With Zack Polanski’s Win, British Greens Attempt Their Audacity Era 

Photo: Rob Browne/Wikimedia Commons

September 2nd | The Announcement 

For all their cautious discipline, Adrian Ramsay and Ellie Chowns had every reason to hope for an easy leadership victory. Just 14 months earlier, the slightly unassuming duo had just accomplished one of the rarest feats in modern politics: election to a National Legislature, in a First-Past-the-Post-System, as Greens. More than that, the newly minted Members of Parliament (MPs) had won contentious elections against both of the British major parties in supposed ‘safe,’ rural, Conservative seats. (In the UK, the Conservative Party plays a similar role to the Republican Party—duking it out against their main “center-left” rival the Labour Party). 

While overlooked by the UK’s media and almost entirely missed internationally, Ramsay & Chowns were the end products of what the Green movement internationally had long promised. They looked like politicians. Well, maybe slightly nerdier, but still. They preached a radical change from the old neoliberal way, one that had hollowed out the public services and left millions destitute in one of the world’s wealthiest countries. (The average UK household in 2025 is poorer than they were before the 2008 Financial Crisis). And most importantly, they had worked their way to the top of politics with grit and hardwork, not graft and complicity. Both first won election as local candidates ‘pounding the pavement,’ gaining more colleagues with each re-election, and then turning around to run on a track record of experience and accomplishment. 

Importantly, the duo also seemed like the kind of people who often make up the base of a ‘Green Party.’ They were the ‘concerned citizens.’ Middle-class professionals from vaguely academic backgrounds, with smart outfits, and a wide grasp on the issues. They could be a bit boring, but they were nonetheless just fun enough to be believable. Ramsay had big ‘dad joke energy,’ while Chowns seemed like your neighbor who would always invite you round for dinner (only if you secured a babysitter first, of course). They had done all the things organizers and activists had long dreamed of doing, and improbably they won big, mere months before Trump’s sweep to a second term across the Atlantic.

So why was it that they were now sitting here politely clapping, thin plasticene smiles and all, while a different Green took questions from a national media gaggle? For that matter, why was all the major press here, in an alternative community center no less?  The press had never come in this scale to their respectable counts on election night. They had barely taken their exhaustively researched plans, delivered with such erudition, seriously. They had barely covered their prime-time politics hammering of a weak prime minister over his moral failings. And that happened in the literal corridors of power! Yet here they were, a smiley backdrop for a sometimes-bit actor-turned hypnotist turned-city councilor. A seeming fit for the odd-job caricature of a left-winger.

His name was Zack Polanski, and he had decisively won the Green Party of England & Wales (GPEW) leadership. (Scotland, Northern Ireland, and territories have separate Green Parties). Ramsay & Chowns were a distant second with 15% of membership votes.

As The Guardian’s coverage of the event noted, Polanski’s ambition for the Greens seemed to grow as his announcement press conference wore on. Under him, the Greens would win 40 seats in the 650-Member Parliament (including Chowns & Ramsay, the GPEW holds four seats up from previous all-time high of one). After a few more questions and appreciations, it wasn’t just 40, it was a replacement government.

For many UK Greens online, the attention was all so rare. It was all overdue. 

August 1-30th, 2025 | The Campaign

Zack Polasnki, Carla Denyer, Adrian Ramsay, & Scottish Greens Co-Leader Ross Greer,
Creative Commons Image

GPEW leadership contests are usually public, but uneventful, affairs in the UK. If anything they are usually noted for the cordiality, the friendliness, that stands in stark contrast to the endless negative briefs and leaks that define intra-party competition in GPEW’s larger counterparts.

Ramsay and Chowns had emphasized their professionalism, their competence. The course that had taken them from volunteer activists to nonprofits to councilors to council officers to MPs. Polanski, meanwhile, talked about an emergent mass membership force. Establishment Green elected officials, such as their widely respected first MP Caroline Lucas, backed the joint slate of Ramsay and Chowns. A respectable but small mix of local councilors backed Polanski. After all… How could he lead the party when he wasn’t in Parliament? How could he seek to change things, when the formula had just finally started to work?

The contest began to gain attention for factors other than cordiality. 

In one widely covered moment, a debate between Polanski and Ramsay descended after Ramsay was asked if he liked his opponent. 

“We’ve worked together…” “I’ve enjoyed working with Zack these past few years…” 

Ramsay seemed like couldn’t finish a sentence. He looked uncomfortable with the idea of being human instead of a practiced politician for a moment. Despite being pressed, no answer came. He shifted in his seat and tried to talk about the setting, a “professional debate.” It was harder to see him as a fun dad on the side, he seemed annoyed, betrayed and distraught over something taken overly serious. Polanski fought back the beginnings of tears.

“I quite like Adrian actually.” 

Camera pans back to ‘Adrian.’ Adrian Ramsay MP. Part of this new difference in style was an ability for Zack Polanski to inhabit his first name all the time. He was Zack, and that didn’t change with a suit. Meanwhile, his opponents had to constantly switch back and forth between their professional, public selves and who they were when they weren’t politicians. Ramsay looked horrified. The expression, unlike the smile he would wear weeks later, seemed genuine. 

September 3rd, 2025—?? 2026 | The Leadership

Regardless of one’s preference, Polanski is impressive. He has butted into the UK’s national news cycle without the benefit of a Parliamentary platform using a clear, confident style. He harvested youth enthusiasm around populist politics and shaped a stylistic divergence of how the Greens should operate, into a sea change for how the entire project should be viewed. Even his social media videos which often skewer the governments platforming of the far-right, (the ‘anti-multicultural Britain’ Reform Party currently leads in polls), manage to cross over beyond the stuffy confines of the UK Green social media-sphere. 

Where the Green Party leadership had long tip-toed around direct-action movements like Extinction Rebellion, of which they share a large membership overlap, Polanski is an open participant. Where the Greens had long touted themselves as the well-meaning alternative to all the usual parties, Polanski defiantly names enemies and friends (he would not go into coalition with Labour, he would be open to working with their still-forming left-wing slinter—Your Party). 

Polanski is pitching a through line between the need for urgent climate action with the need to address the ravages of neoliberal capitalism. He subverted the common UK narrative of its ‘us’ (the Labour Party), or them (the Conservatives, now swapped for the hard-right Reform Party), by substituting the Greens for the Labour government as the bulwark. He has continued to home in on affordability and mill around listening to disillusioned voters who recently turned to the right, like soon-to-be NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani. He maintains a discipline of naming the elephant in the room, appearing brave rather than a product of any ideological orthodoxy. But his skill has its limits, and he occasionally blusters his way into tired clichés when nailed on specifics.

His election has been cited mostly in terms as a ‘move further to the left’ for the Greens but he carries his prescriptions as ‘essential’ and ‘common sense’ (undermentioned is that Polanski didn’t have many significant ideological differences with Ramsay and Chowns, or the prior leadership of Ramsay and another MP named Carla Denyer). 

With the Greens as high as 12% in major polls, Polanski’s announcement proclamations of 40 MPs at the next election, is plausible and then some. Yet it is also the product of the party he inherited, one that quietly was building infrastructure and local presence for decades. GPEW grew from 0.2% of the vote in 1997, evenly spread out, to 6.7% and victory in 4 out of 4 target Parliamentary seats in 2024. In that same time, the party has grown its local councilors exponentially from a handful to 837, while taking seats equally from the major parties in some local government districts. It’s an impressive story, and one that is likely to continue given the ongoing collapse of support for the incumbent Labour government.

Polanski is not one of the cautious, disciplined blobs of credibility buffs who have led the GPEW thus far. His opponents in the media will paint him as a crusty leftist, a Corbynite without the bully pulpit. His vanquished leadership foes will fret over losing their seats, ones that Polanski will debate the wisdom of trying to hold in the first place. Meanwhile the ranks of the party’s membership are likely to continue to swell, grow younger, and start to have less patience for toiling in obscurity in order to emulate Ramsay and Chowns.

As Magid Magid, the former Lord Mayor of Sheffield who became the last Green ‘superstar’ during his term, used to share:

“If you try to be everyone’s cup of tea you might as well be a mug.”

 Magid was one of several prominent Greens not to endorse a candidate in the leadership contest.