PB February-March 2026
February-March 2026 79
Massive Zack Attack
Britain’s Eco-Populist aiming to
replace dismal Labour
S
ix months ago Zack Polanski
was a lively London Assembly
member known mainly for
his theatre background and a
tabloid humiliation involving
“hypnoboobs”.
Today he is the most disruptive figure in
British left politics: a 43-year-old gay Jewish
vegan who has taken the Green Party —
traditionally an amiable chorus on the
sidelines — and turned it into an insurgent
vehicle with ambitions to replace Labour
in the country’s cities; and with, according
to YouGov, an extraordinary 40% of angry
support from Britain’s 18-24-year-olds —
almost twice the proportion who said they
were for Labour.
Polanski, born David Paulden in Salford
in 1982, comes from a family whose Eastern
European Jewish name was anglicised
to evade antisemitism; at 18 he took the
name back, choosing “Zack” partly to break
with a disliked stepfather. He revels in
the narrative of his upbringing: divorced
parents, a scholarship place at Stockport
Grammar, drama school in Aberystwyth and
then Georgia, USA. The American South,
where he encountered explicit racism and
homophobia, changed him.
He moved to London in the mid-2000s,
working in immersive theatre and teaching
at ALRA and the National Centre for Circus
Arts. He worked as a carer and as a bouncer
in LGPT nightclubs in Manchester. He also,
impressively, practised hypnotherapy. In
2013 a Sun journalist approached him for
a session framed as “breast enlargement
hypnosis” and Zack allegedly said he could
deliver. But, of course, he couldn’t.
His early politics were not Green but Liberal
Democrat. He joined the party in 2015, stood
in Camden, heckled Jeremy Corbyn at a
Momentum rally for being too soft on Europe,
and briefly imagined himself climbing the Lib
Dem ladder. When the party rejected him as
a candidate in the 2016 Richmond Park by-
election, a decision he attributed to localism
and, with some bitterness, a lack of interest
in what a “gay Jewish renter” could bring, he
pivoted. After an encounter with former Green
leader Natalie Bennett, he defected in 2017.
From there the transformation was rapid:
Green parliamentary candidate in 2019,
Jewish Greens treasurer, Extinction Rebellion
arrestee in 2019, London Assembly member
in 2021, national deputy leader in 2022. By
the time he announced his 2025 leadership
bid, the Greens’ long stagnation — “too nice”,
as Bennett put it — had reached the breaking
point the now-unipoplar Irish Green Party has
yet to acknowledge.
Polanski supplied the missing ingredient:
theatre.
He is a fluent, emotive communicator
moulded to the modern attention economy.
Videos filmed on pavements about wealth
taxes, corporate power, Gaza, or the
failures of Starmerism ricochet across social
media. His diagnosis of Britain’s malaise is
unembarrassedly populist: a super-rich élite
destroys lives and the climate, and a political
class is too timid or captured to intervene.
He calls it “eco-populism” and “substance
with clickbait”: the climate crisis framed as a
struggle between communities and oligarchs,
not between conscientious individuals and
their carbon footprints.
His enemies call it simplistic. Rory Stewart
in the Rest is Politics podcast was furious
when he appeared not to know the dierence
between debt and deficit or to cite serious
economists as his influences. But Stewart
is an avatar of visionless and deferential
economic incrementalism.
Polanski won the 2025 Green leadership
with 85 per cent of the vote, flattening
the party’s parliamentary leadership and
detonating decades of Green allergy to
charismatic single personages. Under
him, membership surged past 100,000
and — by late January — 190,000, drawing
in disillusioned Labour supporters, young
renters, and assorted casualties of the post-
Starmer left. Labour MPs now worry privately
that he could reproduce Farage’s eect on the
Tories, but from the left.“While I may even
agree with Nigel Farage’s diagnosis of the
problems, it’s very clear that he doesn’t really
intend to do anything about those things”.
Polanski has somewhat confusingly said.
Polanski insists the Greens are not there
to pressurise Labour but to replace it. He
attacks austerity, privatisation, the billionaire
class, NATO militarism, and the genocide in
Gaza. And, unlike Labour, he names villains
— oligarchs, corporations, party donors —
without euphemism. Whether this is strategy
or instinct is irrelevant: it is working.
Polanski’s flagship policy is a wealth tax:
1% annually on assets over £10 million, and
2% above £1 billion. “If someone with half
of Mayfair won’t contribute 1%”, he argues,
“they should ask why”. The point is not just
revenue it is to dramatise a national reckoning
with accumulated privilege.
He would equalise capital gains and
income tax and rebuild public services
on Scandinavian lines. But he insists this
conversation can only occur after inequality
is radically reduced; conveniently, until
then, higher universal taxation is politically
impossible.
On infrastructure, Polanski calls for
renationalisation of water companies and
core utilities, describing privatised water
as “an extraction machine disguised as a
public service”. His climate policy rejects
the allegedly individual-blaming orthodoxy
of Westminster net-zero, indeed sometimes
it is not clear if he rejects net-zero itself: he
attacks heat-pump moralism, flight-shaming
and “behavioural nudging” when rail fares
remain extortionate and the government
subsidises polluting industries. It’s epochally
un-negative. He demands an immediate
ban on arms sales to Israel, recognition of
its genocide, and a long-term transition
away from NATO toward a Europe-centred
diplomatic security architecture.
He champions drug policy based on
public health, not policing, rent controls,
proportional representation, and the
abolition of the House of Lords. The through-
line is consistent: confront concentrations
of power, whether landlords, oligopolies,
militaries or media barons. It happens to be
working.
PROFILE: Zack Polanski: substance with clickbait
INTERNATIONAL
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