Ahead of the May 7 local elections, Britain is at a precipice. The crisis of governance that should have ended with Labour’s landslide victory in the summer of 2024, has instead worsened. For the first time in the country’s history, no party commands even a quarter of the electorate’s confidence and five parties are competing for power.
This fragmentation is symptomatic of the crisis it flourishes in: a country that has not grown meaningfully in fifteen years, whose public services are buckling, whose political class has exhausted its credibility across parties and governments. The anger is legitimate, but the cure is worse than the disease.
Reform and the Greens have built their ascent on this frustration. The former harvested the fears of a left-behind England, while the latter harnessed the anxieties of a generation that inherited a decaying planet and a broken economy. They are not the same party. In fact, on paper, they could not be more dissimilar. But they share something more important than policy: a politics of gesture over programme, of enemy over argument, of feeling over fact.
Populism is one of the most well-researched topics in political science. At the dawn of the 21st century, it has re-emerged globally and powerfully. It relies on a simple yet convincing story: the pure people, victim of and pitted against a corrupt elite. The appeal is undeniable: it takes the genuine complexity of political failure and flattens it into something you can feel in your heart. Emile Durkheim, one of the forefathers of sociology, understood this impulse:
“when a society suffers, it feels the need to find someone to blame for its pain, someone on whom it can avenge its disappointments.”
The moment a populist movement is forced to answer how — how will you fix the NHS, how will you bring down energy bills, how will you house a generation, the dam breaks. Therefore, the programme is always kept deliberately equivocal, the enemy kept permanently in focus. Grievance is the product, not a bug, in populist politics.
On the far-right, Farage’s pitch is not unfounded. Deindustrialisation is real. The NHS is broken. The sense among vast swathes of England that the political class has not merely failed them but quietly written them off. But diagnosis is not the same as remedy. Reform’s programme, including a flat tax that disproportionately benefits the wealthy, sweeping public spending cuts and deregulation would hammer the very communities that vote for it. Farage has spent three decades as a disruptor, never once having to be responsible for anything he engineered; Brexit is the most paradigmatic example. The most economically disruptive policy choice in post-war British history was championed by Farage, who resigned the morning after the referendum result, leaving others to manage the damage.
And then there are the candidates. By the 2024 election, Reform had dropped at least eleven for racist or extremist posts. In the coming election, Reform fielded a candidate who called for Muslims to be “blast[ed] off the face of the earth”; other candidates were found to have shared posts praising Hitler, pushed antisemitic Rothschild conspiracy theories and circulated material from known neo-Nazi organisations. This is no vetting problem; it is a foundational one.
The Greens present a different issue. Climate change is real. The cost of living crisis is real. The fury at a Labour government that promised change and delivered managerialism is legitimate. None of that is in dispute.
But Polanski has quietly transformed the Greens into something more than an environmental party. Israel has become their organising principle; not merely a foreign policy position but a litmus test of political identity, deployed ward by ward, community by community. The absurdity is disarming: local elections are about who fixes the roads, runs the libraries, manages planning applications. The Green Party has made the answer to all of it Israel. Not housing. Not the council tax. Not the bin collections that actually determine whether local government functions. A foreign conflict, however grave, is not a platform for local governance. It is a recruiting tool, a rallying cry.
The consequences for Jewish communities have also been predictable. At the Green Party’s spring conference, WhatsApp messages from party activists described Jewish people as “an abomination to this planet” and suggested a recent arson attack on a Jewish organisation had been a “false flag.” The candidates tell a similar story as Reform: multiple Green candidates have shared conspiracy theories about Jews, including content originating on far-right neo-Nazi websites, along with clear evidence of Holocaust distortion. A Green candidate in Camden shared posts claiming “Zionists” were responsible for the 9/11 attacks and that Israel orchestrated the Golders Green ambulance arson. A candidate in Lambeth claimed Netanyahu “works for Jeffrey Epstein.” A candidate in Newcastle argued that the October 7 attack was justified.
Much like Reform, the platform itself is questionable in its shallowness. When pressed on how the Greens would fund a £160 billion rise in day-to-day spending, Polanski argued that “the fiscal rule we need is to make sure inflation doesn’t go higher than the skills and resources in our economy.” When pushed further, Polanski retreated: “I’m more interested in what’s happening to cleaners, teachers and nurses than being caught up in economic theory.” That is not a programme. That is a cheap, populist deflection disguised as authenticity.
Likewise, in early April 2026, Polanski tweeted: “The economy was designed, and it can be redesigned.” This claim is incredibly inaccurate and simplistic; institutions are human-made, but “the economy” was never designed, it was the aggregate result of billions of decentralised decisions, incentives and feedback loops that nobody foresaw. This statement is exemplary: it oversimplifies a key issue to make it seem straightforward while evidently lacking substance.
On defence, the incoherence is starker: in a single Channel 4 interview, Polanski argued that NATO could be reformed from within, then reversed himself, calling instead for “an alternative alliance” with Brazil, Mexico and Global South countries. At a time when Russia is pushing on the eastern front and global threats are increasing, not receding, the Green Party does not have a unified position on NATO and defence. What it does know is that it wants to “build a relationship with Putin” as was stated by Polanski in March 2026.
Reform and the Greens are not mirror images. But beneath the differences runs the same current: a politics built on performance rather than programme. Both are pushing hard to appeal to a disgruntled middle and working class. Neither are providing meaningful solutions.
Britain’s crisis is undeniably real. It deserves better than a party that cannot define antisemitism without internal chaos or a party whose chief whip thinks Islamists run London.
Serious politics requires something far more demanding than what Reform and the Greens are offering: it demands method, programme, institution, patience. The prophets are always loudest when the times are darkest. That is precisely when you should listen to them least.
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Agreed. But….its hard to listen to any British political party today and believe they are credible stewards of this country. Whatever happens, this country needs to be shaken from its slumber to focus on economic growth. A rising tide lifts all ships.