Corbyn's Gift to the Greens

Thursday’s local elections in Britain, and what the activist conversation already records

A veteran Leeds ecosocialist posted to a Facebook thread on Wednesday evening with an inventory of what was on offer to him in tomorrow’s local elections. His own party, the Alliance for Green Socialism, had been unable to stand candidates this year. None of the Labour addresses through his door mentioned socialism. The other manifestos, all derived from central party offices, had failed to produce any local policies at all. No council bond to fund thousands of council houses. No opposition to Labour’s expansion of academies or its plans for larger police forces. Of the parties actually appearing on his ballot, only the Greens had produced a document with the texture of an actual political programme. He noted, almost in passing, that the Green candidate for Chapel Allerton describes herself as an ecosocialist.

He is voting Green tomorrow. Not because he wants to, but because no one has given him an alternative.

The SWP’s pre-conference bulletin, published in November, named exactly this outcome. Its passage on the May 2026 elections warned that without serious preparation, Your Party would ‘gift the Greens the role as the left alternative’ to Labour, the Tories and Reform UK. The bulletin listed the contests: 4,250 council seats across 71 local authorities, the whole of London, mayoral races in Croydon, Hackney, Lewisham, Newham and Tower Hamlets. It noted that Your Party had registered with the Electoral Commission on 30 September, but that there were ‘few serious signs’ of national preparation. Six months on, the diagnosis has been confirmed at the doorstep.

The seat count on Friday will neither make nor unmake the diagnosis. What confirms it now is the shape of the activist conversation in the hours before the polls open. Replies to the Leeds thread track the same pattern with local variation. A reader in Beeston is voting Green because his Green candidate has promised to represent residents to the council rather than the other way around. A reader in Hyde Park, an inner-city Leeds ward, says the local Your Party candidate has a decent programme but he does not live in that ward, so he is voting Green in his own. A reader elsewhere, asked about the Greens, replies that they are ‘the best we’ve had since the 1960s’. None of these voters wants to be a Green. Each is voting Green because no organised vehicle exists for the politics they actually hold.

This is the cost of not preparing.

The structural failure is now traceable. Your Party spent the autumn of 2025 fighting over its membership list and the company that controls its bank account. Its founding conference was attended by members chosen by lottery, a method that produces an unaccountable conference because no one in the room is answerable to anyone outside it. Its membership rules, in the form initially circulated, banned dual membership of other parties, which severed the project from the existing networks of activists who would have done the local work. By the time the conference closed in late November, no electoral preparation had been done at branch level for May. There were no target wards, no candidate selection processes, no agreed programme on local government, council finance, housing or the academies question. There was a mailing list of 800,000 names and not much else.

Your Party Scotland, which held its founding conference in February, voted by majority to stand in the May 2026 Holyrood elections. Whether that decision was right is a separate argument; the paper trail is in the conference reporting, but Corbyn’s team made sure it could not. Proto-branches that wanted to stand have sometimes improvised: Many have not. Hyde Park ward has a Your Party candidate. Chapel Allerton, two miles north, does not, and so the principled ecosocialist there votes Green for a candidate who has borrowed his vocabulary.

The Greens are not the agents of this story. They are its accidental beneficiaries. Their manifesto, by the veteran’s own assessment, is weak: too much on litter, too much on potholes, not enough on the structural questions. It is just stronger than nothing. A Green candidate who calls herself an ecosocialist is plausibly sincere, but her sincerity is doing political work for a party whose national leadership has not committed to ending capitalism, abolishing private landlordism, or doing very much else that an actual ecosocialist tradition would recognise. The branding migrates. The substance does not.

There is a thought of Ernest Mandel’s that travels here, from his 1970 introduction to the Trotsky selections he edited for Van Gennep. Mandel acknowledges Trotsky’s pre-1917 formula of the ‘self-activity of the working class’ but says it is ‘only partly applicable’ in industrialised countries because that activity, lacking organisational form, threatens again and again to fall back to its starting point and to leave the central problems of the transformation of society unsolved. The Leeds thread is exactly that pattern in miniature. Activists with strong politics, in the absence of an organised vehicle, default to the nearest available container. They do not give up their politics. They give up the expectation that their politics can find expression on a ballot paper. The drift to the Greens is a refusal to spoil the ballot, not a vote of confidence in the Greens’ programme.

This article is harder to close than it should be. The honest position is that the post-election analysis on Friday will most likely confirm the diagnosis at scale: Green councillor numbers up, Your Party presence patchy (and largely limited to supporting TUSC and various independents), Reform consolidating in the wards Labour has lost. But that confirmation is not yet evidence. It is forecast. And forecasts are where political writing goes to lose its footing.

What can be said, ahead of the count, is what the activist conversation already shows. The November warning has been confirmed at the level of the doorstep. Voters who would have gone Your Party cannot find a Your Party candidate. Where AGS would have appeared, the line on the ballot is empty. Activists who hold ecosocialist politics see the word ecosocialist tucked away on a Green leaflet and tick the box. The vehicle has not been built. The trip is being made anyway, as Moreno might say, in someone else’s car.

Whether this can be undone, after Friday, in time for the next round of elections, is the question Your Party’s English membership will have to answer, both at whatever conference it eventually holds, and outside the party (since YP has frittered away the vast majority of its supporters). There is no obvious mechanism for answering it. Its deeply unfair CEC elections produced a body that cannot be held to account, where The Many’s factional block votes mechanically from written instructions prepared in secret. The bureaucratic structure has placed both supporters’ contact details and finances beyond branch control. The dual-membership rule, in any future iteration, will continue to cut the project off from existing networks of activists who would do the local work. None of these is problems that local branches can solve from below inside YP’s bureaucracy. Each requires a national decision the national leadership shows no sign of making.

That is not a forecast. It is the situation, on the morning the polls open, in one Leeds activist’s inbox. The arithmetic of Friday will dress it in numbers. The numbers will not change what the conversation already records.

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Correction (6 May 2026): An earlier version of this piece included 'replacing council tax' in a list of commitments the Green Party's national leadership has not made. That was incorrect. Both Green Parties of England and Wales and the Scottish Greens have long-standing policy commitments to replacing council tax with a Land Value Tax. Thanks to Colin Boyle in the comments for the correction.

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