Zack Polanski: Turbo Normie
“Look, I get it, we all hate party broadcasts – we just want to watch Coronation Street, or whatever’s on next…” So begins a message from Zack Polanski, plonked down on a cream-coloured armchair, tracking his Dr Martens over a greying paisley carpet that looks made entirely out of matted cat hair; the Green Party, despite record donations, is filming its party political broadcasts on the disused set of Last of the Summer Wine. “Corrie” has become somewhat of a favourite of Polanski’s in recent months; this is not the only time the soap opera gets a mention in this two-minute video, nor, strangely, in his campaign videos. He told us last Christmas that his perfect Boxing Day ends in “collapsing in front of Gogglebox”. I believe him. Nothing in this picture would suggest that we are looking at a man with a stranglehold over the youth vote, leader of what was once considered a hippyish fringe party but which will apparently enjoy the largest share of British voters under 65 at the next election.
But, far from the picture painted by Nigel Farage of a sinister force “emboldening the radical left”, Polanski’s Greens do not appear especially radical at all. Weighed against the demands of the People Party’s (precursor to the Greens) 1974 manifesto – among them an upper tax rate of 100 per cent, and the introduction of a Universal Basic Income – that of 2024 looks rather tame. The vision that emerges as to what a Green Party government would look like, fiddling with tax brackets and attention-grabbing legislation on drug decriminalisation aside, is barely different from that espoused by Keir Starmer. The border will be slightly more open, the rich will pay a little more, we will continue not to drill for North Sea Oil and the Monarchy will stay put. Thin gruel.
What has happened? How did we get here? How did he get there? A brief scan of his CV –a stint with the Peaky Blinders Immersive Theatre Experience, some minor credits on IMDb ending in 2011, then the oft-ridiculed move into hypnotherapy – gives no clear answers. What Polanski has pulled off, turning a party that, until 2024, had never sent more than one MP to Parliament into one that could end up filling the opposition bench in 2029, is a much greater deviation from the norm in British politics than what Corbyn achieved in his time as the darling of the left. Yet by comparison, the fanfare around Polanski feels strangely muted. Nobody has chanted his name at Glastonbury, and the 1,600-strong crowd that gathered for his Brighton Dome event last month (his largest yet) is dwarfed by the 200,000 at Corbyn’s 2017 Durham Miners’ Gala. The mood is summed up well by the lazy, disinterested tone with which many of us will have heard “friends from home” pledge their allegiance to the party over the last year or so; the typical formulation is something like: “I’m thinking I’ll probably vote Green, to be fair…” The left awakes to find Polanski as its de facto leader, and one wonders whether something has been slipped into our drinks.
When a clip emerged last month of a younger Polanski, then a member of the Liberal Democrats, declaring at a 2016 hustings that a vote for him and his colleagues in the London Assembly race was “support for Israel”, one might have reasonably assumed this would hurt him in the polls. Or, at the very least, that this is something his supporters, now that he is running on a pro-Gaza ticket, would put him under pressure to address. That would be wrong; his relatively recent about-turn on this question has gone largely unremarked upon anywhere on the left. The community on the r/UKGreens subreddit have asked its members to stop sharing the video. There is, perhaps, another explanation for his volte-face – not only on Palestine, but his more general shift from a relatively middle-of-the-road Cleggmania-Remainer liberal to the leader of the furthest left party in Parliament – than outright cynicism. A theory that also neatly explains both his success and the startling lack of enthusiasm with which it has been handed to him.
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Polanski (who told the Guardian one of his most hated habits is “Doomscrolling on my phone”), it seems, has had his politics shaped from the hours and hours of content the average culturally left-leaning millennial passively consumes. Like osmosis, except it’s via Instagram reels. By power of suggestion, leftism has snuck up on him late in life, as much as he has snuck up on the left. Though this doesn’t say that much for his intellect, it is also his greatest strength because the same is true of many of his supporters, who connect with him intuitively on this basis – even if they lend him only the same bleary half-attention one does to a 60-second “Get Ready With Me” video. Polanski seems to understand this relationship:“Look, I get it,” he apologises, “you just want to watch whatever’s on next.”
Becoming leader of the Greens at 42, Polanski tragically just missed the cut-off to have people refer to him and Zohran Mamdani as both “in their 30s”. Nonetheless, he is, I suspect, a little younger in his mind than his birth certificate would suggest and perhaps more likely than most to change his opinions in accordance with what he believes is popular with the young. The brand of leftist politics presented here is more a “mood” than a particular set of ideas and is hard to define, but it finds its most crystalline expression (other than in Polanski) in the vox-pops and podcast clips posted on Novara Media, or on the trader-turned-guerrilla-economist, Gary Stevenson’s YouTube channel. This is a left quite distinct from that of the late 2010s and early 2020s. The focus on economic inequality is stronger, and “woke” commitments, like transgenderism or racial injustice, appear to have been side-lined. Notably its leading voices are largely men. The tone of righteous indignation that was common during the BLM years has been replaced by one of glib bemusement: political opponents are attacked as buffoonish rather than evil. When Polanski accuses Reform of “ushering in fascism”, the word seems to have lost the sense of urgency it had when levied at Trump in 2016.
Tellingly, this strain of progressive left-coded politics pervades far beyond explicitly political content. The Chicken Shop Dates series, or Eating With Tod‘s search for London’s best jerk chicken, offer an unassuming case for multiculturalism, while the podcast Straight Diva lends a chic, aloof east London sensibility to LGBT causes that have feel less central to mainstream conversation in recent years. These are the default positions, the unexamined priors that underpin the flood of comedy shorts produced by out-of-work actors and comedians, with which a significant portion of the population fill their commutes and bathroom breaks. Watching a skit the Green Party put out last November, in which Polanski’s weary staff assist him in putting on a production of A Christmas Carol, this is a fate to which it is easy to imagine Polanski resigning himself, had life not taken him down this unforeseen bend in the road. The ubiquity of these politics on social media has been the wellspring of an ambient, shiftless left-wing sentiment, unmoored from the Labour Party since Corbyn’s defeat, which Polanski has been able to draw from because he has also been moulded by it.
Under his tenure, the Greens are no longer the party of herb-gardeners who go cold-water swimming on Brighton Beach. It is the party of people who queue outside of sandwich restaurants they have seen on Instagram. The party of Gogglebox, Eurovision screenings in pubs, the outer reaches of the Notting Hill Carnival, where it loses interest in itself and trails off into long rows of food trucks, fizzling out north toward the Grand Union Canal.
[Further reading: Will Nato split the Greens?]
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