The influx of members points to Polanski’s apparent ability to galvanise attention and enthusiasm for a party that has often struggled to get its message across. Photograph: Finnbarr Webster/Getty Images
Green party in England and Wales has had near-50% rise in membership since Zack Polanski took over last month
The Greens in England and Wales have more than 100,000 members for the first time, the party has announced, a near-50% rise since Zack Polanski took over as leader last month.
It puts them on a potential course to overtake the Conservatives and comes little more than a week after the Greens announced they had moved past the Liberal Democrats in membership numbers, getting to 83,500.
If the same momentum continues, party officials say, they could be on course to become bigger than the Conservatives. Tory party membership figures are not made public, but recent reports say the total is slightly above 120,000.
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The Greens’ surge has caused worries among some senior Labour figures, who believe it could take votes and seats from the party in next May’s local elections in England, particularly in some London boroughs.
Polanski has repeatedly set out what he sees as the Greens’ ambition to supplant Labour. In a speech this month to the party’s annual conference, he said that without action Keir Starmer would “hand this country on a plate” to Reform UK.
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Nigel Farage meets members of the public during campaigning in Caerphilly, south Wales. Photograph: Ben Birchall/PA
Farage said he was shocked by Nathan Gill’s admissions relating to pro-Russia statements
Nigel Farage has insisted his party’s former leader in Wales who was convicted of taking pro-Russian bribes was a “bad apple” who betrayed him.
The Reform UK leader was in Caerphilly campaigning for his candidate in a forthcoming Senedd byelection when he was asked about his links to Nathan Gill.
Gill, who led Reform UK in Wales in 2021, last month admitted taking bribes to make statements in favour of Vladimir Putin’s Russia while he was a member of the European parliament.
His activities were said to include making pro-Russian statements about events in Ukraine in the European parliament and in opinion pieces to news outlets.
Questioned by reporters before walking through Caerphilly town centre, Farage said he was shocked by Gill’s admissions. He said: “Any political party can find in their midst all sorts of terrible people.
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Gill, 52, pleaded guilty last month to eight counts of bribery between 6 December 2018 and 18 July 2019.
He was leader of Reform UK Wales from March to May 2021.
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The BBC’s decision to scrap a planned Zack Polanski interview on the channel’s flagship Laura Kuenssberg show has caused fury within the Green Party
The BBC’s decision to cancel a planned conference interview with new Green leader Zack Polanski on the Laura Kuenssberg show on Sunday has caused fury within the party.
As I report today for Byline Times, the decision to scrap the interview came after the show also refused to have him on last month, following his election as party leader, choosing to instead invite Nigel Farage.
Green party sources are particularly furious with the reason they were given for this week’s cancellation, which is that the show needed more time to cover the Manchester synagogue terror attack.
This is particularly galling for Polanski, who is both Jewish and from Manchester, and yet was denied his chance to have his voice heard.
Polanski suggested on social media that the decision to cancel may have been due to his position on Gaza. The BBC declined to comment on their reason, saying only that he had been interviewed elsewhere on the BBC during the Green party conference and would be invited on the show in “the coming weeks”.
However, it is not the first time that the BBC has been accused of ignoring the Greens and others on the left of British politics.
Nigel Farage urges you to ignore facts and reality and be a climate science denier like him. He says that Reform UK has received £Millions and £Millions from the fossil fuel industry to promote climate denial and destroy the planet.
In the mid-2000s, soon after becoming Conservative leader, David Cameron hugged a husky on a trip to the Arctic, in what was widely described as an attempt to “detoxify” the Tory brand. Eighteen years later, Kemi Badenoch has promised to scrap the law that once made that rebranding credible.
Her announcement that the Conservatives will repeal the 2008 Climate Change Act if they win the next general election has the potential to be a major own goal – politically, environmentally and economically.
To understand why, we need to remember how the Climate Change Act came about. The bill was put forward by the Labour government of Gordon Brown, but it had enthusiastic support from the Conservative opposition, which tabled several amendments to strengthen it. Cameron had concluded that green policies were a good way to modernise his party and lead it back into power.
It worked, both for Cameron, who became prime minister in 2010, and for UK climate policy, which has enjoyed a unique period of consensus and stability. Over seven governments, multiple economic crises, Brexit, COVID-19 and the war in Ukraine, there has been clarity about Britain’s climate change objectives. Policies were chopped and changed, often to the frustration of investors, but the institutional framework was stable and widely appreciated.
The Climate Change Act gives the UK a statutory long-term emissions target – initially an 80% cut from 1990 levels by 2050, strengthened to net zero by 2050 by Theresa May, another Tory prime minister.
Progress is managed through a series of five-year carbon budgets, legislated 12 years in advance and monitored by a powerful independent body, the Climate Change Committee (CCC). For much of its existence, the CCC has been chaired by yet another environmentally-minded Tory, Lord Deben (John Gummer). It is this framework the Conservatives now say they want to dismantle.
Husky hugger David Cameron visits Svalbard, Norway, in 2008. Andrew Parsons / PA
Yet the Climate Change Act has delivered, both in terms of process and substance. Indeed, the UK model has been emulated around the world. Nearly 60 countries have UK-style climate change laws and over 20 countries have CCC-style advisory bodies, cementing the UK’s position as a climate leader.
The act gives the UK a steady institutional rhythm. Relevant businesses and other organisations know the formal set pieces, such as the CCC’s annual report to parliament, and can time their interventions accordingly.
When colleagues and I interviewed people from business and civil society about the act a few years ago, they emphasised the predictable process, the clear rules on accountability and the evidence-based discourse it has enabled. This all reduces uncertainty and enables long-term planning.
Importantly, the Climate Change Act has delivered environmentally too. Compared to 1990, UK greenhouse gas emissions are down by 50%. The UK economy now uses three times less carbon per unit of economic output than in 1990. Emissions are at their lowest level since 1872.
This trend started before the act, but it was helped and accelerated by it. This is perhaps most noticeable in the radical transformation of the electricity sector: coal has been completely phased out, while offshore wind and other renewables have flourished.
Most people want climate action
Voters value this progress more than politicians appreciate. A University of Oxford survey found that internationally public support for climate action is almost twice as high as policymakers assume. In the UK, three out of four people are fairly or very concerned about climate change.
Badenoch’s announcement comes just as households are starting to reap the financial benefits of clean technology. Colleagues and I have estimated that four out of five UK households, particularly those owning a car, would be better off if net zero was achieved. The typical savings are £100-£380 per household and year.
It is true that households do not yet see the benefits of renewables on their energy bills. We are still paying for the high costs of early investments in clean power, before technology and sheer scale brought the price down.
Successive governments have chosen to recoup these learning costs through electricity bills, rather than general taxation, which would have been easier on most households. But recent analysis suggests renewables are now cutting electricity prices by up to a quarter.
The policy uncertainty generated by the Tory announcement and similar pronouncements by Reform UK will eventually find its way into the risk premiums for investors, though for the time being this effect is still small.
But the reputational damage is immediate. Undoing the act would signal that the UK no longer values the long-term stability that has driven clean investment and made its climate policy admired around the world.
Climate policy requires debate. Deeply political choices need to be made about different decarbonisation strategies, how to pay for necessary investments or the role of controversial technologies like nuclear energy. The past 17 years have shown that these debates are best had within an agreed framework, with support from all major parties. That is what the Climate Change Act provides.
UK Conservative Party leader Kemi ‘not a genocide’ Badenoch explains her reality that the Earth is flat, the Moon is made of cheese and that she was born from
Unicorn horn dustNigel Farage urges you to ignore facts and reality and be a climate science denier like him. He says that Reform UK has received £Millions and £Millions from the fossil fuel industry to promote climate denial and destroy the planet.Orcas discuss how Trump was re-elected and him being an obviously insane, xenophobic Fascist.
To keep global warming below 1.5°C, greenhouse gas emissions had to peak no later than 2025. That was a key finding of the IPCC’s most recent major report on the topic, published a few years ago. Yet when we surveyed UK MPs and members of the public in four countries, fewer than 15% could identify this deadline correctly.
This matters. If politicians and voters underestimate how urgently we have to fight climate change, they are less likely to back the tough policies needed. Instead, they risk assuming we have more time, all while climate change targets slip further out of reach.
Our study, published in the journal Communications Earth and Environment, found that across Britain, Canada, Chile and Germany, about one-third of respondents thought emissions only had to peak by 2040 or later. In the UK, we also surveyed MPs. We found Labour politicians were more likely than Conservatives to answer correctly, but overall awareness was low in both groups.
Among the public, younger people, those worried about climate change, and those less prone to believing conspiracy theories were the most likely to know the right answer. But overall, the pattern was clear: most people – and most MPs – don’t grasp the urgency of the situation.
The distribution of responses was remarkably similar across the four countries. Kenny and Geese (2025)
Why awareness matters
Knowing the scientific facts does not automatically spur action. But political priorities are shaped by what MPs or their constituents consider as urgent (MPs sometimes cite a lack of urgency from constituents as an excuse for not taking climate actions even when they are concerned about it).
If neither MPs nor their voters realise how pressing the problem is, climate change risks being overlooked in favour of other issues. That MPs were largely not aware that much more immediate action was required may help explain why, by mid-2024, the UK was already behind the pace required to meet its own emissions reduction targets.
Partisan divides reinforce the problem. In our survey, 2019 Labour voters were more likely to know the correct 2025 deadline than those who voted Conservative. Political differences in knowledge were greater than the gap between MPs and the public, suggesting that party identity or political ideology, not just parliamentary expertise, is a factor in level of awareness.
Many of those Conservative MPs were replaced by new Labour MPs in the 2024 election, so perhaps a repeat survey today would show greater awareness of climate change among parliamentarians. But even Labour MPs are still not very likely to appreciate the urgency.
Labour-Tory was a bigger divide than public-politician. Kenny and Geese (2025)
The communication challenge
The IPCC and other big institutions produce authoritative reports, but they are not always written in a manner accessible to non-specialists. Policymakers are inundated with these reports and are expected to absorb huge amounts of information, digest it, and act on it. Crucial findings can get lost in the detail. If the urgency of climate action is not communicated clearly and memorably, it is less likely to be a factor in forming policy.
In the UK, scientists have long made “global greenhouse gases need to peak by 2025 for 1.5°C” a centrepiece of public and political communications. For example, it is there in the slogan of the Tyndall Centre, the major climate research hub where we work, that this is a Critical Decade for Climate Action.
But our findings suggest this message is not cutting through, with either politicians or the public. If deadlines are misunderstood, policies will inevitably not go far enough.
Make timelines impossible to ignore
The science is clear: emissions really did need to peak this year for a chance of staying within 1.5°C. A number of studies suggest this target is now effectivelyunreachable given the lack of substantial progress in recent years, but the urgency remains.
To close the gap between science and politics, communications must be sharper. Reports need to highlight timelines and consequences in ways that are impossible to ignore. Politicians and the public need to understand not just the scale of the climate crisis, but how immediate it is.
John Kenny, Research Fellow (Public Engagement with Climate Change), School of Environmental Sciences, University of East Anglia and Lucas Geese, Research Fellow, Tyndall Centre and School of Environmental Sciences, University of East Anglia
UK Conservative Party leader Kemi ‘not a genocide’ Badenoch explains her reality that the Earth is flat, the Moon is made of cheese and that she was born from
Unicorn horn dustNigel Farage urges you to ignore facts and reality and be a climate science denier like him. He says that Reform UK has received £Millions and £Millions from the fossil fuel industry to promote climate denial and destroy the planet.Orcas discuss how Trump was re-elected and him being an obviously insane, xenophobic Fascist.
