Spare us Zack Polanski and Zohran Mamdani’s empty progressivism
Mamdani’s victory in New York proves it’s time to take Zack Polanski and the Green Party seriously. That means recognising how much their policy platform depends on wishful thinking and fantasy economics, says Eliot Wilson
Harold Wilson, perhaps Labour’s wiliest Prime Minister, supposedly coined the phrase “a week is a long time in politics”. It is hard to imagine many people outside the Green Party of England and Wales or the community of political obsessives would have recognised the name Zack Polanski before autumn last year. He had been the party’s deputy leader since 2022 and a Member of the London Assembly since 2021, neither a route to life-altering fame.
Until the last general election, the Greens had only ever had one Member elected to the House of Commons. Dr Caroline Lucas, an across-the-board left-winger with the preternatural calm of a cult leader and a doctorate in Elizabethan literature, was MP for Brighton Pavilion from 2010 to 2024.
Then the party made a modest but significant electoral breakthrough: its vote share tripled, albeit only to 6.4 per cent, and four Green MPs were elected. Modishly, the party had two co-equal leaders, Carla Denyer and Adrian Ramsay (until 2008 they had a variable number of “principal spokesmen”) but its constitution requires biennial elections.
Before last year’s contest, Denyer decided to focus on her work as an MP, while Ramsay and Ellie Chowns stood as a joint ticket. Zack Polanski, then Deputy Leader, decided to stand alone. He offered a muscular and radical left-wing platform familiar from any 1990s or 2000s student common room: environmentalism, social and racial justice, soak the rich, strong trades unions and opposition to NATO.
Polanski won a staggering victory with 84 per cent of the vote. The Reichstag passed Adolf Hitler’s Enabling Act of 1933 with less support than that
Polanski won a staggering victory with 84 per cent of the vote. The Reichstag passed Adolf Hitler’s Enabling Act of 1933 with less support than that. Since his election was declared on 2 September, his public profile has soared, as has Green Party membership: 68,500 last summer, it had grown to 75,000 within three weeks and surpassed the Liberal Democrats to reach 100,000 by mid-October. A week later, the Greens claimed to have more members than the Conservative Party.
It is hard to know what Harold Wilson, with whom I began, would make of Polanski. Certainly Wilson had a very sharp eye for publicity and would recognise a fellow hustler; Polanski’s utterances are superficially in tune with Wilson’s famous declaration that “the Labour Party is a moral crusade or it is nothing”. But Wilson, for all he could be cynical and devious, knew the importance of realism in democratic politics.
The Mamdani playbook
Last week Polanski met some of the advisers who helped propel 34-year-old democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani to the mayoralty of New York in last November’s election. Mamdani won by nearly 10 per cent over former gof New York Andrew Cuomo, who had admittedly been linked to corruption and lobbying scandals, alleged to have committed multiple instances of sexual harassment and accusaed of racism. The new mayor was elected on a strongly left-wing programme of rent controls, universal childcare, free public transport, municipally owned bodegas and higher corporation tax.
These were not the headline issues Polanski wanted to discuss with Mamdani’s cercle. (He did not meet the mayor himself as the Green Party leader does not fly for environmental reasons.) What Polanski was really interested in was the logistics of power: social media platforms, the effective use of video content, celebrity endorsement, branding.
A Green Party source told The Times: “we want to make sure we’re being as strategic as possible in how we’re using all forms of social media, particularly video, to really own the narrative. Mamdani has set the bar really high.”
Mamdani became mayor of New York, by many measures the wealthiest city in the world, with just over half the vote, albeit on a 43 per cent turnout. Polanski has led the Greens past Labour and the Conservatives in the opinion polls, occasionally to within striking distance of Reform UK. Mamdani’s tally of 1.1m votes naturally intrigues him, and he and the Greens should be taken seriously.
Taking the Greens seriously involves recognising how much they depend on wishful thinking and jam tomorrow. Polanski believes NATO promotes militarism over diplomacy and would negotiate with Vladimir Putin to persuade him to give up nuclear weapons. He would impose a wealth tax on the richest one per cent which would fund – inter alia – universal free childcare, rent controls, nationalisation of water, energy and rail, and Green New Deal “investment” which would lead to lower energy bills and more employment.
Polanski, the 43-year-old former immersive theatre performer, eyeballing Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, ruler of Russia for more than 25 years and former Podpolkóvnik in the KGB, would be box-office. Wealth taxes have been scrapped as unworkable, unproductive or damaging in France, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, the Netherlands, Ireland and Australia (that they would work here is a rare case of British exceptionalism progressives tolerate). Rent controls have again and again depressed the supply and quality of rental properties, the rate of housebuilding and tenant mobility.
But Polanski does not need his policies to work, only to be believed. He would never admit it but he shares this with Reform UK: he is peddling a panacea, a solution to all of society’s ills where someone else always pays the price. Margaret Thatcher skewered the Labour government 50 years ago: “They’ve got the usual Socialist disease – they’ve run out of other people’s money.”
Polanski was once a hypnotherapist who claimed “anecdotal evidence… of a growth in breast size” through hypnosis. Now, his Green Party, like Farage’s Reform UK, is a medicine show peddling miracle elixirs for inequality, poverty, climate change, high taxation and anything else you care to name. But look at what the quack is offering: disarmament in a hostile world, laughably naïve foreign policy, destructive taxes and fantasy economics. No doctor could prescribe that way, because it breaches a fundamental ethical commitment: first, do no harm.
Eliot Wilson is a writer and historian; senior fellow for National Security at the Coalition for Global Prosperity; and a contributing editor at Defence on the Brink