Zack Polanski’s election as leader of the Green Party comes amid the shattering of the UK consensus on climate change and the rise of what The Economist has called the “greenlash” — a growing backlash against the costs and consequences of Net Zero.
Polanksi calls his rear-guard project “eco-populism”. But the term was first coined by Dale Vince, the boss of Ecotricity and Labour donor, in his 2020 book Manifesto. Vince described it as a way of borrowing the emotional cut-through of politically successful figures such as Nigel Farage, Boris Johnson and Donald Trump, while applying it to radical climate action.
Vince has always insisted he is a Labour loyalist and has no formal involvement with the Green Party. Yet his public statements tell a more nuanced story. In a June 2025 interview with Novara Media, he admitted that he clearly sees the strategic value of the Green Party. “The biggest change the Green Party can make,” Vince said, “is to influence the other parties.” In other words, he sees them as playing the same role UKIP and later Reform played on the right: never winning power, but dragging the Conservatives in their direction by threatening their voter base. Polling by YouGov Blue, which works with liberal progressive clients, suggests the strategy could have traction, though affordability remains the critical caveat.
Polanski has said he is “angry about net zero” and that ordinary people are being asked to install heat pumps or take costly trains while elites remain untouched. His solution is a wealth tax to fund the green transition. This is old-school 1970s “Us” and “Them” populism: ordinary people versus elites. In a sense, it is clever tactical politics. Polanski adapts to the new terrain of the Net Zero debate, using the momentum of the so-called “greenlash” to his own advantage. By echoing cost-of-living grievances exploited by Farage and Reform, he positions the Greens to capture the same anger from the left.
But political tactics only matter if they serve a strategy. And political strategy only succeeds if it is grounded in a clear diagnosis of material reality. Eco-populism has none of this. Its fairness framing is simply a variant of the so-called “just transition” narrative: the idea that Net Zero can be achieved quickly and painlessly if only the costs are shifted from ordinary households onto the wealthy or to business. But the problem is not simply who pays. The problem is that the policies themselves are physically and economically undeliverable at the scale and speed promised. By treating wealth distribution as the central issue, while ignoring material constraints, eco-populism sets up a cycle of false hope, frustration, and disillusionment.
This is where eco-populism becomes dangerous. As Morgan McSweeney, Labour’s chief strategist, has warned, voters’ support for Net Zero is conditional. They will punish politicians who “underweight its costs”: higher bills, job losses, constraints on everyday life. Polling by Octopus Energy shows that 71 per cent of Net Zero’s supporters will only continue to support it if energy bills don’t rise further.
Once promises collapse and scapegoats multiply, frustration hardens into direct action and sabotage
Eco-populism bridges this gap, not with frankness about trade-offs and deliverability but with scapegoats and misinformation. Adherents regularly blame the slow pace of change on fossil fuel companies or “dark money” think tanks supposedly conspiring against the transition. Ed Miliband, another politician with eco-populist instincts, frequently points to international markets and Russia’s war in Ukraine as explanations for Britain’s energy woes, obscuring the role of his policy choices and wider system costs for wind and solar energy. He even promised households £300 off their energy bills—- a pledge Energy UK has dismissed as undeliverable this side of 2030 through domestic policy alone.
Once promises collapse and scapegoats multiply, frustration hardens into direct action and sabotage. We have already seen the pattern. Extinction Rebellion (XR) styled itself as more confrontational than Greenpeace or Friends of the Earth. Just Stop Oil (JSO) and Insulate Britain then upped the civil disobedience stakes. Now Shut the System (STS) marks a further escalation. STS’s Palestinian faction recently smashed up Policy Exchange’s offices. Its climate activists, meanwhile, have targeted Barclays Bank and the think tanks of Tufton Street. And in their own manifesto STS make the trajectory explicit: XR has failed, therefore “activists are forced to escalate with more disruptive forms of action.” They warn: “With business as usual the climate crisis will escalate and Shut the System will escalate with it”.
The trajectory is clear. Once movements embrace escalation as a principle, the next logical step is violence. From Greenpeace to XR to JSO to Shut the System, each generation has raised the stakes. The “monkey-wrenching” tactics of Earth First! or the arson attacks of the Earth Liberation Front may not yet have arrived in Britain — but the logic of escalation points directly toward them.
The final danger is foreign exploitation. In 2018, a US Congressional committee found that Russia was using social media to manipulate environmental groups to disrupt energy markets. And the International Institute for Strategic Studies recently noted, Russia is waging an “unconventional war” on Europe — sabotage, vandalism, espionage — increasingly outsourced to proxies recruited online via a “gig economy” model. According to IISS, Russia has quadrupled such operations since 2023, targeting energy, transport and communications. A movement fuelled by disillusion and conspiracy provides fertile ground for this strategy: individuals can be co-opted, knowingly or not, into Moscow’s war.
It may sound alarmist to link today’s climate politics with extremism and violence. But as the late Major-General Richard Clutterbuck — a British Army officer and one of the foremost analysts of political violence in the 1970s — warned in Britain in Agony: The Growth of Political Violence (1980), the unrest of that decade (the worst since 1911) was fuelled in part by militant trade unions and radical movements making impossible demands “no matter what cost to the community,” leading to “frustration, disillusion and escalating confrontation.”
The 1970s brought industrial strife, terrorism in Northern Ireland, and a collapse of trust in institutions. Today the parallel is clear: eco-populism is once again raising expectations that cannot be met. It risks setting in motion the same cycle of disillusion and potential confrontation. If Britain is to avoid repeating those mistakes, mainstream politicians must resist the lure of eco-populism and confront voters with honesty rather than fantasy. And the media must do its part: not legitimising impossible promises, but exposing them for what they are.
