What impact will Andy Burnham have on Zack Polanski and the Greens? | Green party

The change was remarkable. A week after Keir Starmer said he would resign, a YouGov poll showed Labor up two points while the Greens fell by the same amount. Could Andy Burnham’s premiership mean a rethink for Zack Polanski’s party?

The short answer is: It’s too early to know; especially in a time of unprecedented political instability and the rapid rise in poll results that come with it. This year alone, Labor’s five-point lead over the Greens turned into a similar lead in favor of the Greens, which then turned into a seven-point advantage for Labour.

But many Greens accept Burnham may have a different proposition.

In just 10 months at the helm of the party in England and Wales, Polanski has more than tripled the membership of the Greens, nearly doubled poll numbers that had been stuck at around 10%, and shocked Reform UK and Labor by winning the Gorton and Denton by-elections.

Much of that success came from appealing to voters disillusioned with Starmer’s Labour. A separate YouGov poll published this week also showed the extent of this crossover appeal; 85% of 2024 Labor voters said they had a positive impression of Polanski’s party.

It’s unclear for now how much of this applies to Burnham, who is a better communicator than Starmer and can articulate seemingly left-leaning ideas, whatever that means in practice.

“A lot of the impact that Zack has had in these first nine months has been that there was a clear space for an affable leader to the left of Keir Starmer, and now there will be questions about whether that space is still there,” a senior Green said.

“If we have a Prime Minister who is seen as further to the left, moving further to the left will not bring the results we want.”

Others in the party are more optimistic; many say they were prepared for the surge in Labor polls following Starmer’s sacking, but did not see Burnham’s possible policy agenda as different enough to ensure it would have longevity.

“Keir Starmer came in saying he was going to do a lot of things and what worked for him was those diminished hopes,” a Greens official said. “I can see the same thing happening with Burnham. There’s a huge desperation for her to make a difference. If she doesn’t – either because she won’t or because she doesn’t have the time or the space – people will be disappointed.”

Others point out that many Greens are fleeing Labor over issues that Burnham is unlikely to respond to, such as a harder line on Gaza and Israel and the full nationalization of services such as water.

Another senior Greens figure said: “Burnham certainly shows some support when it comes to policies coming from the left, but I suspect there is not much more than that.”

A recurring refrain is that the Greens are a very different party to the one Polanski took over last September, in terms of the scope of their message and their subsequent electoral success.

“More people have voted Green now than ever before, and historically when people do it once they tend to do it again,” another party official said. “For years people thought: ‘This is a nice idea, but it’s a waste of a vote.’ They don’t think so after the Gorton, Denton and local elections.

“There’s a big pool of people who voted Green, who are happy with that, who won’t go back to Labor unless there’s a really good reason. There’s no panic.”

Such positive spins are not universal in the party, especially given the feeling among some Greens that some of Polanski’s initial luster was driven by the impossibility of maintaining such a busy schedule, as well as scrutiny in areas such as council tax.

There is also ongoing, if generally polite, infighting in the party between long-standing Greens who want a more significant crackdown on the environment and nature, and newcomers who share Polanski’s focus on areas such as wealth taxes.

In parallel, there is a heated debate about how many seats the Greens should aim for in the next elections and where they should be. While this will inevitably be in the dozens, there are concerns about spreading resources too thinly and replicating the Liberal Democrats’ experience in 2019, when they won votes with a populist-leaning anti-Brexit message but won almost no MPs.

Work is continuing to analyze the results of May’s local elections and senior Greens say the provisional number target has already been raised.

Despite all the optimism, there are reasons for the Greens to be cautious about a leadership change in No 10, according to University of Manchester political science professor Robert Ford.

He said: “It came easy for Zack Polanski because he could basically run a very simple morality play with Keir Starmer as the pantomime villain and that was a story that disgruntled voters on the left loved to hear.

“I think it’s harder to give Burnham the same kind of role, at least early on. He’s a much more effective communicator, including some of the less traditional communication channels like online that the Greens are getting used to again.”

“What you might call the vibrational environment will be less conducive for them. They won’t be able to gain that by default.”