Assembly Project

If you fancy a career in politics, watch Zack Polanski and study how he speaks:

Who would’ve thought of it, a politician who actually answers the question!

Leaders are often overrated in politics. John Bartle and Ivor Crewe once calculated that Tony Blair, an undeniably charismatic leader, improved his party’s vote share by less than 1% in 1997. So we should be careful at assuming that Polanski is the reason why the Green Party of England and Wales* is currently on a roll. But something does appear to have changed in the six months since he was elected their leader with a whopping 85% of members’ votes.

(*There is no British Green Party, as there are three separate ones for England & Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland.)

Polanski built his campaign on the idea of “eco-populism”, the idea that the Greens need a message of championing champion ordinary people struggling to make ends meet against the business and political elites. He has often been compared to Zohran Mamdani, the new Mayor of New York. Both are charismatic, radical and eloquent, with messages that emphasises tackling the cost of living. Both are at the helm of movements that have inspired political participation and a sense of hope in a way that everyone thought was impossible.

Would it work? The early signs were promising. Almost immediately, he became better known to the public than his predecessors. The Greens’ membership has more than trebled and its support in the polls has risen. But a question remained: would this translate into votes? At first it didn’t. In council by-elections in the last quarter of 2025, the Greens weren’t even the most successful party on the left, winning far less seats than the centrist Liberal Democrats.

Finally last week, the Greens got a result, winning a decisive victory in by-election to fill a parliamentary seat in Manchester. It was aided by their candidate Hannah Spencer, a charismatic, down-to-earth plumber, and a tremendous ground campaign. In the past, by-election victories like these have boosted outsider parties; this has happened several times in the past for the Lib Dems and their predecessors, and more recently for the Welsh nationalists after Caerphilly. And indeed, a sensational poll came out this week with the Greens in second place, overtaking the traditional major parties and closing in on Reform, a far right party that has led the polls in the last year. This could be anything from a blip to a revolution.

Communication

There’s a lot to study about how to communicate well. In the video above, Polanski discusses the backlash against refugees:

Are the people shouting it racist or fascist? Absolutely not. Lots of them are very concerned that they can’t get an NHS appointment, that they can’t get a council house, that there’s a sense the country’s broken. And you know what? They’re right. So the answer is not to blame the migrants. The answer is not to point at the small boats. The answer is to point at the private jets, the private yachts, and to multi-millionaires and billionaires, and say: we will fund our public services, we will build council houses, we will invest in our NHS.

This sentence on its own illustrates several tips:

• Plan for interviews beforehand: You can tell that Polanski practices before giving interviews like this. There’s a clear sense that he’s thought out the best way to explain certain ideas and planned for difficult questions.
• Listen to what they’ve said: He starts by setting out the position of anti-immigration voters. He doesn’t say that they are wrong or bigoted, even as he sets out an alternative theory of what’s going wrong in the country.
• Acknowledge people’s lived experiences: Right-wing tabloids and Twitter aren’t going to make people angry about refugees on their own. Polanski is suggesting that there is scapegoating effect here, became people sense that society is going wrong. I suspect he’s right.
• Be open to new ideas: We can’t tell from here whether he will, but he acknowledges the need, for example, to listen to the working-class “white van man”.
• Focus on experiences, not facts: The only time he says the word “percent” is when he talks about the 99% and 1% like Occupy Wall Street. The human mind can handle dry facts and figures to some degree, but people don’t connect with them. They connect with stories.
• Search for the common ground: Polanski finds that he agrees with them that public services are strained and “there’s a sense the country’s broken”.
• Flip the script by promising something that will improve people’s lives: Having identified the problems affecting those voters’ lives, Polanski promises to address them.
• Tell a story of championing the underdog: Good stories nearly always involve the triumph of the underdog.
• Stand up for what you believe in: It may seem a paradox that the unashamedly pro-migration Greens are gaining support at a time of backlash against it. It is tempting to pander to every whim of public opinion, and that can be expedient in isolation. But as we’ve seen with the current Labour government, ‘government by focus group’ makes you neither popular nor effective. But even when voters disagree, they will respect your honesty. I think a similar effect benefitted Jeremy Corbyn in 2017.

Leadership

There’s also a lesson that leaders do matter. They have come to matter more in the last 70 years as television and then the internet have made them more visible. When a political leader is popular, their supporters will develop a parasocial relationship, feeling as though they have some kind of friendship with someone they’ve never met. They can give a party a human face.

There is a tightrope to be walked between harnessing this while not falling into the trap of depending too much on one man at the top, or less likely one woman. To his credit, Polanski has acknowledged this in the video above, when comparing himself to far right leader:

I guess the one difference I would have is, Nigel Farage is a one man show. If I’m a one man show I’ve absolutely failed as the leader of the Green Party. I want to raise, amplify and lift up the voices of other people. There’s far too many people in this party, but more importantly in the country, that we don’t hear from.

It helps too that the Greens don’t use the whip system. Unlike the larger parties, their MPs and councillors are free to vote as they please. As I’ve argued, we need political parties to be more like this.

Polanski’s leadership also shows the limits of what leaders can do. The Greens are only winning by-elections when they have a campaign on the ground. Parties supported by rich donors and powerful media can get away with an astroturf campaign. But left-wing insurgents can’t win without supporters on the ground, delivering leaflets, knocking on doors and displaying signs. This is something that the Lib Dems have always done well, one reason why they have dominated the recent council by-elections.

Polanski with Carla Denyer, a previous party leader and now MP.

Risks

What happens next? Right now, British politics have never looked so volatile and unpredictable. History may not be the best guide, but it brings important lessons.

In the 1980s, the Alliance topped the polls a few times, as did their successors the Lib Dems in 2010. Then for a brief moment in 2019, British voters were split between four parties. In all the cases, the traditional ‘Big Two’ maintained their dominance at the next election, aided by the first-past-the-post voting system. That could still play out again, especially if Green supporters see them as more of a good protest vote than a viable party of government. But all the signs suggest that the Big Two are the most vulnerable they’ve been since the 1920s, when Labour replaced the Liberals as the main party of the left.

Nor would it be the first time that a radical left has entered the mainstream, and they haven’t had a good track record. Of the three general elections in the last 50 years where Labour has been led by radical figures, they led to one narrow defeat (2017) and two dismal ones (1983 and 2019).

The lessons from the Jeremy Corbyn era are more relevant, though there are differences. Corbyn took over a major party, whereas Polanski took over a minor party. On the one hand, the Greens don’t have the experience of running a major party campaign. On the other, Labour’s power structures and insiders were obstacles to the energy that Corbyn brought; local branches were run by centre left figures were suspicious of the “Jeremy Joiners” and reluctant to get them involved.

There are other differences too, that mostly favour Polanski. Even in the space of five years, much has changed, including how the Conservatives can no longer stay dominant by co-opting Farage’s rabble-rousing. Corbyn made the same mistake with Brexit that Keir Starmer has since made with Reform, offering them legitimacy and appeasement while alienating progressives. Polanski comes across as more astute than Corbyn, though he may also struggle to win trust on issues like foreign policy and economic management. Perhaps like their German counterparts at the turn of the millennium, the Greens will have to become less idealistic in government.

Opportunities

Right now, the Greens have much in their favour, but the future is uncertain and the stakes are high. There is a chance that the far right will come to power and lay their values waste. But there is also a rare opportunity to remake the country and its politics, making it fairer and more democratic than anything we’ve known so far, whether that means the Greens coming to power or cajoling Labour and the Lib Dems to do better. And although the Greens are not likely to take many votes off Reform, they might steal their populist thunder.

For now, the Greens should just try to do the best they can. And they can make use of innovations from assembly democracy. It is likely that the Greens are more open to this than any other party. And in discussing a proposal to regulate the media on his Bold Politics podcast, it’s clear that Polanski is acquainted with sortition, though he hasn’t said much else about it.

My suggestions are:

• Make membership an enjoyable, sociable experience: If the trends continue, the Greens could become the largest party by membership. But why settle for hundreds of thousands when you can have millions? This could be done through pro-social methods of organising.
• Use sortition: The Greens’ previous disputes over issues like trans rights and the environment have been forgotten, not surprisingly as infighting correlates with powerlessness, not with success. But they could surface if the party hits an impasse. So the Greens could learn from the Women’s Equality Party and use sortition (randomly-selected juries of members) to solve disputes and make key decisions.
• Organise communities with local assemblies: For all its advantages, sortition doesn’t give many people a chance to participate in politics. So the Greens should offer a deliberative experience more widely, by organising communities through ideas like people’s assemblies or a coffeehouse culture.
• Make use of not having a whip: Even some of the party’s own members I spoke to were largely unaware that they don’t use the whip system. It’s an asset, because Green candidates can position themselves as community champions rather than party champions.