I sat in on two online Green Party events over the weekend and came away rather impressed by the political content and what seems to be a new appreciation of the opportunities. This despite my views on phrases like “being the best version of ourselves we can be” and describing every speaker as “wonderful”, “incredible”, “brilliant”, “amazing”. A truly inclusive politics needs to have space for misanthropes and curmudgeons, but that is a minor quibble and I am reconsidering my rottweiler / poodle comparison.

The London Green Party conference on Saturday gave me the impression of an event structured to get the membership and sections of the homeless and independent left thinking about a realignment. The process by which this choice was made is something of which I am entirely ignorant.

Faiza Shaheen, who by rights should have been elected as a Labour MP but was stitched up by the bureaucracy, spoke about her experience of organising locally. This is something she is doing very successfully in Chingford and Woodford Green where she holds regular and well attended meetings involving people in political discussions with a network called Community Independents. She made the point a couple of times that is isn’t a great idea to have purity tests when you want to build a large organisation with a realistic chance of winning office. To which I would add that the right often gives the impression of being more willing to accommodate a range of views on potentially controversial issues than much of the left.

Anthony Feinstein stood against Starmer at the general election and got 7313 votes, 19% of the total and a very credible performance. His name has been floating around in connection with various attempts to set up parties, proto-parties and God knows what. Life’s too short to look up the detail. Again, he offered a good critique of Starmerism and made interesting points about how the struggle against apartheid wasn’t just the ANC, but involved a large spectrum of organisations and strands of thought.

Danièle Obono is a deputy in Paris for La France Insoumise (LFI) and essentially offered an outline of how a party can be both anti-capitalist and ecosocialist by bringing the working class along with it. James Meadway pointed to the electoral programme of LFI as a model of how to present the practical, visible changes in working people’s lives that a radical socialist government can commit to delivering.

Polanski leadership bid boosts recruitment

This was not the event I had expected, though honesty obliges me to confess that I attended to some DIY during other sessions. It was a reasonably detailed look at the French experience and how people who formerly supported Labour have reacted to the party’s support for genocide, racism and austerity. To the naked eye, there were no discernible reasons why people who want to challenge Labour politically and electorally shouldn’t join the Green Party.

This brings us onto Zack Polanski’s bid for the leadership. Socialist Worker, which is getting breathless about the prospect of  Jeremy Corbyn, who’s celebrating his 76^th birthday later this month, launching something or other, argues that there is “a deep left-right divide in the party” and “the left needs to get its act together”.

About 300 people sat in on the Zoom meeting for the launch of Polanski’s campaign. It was never put in these terms because the party has a different tradition and vocabulary, but the reason there is such enthusiasm around his challenge is that there is a commitment to supporting workers in struggle, fighting against the anti-migrant racism of Labour, Reform and the Tories, undoing Brexit, a commitment to taking serious action against climate change and reversing the impoverishment of much of the British working class.

It is also worth pointing out that unlike most Labour politicians, Polanski is firmly opposed to the genocide in Gaza and has put his hands up to being wrong about the antisemitism lies directed at Corbyn.

Greens seem to be the most constitutionally upbeat group of people I have ever come across, so what was absent from the meeting and has been missing from Polanski’s campaign is any direct criticism of the current leadership. I have no idea what is said in pubs or behind closed doors but the general sense is that they haven’t been combative enough and Polanski is offering what is referred to as “eco-populism”.

It is on a smaller scale than the Corbyn movement, but this leadership challenge has apparently attracted thousands of new members to the party and these will be almost exclusively on the left. This seems an infinitely more attractive prospect than lash ups between a mish mash of factional, self-serving mini bureaucracies.  The contrast between Starmer channelling Enoch Powell without the rhetorical talent and a left challenge from the Greens is a pretty stark choice for anyone looking a political home.