They may lack Labour’s party machine, but Zack Polanski’s burgeoning popularity could have seismic consequences for British politics
W
hen Zack Polanski won the Green leadership in September, he made clear that he was coming for Labour. At the time, his warning that “we’re here to replace you” still seemed faintly presumptuous, coming from a man who hasn’t even managed to get himself elected to parliament and whose party was only barely into single digits in the polls. Even battered and beleaguered as it was by autumn, Labour was still the big beast of the left: the only one big enough, anyway, to win a majority.
Little more than a month on, pollsters are now talking about arguably the most underpriced wildcard in the 2025 pack, which is the prospect of the Greens overtaking Labour in the polls in the same way Reform overtook the Tories at the end of last year – not just in one rogue sample or outlier, but consistently enough to be credible.
In the most recent YouGov poll, the Greens are still four points behind Labour. But that’s down from 12 points in August, just before Polanski was elected, and other polls have put them almost at parity. If both parties stick to their current trajectories – Labour drowning in pre-budget gloom and recriminations and the Greens surfing an optimistic wave of voters looking for a British equivalent to New York’s upbeat new socialist mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani – then the psychologically important crossover point could be only weeks away. Though polls are only ever a snapshot of a moment in time, revealing very little about the results of a general election that could still be four years away, that would nonetheless be a seismic moment.
