‘How the Green Party Should Respond to Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana’s New Left Party’

Ten years ago, whilst Labour was undergoing a leadership contest following Ed Miliband’s tenure, I wrote an article for the New Statesman asking what would be left for the Green Party if Jeremy Corbyn were to win party leadership. Of course, he did and looking back at my article now, it does seem rather prophetic. The Green Party struggled to advance during Corbyn’s tenure – the only time in the last 20 years when the Party hasn’t advanced.

Partly this was because it did not articulate a clear enough separate sense of its destiny from Corbynism.

Now, a decade on, we finally know for sure that Corbyn is creating a new party with Zarah Sultana, and we once again must ask how this is going to impact the Green Party. We must fear that the Greens will really struggle – unless they strike a deliberate pose as not just contesting the very same space.

In the Green Party, we often tend nowadays to view ourselves as a left-wing party. A lot of this might have more to do with the established parties moving further to the right on economic policy rather than the Green Party having changed its position over time. Nevertheless, the Greens are now sometimes claimed, to be the only major Left-wing party across the UK. 

The graph below is from the Political Compass’s website which they produced at the last General Election (May 2024), showing where the parties of the UK fit upon spectrums of left/right and authoritarianism/liberalism. As you will quickly notice, the Green Party is the only UK-wide party that fits into the left and libertarian grid. Furthermore, all other major parties are in the same right and authoritarian grid. The political bunching of ideology between the other parties currently constitutes the major strength of the Green Party: actually offering an alternative. 

There is a very obvious worry now that the Green Party will lose this edge of being the only left option on the ballot box with the inception of Corbyn’s new party. Due to both being ‘on the left’, there are naturally a fair few items upon which the Greens align with Corbyn, such as Palestine, the Green New Deal, wealth taxes, public ownership and a rise in public service expenditure. Currently, the Green Party attracts, broadly speaking, three categories of voters; those who consider themselves green-minded primarily, those who think of themselves primarily as libertarian, and those who think of themselves through the lens of being ‘Left’.

Corbyn’s new party will almost definitely succeed to a considerable extent in taking one of these groups away from the Greens, since anyone looking for a Left Party will always prefer one that is Left first and foremost rather than Green first and foremost. 

This is fact. It is pointlessly Canute-like to try to resist it.

Ten years ago, the Green Party’s approach to Corbynism in the Labour Party was to some extent to itself veer to the left. The rationale behind this was to try and retain the left-wing-primarily voter base. However, this was a losing battle from the start. Corbyn will always be more appealing to this base. The Green Party must not waste its time on becoming “more left wing than thou” to compete and try to save their portion of this voter base, because it will not work plus it may alienate the other voter bases who want to see a Party who is committed to environmental issues above other concerns, and/or a Party that is libertarian in outlook. 

In case anyone misunderstands, thinking that I am trying to reduce ‘left-wing’ policy in the Green Party, I am not. I am simply arguing that the Greens need to be a Green-first party. Additionally some of our future potential policies that might look leftwing, like bringing in various kinds of rationing, which may become sensible and necessary as the climate crisis bites deeper, are policies we adopt not out of ideological left commitment but out of determination to effectively battle against and cope with climate breakdown. 

But it is worth pointing out categorically that almost every policy that we’ve heard from Sultana or Corbyn about wealth redistribution, public services, and Gaza, are already Green Party policies, and we shouldn’t – and don’t need to – change our stances here.

Perhaps there is scope to work together with this new party later down the line, in Parliament, or even in mutual non-aggression pacts in specific election fights. But unlike Corbyn and Sultana, the Green Party is not ideologically socialist; nor for that matter is it capitalist, communist or liberalist. The central ideology of the Green Party is ecologism, and herein lies the fundamental difference. It is especially ecologism which leads under certain circumstances to adopting left policies, libertarian policies, and so forth.

There is a central problem with the left/right dichotomy; it is not just limited in the sense that it absurdly expresses all political thought on a binary spectrum, but it is limited in that they are two sides of the same coin. The struggle between right and left is a struggle over how much of the spoils of economic growth should accrue to capital and how much to labour. Seen from the Left, it is the effort of labour to get itself a larger chunk of what capitalists will accumulate and hoard for themselves if given half a chance.

Karl Polanyi, in his great work The Great Transformation, shows however that we cannot understand our world adequately, let alone build a better one, if we allow labour thus to be commodified. The pursuit of a higher price for one’s labour concedes that labour is a commodity. But what Polanyi argued so brilliantly is that labour, money and land are all of them fictitious commodities. They are not real, because real commodities respond to the laws of supply and demand. Real commodities are arguably not too horribly deformed by being treated as commodities. Land, labour and money by contrast are fundamentally not things suitable for such commodification: they are the flow of life itself. ‘They’ are us.

This is an ecologistic vision. Thinking of human beings not as capital nor even as labour but as people.

When looking at the political choices available in the UK through this lens, the Green Party stands as a true outlier, and can be seen as quite distinctive of anything Corbyn et al have to offer. For example, the Greens support a Land Use/Value Tax, recognising that land itself is not a true commodity, and has only been appropriated as such over hundreds of years of repression, denying everyday people access to common land.

LVT would deal with the absurd ‘propertarian’ culture of contemporary Britain — and our dangerous levels of financial speculation in land — by returning to the public the escalation of land-value that is not brought about by any action of the owner of that land, but rather by other changes in society, often due to public investment.

No other party in the UK has this as a policy, and only a few in Labour are supporting it. There were rumblings of it becoming Labour policy when Corbyn was leader in 2019, with it dubbed the ‘Garden Tax’ by the right-wing press in an effort to demonise the policy in the eyes of the public, but it never entered a manifesto. It seems unlikely it would this time around either, thus signifying a fundamental difference between the Greens and Corbyn. LVT is not a ‘Left’ policy. Its creator was famously actually right-leaning in politics. It came closest to becoming law in this country under a Liberal, not Labour, administration.

Another key consideration that is missed when politics is viewed simplistically as being left vs right is one further spectrum that we ought at this point to introduce: of centralisation vs localisation.

This adds another dimension to Green appeal. Greens actually mean it about subsidiarity, and decentralisation, and again this fits with and springs from any true ecologistic vision. For all that Corbyn signifies a significant departure from the status quo, his party would still be advocating for strong, central, top-down management of the country, just like every other Government since at least Blair and probably much further.

Remember that Corbyn’s mentor was Tony Benn: a wonderful man and a committed centraliser. Greens, on the other hand, are much more committed to localisation than other parties. On the question of centralisation vs localisation, Corbyn’s party represents more of the same. And Greens need to set themselves thoroughly apart from Corbyn on this front. Saying over and over ‘the Green Party is a Left Party’ will not help achieve that result. On the contrary.

There are further things that the Greens and Corbyn are not aligned upon, most obviously that his ecological credentials are just not up to par. Yes, he is much better than most of Labour’s MPs, considerably better still than the lunacy coming from Reform and the Conservatives, yet he still is not putting environmental concerns front and centre in the way they must be during a time of climate and ecological breakdown.

This can be seen in the statement with which Corbyn and Sultana have announced their new Party, this week, where the grindingly ever-growingly central question of our time gets only the briefest of mentions.

It was one thing to not have ecosystems and climate at the centre of all political decisions when the Green Party was founded in 1972 (then called the PEOPLE Party). Cimate breakdown was then not as evident, and concerns over the link between emissions and global heating had not been publicly confirmed.

However, now we live in a time of undeniable climate chaos. Much of the world had been coping with worsening weather patterns for many years, but now even Europe and the UK are struggling with and increase in frequency and severity of floods, droughts, crop failures, and wildfires. These problems will not go away, climate breakdown will continue for a long time to come. Any party that does not have climate and ecological breakdown front and centre of policy making is part of the old political system, not the new one that we know we need. In this regard, Corbyn’s new party is not nearly as radical and revolutionary as he’d like us to believe.  

It’s good that Corbyn and Sultana have had the courage and determination to leave the false cocoon of Labour and to strike off on their own. They are genuinely good people with something real to contribute to British politics, and I genuinely wish them well. But, the left vs right spectrum is now hopelessly inadequate. Greens should largely eschew it. If Greens are seen as primarily a Left party, they will be a shadow of Corbyn, a support act only; if this happens they will be out-competed and face shrinkage at exactly the moment when they should be rising to the historic opportunity tragically before them, in an era of ecological breakdown and of climate adaptation being a necessity. You cannot out-Left nor out-Populist Corbyn.

If by contrast the Greens are seen as a broadly popularist, (as distinct from ‘populist’), broad-based, depolarising and popular force, a force of decisive relevance to the existential threats that will increasingly dominate politics and our lives, a rapidly growing force that can appeal in Conservative as well as Labour seats, and that can attract rather than repel even Reform-curious voters by wining them over through localism, through authenticity, through good common-sense for our time, then they can greatly prosper whether or not Corbyn’s new venture seizes the day.

This is a choice that is also faced by voters in the Green Party’s current leadership election.