With membership soaring, the Green party is grappling with logistics, culture shifts and a flood of new activists
It is, as one Green activist put it, a never-ending series of “constantly good problems to have”. But how does a party adapt to the sudden trebling of its membership? And when a majority of people in an organisation are new, is it even the same thing anymore?
The basic facts alone are startling. Before Zack Polanski took over as leader last September, the Greens in England and Wales had around 66,000 members. They are now at 215,000, and still rising at speed.
This means the party has many more people to knock on doors and fold leaflets, as seen with the vast numbers of canvassers the party could call on in winning last month’s Gorton and Denton byelection.
But, according to some Greens, it also means the arrival of a sometimes quite different culture, particularly from those who have fled Labour or Jeremy Corbyn’s faltering Your Party.
