𝓤𝓷𝓲𝓽𝓮𝓭 𝓝𝓮𝔀𝓼

Whatever happened to Jeremy Corbyn’s supporters? There was a time when they turned out in droves to hear the Lefty ex-Labour leader speak, chanting his name and dreaming of a better tomorrow. It nearly made him prime minister.

Close to 13million people voted Labour in 2017, when Mr Corbyn was in charge, while just 9.7million backed Labour in the 2024 General Election that put Sir Keir into No 10. So it’s a little surprising that Mr Corbyn’s new party, the bizarrely named Your Party, has made little impact. Instead, Left-wingers, including many former Corbynites, are backing the Green Party, led by the charismatic Zack Polanski.

Examples include Jennie Formby, the former general secretary of the Labour Party in the Corbyn era, who recently announced she was defecting to the Greens. Another high-profile convert is feisty journalist Owen Jones, once Mr Corbyn’s staunchest defender in the media and now a Polanski fan.

They’re just the tip of the iceberg. The Green Party won 6.7% of the votes and four seats in 2024 – its best result ever. But since the General Election, polls have suggested that support for the Greens is surging.

This was demonstrated in the Gorton and Denton by-election in February, when the Green Party overturned a Labour majority of 13,413 to win a spectacular victory in the Greater Manchester seat.

It may have been a protest vote, as by-election upsets often are. But it’s striking that voters protested by voting Green rather than, for example, for the Liberal Democrats – or backing Reform, which came second.

And it may not be a one-off. A new poll has forecast the Green Party could win 71 seats at the next general election, proving its popular appeal.

The survey, by PLMR for Electorcal Calculus, is an MRP poll, which allows for a more detailed prediction than standard polling. Based on a survey of 5,000 people, it forecast Reform could win 188 seats and Conservatives 159 (making some sort of deal with the Right-wing parties to form a government likely). Labour, meanwhile, would win 86 seats, placing them barely ahead of the Greens.

We’ll discover how much support the Green Party really does have in local elections on May 7, but Labour is worried.

How has this happened? It’s partly because voters are disappointed in the recent performances of both traditional parties of government, Labour and the Conservatives, and are willing to try something new. In that sense, Right-wing Reform and the Left-wing Green Party are fishing in the same pool.

But it’s also because the Greens have transformed. The party began life in Coventry as an organisation called PEOPLE in 1972, but soon changed its name to the Ecology Party,

In 1985, it became the Green Party, and later the Green Party of England and Wales, after the Scottish Green Party separated.

As the ecology tag suggests, its roots lie very much in environmentalism and the politics of protecting the planet. It enjoyed a brief surge of support in the late 1980s, when concern about climate change and CFCs (known as “the hole on the ozone layer”) was high.

The breakthrough came after the Greens elected a new leader in August 2025. Mr Polanski, the deputy leader at the time, was an insurgent who wanted to create a mass-membership and unashamedly Left-wing party.

Standing against him were MPs Adrian Ramsay and Ellie Chowns, traditional Greens who both represented rural seats once held by the Conservatives, and believed the party should appeal to a wide coalition of voters, including ex-Tories.

Members picked Mr Polanski, giving him 84% of the vote.

In some ways he’s an unlikely Left-winger. Mr Polanski is a former Liberal Democrat who praised ex-Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg’s work as Deputy Prime Minister in a Tory-led coalition government.

He was a bitter critic of Jeremy Corbyn, accusing Mr Corbyn of allowing antisemitism to run rampant in the Labour Party. Mr Polanski, who is Jewish, has since retracted these claims and says he was “lost in the propaganda”.

Mr Polanski was also once staunchly pro-Israel, while many newer Green supporters are militant critics of the country. He now supports sanctions against Israel and condemns “genocide in Gaza”.

He famously once worked as a hypnotherapist, and a journalist reported in 2013 that he said hypnotism could enlarge her breasts. Mr Polanski has since apologised (though The Sun reporter concerned claimed the therapy worked).

None of this has done him much harm. The Green Party now has 200,000 members, it says, up from 68,000 in September last year. The number has tripled since Mr Polanski took over, and his dream of creating a mass membership party appears to have come true.

Matt Zarb-Cousin, who once served as Jeremy Corbyn’s official spokesman, is one of the former Labour activists now backing the Greens. He said: “A lot of people who supported Jeremy ended up going to Your Party, but it just hasn’t really materialised in the way they hoped. And so the Greens look like the most viable vehicle to shift the debate more to the left.

“Zack’s been a very good leader. He’s cut through a lot, and he’s got a lot of personal appeal.”

The Green Party now aims to broaden its appeal further by axing some of its more loony policies. It is holding a review that could see it scrap proposals for a national 55MPH speed limit, the abolition of the monarchy and the decriminalisation of all drugs.

Mr Polanski has also met the team behind New York mayor Zohran Mamdani’s election campaign, and aims to learn lessons from Mamdani’s victory last year on a Left-wing platform.

But the Greens are also fighting off claims that they have allowed antisemitism to take root in the party

Labour Local Government Secretary Steve Reed claims people that the Labour Party kicked out for being antisemites “were welcomed into the Green party with no checks whatsoever”, including some candidates standing in the May 7 local elections.

Mr Polanski has described this as “an increasingly weaponised, cynical political attack from the Labour Party”. However, in one clear example of antisemitism, Feda Shahin, who is standing for Bournemouth town council, was recorded claiming that “the Zionists during the Bolshevik (sic) killed 20 million Christians” – a reference to the neo-Nazi theory that Jews were responsible for Soviet communism, including a famine that killed millions. Ms Shahin is still listed as a candidate on her local official Green Party website.

It remains to be seen whether this will slow the rise of the Green Party. If all goes as expected, Mr Polanski may wake up on May 8 to discover he has a new army of local councillors behind him – and every reason to hope for more success when a general election comes.