I want the Greens to be a populist party – here’s how – UK Times

It’s an exciting time to be in the Green Party. We’ve gained seats in eight successive elections, have four brilliant MPs in parliament, and we’re polling in double digits.

Since I joined eight years ago, the change has been huge – and built entirely on the hard work of our members. It’s been an impressive decade, but the next decade needs to be explosive. That’s why I’m running for the party leadership, on a platform of “eco-populism”. I want to take the eco message beyond the grassroots and to the masses.

You don’t have to be a political scientist to see why this moment requires a bold Green Party. The climate crisis is affecting all our lives and biting into our livelihoods, but we have a government that has been disappointingly quick to break its promises on climate action, even when green investment is the clearest route to raising living standards and improving quality of life for millions of people up and down the country.

First came the binning of the £28bn green investment, then support for major airport expansion, followed by backpedalling on clean car standards. Prime minister Keir Starmer has gone from shouting about a Green New Deal to jettisoning climate justice.

The sad truth is that Labour is obsessed with the electoral threat from Nigel Farage’s Reform UK, and its supposed green credentials are the first thing to go to the wall. This week, the prime minister made time to give a speech about how Farage, if he were ever put in charge, would crash the economy like Liz Truss. I don’t doubt it – but politics shouldn’t bend to the will of the hard right.

More voters than ever are keen to vote Green. But I believe we need to communicate our clear policy platform in a way that better speaks to people’s everyday needs.

Under my leadership, we will stand with those at the sharpest end of the country’s economic failures – and we will show them how a climate-proofed economy will mean warmer homes, cheaper bills, decent jobs and greater security for all of us.

The current administration is missing basic opportunities to do green things. They’re part-nationalising the railways… but have forgotten the most important part: improving the trains.

Meanwhile, Robert Jenrick this week filmed himself stopping fare dodgers on the London Underground – which is all well and good if that was his job. But, as a former minister, he had both the time and the power to create systemic change – and failed to enact anything of the sort.

Even now, in his role as shadow secretary of state for justice, instead of pushing the government to reduce the burden on some people living in poverty, which is a much more effective preventive measure against crime, he is acting as some sort of vigilante for the sake of social media.

It’s not radical to say that corporations shouldn’t profit from the water coming out of taps, or that extreme wealth ought to be taxed fairly – it’s just that no one is willing to say it.

Some might say such things are a far cry from what the Green Party has been most known for. But there’s no environmental justice without racial, social and economic justice, too. And the same corporations that are discharging sewage into our rivers are destroying our communities and, ultimately, will do the same for our democracy, too.

In the coming weeks, I’m going to make it my mission to tell one simple story – one which says it doesn’t have to be like this. We can do things differently. The UK can have clean air, lower bills, job security and public services that we all can rely on.

This is what I mean by “eco-populism”. At the very heart of our environmental mission are bread-and-butter issues that affect all of us. And making climate action relevant to people’s material, everyday concerns. Under my leadership, we will have a Green Party that can demonstrate that a better country and a better world are within our grasp – one that can build the mass movement needed to demand it.

Zack Polanski is the deputy leader of the Green Party and is running in the leadership contest