Has Andy Burnham Squashed the Green Party? Zack Polanski and Russell Warfield interview

Zack Polanski (0:00)

Am I tough enough?

SPEAKER_2 (0:01)

Strong and stable leadership.

Russell Warfield (0:02)

Total ruba.

Zack Polanski (0:03)

Hell yes, I'm tough enough. Shut the fridge. Not another once.

Russell Warfield (0:07)

It's the PoliticsJOE Podcast.

Ava Santina (0:10)

Okay, so Russell, I'm gonna start with you. I don't know if any of you have read the book because it hasn't been published yet, but if you're like me, you get a little PDF sent to you. It's a great book, and you're all gonna very much enjoy it. The opening line is rather ominous, and Russell starts by saying everything is falling apart. Do you want to talk to us a little bit about the factors?

Some of us may not believe that everything is falling apart. Maybe actually everything in the United Kingdom is completely fine, and we don't need a Green Party. Talk to us about some of the factors that made you write that statement as your opening remark, and tell us how that has brought Zack Polanski into the fold.

Russell Warfield (0:47)

Well, how long do you guys have?

Will I be permitted to go back 50 years if that's okay? So for about 50 years now, we've had an economy and a political system in this country, which has been sustained by privatizing all the things we used to own commonly, all the public goods, and extracting as much profit from it as possible, which means we're sucking wealth up from ordinary people in our communities, and go to an increasingly remote, ultra-rich basically. And it's this economy also which is driving the degradation of our natural world as well, because in sustaining this economy, we're using the planet as a free resource and free rubbish tip as well. And that's what's causing all the climate and nature crises that we are experiencing at the moment we're living through, you know, the summer we've all just had, we'll be very aware of it.

I mean, this economy sort of sustained for several decades on the basis, you know, it sort of received implicit consent from the population for several decades, because it was able to basically give us a bunch of goodies, like, you know, like an abundant supply of material goods, like cheap goods, cheap credit, all the rest of it. And then in 2008, obviously, that all just completely fell apart. And it's since then, really, that we've seen the complete collapse of political legitimacy among the main parties, both here in the UK and, you know, across most Western democracies. And all leaders ever since have really just sort of tried to plough on with this old economic model as if it could be revived somehow, and, you know, nothing they try has worked. But still, we get all the bad effects of that economy, all the exploitation of people, all the degradation of the planet, but without any of that compensation that we had for a while. So that was what sort of led to, you know, various surges of left optimism through the 2010s, obviously. We saw various manifestations of that here in the UK.

All of it sort of hit brick walls by the end of the decade, sort of was sort of drowned out by the waves of austerity that were sort of visited on most Western populations in response to that crisis. And then through the 2020s, so far, everything's got even worse, basically. So, you know, the social disaster of COVID, all the shocking price spikes from the energy crises and all that sort of thing. So the material sort of basis for everyone being so angry in the first half of the 2010s has gotten even stronger. But what happened at that point, obviously, was that under Stammer's Labour, Labour moved really, really far to the right, just sneered at everyone to its left, and sort of completely capitulated to the far right endlessly. So reform and fraud were surging while there was this gaping space into which a figure like Polanski or a party like The Greens could step forward and give millions and millions of people the representation that they were being denied. And I think for a lot of those people feel for the first time in a great number of years, some hope as well.

Ava Santina (3:36)

Do you find that daunting, Zack? I mean, you're being asked to lead a movement here that is going to turn back the tide on everything that Russell has just said. Is that frightening to you?

Zack Polanski (3:45)

It's bloody terrifying.

Like, I'm listening to Russell forgetting that I'm about to be a character in this story or a part of this story. And you're listening and it's gripping because you're hearing everything and you're going, yes, that's true. Everything is falling apart and all of these things are broken. And then you hear the solutions and you go, yes, we can do that. And then he ends up by going, and that's what Zack and the Green Party are going to do. And you go, oh, God, this is why we've got to jump in. I suppose where I balance it, though, is, and I think Russell would agree with this, and I think the book agrees with this, is it's not all on me at all. And actually, whilst if someone just picks up a book, you'd think this is a book about Zack, it's not actually really at all. I'm obviously a central part of it. But it's the history of the Green Party, and actually you can go right back to the beginning and certainly to the Natalie Bennett years. I was really interested that you said in some ways, do you get Jeremy Corbyn without Natalie Bennett? And that was an interesting question I've heard you pose. But actually what Natalie was doing in 2015 was pushing the Overton window, talking about refugees, talking about immigration, talking about a different kind of economic model. And I don't think Natalie would mind me saying she was ridiculed in the press, but she strongly pushed back. And then I think when Jeremy Corbyn came along, that had already started to lay some of the groundwork. That's not to take away from how much work Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party then had to do to keep pushing the Overton window. But I think no one ever occurs in a vacuum. So I'd be terrified if I thought this was all on me and we're in a silo. But actually what I recognize is this is part of a much bigger movement that's been going on for decades. It will go on after me.