When I stood for leader of the Greens in 2025, our party was at a crossroads. The transformative leadership of Carla Denyer and Adrian Ramsay had taken us to an electoral success we’d never seen before. I knew we had even greater potential – and that the country was crying out for the bold politics we could offer.
We have seen unprecedented wins this year – from our first ever parliamentary byelection win to our landslide council and mayoral victories in former Labour strongholds. Those victories have moved Labour. Our electoral successes helped topple Keir Starmer, seeing him replaced by a prime minister unarguably to his left.
They forced a change in tone in the government’s relations with Israel. The government has even rowed back on some of its cruel anti-migrant policies. But the next phase for our party takes place in a landscape that is clearly more challenging for us.
Andy Burnham is enjoying a honeymoon phase, and hasn’t yet had to make the “difficult decisions” that will reveal exactly who will lose out under his government – unpopular choices he will probably start making at his fast-approaching first budget. Of course I wanted to win the Holborn and St Pancras byelection. But our result shows, as the polling expert John Curtice has said, that our party represents a greater threat to Labour in places like this than ever before.
We tripled our vote share in a seat that Labour has comfortably held since 1983 and forced it to campaign hard in a constituency it would once have taken for granted. We have transformed the electoral landscape and, as the first nationwide serious threat to Labour on its left in modern political history, we are here to stay. The result also came at a difficult moment for our party.
A motion voted through at our conference, “Zionism is racism”, has stirred up strong feelings among many members and the wider public too. And I know there have been questions about my approach to the motion. I’m a Jewish man who grew up in a Zionist household.
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