also crystal clear that food production, for example, raises the matter of the number of mouths to be fed and how that can be done without unsustainable side-effects (soil, water, treatment of farm animals, wildlife habitat, the nutritional value of foodstuffs produced, etc).
Any ‘right’ to housing will mean mass construction often over greenfield sites, after mass excavation and manufacture of building materials. The right to ‘connectivity’ entails huge energy and raw material costs as well as pollution (chip manufacture, server farms, E-waste, etc). The issue of rights is intimately linked the number of rights holders but Identitarians such as Polanski are usually militant deniers that there is any problem with human numbers.
Polanski says he want to “lift people up”. Yet giving everyone the same material consumption of, say, a typical person in China, let alone the USA, would require the equivalent 2.4 planets’ worth of resources. The UK is already deep into the ecological ‘red’ but Polanski has yet to provide any evidence that he is even aware of something of such overriding importance https://overshoot.footprintnetwork.org/…/Country…
Given that he enthuses about radical American politician Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, he probably thinks that a ‘Green New Deal’, as advocated by her and many others, can fix things. It cannot https://sandyirvineblog.wordpress.com/…/a-green…/
He does, of course, mention “climate action” for a “burning planet” but routinely fails to provide any hard details about what truly effective policies will mean. Instead, he picks the wrong battleground of Net Zero: https://www.lbc.co.uk/…/were-losing-the-argument-on…/
( c.f. https://substack.com/home/post/p-162706629).
Like so many, he seems to think that what is a crisis of general ecological overshoot is largely a problem of excessive CO2 emissions. He will add the word “nature” but that is all.
Politically he focuses on the need to “confront fascism”. It is indeed very concerning to see the march of racist thugs on the streets. Yet at the moment the real threat is from the Labour government, be it its backing of AI and nuclear power https://www.gov.uk/…/prime-minister-sets-out-blueprint…
and https://www.g ov.uk/…/government-rips-up-rules-to-fire…
its shredding of planning protections of wildlife habitat (e.g. https://www.theguardian.com/…/labour-planning-bill…
and its core agenda of “growth, growth, growth”/”build, baby, build”.
Inside the Green Party, Polanski will probably attract a lot of support. The political law of magnetism is the opposite of the physical one. Like attracts like. Since a major influx into the party of students and recent graduates post-2010, majority opinion, especially amongst activists, has veered into the direction of so-called ‘social justice’ causes, including what above was called ‘Identity Politics’.
Many of these more recent recruits came from university departments where postmodernist discourse holds sway. It is deeply anti-ecological. At best there will be what Arne Naess once called a “shallow environmentalism”. Polanski may have a strong cohort behind him.
Externally, there is certainly a very strong ‘anti-establishment’ tide. Many people now hold the traditional big two parties, Labour and Tories, win contempt. Polanski might actually make the Green Party more popular but it will, in reality, be a party of a different colour from really green politics.