The Greens are lovely. No, really. Their manifesto appears to tick every box on a left-leaning liberal’s wish list: building social housing, repealing repressive anti-protest laws, giving asylum seekers the right to work while their claims are processed; scrapping the bedroom tax and two-child benefit cap; increasing universal credit and workers’ rights, rent controls, a wealth tax, recognition of trans rights… the list goes on. They’d even ban badger culling. Many of these are genuinely progressive policies and it is not surprising that so many people, parti-cularly young, urban professionals and students, rightly appalled by the vicious, overtly racist and pro-Zionist stance of the Labour Party, are flocking to them in droves. The Green Party’s reported membership figure is now over 170,000. They are favourites to win February’s by-election in the formerly safe Labour seat of Gorton and Denton and are seen as posing a serious threat to Labour in national local elections in May.
Not anti-imperialist, not anti-Zionist
But for all the paper promises, in reality the Green Party is neither anti-imperialist nor anti-Zionist, let alone socialist. In demanding that the wealth in Britain – one of the richest countries in the world – be more fairly distributed, with billions more earmarked for health, social care, education and increased Universal Credit, there is no consideration of where this wealth comes from. The Greens are simply proposing a more equitable distribution of the profits plundered from the oppressed nations of the world. In line with this, the Green Party:
• reaffirms its commitment to NATO, to defend ‘British security’;
• endorses British troops being sent to Ukraine in a ‘peace-keeping capacity’;
• calls for intensified sanctions against Iran.
While the party’s charismatic new leader Zack Polanski trumpets the fact that he is a Jew who opposes Israel’s genocide in Gaza, he:
• supported the introduction of the pro-Zionist IHRA definition of anti-semitism in 2016;
• joined in the fabricated attacks on Jeremy Corbyn’s so-called ‘anti-semitism’;
• condemned the Al Aqsa Flood operation of the Palestinian liberation movement against Israel on 7 October 2023;
• insisted that Mothin Ali, Green deputy leader, apologise for social media posts that said ‘indigenous people have the right to fight back’ and demanded an end to ‘white supremacist European settler col-onialism’;
• supports a two-state solution with ‘equal recognition of the rights of Palestinians and Israelis’.
While the Green Party criticises the Labour government’s complicity in the genocide in Gaza, it puts forward no demands of its own for action to isolate the Zionist state.
Just another left social democratic party
As the capitalist crisis intensifies, many of those better-off sections of the working class and petit bourgeoisie who traditionally saw their interests represented by the Labour Party are now finding their own living standards being hammered by a government nakedly serving the interests of the ruling class. Young urban workers in particular are being forced into new political formations, whether in the shape of the Green Party or Your Party, that they hope can serve as an electoral vehicle for their aspirations. While such sections may be socially progressive, they have no immediate interest in challenging imperialism, because it is the system on which their dwindling privileges are based. They have no concept of the state itself as an instrument of class rule, leaving them incapable of understanding the role of the police and the courts in enforcing the capitalist order, or the kind of movement that would have to be built to challenge landowners, corporate interests and bankers to achieve even the limited reforms the Green Party’s policies represent. Rather, they remain deluded that a kinder, fairer form of capitalism can be voted into power – as the Green Party manifesto puts it, disingenuously: ‘We can create a greener, fairer country together… it will take MPs prepared to make brave, principled choices on your behalf’.
A paler shade of green
Ultimately, this leaves even their ‘green’ credentials exposed as a sham. Without challenging the profit-driven imperialist system that is literally destroying the planet on which we all depend at an exponential rate, there cannot be a solution to the climate crisis. There is no sense of anger or urgency in their promises to accelerate the switch to electric cars and ‘green’ energy – or sense of where the resources to meet such an ambition might come from.In October 2025, a new report on the climate catastrophe stated that one of the planet’s ‘tipping points’ linked to greenhouse gas emissions – a stage of now irrevocable damage to the environment – had been reached in the form of coral reef die-off, with other key indicators, including the destruction of the Amazon rainforest, the collapse of major ocean currents and the loss of icesheets, fast approaching that critical stage. In January, the UN reported that the world faced ‘global water bankruptcy’, with many water systems now past the point that they can be restored to former levels – driving fragility, displacement and conflict. The consequences of environmental destruction are already being visited on millions and millions of oppressed people around the world. In the face of this overwhelming climate catastrophe, a promise to enact legislation giving rights to nature, end the use of bee-killing pesticides and introduce a Clean Air Act is a sop to middle-class sensibilities, not a transformative programme for change.
In its desperate search for profits, capitalism is driving the destruction of the Earth as it seeks ever more cheap raw materials, on a vast scale, to renew itself; it is killing millions, depriving millions more of the means of survival and causing them to flee their homes in the face of ecological devastation. It is increasingly clear that only a fight for socialism – a system that prioritises human need over profits – can save the planet and its people. The Green Party is nothing other than an attractively-packaged diversion from that urgent task.
