Times Editorial on the Green Party: The Have Yachts v The Have Nots
Its unusual for the Times to publish an Editorial on anything even vaguely on the left without rubbishing. Its Editorial on the Green Party (22nd October) is an exception.
It paints the new Green Party leader (and Beard of Autumn 2025 winner) Zack Polanski as a maverick, relatively new to radical politics. In doing so it unsurprisingly displays a lack of knowledge of radical history.
Parallels are never exact but the figure of GWM Reynolds comes to mind. Reynolds was a writer of successful popular novels, who declared himself a Chartist in 1848 and went on to found the Sunday newspaper Reynolds’s News. In the late Victorian period it was the biggest selling paper in Britain. It carried a mixture of sex scandals, crime stories, virulent attacks on the monarchy and aristocracy and radical and left politics. In short it was a radical populist paper in modern terms.
The Times of course regards Polanski’s policies as impractical at best, but notes a challenge to Farage on the left. The Greens now have more members than the Tories and without question therefore many more active members than the Tories. The appeal as the Times, unusually correctly notes, is particularly towards younger people who cannot afford to buy a home and are stuck in jobs where wages don’t keep pace with the cost of living.
Will the Times allow an Op-Ed to rubbish their own editorial? It’s not beyond possibility