As Zack Polanski gets the green light, Labour must keep its climate promises

There you are, merrily believing you’ve finally got a big thick wedge to drive interest, to have you taken seriously and viewed as a rare thinker and BAM! – it’s dismissed and floats away on the wind. With you bobbing along beside it. 

There’s nobody quite like Kemi Badenoch. At every turn she is less and less listened to. Her plan to take as much oil and gas out of the North Sea as possible must have seemed like a good idea to somebody (Kemi, presumably) at some point. But it doesn’t stand up to even the slightest inspection. 

Even if Tory Party leader Badenoch somehow became prime minister, and if new drilling licences were to be granted, it wouldn’t solve a thing. It wouldn’t help energy security: around 40% of licences are owned by foreign investors. And the campaign group Uplift recently said the UK exports around 80% of its reserves.  

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That is before you consider the reality of transitioning to renewable energy. There are certainly challenges in making sure that good jobs come in the emerging new energy industry and that the infrastructure is wide enough to allow creation, storage and use of energy. But it’s not binary, regardless of what Kemi Badenoch implies. There will still be fossil fuel needed as the change comes. 

It’s not even clear who her announcement was for. Change is inevitable. Just a couple of weeks ago a YouGov/Friends of the Earth poll found 80% of Britons support renewables expansion. This includes 83% of Conservative voters, and 65% of potential Reform voters. 

Read more:

• ‘Starmer needs to be more scared of us than Reform’: Zack Polanski on how the Greens can outflank Farage
• Could the UK have a Green prime minister? It’s ‘overdue’, says leadership hopeful Ellie Chowns
• ‘Ex-miners are voting Green’: Why the Green Party has made gains in industrial heartlands

The great majority of people understand we’re in some kind of climate emergency and want to see positive steps towards remedying it. 

As often happens in politics, a related event happened that stole thunder and moved the conversation. The election of a Green Party leader is not normally the stuff of major headline news and analysis, but Zack Polanski doesn’t feel like a regular Greens leader. In a time of disruption, he is a disruptor. He’s on a ticket of what he classes as “eco-populism” – one that he believes can pull a number of disaffected voters away from Labour and Reform. 

It’s not hard green, but with a keen focus on what is leaving voters worse off and disaffected and aiming to do something about it. As was made clear in an interview with Big Issue several months ago, this essentially means blaming billionaires, taxing them, being patriotic and proud of communities and country. He said: “People want to see bills lowered, want to see public services, and want to see politicians who actually listen and turn up.”

There are already murmurings from some quarters that he, and his people, are entryists, outriders for a Corbynista rump, keen to bring their leftist future to the Greens and overthrow what was there.  

This is curious thinking. One, it overlooks the fact that Corbyn is in the midst of setting up his own party of disillusioned ex-Labour members. It would stretch his resources rather thin to have a whole other flank devoted to the Green putsch. Besides, it’s not like the Greens haven’t always leaned left. Two, shouts of entryism tend to be bogus. Aside from incidents within the Labour Party a couple of times in the last 40 years that could loosely be tagged as entryism, it’s a concept that doesn’t go much beyond the minds of undergraduate politics students. And three, it says that Polanski should be taken seriously. What is the point of warning about entryism if that element isn’t capable of bringing fellow travellers into the fold and effecting change? 

Labour have been pretty front footed with their green energy targets. They look like they are keen on meaningful change. After the election they removed the ban on onshore wind farms and pushed hard with their case for making Britain a clean energy superpower. They are consistent in their plans and message.  

In a few weeks, they are due to publish a new, binding, plan on how they would meet carbon and net-zero targets. It’d be a curious outcome if their push for good change was thwarted not by Reform, but by a party who exist to, literally, make things green. 

Paul McNamee is editor of the Big Issue. Read more of his columns here. Follow him on X.

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