The Representation of the People

The Observer is a pretty rubbish newspaper these days, its strengths in world coverage a mere memory and its commitment to flogging stuff exceeding even that of The Guardian. The one positive is that its football reporting has improved of late after a disastrous start under Tortoise Media. But it has the advantage that its remove from the daily news cycle means that it can take a more analytical, even judicious, view of what is going on in the world. Obviously it doesn't actually do that. What it does do is summarise the consensus of the media. Rachel Sylvester's report, headlined "Greens facing ‘existential threat’ as membership plummets after anti-Zionist motion", rehearses all the various claims made since Thursday's Holborn and St Pancras byelection, coming to the paradoxical conclusion that (in so many words) "The antisemitic left have infested the party so its Jewish leader must step down". It even goes so far as to quote the usual suspects on the subject, Ian Austin and Adam Langleben. Insofar as there is any analysis here, it is the speculation, based on a tiny sample, that Green Party membership may have "plummeted" by up to 2%, which is well within the bounds of seasonal fluctuation.

It is quite possible that many party members have resigned over the anti-Zionist motion, because party members routinely resign over policy turns and this one is undoubtedly substantial in nature and likely to be provocative for many. But it's equally likely that some members will have resigned because they can see the way the wind is blowing - i.e. that the party will now be subjected to a full-on antisemitism scare across the media and that senior members of the party (notably former leaders like Caroline Lucas and Adrian Ramsay) will leverage this for factional ends. If you think the purges are coming, you may well decide to jump before you are pushed, and one factor in deciding this may be the signals you get from the current leadership. Zack Polanski has been accused of a failure of leadership for not having opposed the motion, but he can also be accused of such a failure for not having immediately called out the media's bias and the wrecking of those party grandees. If this all sounds familiar, it is because it was also the strategic error made by Jeremy Corbyn.

It's worth recalling that after rising steeply under Corbyn, the Labour Party's membership fell by 40% between 2019 and 2025. This was only partially down to expulsions, with the bulk of the fall due to resignations in despair or simple hopelessness leading to lapsed subs. But the press saw that as a triumph, not a concern, as it meant the party was returned to its rightful "owners". There isn't a sincere worry that the Greens will lose Jewish members over the adoption of an anti-Zionist policy but a gleeful expectation that they can be harried into expelling left-leaning members, which will incidentally include Jewish ones (like Polanski) and also Muslims, who in UK politics are now coded as left, because of Palestine, regardless of their actual views. This repeat of what we might call the Corbyn manoeuvre won't follow exactly the same trajectory, however. While it is credible to suggest that you must destroy Labour to save it (from the left), because the depth of support in urban seats means it will always return a rump of MPs, you can't suggest the same for the Greens without reducing them to low single figures in vote share and possibly zero MPs.

The right of the Green Party of England and Wales understands this, but some are deluding themselves that agreeing to the media's demands will return them to the status quo ante of 2024, and perhaps even tempt Caroline Lucas out of retirement. What they don't seem to realise is that the aim is not to cleanse them ahead of a relaunch as a once more respectable party but to make them ineffective as an incentive for Burnham to steer left. Polanski's real offence was not his failure to kill the motion but his claim that a vote for the Green Party would keep Burnham honest. Plenty in the media have noted that it was the Greens that effectively toppled Starmer with the by-election win in Gorton and Denton and thus paved the way for Burnham's journey to Number 10. Their celebration of his recapture of voters that had drifted to the Greens is tempered by an insistence that he must not diverge from centrist orthodoxy to indulge them. Those recaptured voters must accept compromise, and they'll only do that if the Greens are no longer a credible threat. The "Burnham bounce" may not survive beyond the next budget, so it is important that the Greens are disabled now. Those on the left hopeful that Burnham will push "left wing solutions" should consider the extent to which the Labour Party's reponse this week has focused on delegitimising the Greens, not on emphasising the attractiveness of those solutions to the voters of Holborn and St Pancras.

The media only concern themselves with marginal parties insofar as they can be used as goads against the major parties. That, after all, is why Nigel Farage is always on the telly. The purpose of Reform isn't to supplant the Conservative Party but to keep it firmly on the right: eurosceptic, pro-US, small state, anti-tax etc. The racism and bigotry are incidental. This is something that Farage understands, which is why he has tried to draw a clear line between Reform and the far-right of Restore Britain and its neo-Fascist satellites for whom the racism trumps the nationalism. It is also something that Kemi Badenoch understands, which is why her conference speech focused on shoring up support among the upper-middle classes with promises on inheritance tax and childcare, rather than "culture war" nonsense. The aim is not merely to bolster support in the Home Counties seats the Tories lost to the Liberal Democrats at the last general election, but to reassure the Daily Telegraph et al that they can pick up the slack as the parties further to  the right of them descend into sleaze, rhetorical confusion (e.g. who can be English) and street thuggery.

When a marginal party approaches critical mass in terms of support and membership, it starts to exhibit the characteristics of a larger party. This includes bothersome ex-leaders, opportunist candidates and the promotion of technocratic managerialists who tend towards the political centre. But the chief change is that it becomes a coalition. The Greens have always been divided crudely into fundamentalists and realists, but over the last decade they have become more clearly divided between conservative ecologists, concerned about the evironment but fundamentally accepting of the social status quo, and eco-socialists who believe the safeguarding of the environment depends on the reform of society. This left-right dichotomy does not map precisely onto the more traditional one of "fundis" and "realos", for whom the dividing line was over the extent of their engagement with the political party system. In fact, both left and right of the party are realists, in that regard. The instinct of the media is to play upon the inevitable tensions of a party's internal coalition and to suggest that particular factions should move across party boundaries, and for that purpose a left-right orientation is necessary.

Though we like to think the British party system is historically stable, it has actually been marked by major reformations and splits, from the merger of the Liberal Unionists with the Conservatives to the launch of the SDP. In recent decades, we've had the farce of Change UK and the fragmentation of the right around Brexit. Much of this has been driven by the media. Today, you will still hear press voices urging the Tories to "unite the right", while others now demand that Labour rule out the possibility of a coalition with the Greens. The point is not the substance of what is being argued, which is entirely contingent and can change with the weather, but the idea that party politics is mutable and should respond to the demands of the media, rather than to the dictates of internal democracy The current concern that the Green Party must ensure it is not vulnerable to takeover by extremists is just the latest iteration of the belief that politics should be left to the professionals, not civilians. 

The plan to disable the Greens goes beyond forcing Polanski out and rests on a particular analysis of the party's current social composition. According to Andrew Rawnsley, "The Greens are an unstable coalition of middle-class planet-loving environmentalists, pro-Palestinian activists and ultra-left militants who have migrated from Labour and elsewhere". The objective is to prise the party apart. The respectable middle-class rump will be patronised (I'm surprised Rawnsley didn't refer to them a "tree-huggers") and generally disregarded as they revert to 2% of the national vote. The pro-Palestine activists and ultra-left militants are largely the same people, but it suits Rawnsley's purpose to suggest a more fragmented landscape of single-issue groups and cranks rather than a coherent left that draws parallels between rent controls in the UK and settler violence in the West Bank. They will once more be expelled into the political wilderness. The champions of proportional representation will again insist that some people should never be represented in our political system.