What’s Zack Polanski’s story?

0:00Hello, Ed Conway here. Here is what might sound like a slightly random question. What do AirPods, bananas and a pair of shoddily made running trainers from the 1970s have in common? On the surface, not very much. But on my podcast, Stuff Matters, I will uncover the deeper stories behind each of them. You will see how together they tell a fascinating new story about the world we live in. The first full series of Stuff Matters is out now. Just search for it on your podcast app and follow. Zach Polanski, 20 ,411. All hail Zach Polanski, the new leader of the Green Party in England and Wales. He wants to challenge both Labour and reform with his brand of eco-populism.

0:46But is he really the man to finally make the Greens a political contender? Hello, Ed Conway here. Here is what might sound like a slightly random question. What do AirPods, bananas and a pair of shoddily made running trainers from the 1970s have in common? On the surface, not very much But on my podcast Stuff Matters I will uncover the deeper stories behind each of them You will see how together they tell a fascinating new story about the world we live in The first full series of Stuff Matters is out now Just search for it on your podcast app and follow

1:29Hi everyone, Neil Paterson here with the Sky News Daily and today we're talking about the fresh-faced new leader of the Green Party, Zach Polanski. Now he's not without some political experience. Currently he sits on the London Assembly, that elected body that scrutinises the activities of the capital's mayor. But he's certainly ambitious. His eyes have long been set in the Commons where, let's not forget, the Greens already have four MPs. But those opposition benches, they're pretty crowded already. So Polanski wants to offer a different type of politics, filling the void on the left with policies that would include a wealth tax on billionaires and renationalising water companies.

2:10The hope is to be a threat to both labour and reform. We know that fascism is at our doorstep. It really is that serious. We've seen that with Farage's press conferences. We've seen it with a constant capitulation by Keir Starmer to the right. And actually, I want to make sure that Keir Starmer is more worried about the Green Party than he is about reform. Now, someone who can tell us a lot more about Polanski and his politics is George Monaghan, commissioning editor at the New Statesman. He's certainly no career politician. He's born in Salford, 1982. Smart guy, gets a scholarship to the grammar school, studies at university in Wales.

2:46And then he sort of becomes Zach Polanski around the end of school, university. he literally becomes Zach Polanski. Before then he was called David Pauldin, but his family had adopted the name Pauldin when they were emigrating. He wanted to reassert his Jewish identity. So he restored the old family name of Polanski and took a more Jewish forename in Zach. Then after his Abra Wistreth course in Wales, he went to drama school in Georgia and then he kind of gets into the colourful stuff. He's a kind of immersive actor. So he does spooky stuff like Tower of London experience, I think probably being one of those guys who jumps out at you.

3:26He was in the Peaky Blinders immersive show, I believe. But he was also doing kind of good, wholesome stuff such as practicing job interviews with homeless people or letting downtrodden renters practice challenging their landlord for a better deal. And he would play the opposite part. Of course, it wasn't the Greens that were his first political party, was it? No, he joined the Lib Dems kind of around 2015, 2016. His awakening was Natalie Bennett being admitted to the 2015 leadership election, he says, for the Greens. Nonetheless, he joined the Lib Dems where he most famously heckled Jeremy Corbyn about Brexit.

4:00But pretty soon after that, he was into the Greens in 2017. It's an interesting CV and one which he has leaned quite heavily into, I think, in his political life. But there was, you know, one incident which has cropped up in his past. and involves his time as what, as a hypnotherapist? Explain. I thought it might be that. The Sun, I believe it was, got him to try and hypnotherapise one of their journalists to make her boobs bigger. I think, to be fair to him, it was hypnotherapy as a means of self-affirmation and he was probably doing nice things for people troubled by all sorts of things. Soothing anxiety, encouraging people.

4:40And I'm sure they went in and said, I'm really insecure about the size of my breasts and he tried to oblige but I don't think it's malicious. And certainly he has apologised for it. He also has, along with that kind of social conscience an arrest record to go along with it. I mean he was active in Extinction Rebellion wasn't he? Yeah, he was the first person arrested on a Waterloo Bridge protest in I believe 2019 described as a beautiful experience. So what do we know about his political career up until this point then? Not loads because he sort of emerged when the call started coming out for eco-populists and a farage of the left.

5:17His pitch is that he would take the fight to farage, that the only way to do that now is to be a charismatic, TikTok fluent man of the people, and that that's him. Maybe the most representative example is a video where he went to Dover and he talked about the Small Boats crisis. And that was sort of the model of eco-populism for a few reasons. In the first place, he went directly to the battleground, of Farage, you know, here are where people look out and see boats coming in. On the second, he used kind of charismatic language. He said, I call bullshit on this. Third, his solution, he redirected the grievance to wages, the NHS, obscene rents, the rivers being sewers.

5:59And he kind of, his theory for that was the broken wealth inequality and social injustice in the country. Crucially, for it to be eco-populism, this was all posted on TikTok and delivered, they would say, charismatically. And it was fairly charismatic. Let's look at it then through the prism of the other populist in British politics at the moment, Nigel Farage. I mean, can Zach Polanski out-Farage Nigel? I mean, the problem with that is that people are saying it already. Farage is established as a generational politician and has been at the top of British politics for a decade. Polanski emerged this year.

6:32It's way too soon. It may well be that the only way for the left to win power now is with a sort of left populism. But if you believe that, then you need to build up a pretty strong candidate and portfolio. Yeah, and isn't there one out there already? Jeremy Corbyn and Zahra Sotana are still pushing ahead with their left-wing movement. I mean, if there are votes that are going to be siphoned up from the left, they're surely going to be going in that direction. Yeah, Corbyn's a titanically successful left populist. I think he brought in, was it, 12.8 million votes in 2015? For a while under him, Labour was the biggest by-numbers political organisation in Europe.

7:06The problem for Polanski is that, as opposed to the other green candidates, he's basically signalled a willingness to align with Corbyn. But it's hard to see how align means anything other than get swallowed by. Explain then, over the course of the months that you have experienced, have kept an eye on Zach Polanski, I mean, what do you make of him? There's not quite the instant magic that you see with Farage or with Corbyn or even with Boris Johnson or Trump. You know, those populists that you really can't look away from. But, you know, you have to start where you are. polanski's massively improved the greens prominence and the enthusiasm within the party for action it could be a green moment the area to the left of labor is you know fairly young and the lib dems aren't really kind of tick-tock fluent in the way that zapolanski is trying to be so yeah there's loads of space to the left of labor of course there is there a kind of um centrist party or centrist government at the least does nigel farage have something to fear from zach Polanski?

8:05Not yet. I think Farage is thinking about Downing Street and on issues like flags and migration, he's speaking the language of the people represented by Downing Street. He has a much more developed theory of all that than the left does so far. But that's the whole point of the left kind of splitting up and trying to get some energy going is that hopefully they can come up with better answers. There's tons of grievances out there that people are waiting to here's something on. Rents are crazy. Wages haven't grown. You do have to wait in a corridor on the NHS, potentially in your own feces, or your dad does, or your old mum does.

8:41The confiscation of democratic power and the escalation of wealth inequality are there for any populist to engage with and do well on. The last thing that a populist party has to figure out is what they're going to say about immigration. It's the kind of tricky bit, the most tricky bit of globalisation, that Labour was also freed up as a kind of free-moving resource. The right have a really easy answer to that. Stop it. The left don't know how to come up with anything that doesn't feel like moral or political suicide at the moment. But maybe they can. Thanks, George. Now, I want to get more of a sense of Zach Polanski as both man and politician.

9:25Caroline Russell, Green Leader of the London Assembly, has of course worked alongside him and backed him throughout his campaign. I mean, Zach joined me and Sian Berry on the London Assembly back in 2021 after the London mayor elections. And he just hit the ground running and had to get started as chair of the Environment Committee and just took it all in his stride. He's an incredibly cheerful and enthusiastic, happy person to have around the place. And he kind of seems to bring everyone along with that sort of infectious enthusiasm for whatever it is that he's talking about or being interested in.

10:02So what then, Carolyn, do you think was it that attracted party members to the Polanski cause? Well, I think the thing about the Green Party is it's a bit different to other political parties. We have a member led policy platform. And so the leader is someone who is communicating what the Green Party believes in and what elected Greens do, how we work and how we engage with people. And so I think people just saw Zach's campaign and just thought, wow, this is capable of taking us to another level in terms of the amount of media coverage we get. And I think just everyone just thought, yes, we want some of this.

10:40Looking at the CV that he possesses, you wouldn't describe him as a career politician and, you know, a number of jobs, acting has been involved in there, you know, getting arrested whilst protesting along with Extinction Rebellion. This is not the traditional route to being the leader of a political party. But I'm just wondering, what about it that you think might stand him in good stead for that particular role? It means that he's very connected, having been an actor, having lived on pretty low incomes, living a bit of a hand to mouth, one job to the next. So he's got a real lived experience of that.

11:16So very connected with people and causes. that sort of non-traditional political background is something actually that many Greens have and an awful lot of us have been arrested for things over the years. So it's not actually that unusual because we do stand by our principles. Leadership campaigns, no matter the political party, they can get a little bit hard-edged at times. There have been some gaps revealed within the party. What does he have to do to reunite the divide that did emerge to an extent during this leadership campaign? What you saw on the day of the election and the warmth with which Ellie and Adrian greeted Zach and his win, I think the whole party is we're a team, we work together, and that is a sort of real green value.

12:07Like on the day of the announcement, I was at City Hall in Economy Committee making sure that the Green Assembly members were still doing their thing. you know we work as a team we do stuff for each other and so I really struggle to recognise that that gap that you're talking about. I suppose it is the gap when it comes to the strategy which the party will deploy moving forward obviously now you have a degree of parliamentary representation that you've not had before but you know there are other parties snapping around the edges of British politics and I'm just wondering how Zach how the Greens deal with let's name it the reform issue.

12:44A lot of people in this country are really struggling after years and years of austerity. The social safety nets are worn very, very thin and people are falling between the cracks. And that can be happening whether you're living out in the country, whether you're living in a small town or whether you're living in a big city. And the connection, the importance and the way of connecting with people and hearing what they care about and making sure that there is a party of hope for people to turn to rather than a party that is just about having a go at migration and you know sort of a very negative tone of reform.

13:28But do you think it is possible to have as it struck me at points during the leadership campaign that Zach was after a populist environmental party. I mean, that's one of the things, again, about the Green Party. We see environmental justice tied up entirely with human rights, with social and racial justice. You can't have one without the other. That just feels so obvious, I suppose, because I'm inside the Green Party. And we obviously need to get better at explaining that. And maybe I think that's what Zach means about eco-populism. I think Zach's values are in the right place. And I think Zach is very good at opening his mouth in a very effective way.

14:07And actually, I think that's what you need in a leader, because one of the things that we've all watched over the last kind of, I don't know, 15 or more years is Nigel Farage has been able to get onto the television all the time, probably because he's good value. He's reliable in that he's going to make good television. And I think Zach's someone who can counter that, but he's going to have different things coming out of his mouth and messages of hope. So tell me a little bit more about Zach not the politician, away from City Hall, when he wasn't prowling the corridors and campaigning away. I mean, what's he like?

14:46I've always known Zach as someone who's a campaigner. But I think Zach's very chilled. He's vegan and kind of cares passionately about, you know, trying to get City Hall to be a vegan-first canteen. He's just very friendly, very good at just sitting down with people and starting a conversation, you know, and having a chat. A brilliant person, you know, he's always incredibly enthusiastic and you just feel like, oh, he's living his best life today, but he's doing that every day. And so I think that's how I describe Zach. And I cannot believe his energy and his stamina as he's gone through this campaign and now this last few days of whirlwind since the result.

15:32Just in terms of the politics, do you see the battle? And there clearly is a battle for votes going on up and down the country right now, driven by the reform phenomenon. I mean, do you see yourselves as in competition for the same votes that reform are sucking up? I think there will be people who do vote for the Green Party who might have gone to reform if they encounter the Green Party and the messages of hope and the sort of practical solutions to everyday problems. I think we may well find voters from the same pool. But I think it's actually this idea that voters belong to a particular party.

16:12It's up to political parties to encourage voters to vote for them and for their policies. And I think what we've seen over this last bit, we've been through years through leading up to the Brexit campaign and right through to the last election. we've been through a period of very binary politics where it's, you know, vote Labour to keep the Tories out or vote Tory to keep Labour out. And actually what we're seeing now is that the smaller parties can focus and can break through. And I think that that means that that kind of old binary politics going between Labour and Conservative is possibly has had its day.

16:55and actually we're going to see voting feeling very different. Caroline, thank you. That's all for this week. If you missed any of our episodes on banning phones in schools, Kenny Badenoch's plans to drill oil and gas in the North Sea or even asylum seekers in Nuneaton, all you have to do is scroll back in your feet. The Sky News Daily is back again Monday. Have a lovely weekend.

17:23Hello, Ed Conway here. Here is what might sound like a slightly random question. What do AirPods, bananas and a pair of shoddily made running trainers from the 1970s have in common? On the surface, not very much. But on my podcast, Stuff Matters, I will uncover the deeper stories behind each of them. You will see how together they tell a fascinating new story about the world we live in. The first full series of Stuff Matters is out now. Just search for it on your podcast app and follow.