Watermelons: the term used to describe the members of the Green party of England and Wales who are green on the outside and red on the inside. People in this faction are environmentalists but bleed socialist ideologies. Of the roughly 160,000 people who have flocked to the party since Zack Polanski became leader last year, most are thought to be in this camp, drawn to a political space on the left that they see as vacated by the Labour party.
But the author of a new book – The Green Socialist: Zack Polanski and the Battle for Britain’s Future – says this flavour of Green is nothing new. During the leadership contest between Polanski and co-runners Adrian Ramsay and Ellie Chowns in 2025, a senior Green source described Polanski’s rise as a “hostile takeover”. Even Caroline Lucas, the Greens’ first MP and a former party leader, has said, when pressed, that she would love him to talk about the environment more.
Since Polanski took over, he has been splashed across newspapers and TV screens discussing subjects ranging from Gaza to wealth taxes – progressive politics, but not necessarily or overtly green. Warfield responds with a statistic: 34% of voters trust the Greens more than any other party on the environment, according to YouGov polling – the highest level of trust recorded for any party on any issue. And it got us so far, but the manifest moments of material advancement have been tied to moments where we’ve been able to be more responsive to the actual political context of the day.” Warfield points out that many of Polanski’s positions are not his alone.
Green party members vote on policy and the leaders are constitutionally duty bound to advocate for it. A ‘wealth tax’ is called for as ‘a means of limiting large accumulations of wealth’ in a Green party manifesto published long before Polanski’s leadership.” The book finds links between the party’s past and present, even in unlikely places. It’s unavoidable, Warfield writes, that there were “some distinctly rightwing people present at the formation of the Green party”.
The first key figure was Teddy Goldsmith, an environmentalist part of a famous Tory family. His writings formed key texts for People, the political party from which the modern Greens descend. But even Goldsmith – whose “deep ecology” philosophy leaned into Malthusian concerns about human population and misanthropic views that blamed humanity as a monolith for ecological degradation – shares threads with Polanski’s Greens, Warfield says.
Both share the golden Green rule that infinite economic growth and endless extraction are impossible on a planet with finite resources. Both reject the idea that capitalism can simply carry on with business as usual, green or otherwise. As the party has shifted towards social ecology over the years, Warfield says Polanski’s eco-socialism simply represents a modern evolution: arguing that capitalism and the 1% – not all of humanity – are the root cause of environmental destruction.
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