Neither Labour nor Your Party is the answer – here's why I joined the Greens
Green Party leader Zack Polanski speaks at a protest against the Rosebank Oilfield outside the Department of Energy, Security and Net Zero, London, 2025 (Richard Bayfield / Alamy)
4 min read
Politics, for me, is about shifting the balance of power away from the rich and powerful into the hands of working-class people. For that, we must have courage – and utter clarity about who we stand with and who we’re prepared to confront.
Across the country, working people are facing the sharp end of a cost-of-living emergency. Bills keep rising. Wages aren't. Public services are stretched thin, and too many families are one bad month away from real trouble. At the same time, the far right is organising openly as a serious political force. That combination is dangerous. When insecurity becomes normal and politics offers no meaningful relief, anger doesn’t disappear – it gets redirected.
I was once a member of Labour’s national executive committee. But in government the Labour Party has not relieved those pressures – in many cases, it has reinforced them. From the erosion of civil liberties to economic choices that accept insecurity as inevitable, the gap between what people were promised and what they are experiencing is widening. Reform UK is feeding off the frustration this creates, offering easy scapegoats and no solutions.
Nor do we have time for the different sects in ‘Your Party’ – whether they are Marxists, Leninists, Trotskyists, Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, Spartacists or Revolutionary Communists – to sort out their minuscule differences. I've come to the realisation that they never might overcome the battle of the £1 newspapers before taking on the real challenges this country faces.
Instead, I’ve joined the Green Party of England and Wales.
Not because it is fashionable but because it is the party with the potential to do the unglamorous work of building power from the ground up. The Greens are standing against racism and Islamophobia, defending migrants and minorities, opposing endless wars and genocide, and linking environmental justice with social justice rather than treating them as competing priorities.
Too often, Westminster is dominated by people who have spent their working lives inside party machines, think tanks or advisory roles. That narrow pipeline produces fluency but not understanding. It is dominated by careerists who decided to go into politics after binge-watching The West Wing. Of course they struggle to speak credibly to people whose lives are shaped by insecure work, rising rents and declining public services.
That’s why the selection of Hannah Spencer as the Green candidate in Gorton and Denton matters nationally. A working-class plumber standing for Parliament is not a gimmick. She was selected overwhelmingly by local members and it's a statement about what kind of politics the Greens want to build. Representation shouldn’t be reserved for those who’ve spent their lives in Westminster corridors. This by-election could well help rebuild trust with people who feel locked out of a system that rarely looks or sounds like them.
So, if the Greens are serious about becoming a force capable of reshaping national politics, the party must invest the financial benefits of a massive membership – nearing 200,000 – into organisers and party infrastructure.
The Greens must also speak plainly about the common enemy working people face: a political and economic system that concentrates wealth and power at the top. Not in academic language but in terms people recognise from their own lives – rising bills, insecure housing, stagnant wages, polluted neighbourhoods. Zack Polanski and his comms have pushed this message really well so far but now is when economic policy stops being abstract and starts being real.
I believe the Green Party needs to clarify its programme. Public ownership of energy is about lowering bills and ending profiteering from necessity. A serious housing agenda is about security and dignity, not speculation. Treating essentials as public goods, not market opportunities, is how class politics becomes everyday politics.
I didn’t join the Greens to make a statement. I joined because I want to help turn moral clarity into real political power. Winning isn’t a dirty word. Winning is how you stop the far right and protect communities under pressure.
We cannot effect change via speeches, cutting-edge comms or statements alone. It requires organising, building trust and showing up consistently. That’s the work I want to be part of – to build a politics that is serious enough to meet the challenge and strong enough to win.
Mish Rahman was a Labour NEC member from 2020 to 2024
