Monday 5th October 2026
This morning I cancelled my membership of the Green Party of England and Wales.
I joined in June 2025 after a very a long time coming.
I've always considered myself aligned with Green politics, and had been collecting and reading Green Party manifestos since at least 2010. I had voted Green in the majority of elections, but for years I held back from becoming a member because I never felt completely aligned with the direction of the party.
When I finally joined, I had realised membership was “precisely the entry to influencing this direction”. I didn’t expect to agree with everything. That was almost the point. I thought it was better to join a political movement which broadly represented where I wanted society to go and participate in shaping it than wait around for a party which somehow represented every political belief I had already formed.
In my original joining email I wrote about how appalled I was with the direction Labour had taken under Starmer, including Palestine, welfare, neoliberal economics and our relationship with the US. After Labour ousted him, I wrote that Corbyn was hugely missed from mainstream politics and that I wanted to be part of a more “strong-footed left”. At the time, I actually thought the Green Party had historically been too soft and that the changing political landscape required more fire from the left.
My politics haven’t moved towards the centre since then. If anything, I have continued moving further into socialism, post-capitalism, redistribution, public ownership and questioning how land, wealth and productive power are distributed in the first place. I've definitely not become uncomfortable with radical left politics. In this instance, one policy change has been enough to want me to stop alignment with the party.
The immediate trigger is the Green Party conference adopting the motion generally referred to as “Zionism is Racism”.
The motion passed by 1,022 votes to 813 and formally establishes the Green Party as an anti-Zionist party. It defines Zionism as an ethnonationalist political project, says it should be treated through the party’s anti-racist politics, and reiterates support for one democratic Palestinian state throughout historic Palestine, alongside Palestinian liberation, right of return, BDS and an arms embargo.
This is an extremely different position from how I have ever seen Green Party stand on the situation, as reflected by Caroline Lucas and the majority of the party leadership in their statements since the motion passed.
There are actually significant parts of that political programme that I agree with. I support Palestinian liberation and freedom. I support ending the occupation. I support BDS, sanctions and an arms embargo against Israel. I support ending administrative detention and the release of people unjustly imprisoned. I support de-proscribing Palestine Action and releasing people imprisoned for non-violent pro-Palestinian direct action.
My objection isn’t that the party has become too uncompromising in its support of Palestinians. My problem is the point where criticism of particular governments, systems, forms of nationalism and actual conduct becomes the much broader proposition that “Zionism is racism”, and that proposition becomes an institutional political identity.
Zionism clearly isn’t one singular political belief. Historically it has contained religious, secular, socialist, liberal and nationalist traditions, alongside arguments ranging from exclusive Jewish statehood to forms of binational coexistence.
There are forms of Zionism I strongly oppose. If somebody believes Jewish people have a superior right to land, that Palestinians can legitimately be displaced, that settlements should continue expanding, or that ancient religious or historical claims entitle one population to dominate another, then I oppose those beliefs completely.
But somebody saying that Israel should continue to exist, or that Jewish people have some right to national self-determination, is not necessarily making the same political proposition.
It is also worth remembering that the UN General Assembly itself adopted the determination that “Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination” in 1975 through Resolution 3379, before formally revoking that determination in 1991 through Resolution 46/86.
That historical reversal obviously doesn’t prove that Zionism cannot take racist forms. But it should tell us that this is not some incredibly simple moral truth which nobody reasonable could ever have grounds to dispute.
Most of the world has experienced conquest, invasion, occupation, forced migration, colonisation or changing borders at some point in its history. Human history is incredibly messy.
The Nakba was a disgusting piece of history. Palestinian dispossession matters. The continuing occupation is disgusting. Somebody having their home or land taken from them today is not justifiable.
But I don’t think the answer to historical injustice can be that generations born afterwards inherit diminished human or political rights because of how the state they happened to be born into originally came into existence. If we applied that principle consistently, where would it stop? We would be reopening historical claims across huge parts of the world.
For me, the much more useful principle is to stop occupation now and prevent occupation in the future. Stop expanding settlements. Stop taking people’s homes. Stop creating refugees. Stop killing civilians. Stop creating another generation who will inherit another war.
Protect the people who are actually alive.
History should inform justice, but I don’t think humanity can progress if history becomes a permanent excuse to transfer collective guilt from one generation to another.
This is also why I cannot support the Green Party prescribing one Palestinian state across the whole territory. The policy says that everybody within that state should have equal rights, and that is important. It would be wrong to misrepresent it as simply demanding that Jewish Israelis be expelled.
But equal individual rights don’t completely answer the national question. The proposed outcome still means Palestinian national sovereignty across historic Palestine while Israel ceases to exist as a separate state. There are millions of Israeli people who were born there, grew up there, have families there and have no personal responsibility for the historical creation of Israel. What happens if the state they were born into is abolished? What happens if millions of them don’t consent to that constitutional settlement? How exactly do two populations with strong national identities, enormous collective trauma and a recent history of extreme violence get from where they are now to a single state without another period of war, coercion or displacement?
The destination is much clearer than the route.
A solution to Palestinian dispossession cannot simply ignore the possibility of Israeli dispossession.
I also find it uncomfortable that people in Britain, including plenty of white activists who will never personally experience the consequences, confidently deciding what the entire political settlement of Israelis and Palestinians should be.
We are supposed to be helping people find a route out of war. I don’t see how continually escalating absolute national claims from Britain necessarily helps with that.
This is one of the places where I agreed with Zack Polanski, who backed an amendment which would have removed the explicit commitment to one particular constitutional settlement. I think leaving the ultimate arrangement open rather than having the Green Party of England and Wales prescribe it was the more sensible position.
The process by which this became national policy is part of my concern too.
The Green Party had more than 230,000 members by June this year. The final vote on this motion was 1,022 in favour and 813 against, meaning 1,835 members cast a vote on it. Against the reported national membership, that is around 0.8% of the party. The number actually voting in favour was fewer than half of one per cent of the membership.
The European Green Party has itself now pointed out that the motion was backed by less than 1% of GPEW members.
That doesn't make the vote constitutionally invalid. Green conference is deliberately the party’s supreme decision-making forum, but that is also the structural problem.
A direct-democracy system only expresses the wider membership to the extent that the wider membership participates.
The quicker Britain relearns this, the better.
When participation is tiny, organisation and intensity begin to matter enormously.
Senior Greens were already examining the party’s policy-making structure months before this conference because the enormous growth in membership had made conference voting increasingly unrepresentative. The concern reported at the time was specifically that a system in which only conference attendees vote could give disproportionate influence to organised issue-specific groups, while attendance itself is self-selecting around who can travel, book accommodation and take time away from work.
The Green model is designed to prevent the leadership simply imposing policy on members. I like that principle. But it creates another vulnerability in the opposite direction: a sufficiently organised minority can potentially override not only the leadership and parliamentary party, but a huge passive majority of ordinary members who never vote at conference.
I was researching entryism and the conference voting system in January, but because my focus was mainly on the thought experiment that right-wingers could potentially infiltrate from other parties to sabotage the party I was blindsides to what feels like being flanked from the far left.
Greens for Palestine is not formally affiliated with the Green Party. However, The Guardian documented that it repeatedly encouraged supporters to join GPEW specifically so they could get this motion debated and then adopted at conference.
The Green Party responded that the vast majority of its recent membership growth occurred before that particular attempt at mobilisation and explicitly said that it does not support the views of the Anti-Zionist Movement, with which people involved in Greens for Palestine had collaborated.
I do not have evidence that the Green Party was somehow secretly “taken over”, and I don’t think it would be accurate to describe everybody who joined because of Palestine as an infiltrator. Joining a political party because you care intensely about an issue is completely legitimate political participation. But I do think there is a genuine grey area here.
As far as I can establish from the party constitution, there is no qualifying membership period before an ordinary paid-up member can attend conference and vote on policy. The rule is simply that paid-up members are eligible. Organising large numbers of members around a particular policy is not prohibited either. Individually, both rules are understandable and democratic. Together with very low conference participation, however, they create an obvious opportunity.
An organised issue-specific network does not need to persuade anything close to the entire Green Party membership. It needs enough motivated people to join, get a motion high enough in the priority ballot, attend conference and form a majority among the relatively tiny electorate that actually votes when the motion is called. That may all happen within the rules, but something being procedurally legitimate does not automatically make the outcome broadly representative.
This is the part I think deserves much more scrutiny than simply saying “conference voted democratically”.
What exists to prevent a leadership overriding grassroots members can allow a highly mobilised grassroots faction to override the preferences of much of the parliamentary party and potentially a very large passive majority of the membership. That is a major governance problem for a party that has grown from around 68,000 members to more than 230,000 in roughly a year while retaining structures designed for a much smaller organisation.
And in this particular case, the group campaigning for the policy openly encouraged joining the party specifically to advance it. That's a structural grey area between ordinary democratic mobilisation and entryism, made much more consequential by a policy system in which fewer than one per cent of members can determine national policy.
Something else I find important is that this new position does not appear to represent some inevitable international Green consensus.
The European Green Party, of which GPEW is a member, had already contacted the party before the vote to express what its co-chair Ciarán Cuffe described as “deep concern”. After the motion passed, he said it was “not aligned with agreed EGP positions” and that the European Greens would seek discussions with the GPEW leadership and parliamentary group about Israeli and Jewish self-determination and protection of Jewish party members.
The agreed European Green position is materially different. It recognises the right to self-determination of both Palestinians and Israelis and supports recognition of a Palestinian state as part of a two-state political settlement. That matters because it means I haven’t simply found myself objecting to where Green politics everywhere has naturally arrived. The wider European Green family is itself questioning what has happened here.
The United States Green Party is an interesting comparison, though. The US Greens are, constitutionally, much closer to GPEW’s new position than the European Greens. They support one secular democratic state between the Mediterranean and Jordan with Jerusalem as its capital. But even there the wording is noticeably different.
The US Greens describe that state as the national home of both peoples. Their platform explicitly reaffirms the right to self-determination of both Palestinians and Israelis, says all residents should have equal rights and freedoms, and states that US Greens refuse to impose their own views on the people of the region.
So even a Green party which already supports a one-state constitutional settlement retains language around two peoples and two rights to self-determination.
I also have not found the US Green Party adopting the additional GPEW proposition that Zionism itself should be formally treated as racism through the party’s anti-racist machinery.
The US comparison interests me for another reason.
For years I have become increasingly sceptical about how much American political culture flows into the British political zeitgeist.
Since Trumpism in particular, American political argument seems to have become extraordinarily culturally dominant.
US politics is structurally binary in a way ours historically hasn’t been to the same degree. Two enormous political camps increasingly behave not merely as competing electoral coalitions but as opposing identities. Political questions become cultural signals about which side somebody belongs to. Politics becomes identity. Identity creates its opposing identity. Complicated questions become moral binaries and then everybody is asked which side they are on.
Zionist or anti-Zionist. Oppressor or oppressed. Left or right. Good person or bad person.
Sometimes those distinctions describe something real. They are terrible substitutes for investigating history, systems, competing rights and actual behaviour.
I increasingly wonder whether parts of the British political zeitgeist are absorbing the dogmatic, binary style of American politics even where the actual subject has almost nothing to do with America. There is something slightly ironic about the fact that, on this particular issue, even the US Green Party seems to preserve more explicit space for the rights and self-determination of both populations than the policy just adopted by GPEW.
I still find myself strongly drawn to many Green politicians.
Caroline Lucas opposed the motion. So did several current Green MPs and senior figures, including people whose politics helped draw me towards the party in the first place.
Caroline Lucas has spent years supporting Palestine and strongly criticising Israeli governments. Ellie Chowns has taken strong positions on Palestine. Siân Berry, Carla Denyer and Adrian Ramsay are hardly representatives of a timid centre-right interpretation of Green politics.
Their disagreement demonstrates something: you can be deeply pro-Palestinian, opposed to occupation and fiercely critical of Israel without concluding that “Zionism is racism” should become party doctrine.
And the list of politicians I find myself drawn to increasingly ignores party boundaries anyway.
There’s Caroline Lucas, Siân Berry, Zoë Garbett, Zack Polanski and Ellie Chowns within Green politics. Then there’s Jeremy Corbyn. Locally, I have a lot of time for Jess Brown-Fuller in Chichester despite her being a Liberal Democrat.
They don’t all agree with one another. I don’t agree with any of them about everything. So maybe I’m increasingly finding myself politician-led and principle-led rather than party-led.
I.e. maybe I'll only vote Green locally now if I know the politics of the councillor or MP inside out and trust them enough regardless of party affiliation.
None of this means I want Green leaders to acquire the power simply to veto conference whenever they dislike the result.
I believe strongly in party democracy. If anything, the Green Party’s unusually strong commitment to grassroots democracy is one of the things I have always respected about it.
But democracy is not merely the existence of a vote. Representation, participation and the design of the electorate matter too. A vote in which around 0.8% of the membership participates is democratic according to the rules, but it does not follow that it captures the considered view of the whole membership.
On the left we criticise FPTP voting and mostly opt for proportionate representation - but this weekend Green Party themselves have demonstrated where voting itself is a problem, if not properly accessible by every member.
The quicker we get to some sort of "blockchain" ledger-based voting system, the better.
That distinction becomes particularly important when organised factions understand the rules better, care much more intensely about one issue and can mobilise supporters around attending the forum where policy is actually decided.
The parliamentary leadership can be elected by tens or hundreds of thousands of members, yet a comparatively tiny conference electorate can establish national policy against the position of most of those elected representatives.
I was particularly uncomfortable with the rejection of an amendment intended to ensure that members were not pressured or disciplined merely because they belonged to Jewish organisations, synagogues or other institutions which identify as Zionist.
The argument against the amendment was that existing party processes already protected people and that the motion itself did not create disciplinary procedures.
If a political party is going to classify Zionism as racism while knowing that many Jewish people use the word much more broadly than support for Netanyahu, occupation or settlements, I don’t understand why explicitly protecting Jewish members who have committed no racist act should be difficult. If they genuinely were never supposed to be the target, saying so should have been easy. Instead, the safeguard failed.
That concerns me because the party has not merely decided to condemn certain Israeli policies. It has chosen an explicitly anti-Zionist political identity and committed itself to expressing that opposition internally and externally.
That isn't the political culture I want.
Then there was the chanting after the vote.
Supporters were filmed chanting: “Say it loud, say it clear, Zionists are not welcome here.”
That made me deeply uncomfortable.
I find political chanting uncomfortable in general, and I think part of that comes from the historical image I cannot entirely separate from it: mass political crowds chanting “Sieg Heil”.
Obviously I am not saying that people chanting at Green Party conference are Nazis, or that an ordinary protest chant is morally equivalent to Nazism.
What unsettles me is a large crowd repeating exactly the same words, at exactly the same rhythm, until the individual voice begins to disappear into a collective one. The complexity of whatever is being discussed has to be compressed into something simple enough for everybody to shout together. This, by design, is about using the collective power of a simplified idea to shrink a smaller group, or person. It's akin to bullying.
The most extreme historical examples show where that mechanism can go when collective identity becomes more important than individual judgement. That makes me instinctively wary of it even when I broadly agree with the political cause behind a protest.
In this particular case:
Once a politically and historically complicated category becomes something a crowd can chant about as a group of people who are “not welcome”, those distinctions disappear very quickly.
There is an interesting continuity here because when I joined the Green Party I specifically wrote that Jeremy Corbyn was hugely missed from mainstream politics.
I don’t agree with Corbyn about everything, but he remains one of the British political figures whose instincts I repeatedly find myself coming back towards. And, as usual, I seem to land fairly close to him on this too.
Corbyn has spent decades supporting Palestinians and heavily criticising Israeli governments. Yet in 2018 he explicitly wrote that some on the left had argued “Zionism is racism” and that “That was wrong”, while also saying that asserting “anti-Zionism is racism” was wrong.
Neither Zionism nor anti-Zionism should work as a magic word which tells us whether somebody is morally good or bad. Ask what they actually believe. Look at what governments actually do. Look at occupation, law, land, violence, discrimination, wealth and material power. Judge conduct and systems rather than trying to derive somebody’s entire moral character from an ideological label.
Obviously reading the Old Testament doesn’t prove whether I am or am not a Zionist. Zionism is a modern political movement and has had plenty of completely secular forms. But I have spent a lot of time actually engaging with the religious history, moral claims and ideas around covenant, chosen people, land and divine entitlement which form part of the deeper background to this conflict. A lot of it conflicts very strongly with my ethics. I don’t believe an ancient religious text gives a modern population an overriding moral entitlement to remove another population from the place where they live. But actually reading and trying to understand those traditions has also made me less comfortable with people treating Judaism, Jewish identity, Zionism, Israeli identity, religious nationalism, the Israeli state and the Netanyahu government as if they are all one interchangeable thing.
Understanding a belief doesn't mean agreeing with it. But I think people should at least make a serious attempt to understand what they are arguing against.
My politics are much more concerned with the people and systems which actually hold disproportionate power over everybody else: extreme wealth, concentrated ownership of land, landlordism, financialisation, corporate ownership of basic infrastructure and an economic system which allows a very small number of people to accumulate more wealth and productive capacity than they could ever personally need.
People and institutions with enough ownership of capital, land, property, corporations, infrastructure, media or financial systems that they gain disproportionate power over the conditions in which everybody else has to live.
We don’t need conspiracy theories to establish that concentrated economic power exists. We can look at who owns land. We can look at corporate ownership. We can look at wealth concentration, lobbying, monopolies, landlord portfolios and political donations. The structure is already visible.
Some people will argue that Zionism itself sits somewhere inside a wider system of elite control. That idea is certainly circulating heavily in the current zeitgeist, and it can slide very quickly into very old conspiratorial ideas about Jewish power.
My answer is: attack the system.
If somebody has excessive political power because they control enormous quantities of capital, break up concentrated capital.
If somebody can control the homes of thousands of people because they own vast amounts of property, change the ownership structure of land and housing.
If corporations control basic utilities because governments sold them, bring essential infrastructure back into public or common ownership.
If extreme wealth can purchase political access, remove politics which allow wealth to become political power.
It matters very little to me whether somebody benefiting from that system is Jewish, Christian, Muslim, atheist, British, Israeli, American, Russian, aristocracy or anything else.
Take away the economic machinery which creates oligarchic power and the oligarch loses that power, whoever they are.
In war, you don’t defeat an opponent simply by naming the individual soldiers. Armies depend upon supply lines, resources and infrastructure. Historically, destroying those systems could leave an enemy unable to continue fighting. I think the useful political equivalent is entirely structural and non-violent.
Don’t obsess over the identity of every individual powerful person. Dismantle the infrastructure which continually allows extreme wealth to reproduce extreme power.
If concentrated capital is the supply line, cut the supply line.
I keep coming back to an incredibly simple idea of what people should actually need in order to live a good material life.
A modest home, a modest bit of land, enough food, clean water, energy, healthcare and education. Somewhere to grow something. The ability to make and repair things. Useful work. Creative work. People around you. Enough security that you have some actual time to be alive.
If I suddenly had enormous amounts of money, my own idea of wealth really isn’t complicated. I would want my own piece of land, a home full of love, my garden, somewhere to grow food, somewhere to make music, somewhere to train, and enough security that most of my energy could go into nurturing those things rather than continually earning permission to exist.
Scale that principle outward and it becomes political.
Why should that modest level of material independence be so difficult for ordinary people to obtain?
We have created a society where somebody can spend decades working and still be unable to afford a small patch of land, while another person or corporation can own hundreds or thousands of properties.
People give enormous amounts of their waking lives to generating wealth for somebody else, then hand another large portion of what they receive to somebody else for permission to occupy part of a building.
Land is investment. Homes are investments. Food is an industry. Energy is a product. Attention is a product.
Nearly every basic condition of being alive ends up mediated through somebody else’s ownership.
That is what increasingly feels fundamentally wrong to me.
There is something Eden-like about the alternative, symbolically. People having enough, nurturing their own patch of soil, living close enough to nature to understand where food actually comes from.
Communities where useful work has some connection to maintaining life.
Enough material security that family, friendship, creativity, thought, spirituality and idleness can actually exist.
The elite and the economic system which sustains them keep most of us far, far away from that kind of life.
That feels much closer to the political struggle I actually want to spend my energy on.
I want housing, food, healthcare, energy, water, transport and education to be treated as basic social foundations rather than things people continually have to earn access to.
I want limits on extreme wealth and much less concentration of land. I want major infrastructure in common or public ownership.
I want everybody to possess enough productive capacity to participate meaningfully in maintaining their own life.
Where communism has historically gone wrong is trying to manage all of that at state level (and then that state being run by dictators).
This recent exposure of how democracy can itself go wrong puts a new spanner in the works.
A successful anti-capitalist world means resources for all needs to be managed in a way where there are no state-induced fuck-ups like famine etc. That means the state needs to be incredibly good at ensuring quality of life for all of its citizens. How do we create this incredibly "near perfect" state and democratically elected leadership and administration of it?
I don’t really want a giant central authority micromanaging how everybody lives, a la communism or capitalism 2.0.
At the same time, I am not anti-establishment in some absolute sense. Healthcare, transport, water, energy, waste systems, defence and other genuinely large-scale infrastructure need coordination, standards and long-term planning.
I want power distributed downwards. I want strong local communities. I want people to have autonomy over their homes, gardens, work, relationships, creative lives and contributions.
Some of the numbers and structures I have previously written down while trying to work this philosophy out were thought experiments rather than finished policies. The underlying principle is much more important. Everybody should have enough, and everybody should have some meaningful access to the productive world rather than everything important being owned above them.
As always, it's some sort hybrid.
Universal provision at the large scale and local autonomy at the human scale.
Collective ownership where genuine collective infrastructure is required, and personal stewardship where people can reasonably govern their own lives.
Markets can exist beyond basic needs (to gamify life), but nobody’s survival should depend upon succeeding inside one.
People should be able to work, create, invent, garden, build businesses, make art, sing together, drink local beer and wine in the community pub, study or contribute to their community because they actually want to develop something, rather than because it has the potential to make profit.
Maybe it's libertarian socialism. Maybe it's "participatory post-capitalism". Maybe it's "decentralised eco-socialism". Maybe parts of it are anarchistic. Maybe it is communism but not communism.
I’m becoming less interested in getting the label exactly right. The Green Party I was proud to be a part of cared about these things, and if it wasn't for one very serious policy change, this could still be an ideal I could explore with that party.
This is also why the sheer amount of political energy being poured into ideological labels such as Zionism feels strange to me.
Palestine matters enormously. So does anti-war, anti-occupation, anti-ethnic-cleansing, anti-genocide and anti-apartheid. But "anti-[type of identity]" (besides obviously self-proscribed hateful labels -i.e. terrorists) is not something I want to proscribe to.
The economic systems shaping the lives of billions of people every single day are my enemy.
Capital concentration. Housing. Land. Work. Food. Energy. Climate. Ownership. Whether somebody can afford children. Whether somebody ever owns a home. Whether somebody spends most of their waking life doing something they dislike because otherwise they lose access to shelter. Whether enormous corporations have more influence over governments than ordinary citizens. Whether wealth becomes power and that power then protects the wealth.
Those questions feel foundational to me. These are my political focus.
So when a political movement puts enormous energy into deciding who qualifies as a Zionist and whether that ideological identity itself constitutes racism, I start wondering whether we are looking at the right level of the system.
Even if somebody were convinced that a particular network of wealthy Zionists held disproportionate political power, my answer would remain exactly the same. Destroy the economic mechanisms which allow any network of wealthy people to hold disproportionate power. Then you don’t need to spend your life speculating about the identity of the puppeteers, you’ve removed the strings.
I may be becoming more politically independent in the literal sense. Not politically neutral. I clearly am not. I still have strong ideological commitments. Equality matters enormously to me. I remain firmly left-wing in the eco-socialist respect. I want wealth and power distributed much more evenly. I want capitalism substantially dismantled or transformed. I want serious environmental protection and a society organised around human and ecological wellbeing rather than perpetual economic growth.
But I am not less interested in accepting a package of beliefs because they belong to the political tribe I currently happen to identify with.
So, now I ask, on a person-by-person basis:
Those questions increasingly matter more to me than whether somebody has the correct colour rosette.
This is ultimately where I land on leaving the Greens.
It is true that individual Green MPs and councillors don’t have to endorse every item of party policy.
But there comes a point where that distinction stops being particularly useful for me.
“Zionism is racism” is now a prominent national Green Party position. If I tell somebody I am a Green member, I would now reasonably expect to have to explain that I disagree strongly with one of the party’s most controversial policies.
I don’t want membership to work like that.
Voting is different. I will vote because I believe strongly in democracy. Sometimes that means voting for somebody while disagreeing with substantial parts of their party’s programme because an election involves choosing between the actual options available.
A vote doesn’t mean I have wholehearted loyalty towards everything attached to it, but membership means more to me.
When I joined the Green Party, I voluntarily put my name behind the organisation. I paid into it. I joined the local party. I offered my skills and genuinely wanted to help build it. That requires some meaningful level of political identification.
I already disagreed with Green policies when I joined. My original joining email explicitly said so, and I thought joining was precisely how I could participate in influencing those disagreements. But there is a difference between disagreeing with some policies and beginning to feel that the wider political culture is moving somewhere I don’t want to follow.
Leaving the Green Party doesn’t mean I have suddenly rejected Green politics.
I still respect many Green politicians. I still support huge areas of Green policy. I will still vote for Green candidates when I think they are the right person to represent me, and I will still support Green campaigns when I believe they are right.
I remain strongly supportive of Palestinian rights too.
What has changed is my willingness to let a political party function as shorthand for my worldview.
The left I want is radical, but it also needs enough discipline to question itself. It needs to be able to run Chesterton's Fence analysis and understand causation and casualties. It should understand systems rather than simply identify enemies. It should be capable of holding historical injustice and present human rights in the same thought. It should apply compassion universally, including when doing so complicates the slogan.
And it should be suspicious of crowd certainty.
Losing the individual inside the crowd is something we should always be careful of.
I also don’t know that this has to be a permanent exit. When I replied to my local party coordinator today, I told her I hoped it wasn’t permanent, but that as things stand I cannot represent a party with a policy like this.
Perhaps leaving the Green Party is therefore less about abandoning a political home forever and more about accepting that, at least for now, I may not need one.
I joined because I wanted to help build a stronger, more courageous left. I still do. I’m just increasingly interested in building my politics from first principles, then judging parties and politicians against those principles, rather than choosing a party and gradually allowing it to tell me what those principles are.