A party history that flinches from its subject

Russel Warfield’s The Green Socialist (Pluto Press, out on 20 September) arrives at an obvious moment. The Green Party is more electorally relevant than at any point in its history, Zack Polanski has become its most recognisable figure, and there is remarkably little serious writing on how the party actually works. Warfield, a lay Green member since 2015, a party staffer between 2016 and 2021 and a campaign volunteer for Polanski last year, is about as well placed as anyone to fill that gap.

He does, up to a point. The early chapters tracing the party’s history – from its 1973 origins as PEOPLE, founded largely by disaffected Conservatives, through decades as a fringe concern, to its current moment – are the book’s most useful contribution. Warfield doesn’t shy away from the uncomfortable parts of that history. PEOPLE’s first manifesto carried anti-migration and anti-birth strands that sit closer to today’s far right than to anything in Polanski’s platform. It’s a history worth having on the record and Warfield tells it with more candour than the party’s own mythology usually allows.

What the book struggles to do is turn that history into an argument. Warfield writes that “the potential for a politics like Polanski’s has been encoded into the DNA of the party from its inception” – but his own fourth chapter, on PEOPLE’s founding, makes the opposite case at least as plausible – that the party’s origins owed as much to a paternalistic, anti-industrial strand of Toryism as to anything resembling ecosocialism.

In pursuit of a continuity within Green history, Warfield neglects a more interesting question about how the party began there and ended up here. Clearly the party has gone through fundamental changes, not one long forward march to ecosocialism. A more grounded historical analysis of the changes would have been of more use to readers trying to understand the party.

The same pattern of keeping up appearances holds on the party’s internal life. Warfield describes the Greens as “a more democratic body than other UK parties”, built on the case that conference sets policy directly rather than leaving it to a leadership. That’s true as far as it goes – though it’s also true of Labour’s conference, which doesn’t bind MPs any more than the Greens’ does.

What’s missing is any real account of what “democratic” means once you get past conference – no standardised local-party constitution, no consistent selection process, decision-making that in practice runs through unelected working groups and a consensus model that can leave meetings without clear outcomes at all. Open selection for MPs is rightly credited to the party, but Warfield doesn’t examine the rule that bars substantive political campaigning between rival candidates for selection – which rather blunts the point of having a contest.

Decentralisation is called “valuable” without much sense of its costs. A party this loosely structured is hard to hold accountable to any programme, including Polanski’s. That matters more, not less, if the party’s ambitions are what Warfield says they are.

Those ambitions are themselves unresolved on the page. At one point the book states plainly that “the animating purpose of the Green Party of England and Wales... will always be to form the first ever Green government”. Elsewhere it gestures towards a different, movement-building vision, one that might “escape the oscillation between movement building and electoralism” – without settling what that would actually require, or engaging with the substantial body of left thinking on exactly that tension.

A description of ecosocialism as something reached by “strengthening social democratic principles which tend towards the eventual ability to transcend capitalism entirely” reads like it could have come from any point in Labour’s last century – gradualism and all – and Warfield doesn’t say why or how the Greens might avoid Labour’s version of that trap.

There’s also an unevenness of tone that suggests the book was written across a shifting political moment. Its opening register is triumphalist about Labour’s decline; by the closing chapters, under what reads like the more sobering experience of the current Burnham government, that confidence has thinned considerably. Neither the earlier optimism nor the later caution is dishonest, but the book never quite decides which mood it wants readers to leave with.

None of this makes The Green Socialist worthless. As a piece of reportage – on Polanski’s rise, on the mechanics of a party most political journalism ignores – it has real value, and anyone trying to understand where Green politics sits right now will learn something from it.

However, as political analysis, it keeps pulling back exactly where the argument needs to get sharper – on the party’s origins, on what “democratic” actually means in practice, and on whether its stated ambitions to form a government sit at all easily with the movement politics it also claims to represent. This book does not truly explain the Greens, but it is an excellent example of a new institutional ideology that is growing within the party – one that increasingly bares resemblance to Labourism.

Readers hoping for a reckoning with the Green Party as an institution, rather than a sympathetic tour of its recent history, will come away wanting more. But the purpose of this book seems clear – to convince the left to join the Greens, which explains why so much of the book is, really, papering over the cracks within the party.

What Warfield should recognise though, is that the left does not need to believe that the Green Party is a finished product to join it – they need to believe there is a socialist project within it – and that there is a plausible vision to transform the party. Unfortunately, this book doesn’t show that potential.

The Green Socialist by Russel Warfield is published by Pluto Press on 20 September 2026, price £12.99.