Zack Polanski and the Battle for Britain's Future

Hmm.

It's interesting.

We're of a similar age, actually.

And we've clearly had some very similar moments of, you know, radicalization or whatever in our past.

I was not particularly kicking down any glass panes

at Milbank,

but I was there when that was going on.

And I just left university at that point.

And you've mentioned the Iraq war as being another sort of radicalizing moment for you and so on.

So...

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah.

So I would have been about 13 when the Iraq war happened.

So that was, yeah, my association with Labour has always just been Blair's Labour, basically.

I didn't come from a family that was a Labour family.

So my own immediate experience of it was my own only sort of knowledge of it.

Yeah.

I didn't have any sense of its history or its traditions really as a kid or early teen.

So yeah, that was another part of the process of arriving at the Greens, I guess.

So it's interesting, you've already mentioned how Polanski's leadership has been seen, whether disingenuously or genuinely, as like a moment of rupture with the party's past.

Maybe the idea that he's somehow moving away from what the Green Party is supposed to be about.

But, you know, as you kind of make the point in the book and you've already alluded to it, he is kind of really more of a continuity sort of with the party's kind of past than a rupture.

And we've mentioned, again, like some of these kind of very impressive statistics that you could kind of point to since he's become leader, you know, quadrupling the party's membership, doubling its polling, winning its first ever parliamentary by-election, returning its fifth MP and delivering the Greens' strongest ever local election results in May of this year.

So these are very compelling.

And, you know, I guess it might be good to think about if this is indeed attributable in large part to Zach Polanski becoming leader of the party.