One year of Polanski: more continuity than change?

0:00Noa Hoffman: Hey, I'm running out to drop off a stack of letters and packages. Need anything shipped while I'm gone? Save the gas. Stamps.com lets you print postage and schedule pickups right from your desk. Sync your contacts into the address book, get detailed accounting insights, and get notified the moment your certified mail is delivered. All from my desk? All from your desk. Join the 4 million businesses using Stamps.com right now with code podcast and get your free welcome gift. Stamps.com code podcast. Taxes and fees apply.

0:35Noa Hoffman: Hello and welcome to Coffeehouse Shots. I'm Noah Hoffman and today I'm delighted to be joined by Russell Warfield. Russell is a communications strategist and writer who has spent over a decade working across climate campaigning and politics. He previously worked in the Green Party's communications team as well as for the National Union of Students on their sustainability projects. He's also a commentator with articles and reviews in outlets including The New Statesman, Resurgents and Ecologists and Byline Times. His new book, The Green Socialists, Zach Polanski and the Battle for Britain's Future, brings together his experience in climate justice and political organising to explore Zach Polanski's role in reshaping British politics.

1:16Noa Hoffman: Russell, to begin with, can you sort of, I know obviously there is so much to dig into, but what is the overarching thesis of your book? Thank you for having me on. That's a really great question. So the overarching thesis of my book, the impulse that I had to write it in the first place, was to make the argument that Polanski's leadership of the Greens is more of a continuity with the party's recent and deeper past. And it's sometimes presented by commentators, critics and even well-meaning allies in the political sphere who perceive Polanski to be a ruptuous break from the party's past in one way or another.

1:54And yeah, I want to argue that actually he's sort of articulating the settled representative politics of the Greens that have been in place for certain years, if not arguably decades.

2:05Noa Hoffman: So Russell, as you said, your sort of argument is that the left wing populism that Polanski communicates has always been there. But why are the public and voters only noticing it now? Was Is that a problem with former party leaders being able to communicate that message in a way that Zach Polanski is able to communicate those messages in a way that past leaders haven't, for instance? Yeah, I think there's a few factors contributing to this. So the first is definitely that Zach is a notably better communicator than a lot of his predecessors. That is, if there's an obvious break from the party's recent past, it is that.

2:47I worked at the Greens from 2016 to 2021. during which Times Act was playing a few relatively low-level spokesperson roles in the party. I worked in the comms team, and I could see even then doing something, a bit of a dead-end brief, like the democracy spokesperson role, and a low ebb for the Greens anyway. I could see it had the raw materials of one of our talented communicators without question. I do also think, though, that the wider political conditions were more ripe, and I think that the space that Starmer specifically had vacated to his left was aching for a proper expression of the constituency of the electorate that is notably to the left of what Labour was articulating under Starmer and delivering under Starmer, more importantly.

3:33And I think that the combination of his skills as a communicator with that political opportunity were the chief reasons for the explosion in the popularity of the Greens over the last year or so. I mean, the other notable structural thing, I guess, is that there has been the way that Polanski communicates above just being quite talented or what have you, is his willingness to use the word yourself, speak in a more populist way, which more mirrored the success of like Farage vehicles to the right of the conservatives, but for the left and Labour, which is something the Greens hadn't really either been willing to do.

4:08and when they have been willing to do, haven't successfully done, really, which is to conduct politics in the way that a lot of people see it as it actually is, which is a conflict of interest and a class conflict in many ways, rather than the Greens have got a history of trusting that the best ideas will win out in some sort of fair marketplace of ideas in which politics is contested. That's not the reality of politics, of course. In the attention economy and the reality of politics today, Polanski got that in a way that previous leaders didn't and was able to capitalise on it.

4:40Noa Hoffman: Interesting. And I want to ask you, what does your book argue about just how big the constituency is for some of the more radical ideas within the Green Party? So, for instance, legalising hard drugs, heroin, you know, making sure Parliament has to vote for the launch of every drone in any sort of war or conflict. Some of the more radical ideas. Do you think that there is genuinely a big enough constituency who agrees with those opinions in the UK that could ever lead to a situation where the Green Party wins an outright majority? Taking the Green Party's policies more broadly in the first instance, I mean, if you see the history of polling on this question over the last, I don't know, let's say since 2010, since Caroline was in Parliament for the first time, you will consistently find that routinely the Green policies are quite often the stated preference of the electorate.

5:39the hurdle really has always been that they don't ever believe that the greens can win either where they are running like locally as a local candidate or certainly nationally that's you know that's the that's the threshold the greens have more traditionally had to traverse rather than the popularity of their policies per se i mean i take your point on you know some of the uh some some of the sort of policies that you're citing even among that i would cautiously depend especially the you know the harm reduction of harm reduction led policy on drugs has more popularity with a as a common sense approach to minimising drug deaths, etc.

6:13among the public, that might be assumed. But broader than that, I think that the broader platform of the Greens is a manifested popular one. The electoral ceiling of the Greens is raising with each sort of Green surge that they've had. One of the parallels I draw in the book with Polanski is the similarly proportionately sized Green surge that was experienced under the first years of conservative austerity with natalie bennett as leader where there was like a quadrupling of membership at that time obviously starting from a much lower baseline because the platform that the the greens went on is traditionally quite quite popular among a relatively sizable constituency of the public i mean what i one of the things i argue in the book i guess is that i'm i argue that there is a working social majority or a left-wing break from neoliberalism in the uk basically um and i I think that the Greens can play a part in building that.

7:07I think that we're now in a situation, obviously, where Burnham is paying, at least at the level of rhetoric, lip service to wanting to do the same thing, which is the first time I've seen that in my lifetime from a prime minister. And in fact, it's not the sort of thing that even Corbyn would go around saying, incidentally. He rarely articulated Britain's problems as being rooted in thatchalism and neoliberalism, etc. But I think there is a working social majority for a progressive break from neoliberalism from the left. and yeah, the Greens are one part in that. I would only add to that question, again, on the points of the policies you're raising, is that, you know, I've always admired, and I think a lot of people do admire, in politicians and in politics in general, people willing to take unpopular positions out of principle and go out and argue for them.

7:49And I think that, you know, when the Greens do do that, when they're given the platform and the opportunity to do so, people respond well to that, even if they don't agree with the position being advocated.

7:59Noa Hoffman: Yeah, I understand what you're saying. And I think a lot of that rings true in terms of the big cost of living and economic policies, say nationalization, for instance, and, you know, where you can really make a difference to how much money someone has in their pocket at the end of the day. Polanski is quite good at going out and making an argument for that case. But it's there is a lot of more niche, very fringe opinions that come to the forefront of coverage of the Green Party. And I think it's more difficult for me to understand how you argue that there would ever be a majority opinion for that, even if we're looking at something like, you know, getting rid of Trident in an era of so much global instability when we have Russia at our doorstep, the idea of eventually leaving NATO as well.

8:51Noa Hoffman: I think that's more harder to see where that working social majority is as opposed to the economic measures you mentioned. You know, there may be something to that. I mean, I would say that like, if you look at, you know, we're talking about a party which presently has five MPs and until recently four. And I consider it a good problem to have for the Greens to be, you know, to be responding to questions of this nature of like, where is your, you know, should there be a ceiling beneath you winning an out-of-the-majority in Parliament? That's a lovely problem to have. It's not a question that the Greens have ever been presented with until September 2025.

9:24so yeah i'm i'm pleased to be that that being the the sort of center of gravity the discourse at the moment but you know i think it's also worth taking a realistic approach to what is the likely role of the greens in a parliament in 2029 and going forward right so it i you know when i started working on polanski's leadership campaign just to to give this some context the like i said we had four mps at the time and the re one of the reasons that i was i thought that zach was the better choice leader than the his his principal opponents um the the mps ellie chounce and adrian ramsey were that they represent sort of small city conservative rural seats um and obviously a couple of the mps have inner cities or graduate heavy you know um quite richly diverse economically precarious seats um if you looked at all the second places that we got in 2024 i i believe from memory 39 of them out of 40 were more like bristol they were bristols and brightons not norwiches and so on and so forth so i mean the the ceiling that i've always been looking at realistically but especially in the immediate term of the next general election is to you come out of that playing a you know extremely pivotal role in a some sort of broadly center-left parliament right i mean the the route from here to a to an outright majority or run a green government in the next sort of three years.

10:49That's a narrow path if ever I've seen one. And I think that to throw away one of the principal strengths of the Greens, which is that willingness to take a deliberated, principled position on some of the most pressing social and economic problems of the day, which I think is the chief contribution that the Greens make in political life, if you like, is something that shouldn't be thrown aside for the fantasy of chasing an an outright majority in the immediate term.

11:16Noa Hoffman: So are you arguing that it's the sort of campaigning, protesting side of the party is more important than winning an outright majority, at least for now? I wouldn't so much say as a campaigning, protesting side, but I'd say that, you know, almost all things that are now taken for granted were at one point considered to be a silly, utopian idea. And I think there's an important role and certainly space in political life for Party to be laying the groundwork for making arguments for the century ahead that one day we may look back on and think we should have been doing it all along. Yeah, interesting.

11:52Noa Hoffman: I mean, I would argue that a lot of the reason we've seen Labour move a bit more to the left is down to Polanski and the Green Party. And I do genuinely believe that Polanski's campaigning and his popularity had a role to play in Keir Starmer becoming so unpopular among his membership and this desire of the Labour Party as the party of government to win back green votes. And that sort of moves me on to my next question, which is now Labour have overtaken reform in the polls. And YouGov, at least, says in part that is due to winning back some green voters. How do you take the fight to Burnham as opposed to the fight to Keir Starmer?

12:34Noa Hoffman: Because they're two very different characters you're working with, namely at the moment, at least, one is far more popular among those who might be tempted to vote Green. I do think that Burnham is a direct product of Polanski's leadership. I don't think that, there's a plausible version of events where Salma is still Prime Minister now, and even if he had been forced to step down, I think a minimum he would have seen an actually contested field of candidates, etc, etc. But I think it was like the trickle shocks, if you like, of just the surge in polls for the Greens immediately after Polanski became leader, and then the twin shocks of the Gorton and Denton by-election, and then the results of the May 2026 local elections, which, yeah, as you say, forced Labour to confront a certain number of electoral facts, chiefly among which that they lost four times as many votes to the Greens as they did to reform.

13:20So this whole approach this time I had of trying to somehow coalesce the left-wing bloc of the electorate by aping reform more and more and more, the natural conclusion of that was quite exposed, basically. I do also think that there will very shortly be quite a lot of political space opening back up because the reason that I say that is because if you look at the track record of Burnham so far, we are seeing, we've got a commitment at the level of rhetoric to breaking from neoliberalism. But the things you would have to do to do that are actually very politically courageous and quite politically difficult in many ways.

13:58And the announcements he made so far, whilst I think I must credit him as a political communication strategist, I think he's done exactly the right sort of things. It's what I would probably be doing in his shoes. But like the sort of policies he's announcing, really tinkering at the edges of something that is much bigger, much more structural, much more endemic. And the public are going to realize that sooner or later because their living standards won't be rising. I mean, a good example of this from last week is that policy he announced on ending subscriptions, right? That you can't get out of and all the rest of it.

14:28Which I think is fine. It's a good piece of political positioning. It's something that's annoying and it shows you that you're on the side of the public, etc etc fine but you know as annoying as like a fiver going out of your account every month is it's not as annoying as like over half your income going on rent and your bills going up and up and oil companies profiteering from war and disaster and lots of companies profiteering from a system where they just pump sewage into the oceans and all the rest of it and you've seen from recent the recent past that the public is extremely impatient for political change and have a very short honeymoon and when living salaries don't rise uh that burn and bounce will i will predict that to fall quite quickly.

15:04I don't anticipate him being anywhere near as unpopular as Starmer. But what I do think is that despite some false storms that we had in the 2010s that some listeners may remember, I do think we are now basically operating, at least in the medium term, in a genuinely multi-party democracy at the moment.

15:20Noa Hoffman: Yeah, and I think as well, with some of the bigger, more radical changes that Burnham is promising, those that the Green Party would, I imagine, support such as a mass council house building program um universal social care i it's it's hard to see how he pays for that without breaking labor's initial manifesto promise so already the questions are going to be asked about how he can make those big changes that uh the greens advocate for without potentially going into an election and and then in and in such an election he would have to make the case for tax rises, which, again, correct me if I'm wrong, but I think the Greens would be quite comfortable making that case, but some in Labour perhaps wouldn't be.

16:05Noa Hoffman: So there's some interesting differences there. I mean, the thing I'd add to that as well, of course, is that the current makeup of the parliamentary Labour Party was to a degree gerrymandered by, you know, the Starmer and the people around him ahead of the 2024 election and arguably represents, you know, the most right-wing grouping of Labour MPs that there have been, or at minimum the most moderate and the least ambitious for ruptuous change. So from a party management perspective as well, his choices are to try and deliver these things with a majority that are not agitating for it or go to the country again, almost certainly lose 50 to 100 to 150 MPs and try to do so on a minority administration with the support of other parties, neither of which are particularly easy.

16:52Noa Hoffman: I want to ask you about Polanski himself. a bit he can be a bit undisciplined on social media we've seen he's had to walk back a few times from some errors he's made in terms of say um reposting whether by accident he says or otherwise a picture about uh like Nigel Farage being hung and then of course he's got this past that keeps coming back to haunt him where he promised that he could enlarge a women's women's boobs um he was once a lib dem you know all all these very interesting elements to his personality are they by the by do you think that's something that people will get over or is this constantly going to be something that's a thorn in his side well i think there's a few you know the examples you've sort of pulled together they're probably worth addressing as separately so i think that the the social media thing i think that i would put my hands up and say that there's been unforced errors there but what i would also caveat that with is that i do think that they are they pale in comparison to the the net benefit that there has been in having a political leader who has been so hyper accessible online basically um his social media conduct if you like and his output and the work that he's done with like incredible content creators to create really really evocative comms i think it would be difficult to argue that that has not been the net boom for him and you know the unforced errors, if you like, that have cropped up.

18:19An almost inevitable byproduct of that style of social media usage, but one which I think, like I said, the Greens have needed someone to have the courage to operate within politics in this way, and he's done so. And the other examples, I guess, of his past, I mean, the example of him being Lib Dem, for instance, and his sort of journey leftwards, if you like, the legitimacy of people changing their political views when they're going from the left to the right is much less frequently challenged than it is when someone who is going from the centre further to the left where they feel like they must be sort of putting on those clothes and dressing up as it in some way.

18:55Very rare. I can't remember a single instance really apart from the columnists in the most rightward broadsheet papers that would ever really bring up that Keir Starmer used to be part of socialist sects when he was not particularly a grown-up as far as I'm aware. And similarly with this trust, obviously it was like raised as a sort of curiosity but it was never really uh raised in the way that was meant to delegitimize the sincerity of her commitment to the right-wing project that she was pursuing

19:22Noa Hoffman: as prime minister right so like i suppose it is just what would you agree that there is it is a more common political trajectory i mean anecdotally i see what you i see what you mean i mean there's more people in public life maybe that make the that get to the top of uk politics but i mean like there's more right-wing people at the top of uk politics and more frequently in charge so So I wouldn't, yeah, I've not really reflected on that too much. But I think that there is a sort of a folk politics, I guess, or, you know, folk politics of like that being, you know, a narrative of that being someone growing up, shall we say.

19:55And there is a tendency to undermine people that as they get older, become more left wing. I mean, in terms of the wider public, you know, you're right to raise that question. I do think that there is an orchestrated attempt to, I don't want to say cherry pick, but pull together these sort of disparaged threads that you could pull out from this past to sort of paint an overall picture of someone that should be delegitimized, cannot be trusted, etc. And that seems to be that was sort of the attack approach, especially ahead of the May 26 elections, where we saw an attack on the Greens from the establishment press and Labour particularly, which was reserved usually for the leader of the opposition in the general election.

20:41It was an attack machine from Labour in particular that was quite substantial. I'd never really seen deployed in the local election campaign. And that was one of the chief things they really had to sort of throw at him. And the question of whether he can overcome that by articulating a politics which appeals to enough people is an open but I think a promising question.

21:02Noa Hoffman: I want to ask you about what you touched on earlier which is the different demographics of voters. You spoke about how the sort of old guard managed to do quite well in the more sort of posh shires, you know, with the more middle class voters who love their rivers, who want to see the environment protected, who want to take really urgent action on climate change. And then this newer demographic of graduates, of renters, of people in cities, you know. But there is also that third demographic as well, which is a conservative Muslim demographic who are voting for Greens on the Gaza issue. Now, I think, I believe in your book, you say that there's no tension between those demographics when it comes to your party and to making policy.

21:55Noa Hoffman: And I was just wondering if you could explain why there's no attention and maybe respond to some of the questions people have about how to use very colloquial terms you can have woke lefties so to speak and conservative muslims come together um in one party could you could you explain how that works one of the reasons you could say that there's little tension between those positions is because there is there's manifestly been it's been a successful voting coalition for about 10 years now and has resulted in a near 50 50 split between, this is speaking truthfully at the local authority level in council seats, because those elections are more frequent, where the Greens have grown exponentially in the last 10 years.

22:35And they've done so by taking an almost 50-50 split between the sort of inner city seats that you're describing from Labour and the sort of more rural, older, small city Conservative seats from the Tories. And they've been able to do that almost straight down the middle. and that's actually been reflected in the composition of MPs from the 2024 general election, as you say. So, I mean, there's an actual track record of them being able to traverse that divide, if you like. I mean, one of the reasons, there's a few reasons that I go into in the book of why I think that that is coherent. And the first is that it is commonly sort of assumed that progressive people don't live in the countryside, and they do.

23:15And I know that sounds like an obvious point to make, but the Greens are quite often the people that are able to hear the progressive vote in rural areas where Labour traditionally don't win and can do so successfully enough to go over the line first-class to post basically because whether you're in a village or in a city especially where they're older and they're thinking about the interests of their children and there's plenty of people that are opposed like a two child benefit cap, university tuition fees going up and up and all the rest of the sort of, the bread and butter platform of the Greens that we sort of discussed a little bit earlier in the conversation.

23:56Those people do live in villages. I'm from a village. I've arrived at these cities. I've never shot a fox. So there's that. And I think that the other thing as well is that it is commonly sort of asserted that the Greens are doing that by saying one thing to one set of voters that it's irreconcilable with what we are saying to another set of voters. And I think the reason that the Greens have done this so successfully is that they are actually quite proudly committed to actually advocating for the policies they actually stand for. So you mentioned rivers, right? So this is a good example. So if you take Ellie Chowns in Herefordshire, who did loads of campaigning on the water quality of the river, why, I believe, if I say cautiously, and campaigned about the water quality there.

24:44You'd get someone like Denier campaigning about the price of rip-off water bills amongst hard-up graduates in the inner city of Bristol. The policy prescription for both of these problems was identical, which is that this is the product of a privatized water system that is setting up our bills, polluting our rivers, all the rest of it. The solution is to bring it back into public ownership to remedy all of these problems. So we were saying exactly the same things to the same group of people. I think where you become, where the Greens would have become unstuck and could become, in principle, would have become unstuck if you are literally just promising completely irreconcilable things to different parts of your voting coalition, which is not what's happening.

25:20And I think that people often portray the Greens as doing exactly that, basically, just saying what they need to say to the people that they're trying to win with locally, and they worry about those contradictions coming on us anyway. What I'm arguing, basically, is that there is never a contradiction between the positions taken in different localities of the UK. And the Greens are always proud to be campaigning on the policies that they're actually advocating for.

25:45Noa Hoffman: And in terms of the conservative Muslim voters you're winning over? Right, yeah, yeah. So, I mean, the phenomenon of conservative Muslim voters, I mean, I don't know much about this specific label of them being conservative Muslims, but for the sake of argument, I know what you're talking about. I suppose if you're a woman and you're only showing your eyes, one would presume that that is a conservative position. For sure, but what I meant, sorry, by that was more what specific compositions such Muslims are making up in the Green Boat relative to others. Well, for instance, in Gorton and Denton, it was quite a substantial one.

26:25Sure, sure, sure. Yeah, the point being, I guess, is that obviously that was a direct product of two particular things, which was the events that have unfolded since 2023 in the Middle East and Labour's response to it. So Labour has very famously been hemorrhaging almost every part of the working coalition over the last sort of, well, 5, 10, 24 years, basically, slowly, slowly, and just shedding the monophorized cell, and that's one of the last ones that went. And the Greens were the natural beneficiaries of this. And I think because, actually, one of the under-discussed parts of the voting coalition of the Greens, through the 2010s, let's say, when there was the first run of properly national prominence, when Caroline went to parliament and Lucas became leader, forgive me, Bennett became leader, was the modest but detectable disproportionality of people who were either first or second generation immigrants from places affected by conflict around the world attracted to the Greens' low-held principle down to war stance on a range of foreign policy issues.

27:34It must be said, admittedly, combined with their position on climate in many places, especially where people were at either origins in or ties to places which were being on the front-line effects and feeling the front-line effects of the initial climate impacts that we're experiencing. But the principled anti-war stance of the Greens is something that has been attractive to a certain contingent of voters. And I think that the particular contingent moment of, like I say, the events following 23 and Labour's response to them and some of their more recent history as well saw a mass swell of support for the Greens' position on that.

28:10Noa Hoffman: Yeah, no, for sure. So I don't mean to drag on this too long. It's just I understand your argument about the overlapping interests of the sort of rural small C conservatives and the inner city grads. But when it comes to particular progressive issues, it is harder to see an overlap with some of your newer voters and some of your more progressive core, so to speak. But I suppose every party has its... Exactly. I mean, there is not like complete ideological unity between the voting coalitions. Yeah, exactly. You've articulated exactly what I would have said, really, which is that obviously there is a balancing act between holding together a different party or voting coalition.

28:54And the way that the Greens have done so so far is, like I said, primarily been led by taking the actually advocate for the actual position that's been arrived at by their members through democratic processes and building the coalitions from there, rather than, as many parties do, basically doing it the other way around and gerrymandering their own positions on the issues of the day relative to the voting coalitions they hope to put together.

29:14Noa Hoffman: Well, Russell, I think with that, I will bring this podcast to a close. It's been such a fascinating chat. Thank you so much. And everyone, Russell's book is available now. It's coming out in September. So you could pre-order it from fine bookstores everywhere. Yeah. There we go. And we love an independent bookstore, no doubt, is the green message over Amazon. Absolutely. Absolutely. brilliant well thank you so much Russell and thank you for listening to Coffeehouse Shots so Thank you.

30:17Noa Hoffman: All from my desk? All from your desk. Join the 4 million businesses using Stamps.com right now with code podcast and get your free welcome gift. Stamps.com code podcast. Taxes and fees apply.