“The answer here is for the government to actually tackle inequality.” That’s not Jeremy Corbyn — it’s Zack Polanski, almost certainly the next leader of the Greens and a walking, talking political revolution. Transforming his party from an eccentric pressure group into an assertive progressive force, he’s spent the last several months talking as much about billionaires and Gaza as he has about wind farms. Due to be anointed tomorrow, when the results of the party’s leadership contest are finally announced, Polanski offers nothing less than a reenergised Left, positioning the Greens as a kind of anti-Reform. Yet amid the soaring membership numbers, and viral takes on the failures of “briefcase politics”, real power looks as distant as ever, while Polanski himself risks wrecking the very radicalism he claims Britain needs.
Whatever you think of his politics, Zack Polanski embodies the outsider narrative he preaches. His background is varied: actor, activist, youth worker — and, most infamously, hypnotherapist, where he apparently tried to enlarge a woman’s breasts. Polanski’s political development is just as striking. Elected as deputy leader of the Greens in 2022, he became the most senior openly gay Jewish politico in British history. Born David Paulden, he reclaimed his former family name, and his religious heritage, at 18.
Polanski has made much of his unconventional personal journey, projecting authenticity and charming much of the media in the process. Branding himself as a youthful and emotionally charged disrupter, he has been careful to contrast himself with Green Party stereotypes — less Home County geriatric and more insurgent with a green beret. Even Polanski’s insistence that the Greens select a single head, dumping the party’s traditional system of co-leadership, points towards an incipient form of personality cult. The ex-actor’s showmanship is easy to criticise. Yet the results speak for themselves: Polanski’s campaign launch video received over two million views, while Green Party membership has surged roughly 8%, and is now approaching its 2015 peak.
This change of tone is echoed by policy, with Polanski’s Greens enthusiastically embracing so-called “eco-populism”. Aiming to strip environmentalism of its stodgy middle-class baggage, it instead aims to inspire apolitical voters. Polanski ties these reforms to redistributionist themes, painting every green policy as a step toward greater social justice. One example is linking climate action to wealth inequality, even as he argues that obsessing over immigration misses the bigger picture: a super-rich elite not paying its share. Unsurprisingly, Polanski also champions a comprehensive wealth tax of 1% on assets exceeding £10 million, and 2% on assets over £1 billion. This, he claims, means the green transition can be achieved without burdening ordinary people.
A longstanding tenet of the Green Party has been the so-called Green Economic Transformation, which the party’s leader will be expected to deliver. At its core, this is a commitment to spend £40 billion a year in new public investment. This will fund sweeping eco-friendly retrofits, from home insulation and low-carbon heating. Beyond that new wealth tax, this would be paid for via a steep carbon levy on all fossil fuels. Alongside cancelling all new oil and gas licences, and ending the relevant subsidies, the Greens would effectively legislate oil and gas out of existence.
Such radicalism is reflected elsewhere. For starters, Polanski hopes to renationalise key utilities, bringing trains, water and energy back into public ownership. Then there’s foreign policy. Polanski has called for the UK to leave Nato, in large part due to Donald Trump, whom he deems an unreliable ally. As for Gaza, Polanski has attended pro-Palestine marches, using his Jewish upbringing to assail Labour’s support for Israel. These stances underline his anti-establishment appeal, which has also started to reshape the party’s base. Much of its growth comes from former Labour activists and Corbyn-era allies. Eager to take on both the Right and mainstream Treasury orthodoxy, Polanski has even indicated a willingness to collaborate with other Left-wing insurgents, notably Corbyn’s and Zarah Sultana’s new outfit.
This approach seems to be working: internal Green Party figures suggest 30% of young people may now vote for them, an excitement apparently echoed by one-in-ten voters nationally. Yet if this is a 43% jump from the already-record vote share the party secured last year, the Green prospectus is very far from perfect. Consider, for instance, the question of carbon levies. In 2024, the Institute for Fiscal Studies noted that any success the tax had in cutting emissions would directly result in revenues collapsing. Many of Polanski’s spending pledges, in areas from health and social care, would effectively be financed by a revenue stream tailor-made to shrink.
The party’s proposed wealth tax is also flawed. An annual levy on complex assets, which make up the bulk of this wealth, would be administratively costly and prone to evasion. This is mirrored in the experience of other developed economies, notably the Netherlands, where the supreme court went so far as to rule that the tax was a violation of European law. Elsewhere, countries from Germany to Sweden were forced to repeal their wealth taxes due to capital flight, and because they deterred foreign investment and cut tax revenues. And if these fundraising measures look faulty, so too do the outlays.
One of the party’s main promises is to make electricity generation 100% renewable by 2035, completely eradicating carbon-based energy. Right off the bat, this goal is made more challenging by the party’s long-standing disdain for nuclear energy, which it deems unsafe and expensive. That’s debatable: but either way, around half of British power currently comes from gas-fired plants, with nuclear providing a further 9%. No less important, the grid isn’t ready for Polanski’s renewable revolution. Building the necessary battery storage infrastructure would cost hundreds of billions alone, far exceeding the party’s calculations. As for renewable projects, many remain stuck in connection queues, unable to hook into the grid, with waiting lists stretching to over a decade. For the Green Party to hit its renewable targets, it would need to connect more turbines than the entire current queue — and all within a decade.
In a way, though, and as Polanski’s own style implies, the point here is less about policy outcomes and more about radicalism per se — with those extravagant green offers simply one pillar of a broader anti-establishment platform. This, of course, raises the perennial question of whether the Greens are mainly an environmental movement, or else a progressive party that uses climate change as a Trojan Horse. Certainly, think tanks on the far Left have been advancing nearly identical policies for years, just without the green branding.
Whether this socialist turn will expand the party’s appeal is the biggest gamble of Polanski’s leadership. For if the polling numbers seem strong, the electoral fragmentation implicit in his strategy could yet be his undoing. Even a vote share of just 5% could see the Greens gain a number of seats, especially in our dawning age of five-party politics. More to the point, Polanski is probably right in thinking that a chunk of disillusioned Labour supporters are ripe for the taking, particularly after four more years of idea-free Starmerism. At the fringes, though, Polanski’s revolution extends even beyond that. Among other things, he claims that many Reform voters are simply frustrated by low pay and poor public services, and that Green “eco-populism” is clearly the solution.
Indeed, this idea has likely shaped Polanski’s decision to echo Reform’s campaign strategies, with the man himself stating that his party must “learn from Farage”. In practice, though, there are reasons to think that Polanski is overstretching. For one thing, campaigning for Labour voters undercuts any notion of shared purpose. If too many disaffected voters scatter, Reform’s vast poll lead will only grow. By emphasising that they are not fundamentally at odds with Labour ideology, meanwhile, the Greens risk foundering were Starmer to tack Left. This places the party in a far more tenuous position than Polanski may realise — and that’s before you add his idealistic paean to the material interests of Reform voters, oblivious to the ways immigration and identity are transforming British politics. Hypnotherapy, political or otherwise, just won’t cut it.
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Author: Gabriel McKeown
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