If someone were to claim five years ago that the Green Party would be a serious political force in 2026, capable of record polling, potentially coming second only to Reform, and on track to win double-digit parliamentary seats at the next general election, you would be forgiven for thinking they had been dropped on their head. Yet that is exactly what is happening now.

Greens Blooming

In November of last year, the Greens surged into second place for the first time, polling at 18 percent according to Find Out Now, overtaking both the Conservatives and Labour. In a recent seat projection, they were forecast to take a staggering 53 seats by YouGov, one of the most reliable pollsters in the country, many of them in traditional Labour heartlands. Some projections even put them as high as 85 seats based on Find Out Now data.

The Greens are now the third-largest party by membership, at over 190,000, trailing only Reform and Labour. This represents a dramatic rise since current leader Zack Polanski took charge.

The party has come a long way since former leader and Brighton Pavilion MP Caroline Lucas was its sole high-profile figure, serving for years as the only Green voice in the House of Commons. That changed at the last general election, when the Greens gained three additional seats: Bristol Central, Waveney Valley, and North Herefordshire, all with comfortable majorities.

In the 2023 and 2024 local elections, the party made record gains, increasing its number of councillors to 899 and securing control of 12 councils. Polanski even topped a party-leader approval poll in December, registering at minus one, while Keir Starmer plunged to a glacial minus forty-three.

The Greens are also expected to perform strongly in the upcoming Senedd elections, finishing third with 13 percent of the vote behind Plaid Cymru and Reform, according to YouGov. They are currently contesting a significant by-election in Gorton and Denton, Greater Manchester, scheduled for 26 February. In 2024, the Greens came third there with 13.2 percent of the vote, just 332 votes behind Reform.

Although Labour retains a comfortable majority in the seat, its vote share fell sharply, much of it absorbed by the Greens. This mirrors a broader trend visible in recent council by-elections.

Labour’s National Executive Committee also blocked Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham from standing in the constituency, a decision likely to have knock-on effects, potentially to the Greens’ advantage. The party also recently gained the Horsley council seat in Derbyshire from Reform, a notable first. Where voters feel Labour has failed, on issues such as traffic management and local governance, many on the left are drifting from red to green. Crucially, the Greens have also shown themselves capable of taking votes from Reform. They have become the de facto progressive left-wing alternative.

Greener on the Other Side?

Despite their reckless and enormously costly commitment to Net Zero, their flagrant disregard for controlled borders, and their refusal to engage seriously with the immigration question, to the extent of advocating the abolition of the Home Office in favour of a dedicated and frankly dystopian Department of Migration, the Greens are still resonating with certain segments of the electorate.

So who exactly is voting for them? Are they merely mopping up disaffected Labour supporters? Largely, yes. However, voting-intention data from YouGov suggests a more specific profile. Women, 18 to 24-year-olds, which may explain the party’s push to lower the voting age to 16, renters, and the highly educated are all more likely to vote Green. Notably, there is no significant difference between higher- and lower-income voters, suggesting a disconnect between the party’s self-image and its actual appeal.

The Muslim Vote, a coalition of organisations seeking to mobilise the UK’s four million Muslims politically, has endorsed the Greens in the Gorton and Denton by-election. As I have written previously, bloc voting along ethnic, cultural, and religious lines is already well-established in Britain, particularly among pro-Gaza independents. This has fuelled an increasingly ugly sectarianism that worsens with each election cycle.

What makes this alliance especially peculiar is that British Muslims are overwhelmingly socially conservative, entirely at odds with the Greens’ own radical progressivism. Yet this marriage of convenience between socially conservative Muslim voters and the far left is nothing new, and it strongly suggests a mutually self-interested alliance rather than any shared values.

That said, the Muslim vote is not insignificant, and the Greens are exploiting it effectively. Muslims make up roughly 6.5 percent of the electorate, and while that figure may appear modest, their populations are highly concentrated in key constituencies. In cities such as Birmingham, Blackburn, Leicester, Bradford, and large parts of London, Muslims account for 30 percent or more of the local population.

Whatever one thinks of him, Zack Polanski has been central to the Green Party’s meteoric rise over the past year. Membership has tripled, he has become the party’s most recognisable public figure, and though he embodies much of what the patriotic British public rejects, he has successfully drawn new supporters into the Green orbit. Several Labour councillors have also defected to his party. Clearly, there is an appeal.

The Greens are vocally hostile to Zionism and the state of Israel, consistent with their stance on Gaza. Many former Labour voters cite Labour’s perceived failure to address the Israel-Palestine conflict as a key reason for switching allegiance. That conflict has translated disastrously onto British streets, fuelling sectarianism, from the Maccabi Tel Aviv scandal to outright terrorism, as seen in the Manchester synagogue attack. Syrians and Kurds also recently clashed violently on Manchester’s Curry Mile over events in Syria. This is a far cry from the post-racial, multicultural utopia Polanski and his party envision.

Domestically, the Greens do ask some of the right questions. In their widely shared How We Make Hope Normal Again party broadcast, Polanski highlighted the cost-of-living crisis, extortionate energy bills, soaring rents, wage stagnation, a crumbling NHS, and inevitably their familiar bogeyman, the super-rich.

Yet he said nothing about the super-rich migrant hotel operators awarded lucrative government contracts, funded by taxpayers, to house predominantly fighting-age foreign men in British communities. Nothing about the profits made from the ongoing misery of society’s most vulnerable. Nothing about how imported cheap labour suppresses wages, or how unchecked population growth strains public services. Addressing these realities would unravel the party’s entire worldview.

Our Country Is Just a Melting Pot

Even if the Greens serve as a wake-up call for a failing Labour Party, their vision for Britain should be resisted at every turn. In a video responding to Robert Jenrick’s comments describing parts of Birmingham as slums, Polanski quoted West Indian poet Benjamin Zephaniah, likening Britain to a warm, welcoming soup of countless ethnicities, cultures, and religions living in harmony.

Afghans, Somalis, Pakistanis, Nigerians, Indians, Iraqis, Bangladeshis, everyone welcome, just stir well and sprinkle generously. The problem is that many of these groups are disproportionately responsible for sex crimes, grooming gangs, welfare dependency, and the erosion of cohesion in traditionally working-class British communities.

Like any soup overloaded with ingredients, the original flavour is lost. What remains is bland, diluted, and inferior to what came before. And what came before was not broken. It was better. We are realising this more clearly with each passing day, at the expense of our own people.