‘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.