polanski's chance
By grace wilson · 21st august 2026 · 9 min read· image: flickr.com
The Green Party’s support has increased considerably since the 2024 general election. The latest YouGov poll puts the party on 13% compared with the 6.7% it received at the last election. But looking at the national figure alone does not tell us much about where those votes could translate into seats. FPW’s forecast gives the Greens six seats. More interestingly, it shows that their support is spread across a much larger number of constituencies. The party is forecast to receive at least 10% in 443 constituencies, 20% in 43 and more than 30% in nine. It is also forecast to finish second in 53 constituencies.
The scale of that support is notable, particularly when compared with the four seats the Greens won in 2024. That election was the party’s best, yet despite winning four MP’s, the Greens only secured 6.7% of the national vote. The current numbers look different. The Greens are now polling at almost twice their 2024 vote share, and their support appears across a much larger section of the electoral map. The party is no longer dependent on the handful of constituencies where it has historically performed best.
The geography remains fairly familiar. Green support is strongest in urban and metropolitan areas, with London recording the highest average vote share change at around 16%, while Bristol and Brighton are also among the more established areas of Green support. That fits the party’s wider electorate. Younger voters are considerably more receptive to the Greens than older voters, with YouGov finding that 36% of 12-24-year-olds would consider voting Green, compared with 15% of 50-64-year-olds. This is why cities remain so important. Younger populations, large student communities and electorates that already lean towards Labour or the Lib Dems provide fertile ground for the Green candidates. The 2026 local elections offered some evidence of this movement, with YouGov finding that 22% of 2024 Labour voters who voted in this year’s council elections switched to the Greens.
Bristol provides a useful example. The Greens are forecast to win Bristol Central, but their support extends into neighbouring constituencies. In Bristol East, they are on 36.4%, just 0.3 percentage points behind Labour. In Bristol South, they are on 30.8%, 3.6 points behind.
The picture changes further down the list. In Birmingham Hall Green and Moseley, the Greens are forecast to finish second with 15.2% but remain 7.3 percentage points behind Labour. That is a high level of support but equally still a long way from winning the seat. Being the main challenger does not necessarily mean being close to victory. In some constituencies, the party has established a strong position without yet having the support needed to seriously threaten the incumbent party.
There is a considerable range hidden inside those 53 second-place finishes. Some are almost level with the party in first; others would require a much larger movement in the vote. That is perhaps the most interesting feature of the current Green vote. It is no longer particularly difficult to find places where the party has a meaningful level of support. The harder part is finding enough places where that support has reached the level required to win. The Greens have moved a long way from being a party whose parliamentary presence could be explained by four isolated constituencies, but the forecast still shows only six seats.
The Tactical Voting Problem
There is another factor which could make the Greens’ second-place finishes harder to convert into seats: the possibility that some of their natural supporters will vote for Labour tactically. The Greens and Labour are competing for a similar pool of voters, particularly among younger and more left-leaning voters. YouGov’s local election analysis found that Labour lost almost four times as many voters to the Greens as it did to Reform in May, showing that there is already a considerable amount of movement between the two parties.
But a general election creates a different calculation. A voter can prefer the Greens and still decide that Labour is the better choice if the local contest is between Labour and Reform. With Reform now capable of winning constituencies across the country, stopping it can become more important than voting for a first-choice party. YouGov found that 57-58% of Lib Dem and Green voters would vote for Labour to prevent Reform from winning their seat. The dynamic has since appeared in actual contests. At the Makerfield by-election, polling found that more than half of people who said they would vote Green or Lib Dem at a general election planned to back Burnham in the by-election. Green voters were willing to lend their support to Labour when the immediate objective was keeping Reform out.
The more competitive Reform becomes, the stronger the incentive can be for left-leaning voters to consolidate behind whichever progressive candidate looks most capable of beating it. In a constituency where the Greens are third, that is unlikely to matter much. In a constituency where they are second to Labour, it could be decisive.
The effect of tactical voting will depend heavily on the local numbers. Where the Greens are the strongest challenger to Reform, voters from Labour or the Lib Dems may have an incentive to move towards them. Where Labour is ahead of the Greens and Reform is also competitive, the movement can go the other way.
Where the Greens Could Grow
The Greens have spent much of their recent growth competing for voters who already have a fairly clear reason to be sympathetic to them. The more difficult task is finding issues that can persuade people who might agree with parts of the Green programme but have not previously seen the party as their natural political home.
This summer has handed them one such opportunity. By 10 August, 71.3% of England was officially in drought, with 45 million people living in affected areas and 27 million facing water-use restrictions. England and Wales had also recorded their driest July in 190 years. The consequences have been felt well beyond reservoirs, with farmers warning about food production and wildfires adding another visible consequence of the extreme conditions.
Zack Polanski has accused Labour of a “dereliction of duty” over its response to the heatwaves, called for publicly accessible cool spaces and greater resources for firefighters. He has also called for fossil fuel companies to contribute towards the cost of tackling wildfires. Polanski is now connecting climate change with what the voters encounter in their daily lives: the reliability of water supplies and the condition of their homes during extreme heat. It allows the Greens to argue that the effects of climate change are no longer something for a future government to worry about.
The bigger opportunity, however, may come when Labour has to make decisions that put its economic and environmental priorities into conflict. North Sea drilling is perhaps the clearest example. Labour’s 2024 manifesto promised that it would not issue new oil and gas licenses, but Burnham’s government is now facing issues over Rosebank and Jackdaw. Both projects were previously approved by the Conservative government before their consents were overturned following legal challenges over their climate impacts. The new government is now considering whether they should proceed.
The North Sea is a declining source of production, and new fields would not make Britain independent of imported fossil fuels. Rosebank’s oil would largely be sold into the international market, while Jackdaw’s contribution to Britain’s gas supply would still be relatively small. Approving new fields would therefore do little to solve the problem of Britain’s dependence on fossil fuels. The argument for them is much more familiar: jobs, investment and energy security. With the UK still heavily dependent on gas and officials warning about potential shortages in the 2030’s, Labour can argue that withdrawing from domestic production before alternatives are ready risks making Britain more dependent on foreign suppliers.
But that is exactly the space in which the Greens can attack Labour. They can accept that Britain still needs oil and gas today while arguing that approving new fields is the wrong way to deal with that dependence. If production from the North Sea is declining anyway, the more important question is how quickly Britain can reduce the demand that leaves it exposed to volatile international prices. Polanski has taken that decision directly, calling on Burnham to block Rosebank and Jackdaw and arguing that there should be no new North Sea drilling. His intervention has put the Greens on the opposite side of Labour at precisely the moment when climate has become a more important issue for voters.
Research suggests that Labour could lose up to 50 seats to the Greens if the government approves new North Sea drilling. These are precisely the voters that the Greens need. The party does not have to persuade Conservatives or Reform voters that climate change matters. Its more immediate opportunity is among people who already lean Labour but are dissatisfied with how far Labour is prepared to go on climate. North Sea drilling gives them a very simple dividing line. Labour can talk about energy security and the transition taking time. The Greens can point to a government that promised now to issue the new licenses and ask why it is now considering expanding fossil fuel production while Britain is experiencing drought, wildfires and record heat.
Whether that is enough to move voters is another matter. There is evidence that the energy-security argument has genuine support even among Labour’s electorate, and Dale Vince, a major Labour donor and prominent supporter of renewable energy, has recently changed his position to support Rosebank and Jackdaw on economic and energy-security grounds.
If Labour approves the projects, it gives Polanski a clear attack on the party’s environmental credentials. If Labour blocks them, it removes one of the clearest dividing lines available to the Greens. Either way, the debate allows the party to make the argument that its supporters already want to hear, and potentially persuade some Labour voters that the difference between the two parties is larger than they had assumed.
A similar argument is beginning to emerge around data centres, although the politics are less established. Labour has made AI infrastructure a central part of its growth strategy, with AI Growth Zones intended to speed up planning and grid connections for large data centres. The government presents this as an opportunity to attract investment, create jobs and establish Britain as a leading AI economy.
Polanski has not opposed AI itself. His criticism is aimed at the way its expansion is being pursued. He has argued that AI “has the potential to be a force of good”, while pointing to the jobs already being displaced and the enormous quantities of energy and water consumed by the infrastructure behind it. Planned data centres, he argues, could create relatively little employment while putting pressure on communities and making Britain’s climate targets harder to achieve. There is a political argument here that goes beyond environmentalism. Labour is effectively asking voters to accept that some of Britain’s scarce resources should be directed towards a rapidly expanding private industry because of the economic benefits it could generate. The Greens can ask a much less comfortable question: what does the public actually get in return?
The pressure on infrastructure gives Polanski a stronger argument than simply opposing another development. AI Growth Zones are being given preferential treatment for grid connections, while Water UK has warned that the government’s planned expansion of data centres cannot be supported by existing water resources. During a drought, questions over who gets access to scarce infrastructure become inherently political.
A proposed centre near Larbert has attracted almost 7,000 objections, while a £14.7bn development in East Havering would occupy 218 hectares of Green Belt and require electricity equivalent to more than one million UK households. Polanski therefore does not need to convince voters that AI itself is bad. He can accept its potential while questioning Labour’s approach to building the infrastructure behind it. If a development receives priority access to electricity and consumes substantial amounts of water while producing relatively few permanent jobs, the promise of investment becomes easier to challenge.
Public opinion is not necessarily hostile to data centres, and their economic benefits give Labour a strong argument in their favour. But the politics can look very different once a development is proposed locally and questions of land, water, electricity and jobs become tangible.
For the Greens, that opens up an argument that reaches beyond environmentalism. Polanski can present data centres as part of a wider question about Labour’s approach to growth. Combined with his attacks on North Sea drilling and the handling of drought, it gives him a way to argue that economic growth should not come at the expense of communities and public infrastructure.