The Green Party’s biggest conference showed a party with a great deal to be proud of, and a left with a growing audience. To turn that audience into influence, the left has to change how it works.
When Die Zeit sent Jochen Bittner to the Green Party conference in Brighton, he did not like much of what he saw. But the most quotable passage in his report came from an 18-year-old helping on the Resistance Books stall. “They sold us this dream,” Laurence Liu told him. “Go to university and you will get an excellent job. That dream has turned out to be a nightmare.” Laurence reached for the Greek proverb that a society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they will never sit in. The generation before his, he said, did not plant them.
Bittner, to his credit, took the point. He noted that youth unemployment in Britain has reached 16.4%, and he conceded that the capitalism which offered young people’s parents opportunities now stands in front of them like a cliff face with no first foothold. That, more than anything said on the stalls in the foyer, is why the Green Party now has around 200,000 members.
The question for socialists in the party is what that membership, and the conference it produced, add up to, and what the left should do next.
A conference to be proud of
The party as a whole can be proud of Brighton. It was the biggest conference the Green Party has ever held. When the hall was asked for a show of hands from first-time attenders, it looked like three-quarters of the room or more. Membership roughly tripled in well under a year, and the growth runs across every generation: the older layer who came through the Corbyn movement, and a much younger cohort, including many young trans members, who have joined a party that stands up for them when others will not.
The mood was optimistic and positive. The conference held its ground on bringing water back into public ownership. It also kept the party’s long-standing culture of consensus, which is less toxic and more supportive than much of the left is used to. That culture has real strengths. It keeps a fast-growing party moving forward together.
Zack Polanski’s speech set the tone. He went out of his way to praise the party’s MPs, its deputy leaders and his predecessors, including Natalie Bennett and Caroline Lucas, and he pointed out that his election was part of the party’s growth, not its cause, though he has certainly turbo-charged it. He called for an immediate three-year freeze on private rents, public ownership of water and other utilities, and wealth taxes. After the summer’s heatwave, he praised Hannah Spencer’s bill on workplace heat and restated the party’s opposition to the Rosebank and Jackdaw oil and gas fields. He named Palestine and trans rights as non-negotiable red lines, and both drew standing ovations. He called for Palestine Action to be de-proscribed. His slogan, “Vote Green, move Labour”, sums up what a small party with few seats can do: pull the agenda left when so much else is pulling it right.
The Zionism motion and a mature response
The vote that drew the headlines was the motion declaring that Zionism is racism. It passed by roughly 1,000 votes to 800, a bigger margin than many of us expected. Opponents demanded a card vote on every single vote in the debate, which amounted to filibustering. I opposed those tactics. They showed how much obstruction can disrupt a conference, but enough time had been allotted, the chair handled it superbly, and the motion passed anyway.
The debate had real substance. Two amendments argued that Palestinian self-determination might take forms other than a single democratic, secular state, and that it was not for the Green Party to prescribe which. They were supportable, and they fell. An amendment from Jewish Greens conflated Zionism with Judaism and recast the question as one of safeguarding Jewish members. It fell too, after delegates heard that the motion has no bearing on party discipline. Outside, on the Saturday, a pro-Israel demonstration joined by local fascists and self-styled patriots chanting “God bless the IDF” did its own cause no favours. The party that exists today has been formed in the crucible of the genocide in Gaza, and its members know it.
It would be easy to tell this as a story of conference defeating the leadership. That is not quite what happened. The leadership put real effort into a consensus alternative, and it was not a bad text. It reflected where much of the party stands, and it too spoke of genocide in Gaza. The leadership was also divided: Caroline Lucas spoke against the motion, and Deputy Leader Mothin Ali spoke for it. In an extreme situation, the leadership let its differences show rather than whipping the hall.
What matters now is how the party lives with the decision. The leadership’s initial response has been mature and constructive. The joint statement from the party’s MPs after the vote was measured. Some saw it as too modest. I think it was helpful, and it is the kind of response that lets a democratic party hold together through a hard argument.
There is also a lesson here for the left. The motion succeeded because it rested on one simple proposition that could gather a majority. That is a model for how the left can win other arguments in this party, though on most questions it will take more than one conference.
A more visible left
Brighton also showed the left in the party to be more visible, and to have a growing audience. Green Left, frail as it still is, made a real impact. ACR comrades helped staff its stall, where members came to talk about socialism, Marxism, ecosocialism and how a transition beyond capitalism might work. Its team put Marxist ideas clearly and won a hearing. Its bulletin, Watermelon, gave delegates detailed voting advice on the motions, something Greens Organise did not offer beyond backing the trade union motion. Watermelon has appeared at every conference for many years, but with most delegates at their first conference, few already knew Green Left or its bulletin. So we took it to them and explained what it was: free, written by party members, and full of practical voting advice. That advice is the most useful thing the left can give delegates, and it should be built up.
The Resistance Books stall did a great trade, thanks in no small part to Laurence, and Bittner’s was only one of many conversations there. We will be thanking the party’s executive and offering to help local parties set up bookstalls of their own. Greens Organise brought energy to the conference, and helped run the Undercurrents programme next door, with a strong line-up of progressive speakers. The left’s wins on rents and water came from pressure from below that the leadership was willing to take up. The leadership is not one thing. It is a team of people with different views, and the left can work with that.
But a growing audience is not the same as growing influence. Three weaknesses stood out.
Three things the left needs to change
1. Learn how the party actually makes policy
The Green Party’s policy is not really made at conference. It is made in the policy working groups, and it reaches conference after online workshops whose views and votes are reported to delegates before they vote. Fewer than twelve motions arrived at Brighton without a working group’s recommendation. Conference is less the engine of policy than its emergency brake.
The hall rewards that process. In the health debate, a working group asked delegates to vote down an amendment it agreed with, because the amendment had not come through the group. Delegates did so. Most amendments fall, including good ones. When time ran short, the ecosocialist policy motion, which members had placed high on the agenda in the priority ballot, was simply skipped, and nobody objected from the floor.
The left can complain about this, or it can adjust to it. Culture eats strategy. If socialists want an anti-capitalist break in party policy, they need to be in the working groups and the pre-conference workshops early, not arriving at conference with amendments the process has not seen. And when they do go to conference, they should do what the Zionism motion did: build consensus around one clear proposition, and be prepared to win it over two or three conferences.
2. A clearer line on being in and against the state
The Greens now run councils and have MPs. They may soon hold more power. That raises the oldest question the socialist left faces: what do you do when you hold office inside a state, and an economy, that are built to stop you?
Any Green administration that tried to carry out its programme would be frustrated, by the state and by the markets. We do not need to reach for old arguments about the bourgeois state to see this. Syriza and Podemos showed that even mild social democracy can be blocked, not only by state institutions but by international finance. What Brighton makes more likely is that a Green Party in power would be on the left and stay there. It is the reality of capitalism, not the character of the Green Party, that makes the clash likely.
The left needs a stronger and clearer line on this, and it needs to offer it to the whole party, not keep it for its own meetings. Too much socialist talk in the party treats ecosocialism as a destination somewhere over the horizon, while the day-to-day work is about winning council seats. That is a minimum-maximum programme with a large gap in the middle. What fills the gap is a strategy for being in and against the state: using office to support struggles outside it, refusing to become the local managers of austerity, and building the movements that can defend a Green council or government when the pressure comes.
3. Organise locally, and at conference
Only around one per cent of the party’s members came to Brighton. That is not a scandal: if policy is made elsewhere, there is less reason to come. What matters more is what happens in local parties, and there the picture is better. Attendance at branch meetings is improving. But a party where people turn up to meetings is not yet a party of activists.
At conference itself, the left was more visible than coordinated. There was good voting advice, but no serious attempt to organise vote by vote. A left that wants to shape the outcome needs a caucus at the end of each day to review what has happened and agree what to do next, an online voting guide that can keep up with a complex and fast-changing agenda, and a fringe event of its own.
What to do next
That points to three tasks.
Get local Green parties campaigning. Local parties should turn outwards into their communities, and not only through electioneering or listening campaigns, which are canvassing by another name. They should be building and supporting the anti-racist and anti-austerity movements, and offering a vision of the Green Party as an activist party rooted in united-front community campaigning.
Get the left coordinated and working productively in the policy process. The broad left in the party, including Green Left, Greens Organise and the Green Party Trade Union Group, needs a shared view of which policy working groups and which debates are strategic, and how to change what local parties do. It needs to be in those working groups early, drafting with them rather than amending against them.
Build a clear anti-capitalist pole in the party. That means a current that relates to the whole party with a visible political alternative, not one that blends in or, at the other extreme, stands outside shouting that the Greens can never become socialist. Green Left gives the party’s socialists a real lever for this work, and its impact at Brighton shows the audience is there.
Laurence Liu was right that his generation has been left to build almost everything anew. Brighton showed that many of them have chosen the Green Party to do it. The left’s job now is to help them plant the trees.