The Jugular Named, the Jugular Avoided: Greens Organise After the Wave

Greens Organise ‘What Next?’ event this week felt a lot like Momentum

TL;DR. Greens Organise has built a serious socialist current inside the Green Party on founding documents that commit to an ‘internationalist, anti-capitalist, and ecologically transformative agenda’. Its ‘What Next?’ event of 18 May 2026 revealed the gap between that programmatic commitment and the operating strategy: organise as if you will form a Green majority government in 2029, built on community wealth building, capital-flight refutation and the magic-money-tree argument. The Manchester Manifesto names what Jamie Driscoll called the jugular: who controls the money and the power in this country. The constitution and the operating strategy defer the question. Coalition government and the next economic crisis will force the answer.

---

The strongest moment of the Greens Organise ‘What Next?’ event came forty minutes in, when Jamie Driscoll, the former North of Tyne mayor turned Newcastle Green councillor, named the question that British politics is structured around refusing. ‘They want to keep the debate there,’ he said, meaning austerity arithmetic and street protest rights. ‘What they won’t like us going for is the jugular, which is who controls the money and the power in this country.’

He’s right. They wouldn’t like it. Which makes what came next instructive.

The argument Driscoll then made was not about who controls the money and the power. It was about capital flight, the magic money tree, and the case for community wealth building in local councils. ‘The billionaires will leave the countries, most of them don’t live here anyway.’ The jugular was named. Then it was stepped around.

This is not a Driscoll problem. It is the analytical structure of the entire two-hour event.

The Manifesto and the joining mechanism

Greens Organise launched at the Mechanics’ Institute in Manchester in September 2024, with a founding document called the Manchester Manifesto. It is the socialist current inside the Green Party of England and Wales; the Scottish Greens are a separate party, and GO does not organise there. The venue choice was deliberate; the TUC was founded in the same building, on Princess Street, on 2 June 1868. The signal is real. The organisation has built, in eighteen months, the most substantial socialist current inside any British parliamentary party since Momentum. Paid membership in the four figures. An elected steering group. Paid staff. Thirteen or fourteen local groups. An Ecosocialist Essentials political education curriculum. A forthcoming partnership with Red Pepper to produce a thirty-six page magazine called Green Pepper for autumn Green Party conference. The organisational craft is real and recognisable: this is what Momentum built in the Labour Party between 2015 and 2019, and what Momentum could not sustain after the Corbyn project’s defeat. GO is the same kind of vehicle in a different host.

Read the Manchester Manifesto alongside the constitution. The Manifesto, published on the eve of Green Party Conference in September 2024, commits to ‘an internationalist, anti-capitalist, and ecologically transformative agenda’, to ‘mobilise a diverse working class’, and to the party’s ‘founding purpose... to change the system, not the policies within it’. The constitution goes further. Its first Aim is ‘an internationalist and eco-socialist transformation of society so that resources are held in common and society is run in the interests of people, not profit’. The second Aim names total liberation across race, sex, gender, sexuality, class, religion and disability. These are not social democratic formulations. They are the formulations of a current that wants to be read as serious about ending capitalism.

The procedure for joining GO is to assent to those Aims and to a code of conduct, pay a subscription, and enter a framework that operates by simple majority of members present at general meetings, with quotas for gender and global-majority representation on the steering group. The procedural architecture is real, and significantly more democratic than most British socialist groups currently operate. Joining gets you participation in the procedures. It does not get you a programme of construction. GO has produced an Austerity Pledge committing Green council candidates to hold emergency summits, open the council books, demand a wealth tax and rent controls and a national care service, and resist the managed decline of local services. The pledge has substance. It is also fundamentally a programme of refusal: what Greens will not accept when the Local Government Finance Settlement squeezes the budget. In politics, what you are for matters more than what you are against. ‘Resources held in common’ has not been worked out into the positive programme that would tell a Green councillor what to build, with what resources, against whose interests. The constitution provides the procedures for that work. The work has not been done.

This is the same evasion as the Driscoll moment, in structural form. The jugular is named in the founding documents. The mechanism of joining defers the working-out of what naming the jugular actually commits you to. The Manifesto itself has no dedicated page on the GO website; it sits at the bottom of the homepage, while the constitution gets its own URL. The document that filters new members is the procedural one, which sets the rules of participation rather than the content of the programme. Joining GO is joining a framework to make the Green Party more effective. It is not joining a programmatic struggle over what ‘eco-socialist transformation’ should mean.

A GO member might object that this is exactly what the 6 June strategy events, the Ecosocialist Essentials curriculum and the steering group deliberations are for: that internal political education and strategic discussion are the programmatic struggle. The objection has weight. The procedures are working, the political education is real, and there are clearly socialists inside GO with serious views about what ‘eco-socialist transformation’ should mean. What the published record does not yet contain are GO positions on the substantive questions: energy ownership, banking, finance capital, what a Green-led council should do when capital flight is threatened. The deliberation is happening as organisational development. It has not yet produced the published positions that other socialists, inside or outside the Green Party, would need in order to enter into political engagement with GO on questions other than its existence and growth.

The horizon is 2029

One line from the meeting sits at the centre of the entire project. The staff organiser quoted it as something Mehmood, a steering group member, had said to her while they were preparing the new GO strategy: organise ‘as if we’re going to be the government majority government in 2029’. That sentence is the strategic horizon. Everything else, the five new coordinator roles announced in the meeting, the strategy deliberation events on 6 June, the members’ meeting on 29 June to ratify the new strategy, the Ecosocialist Essentials training, the local groups, the Red Pepper partnership, follows from the assumption that the British state is the instrument to be captured, and that 2029 is when the capture becomes operative.

Two ecosocialisms, and the flavour of the month

Say this clearly. The ‘ecosocialism’ that Greens Organise puts forward is not the ecosocialism that Ernest Mandel began sketching in the 1970s, nor the ecosocialism Michael Löwy developed at greater length from the 1980s onward. Those traditions were built around a specific synthesis: ecological catastrophe is produced by the capitalist accumulation imperative, and addressing it requires breaking that imperative. That in turn requires a transitional programme of demands that the parliamentary form of the bourgeois state cannot deliver from within: energy production and distribution under common ownership, democratic economic planning by workers and consumers, the dismantling of fossil-fuel infrastructure, the suppression of useless and harmful production, the conversion of arms production for civilian use. None of this can be implemented by a Green parliamentary majority operating inside capitalism’s property and constitutional framework. Greens Organise’s ecosocialism takes the parliamentary road: the Bernie Sanders / Zohran Mamdani / DSA programme transplanted to a Green Party host. Its lineage is not Brussels and Paris in the 1980s. Its lineage is Burlington, Vermont in 2015.

That lineage was on the panel. Joe Todd, who hosts the Life of the Party podcast, was the head of communications at Momentum during the Corbyn years. He had written a report on the Belgian Workers’ Party, the PTB/PVDA, which he presented as an explicitly Marxist party founded in 1979, with workplace-based branches alongside geographical ones. Its members have established practices under the Medicine for the People banner in communities underserved by Belgium’s social insurance system; the practices are funded through the mutualities like any other clinic, but the political content is the deliberate choice of where to locate and whom to serve. A cadre that includes, on his account, MPs donating the majority of their parliamentary salary back to the party. A serious party, in the historical sense of seriousness: organised to take and hold power on a class basis.

Todd admired it. And then: ‘I’m not saying the Green Party should set up medical centres, we live in a very different context. We’ve got an NHS that’s fantastic.’ The comparison was already inapt. Medicine for the People’s practices are not parallel provision; they are politically motivated choices about where to locate within an existing insurance system. That choice exists in an NHS country too.

A serious Marxist option in European left politics was placed on the table and declined on the grounds that one specific service is unnecessary in Britain. This is the latest iteration of a recurring pattern on the British left. A few years ago it was Syriza. Then came Podemos, then Corbyn-era Labour. Now PTB/PVDA. Each time, a parliamentary left breakthrough has been hailed as the model. The structural problems of parliamentary socialist strategy then produce the same kind of crisis: coalition capitulation, retreat on social questions, fracture under economic pressure. The left moves on to the next example without doing the critical work.

PTB/PVDA is not an unambiguous model. It carries a Maoist lineage from its 1979 formation under Ludo Martens, modified by a strategic renewal in 2008 that was more cosmetic than ideological. It condemns the Russian invasion of Ukraine but opposes arming Ukrainian self-defence, and its international department has not named a single Ukrainian socialist or trade union organisation it stands in solidarity with: not Sotsialnyi Rukh, not the KVPU. Its local section in Liège supported mandatory EVRAS sex education in schools, then went silent at national level when conservative and religious groups launched a backlash campaign. Red Mole has examined the PTB/PVDA record at length elsewhere.

The wrong question GO asked of PTB/PVDA was: do we need free clinics when the NHS exists? The right question was: what holds a socialist party accountable to its founding commitments when electoral pressures cut against them? Syriza failed that question in 2015 when it accepted the Troika’s terms. By 2023 Podemos had been hollowed out by splits and electoral decline. The Corbyn project failed it through 2017-2019, unable to convert insurgent energy into a programmatic position that could hold its electoral coalition together. PTB/PVDA failed in Brussels, where 613 days without a regional government demonstrated that the party prefers eternal opposition to the test of implementation. GO will face the same question, on its own ground, in its own way. The meeting did not put it on the table, because GO does not appear to have developed a critical view on what went wrong with the previous projects.

The Abdullah Farooq intervention confirmed what the structure of the meeting suggested. Farooq sits on the DSA’s National Political Committee, the highest leadership body of the largest socialist organisation in the United States. He flew across the Atlantic, figuratively, to tell the Greens Organise audience that ‘you all are kind of a template for DSA, you all are, in my view, very far ahead of DSA’. The DSA is not looking at British Green ecosocialism and seeing the continental tradition. It is looking, or more precisely, it is recognising itself, and seeing the next iteration of the Bernie campaigns transplanted to a parliamentary party with a serious electoral base. That is corroboration, of a sort. It is also confirmation that the international left-populist project, the Bernie/Mamdani/Polanski sequence, treats GO as a sibling rather than as a continental ecosocialist current it is connected to.

Class, craft, and Newcastle-upon-Tyne

Beth Lewis, on the Greens Organise steering group, supplied the closing frame for what the meeting called ‘the factionalism question’. Her answer: ‘the ultimate divider we have in society is not that between those who vote left and who vote right... it is between those who are at the top, who are the richest and the most powerful, and who are at the bottom’. The rhetorical register is deliberate, and the rhetoric has its uses. The analytical question is which framing of class no one on the panel reached for. Top and bottom. Not owners and workers. Not a class relation to production. A vertical image that is static, not relational. The class talk of the meeting is class without class struggle, which is to say class as moral category rather than analytical one. This is, again, the form rather than a deviation; it is the form left populism takes everywhere.

A word about what Greens Organise actually does well, before this becomes mistaken for a hatchet job. The organisational craft is the best on the British left at the moment. The ‘Your Green Role’ tool described by Lewis, which surveys new members on skills and interests and matches them to local needs, is a piece of cadre development that the British far left has consistently failed to do. The five new coordinator roles announced by the strategy presenter, Emily, are positions any FI section would benefit from having. The Ecosocialist Essentials political education programme is, on what is visible from outside, a serious curriculum. The decision to hold a women and non-binary only strategy deliberation event reflects an understanding of how strategic discussions get gendered that the British socialist tradition has historically failed to grasp.

The Newcastle election story Driscoll told is also worth taking seriously. In the Walker ward, an old shipyard area he described as ‘reform ground zero’, a Green candidate named only as Matt, a local mental health worker, won by knocking every door. The pattern, Driscoll said, was unexpected: ‘Greens came first, Reform second, Reform third, Greens fourth and fifth.’ If accurate, that complicates the standard reading of Green voters as exclusively middle-class graduates in university towns. It complicates the standard reading of Reform’s reach. There is something happening in northern English working-class neighbourhoods that the Reform-versus-Green binary doesn’t capture, and the Green Party, on the ground, is currently better organised to engage with it than any socialist current outside the party.

The Scottish rehearsal and the European pattern

So the question the meeting poses isn’t whether GO has built something significant. They have. The question is what the strategic horizon of that building actually is, and whether the gap between the explicit self-description (’eco-socialist’) and the operative strategy (’majority government in 2029, capital flight refuted on its own terms, community wealth building in local councils, no debate about ownership’) will eventually produce a programmatic break, or whether the gap is structural to the project.

The historical reading suggests the latter. Every previous attempt to construct a left-populist current inside a British parliamentary party, the Bennite left in Labour in the 1970s and 80s, Militant in the same decade, the Socialist Alliance and Respect, Momentum during the Corbyn years, has eventually faced the same question. The state form does not yield to the parliamentary capture of one party. The accumulation imperative does not pause for a Green majority government. The pressure that produced the 1981 deputy leadership campaign, the 1983 election defeat, the 1986 Militant expulsions, the 2019 election defeat and the subsequent Starmer reconstruction, is the same pressure that will produce whatever crisis Greens Organise faces three or four years from now.

The Bute House Agreement was the rehearsal. Scottish Greens entered coalition government with the SNP in August 2021 on a programme that promised independence-referendum legislation, rent controls, a higher Scottish Child Payment, a just transition fund and substantial energy-efficiency investment. Three years later, the SNP had retreated on its 2030 climate targets, paused gender recognition reform under Westminster pressure, and on 25 April 2024 Humza Yousaf terminated the agreement unilaterally. The Greens did not exit; they were ejected. They left with their parliamentary positions damaged and their ecosocialist credentials substantially impaired. That experience does not appear to have shaped the Greens Organise strategy in any visible way. The cross-border learning would have to be deliberately undertaken; GO has no presence in Scotland and no formal relationship with the Scottish Greens. Driscoll mentioned, in passing, that Newcastle Greens were currently in coalition negotiations with the Liberal Democrats, and that he had pointed out that since the Lib Dems believe in proportional representation they should give the Greens more cabinet seats. He said this lightly. It is the same dynamic, on a smaller stage, that Bute House was on a larger one.

The pattern is not just Scottish. The Irish Greens entered coalition with Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael in 2020 and lost most of their parliamentary seats at the 2024 election. The German Greens entered the SPD-FDP traffic-light coalition in 2021 and have spent the years since defending NATO, voting through arms shipments while abandoning their own 2030 climate commitments. The structural problem is not Bute House specifically. It is what coalition government does to a Green party that has committed in advance to operating within capitalism’s parliamentary forms.

What the FI tradition can offer, and the contradictions to come

The obvious reading is that the FI tradition’s job here is to offer a critique of Greens Organise. But that is not quite right either. A critique that is not connected to alternative movement-building is just commentary. The FI tradition’s offer is different from a 2029 majority government: it is the patient work of linking the defensive struggles already underway, in housing, in strike support, in climate-justice mobilisation, in migrant solidarity, into a developing strategic capacity that does not depend on capturing the state by parliamentary means. The question is whether the FI tradition has anything specific to offer the people GO has organised, particularly the ones who have begun to ask questions about the parliamentary horizon and have not yet had those questions met. There is no evidence from the meeting that such questions are being asked at the steering group level. There may well be evidence elsewhere that they are being asked at the branch level, in the local groups, in the conversations that didn’t make the formal Zoom panel. The Ecosocialism Conference in London on 30 May is one space where English ecosocialists from inside and outside GO will gather, perhaps to explore exactly these questions.

What was striking, watching the meeting unfold, was how good-faith the discussion was. The ‘vibes’ theme that recurred across three different speakers, Farooq, Todd, the host, can be read two ways. The first reading is that ‘good vibes’ is what you reach for when you don’t yet have a programme to disagree about: warmth as a substitute for the harder analytical work of figuring out what to commit to and how to disagree well. The second reading is the recognition by people who have lived through Momentum factional war or DSA factional war that political organising does not survive without affective texture. The willingness to keep things ‘comradely’ was not a substitute for analysis. It coexisted with analysis. The question the meeting raised, which the meeting did not answer, was whether the analytical content was thick enough to bear the weight of the affective commitment.

The good faith is partly a function of the current moment. The Greens are surging. They have become, on most metrics, the left party in England. The issues that fractured the previous Labour left, Brexit being the principal one, do not yet dominate Green internal life. The contradictions will come as the Greens become more successful and the triangulation that every parliamentary-based party performs comes with the success.

It might not be. The meeting closed with self-facilitated breakouts organised by English region, with explicit instructions that confident speakers should not volunteer to facilitate and frequent speakers should take notes instead. This is good practice. It is also revealing about what kind of equality the meeting reached for: equality of voice in the room, not equality of relation to production. The first is a real and worthwhile practice. It does not stand in for the second.

The contradictions will come. They have come for every parliamentary left current since the 1970s, since the post-war boom collapsed and the material basis for reform-without-rupture disappeared with it. What will matter is whether GO has by then developed the analytical resources, and the rooted movement-building, to answer them differently. The work of developing those resources has to begin before the contradictions arrive. The meeting did not show whether it is happening. The meeting was not where it would show. That answer waits at the branch level, in the conversations Driscoll described, in the local-group political life that no Zoom panel fully captures. Some inside GO would say the work is already happening: that members are on a political journey, that the younger cohort coming in over the past two years brings openness and curiosity rather than fixed positions. They may be right. Whether the political development inside GO is fast enough to meet the contradictions when they arrive is what we don’t yet know.