Being wrong

Less than a month ago, I wrote about why I left the Green Party before Zack Polanski’s leadership vote was even held. I agreed with his class-first approach, with his eco-populism, with linking climate action to wealth redistribution. But I left anyway, worried that the Greens would abandon environmental expertise to become “Old Labour with solar panels,” leaving a vacuum in dedicated environmental advocacy.

I called it “an experiment with stakes too high to get wrong.”

Well, the results are in. And it looks very likely that i might have been wrong.

A new Find Out Now poll puts the Green Party at 15.31%, marginally ahead of Labour at 15.23%.¹ This is the Greens’ best polling performance in their history. Labour, meanwhile, is experiencing its worst post-war polling just 13 months after winning a general election.

But there’s a caveat here. Find Out Now consistently shows Reform UK polling much higher than other pollsters - 32% in this poll, compared to most other firms showing Reform in the high teens or low twenties. In the 2024 general election, Find Out Now overestimated Reform’s vote share by 3.3 percentage points and underestimated the Conservatives by 3.9 points.² Their methodology differs from traditional pollsters: they use a panel of 100,000+ daily respondents who have been on the panel for years, and they never re-ask past voting behaviour, instead referring back to post-election data.

Find Out Now argues this makes them more accurate because it avoids false recall and captures disengaged voters that other pollsters miss.³ But it also means their polls might systematically overstate support for insurgent parties like Reform - and potentially the Greens. If Find Out Now is overstating Reform by 3-4 points as they did in 2024, they might be overstating the Greens by a similar margin.

Even accounting for that, though, the trend is undeniable. Other pollsters also show the Greens surging - just not quite as dramatically. The membership data doesn’t lie: the Greens are growing at an extraordinary rate, and Labour is hemorrhaging support. Find Out Now might not be the perfect barometer, but the direction of travel is clear.

Green Party membership has surged to over 112,000 - a 45% increase since Polanski’s election in early September.⁴ They’ve overtaken the Liberal Democrats and are rapidly closing in on the Conservatives. Labour, despite winning the 2024 general election, has hemorrhaged members under Starmer, dropping from over 530,000 at the end of the Corbyn era to around 309,000 by early 2025.⁵ Meanwhile, Reform UK has surged to 250,000 members by September 2025, more than doubling the Conservative Party’s membership.⁶

The chart tells the story: Labour declining, the Greens surging. The traditional party system is fragmenting, and Polanski’s eco-populism is capturing disillusioned left-wing voters who have nowhere else to go.

What I Got Wrong

My fear was that eco-populism would dilute the environmental focus. That making the Greens a vehicle for left-wing economics would mean losing the policy expertise, the institutional knowledge, the dedicated environmental advocacy that made them valuable even when their broader politics were frustratingly centrist.

But what’s actually happened is more interesting and more important: Polanski hasn’t abandoned environmental politics - he’s made them relevant.

You can see it in his media appearances. On Question Time and Jeremy Vine,⁷⁸ he’s been assertive yet calm, linking climate action directly to people’s immediate material concerns. The message isn’t “sacrifice now for the planet’s future” - it’s “the same people hoarding wealth are destroying the planet, and we can fix both problems by redistributing power.”

This is what I should have understood: environmental advocacy divorced from class politics doesn’t work. It becomes middle-class virtue signaling, asking working people to make sacrifices while the rich continue their private jets and superyachts. Polanski’s approach doesn’t dilute environmental politics - it gives them the class analysis they always needed.

The Media Response

The British media’s reaction tells you everything. The BBC refused Polanski a slot on Laura Kuenssberg’s show despite previously platforming Nigel Farage when Reform had no MPs.⁹ The Spectator attacked his wealth tax proposals. The Telegraph ran multiple hostile pieces portraying him as “woke” or “deluded.”¹⁰

When the establishment media treats you like a threat, you’re doing something right.

Even Labour insiders reportedly see Polanski as a real threat. The New Statesman noted the Greens’ rising support in urban strongholds - London, Manchester, Bristol, Sheffield, Norwich - where they now frequently finish second to Labour.

This isn’t the media response to a party diluting its message. This is the response to a party that’s found one that works.

Your Party’s Collapse

The timing matters. Polanski’s surge has coincided with the organisational disaster of Your Party - the Corbyn-Sultana project that was supposed to be the vehicle for left-wing politics outside Labour.

Zarah Sultana announced it publicly in July without warning Corbyn, breaking agreed secrecy. In September, she sent out an unauthorised email opening paid membership, which Corbyn had to publicly disavow and relaunch days later. The party’s now registered with Corbyn as leader and Sultana apparently sidelined.¹¹

I wrote about the problems with hero worship in movements. Your Party demonstrated exactly those problems: competing personalities, unilateral decisions, no democratic structures, no collective control. Just chaos.

And where did the disillusioned left-wing voters go? Not back to Labour. Not into political apathy. To the Greens. To an actual organisation with actual structures, led by someone who could articulate their politics without the organisational shambles.

What About the Environment?

Polanski’s platform is environmental. Wealth redistribution and fair taxation. Public ownership of essential services. Workers’ rights and decent housing. A green industrial strategy addressing the climate crisis. A foreign policy rooted in peace and justice.

Every single one of these connects to environmental politics. You can’t address the climate crisis without public ownership of energy. You can’t build a green economy without workers’ rights. You can’t achieve environmental justice without challenging the wealth that enables the worst polluters to escape consequences.

I was looking for “environmental expertise” as a separate category, a distinct policy area. But that’s exactly the liberal framing Polanski rejects. The expertise the Greens need isn’t just about carbon budgets - it’s about understanding that environmental destruction and economic exploitation are two sides of the same system.

Maybe the party does lose some of the technocratic environmental policy wonks. Maybe some of the centrist environmentalists do feel alienated. But what they’ve gained is far more valuable: a politics that can actually mobilise people, that connects environmental crisis to their lived experience, that offers solutions rather than guilt.

I wrote that we were conducting “an experiment with stakes too high to get wrong.” I was right about the stakes. The climate crisis is existential. The collapse of social democracy is accelerating. We can’t afford another decade of losing.

But I was wrong about the experiment. This isn’t a risky gamble - it’s the only approach that’s ever worked. Every successful left movement has connected disparate struggles into a unified class politics. The civil rights movement linked racism to economic exploitation. The Labour Party was born from unions connecting workplace rights to political power. The climate movement will only succeed by doing the same.

Being Wrong Is Good, Actually

I’m genuinely happy to be wrong about this. I wanted to be wrong. I actively hoped to be wrong. But I couldn’t convince myself at the time.

That’s what I’ve learned from this: sometimes you need to see the evidence. Not just the theoretical argument, not just the inspiring speeches, but the actual results. Polling data. Membership numbers. Media reactions. The concrete proof that the strategy works.

Three weeks ago, I thought eco-populism was a risk we couldn’t afford. Now I think it’s the only strategy that makes sense. I was wrong, and I’m delighted about it.

What Polanski has done is remarkable. He’s positioned the Greens as “the only real opposition on the left,” championing fair taxation, climate action, and social justice over corporate interests. Labour is collapsing. Your Party is a shambles. The Greens are doing the work.

This is a genuinely interesting political experiment - one with the potential to bring millions of disillusioned left-wing voters into a fundamentally different form of politics. Not the politics of guilt and sacrifice, but the politics of self-interest aligned with collective liberation. Not “save the planet by cutting your consumption,” but “we can all live better lives and save the planet by making the rich pay their share.”

Whether this experiment succeeds depends on what comes next. Whether the Greens can translate momentum into genuine political power. Whether Polanski can maintain both the radicalism and the discipline needed to build something that actually wins. Whether the movement can expand beyond current supporters into the broader electorate.

But the fact that it’s working this well, this quickly - that people are responding to this message in such numbers - that’s remarkable. It suggests there’s real hunger for a politics that refuses the false choice between environmental responsibility and material comfort.

The Warning for Labour

There’s a lesson here for the Labour leadership. The Conservatives learned it too late with UKIP: when you abandon your base’s core concerns, your base will find someone else. The Tories spent a decade trying to outflank UKIP on immigration while ignoring the deeper material anxieties driving people toward that party. By the time they realised what was happening, the damage was done.

Labour is repeating this mistake. They won the last election on the promise of change, of genuine redistribution, of putting working people first. Thirteen months later, they’re hemorrhaging members - losing a member every ten minutes - while a party barely six weeks old under a new leader is capturing their former voters at a rate faster than they can spin policy lines.

The Labour Party still has time to correct course. But it requires understanding that the hunger Polanski is tapping isn’t about identity politics or environmental guilt-tripping. It’s about material security. It’s about whether people can afford to live. It’s about whether the system that’s destroying the planet is the same system extracting wealth from ordinary people, and whether anyone in power actually wants to change it.

If Labour doesn’t answer that question - and answer it credibly - they’ll find themselves in the same position as the Conservatives: watching as a insurgent movement peels away their base one constituency at a time. The difference is that this time the insurgency has the policies and the momentum to actually win.

Sometimes being wrong is the best thing that can happen to you. It means reality is better than you feared.

I’ll take that.