It is astonishing how two meetings in the same venue for the same ostensible purpose can be very different. A month ago I went along to a local meeting of Your Party which was not unpleasant but not inspiring. Tragic obsessives can read about it here. That said, it was better than the Hackney one.

Last night I went to the Greens Organise London meeting, a decision facilitated by the fact that it’s a fifteen minute walk from my sofa. This is a group of Green party members who are determined to transform what has been a fairly loose outfit into a mass left party with a serious perspective of taking power.

I was very impressed.

My views on ice breaking activities hardened many years ago at a work event when we were invited to talk about our happiest childhood memory, so I used that time to inspect the sanitary arrangements. If I want to talk to strangers, I buy a can of Kestrel and sit at a bus stop.

There were about eighty people in the room and by my reckoning they were mostly of an age where the prospect of turning forty is an existential tragedy rather than the good old days. It was a young crowd. You may wish to compare this demographic with another ongoing attempt to launch a radical left party. Just as importantly, they were all there as individual party members who want to be part of pushing it to the left. I certainly got no sense that a particular faction was slugging it out to run the show. You may wish to compare…

A man, who I would estimate to be from about forty miles outside Belfast, gave the political report, though that is not the sort of phrase that is used in the Greens. He was explicit in referring to the project of creating an ecosocialist party, a concept that this site was plugging from just after the Late Devonian extinction. For me, the time allocated to speaking to, or avoiding speaking to, your neighbours would have been better employed explaining what was meant by this and the strategy for achieving it. However, the report was enthused with the justifiable enthusiasm of someone who is part of a rapidly growing party which is on the cusp of making significant electoral breakthroughs.

We only heard reports from a handful of areas, but Michael from Lambeth made two very significant points. The first was that the old model of steady, incremental growth now longer serves. Where the party is standing candidates it needs to put forward serious slates. From that follows the problem of what happens when Green left councillors control a local authority. What is the plan for resisting austerity?

To the best of my knowledge, this was the first in person London meeting of Greens Organise and I would judge it to be a big success. Again, this is not a term most people in the room would use, but it is fair to call those who were there a vanguard. A skilled, politically sophisticated young leadership has emerged which is seriously up for the job of replacing Labour, moving the party sharply to the left and taking on Reform in working class areas.

Then to cap it all, you wake up to the news that Zohran Mamdani got elected as mayor of New York and you can’t help thinking that the optimism last night is very reality based.

And since Mamdani used the title of this song in his victory speech.