The Green Party of England and Wales held its autumn conference in Brighton. There it passed a motion declaring that Zionism is racism and that the Greens are an anti-Zionist party. The vote was 1,022 to 813. Zack Polanski had already left the conference and did not vote. He has since said he could only have supported an amended text.
The press reaction was what you would expect. The more revealing reaction came from Labour, and it had nothing to do with Israel or Palestine. It was about councils.
The ultimatum
Labour’s chair, Bridget Phillipson, has written to every Labour council group that shares power with the Greens. Each is to ask its Green partners “to make clear that they reject this position and to call on their national leadership to reconsider” it. Where the Greens cannot give that assurance, “Labour will bring any such local arrangement to an end”. The deadline is seven days. At Prime Minister’s Questions Andy Burnham called the motion antisemitic and said his side of the House “will have nothing to do with it”. Labour has since confirmed that this applies to town halls as well as to Westminster.
Eighteen councils are affected, seventeen in England and Monmouthshire in Wales. Labour leads five of the arrangements: Sheffield, Stafford, West Suffolk, Havant and Monmouthshire. In Coventry, Labour depends on a confidence-and-supply agreement with the Greens. The Greens lead three: Lewes, Wealden and Warwick. The rest are Liberal Democrat-led or independent-led coalitions in which Labour and the Greens both sit.
So this is not a ban on every future dealing with the Greens. It is a deadline imposed on coalitions that already exist. But the principle is plain. A vote at another party’s conference now decides whether Labour will help run a town hall.
What is being demanded
Look at what local Green councillors are actually being asked to do. Nobody is asking whether they will keep the bins collected, protect the housing budget or vote the budget through. They are being asked to denounce a policy their own conference adopted democratically, to do it collectively, and to do it within a week. They must also lobby their national leadership to drop it.
The Greens answered that Labour is wrong to “conflate criticism of Israel with antisemitism”, and that “trying to tell local parties what to do and who they can work with is undemocratic”. On both points they are right. Green local groups decide their own arrangements, and the party has no whip. Individual councillors who voted against the motion are entitled to say so. In Southwark the Greens have already disowned the policy to keep their coalition with the Liberal Democrats. Being made to recant collectively, on Labour’s timetable, is a different thing.
The Liberal Democrats show that another response was available. Their local government spokesperson, Zöe Franklin, called the motion “divisive, irresponsible and deeply insensitive”. The party then refused to instruct its local groups, saying coalitions are a matter for councillors on the ground. Whatever their reasons, that was a choice. Labour made the other one.
Where it bites
The ultimatum does not work the same way everywhere. Where the Greens lead — Lewes, Wealden and Warwick — Labour is the junior partner. A Labour walk-out does not by itself remove the Greens from office: they can look for other partners or govern as a minority. In Warwick the Greens hold 15 of the 44 seats and Labour 7, and the council is led by the Green councillor Ian Davison with Labour members in the administration. Withdrawing would leave the Greens needing eight votes from elsewhere. It would also leave Labour outside a council it now helps to run, and by its own decision. In West Oxfordshire, Runnymede, Rother and West Devon the administration can survive without Labour if the arithmetic allows. The Lib Dems’ localism makes that more likely, not less.
Where Labour leads, the risk runs the other way. Sheffield has 84 councillors, so 43 is a majority. Labour holds 26 and the Greens 19, which gives the coalition 45. The Liberal Democrats have 22, Reform 11 and independents 6. Without the Greens, Labour is the largest group but a long way short of a majority. In Coventry the Labour minority survives on Green votes. In both cities the ultimatum means Labour risks its own administration in order to make a point.
So in a good number of these councils the likeliest result is not that the Greens are punished. It is that Labour leaves office and the Greens stay.
Why the Tories and not the anti-Zionists?
Why would a Labour leadership rather have no partner, or a Conservative one, than a Green group whose conference has called Zionism racist?
It is not as if Labour shuns the right in local government. In June, Birmingham’s Labour group agreed a deal with Reform and the Conservatives to share out the council’s seven scrutiny chairs. One Labour councillor resigned from the party after voting for it. The Conservatives then made a better deal with the other groups and took all seven. Kemi Badenoch has said openly that the Conservatives have governed councils in coalition with Labour before. No ultimatum went out over any of this.
The reason is not arithmetic. It is about which forces count as respectable. The Conservatives are a party of the British state. They share Labour’s commitment to NATO, to the Atlantic alliance and to Israel as an ally. They also share the assumption that the foreign policy of the British state is not a matter for municipal politics. On those questions, the Tories are a rival, not a threat. A party that calls Zionism racist challenges something Labour’s leadership treats as off-limits: the alignment of British foreign policy. That is the line being policed. Bin collections were never the issue.
This is not new. In April 1987 Mick Archer wrote in Socialist Action about two developments that had arrived together. The Labour right had begun openly to talk of coalition, then with the SDP–Liberal Alliance. At the same time a new witch-hunt was under way against the Labour Party Black Sections. “Witch hunters, new realists and teachers” argues that the two were one movement: openness to the centre went with exclusion of the left and the oppressed. Thirty-nine years later the pattern is the same. Labour will deal with anyone to its right and treats anyone to its left as a disciplinary matter.
What Labourism was, and what it is now
To see why, it helps to ask what Labour was in the twentieth century.
Labour was founded by the trade unions to get working-class representatives into Parliament. It was never a revolutionary party, and the Communist tradition never pretended it was. In 1920 Lenin called it a party of workers led by reactionaries. As the Socialist Outlook “Our history” column recalled in 1993, his judgement was that “the Labour Party is a thoroughly bourgeois party”. In the same breath he called it a “very peculiar party”, and in some ways not really a party at all. Its federal structure — unions, socialist societies and constituency parties — left room for socialists to organise and argue inside it.
That combination was Labourism: a workers’ party with a bourgeois programme. Its reforms were paid for by the strength of British capitalism and its empire, and delivered through Parliament. Archer’s 1987 article put the material basis exactly. British imperialism had been strong enough to grant concessions to the working class, unequally but widely, and so to hold a single reformist labour movement together. The 1945 government was the high point of that arrangement. The crisis that began in the 1960s, and Thatcher after 1979, broke it.
Is today’s party the same thing? The union link survives, and so does the voting base. The rest has changed. There are no longer concessions to buy consent. The federal party that Lenin thought socialists could work inside has been centralised: candidates are vetted, affiliated groups are proscribed, members are suspended by administrative decision. What is left is the bourgeois leadership without the reforms. Today’s Labour is defined less by what it delivers than by what it rules out. An ultimatum to the Greens is the natural way for such a party to conduct a coalition.
Freedom of criticism, and who is next
The workers’ movement has a long-tested method for parties that disagree but need to act together: the united front. Its first condition is that nobody gives up the right to say what they think. Trotsky put it plainly in March 1922, writing on the united front:
we cannot possibly accept any agreement which in any way limits our freedom of criticism and agitation.
Common action on agreed and limited questions, and full freedom to criticise one another: that is the deal. Labour’s demand to the Greens turns it upside down. Cooperation over practical council business is made conditional on the partner giving up an opinion that has nothing to do with that business.
Will Labour use the same method elsewhere? It already has. The 1987 article was about expelling Black Section activists. In 2016 Roland Rance wrote in Socialist Resistance about the “dead cat” of antisemitism smears aimed at the Labour left. Later that year he wrote about the suspension of Jackie Walker and a parliamentary move towards making anti-Zionism itself a crime. In 2020 Jeremy Corbyn was suspended. In 2021 the NEC proscribed four left groups, so that membership of them, or support for them, became grounds for expulsion. That was on 20 July 2021, and the four were Socialist Appeal, Labour In Exile Network, Labour Against the Witchhunt and Resist. The argument about Israel came first, and it built the machinery. By 2021 the machinery no longer needed that argument: Socialist Appeal was not proscribed over Palestine.
There is no reason it should stop with Palestine. A test that a coalition partner must publicly disown its own party’s position works on any question. It could be used on rearmament and NATO, on migration, on climate protest, on strikes. Once Labour’s leadership claims the right to decide what its partners may believe, the only question is which issue it picks next. Anyone who hopes to work with Labour, inside or outside the party, should take note.
Who will you govern with instead?
The real test comes when the deadline passes. In councils where Labour cannot govern without the Greens, Labour groups will have to choose. They can walk away from administration. Or they can look for the other arithmetic.
Sheffield, Lewes and Warwick are the places to watch. Sheffield has no Conservative councillors at all. There, the only way back to a majority without the Greens runs through the 22 Liberal Democrats, or through Reform. Elsewhere, the other arithmetic includes Tory seats. Wherever Labour groups decide they would rather govern with the Lib Dems, Reform or the Conservatives than share power with anti-Zionists, they should be made to say so plainly. Some on the left think the motion was tactically blind, a feel-good text that handed the Labour right an easy weapon. But a party that would rather not govern at all than govern with people who call Zionism racist has made a political choice, not a tactical one. If voters then conclude that Labour, not the Greens, misjudged the tactics, they will be right.
Socialists should say three things. Local Green groups have the right to answer to their own voters and members, not to Labour HQ. The basis for working together on a council is the budget, housing and services, not loyalty tests on foreign policy. And to every Labour group in those eighteen councils, there is one question: who will you govern with instead?
Thanks for this Duncan. Good thing there are alternatives eg. https://theleftlane2024.substack.com/p/the-greens-zionism-is-racism-motion