A RedStar Exclusive Feature
At an eve-of-poll outdoor rally in Camden, Green leader Zack Polanski made his closing pitch to the assembled activists on Sunday.
With ten days to go, the Greens brought their national leadership to Holborn and St Pancras on Sunday for an open-air rally that doubled as a statement of intent. Rachel Millward, Mothin Ali, Salma Yaqoob, Andrew Feinstein and Green MP Hannah Spencer all spoke in support of Zack Polanski’s campaign.
The turn out was multi class, multicultural, multiracial, multi-faith, multigenerational, representing all genders, ages as well as many disabled and LGBTQ+ people.
The message was consistent: this is not a protest vote. It is a bid to change who holds power.
The four battlegrounds
Whilst the main stream media often paint the Greens as middle class nimbies who are out of touch, the “four battlegrounds” show otherwise.
The Greens are fighting this by-election on four priorities where they say Labour has failed the constituency: housing, climate, community safety and racism, and Palestine.
On housing, Polanski’s pitch is concrete. “We want rent controls, council houses to end the feudal system of rate paying,” he told the crowd. It is a message calibrated to a seat where roughly three-quarters of residents do not own their homes.
Labour, no longer, represents the working class but big business a Green Party organiser from Camden told me.
On community safety, the Greens frame the issue around racism as much as policing — a deliberate contrast with Labour’s law-and-order framing.
On Palestine, the party’s position is unambiguous and it is the issue that most clearly separates them from Labour’s candidate, Camden Council leader Sagal Abdi-Wali.
On climate, the Greens are pushing an argument sharpened by the Thames Water crisis. Polanski had a direct message for Andy Burnham: “Nationalise Thames Water. Just do it already.”
“Politics is done to us”
Rachel Millward set the emotional register of the afternoon. “All I have to do is speak our truth,” she said. “It’s so important to be gathering in person. After decades of austerity we all feel like politics has been done to us. The Green Party will never be bought out by billionaires and tech oligarchs.”
That note — politics as something done to people rather than by them — ran through every speech. It is also, on the doorstep, the Greens’ strongest card.
“MPs who listen”
Mothin Ali, a Leeds Green councillor and Deputy Leader with Rachel Millward, made the party’s case on method rather than policy. “We pride ourselves in being a member-led organisation. Everyone here is driving that change. Our MPs, our leadership team were here for you,” he said. “We don’t need more MPs who proclaim to know what needs to be done, we need MPs who listen.”
He pointed to the inequality that defines the seat’s geography: “There’s million-pound houses right next to housing estates that are underserved. You are going to change that.”
“Labour: Aiding and abetting genocide”
Salma Yaqoob, the former Respect Party leader, was there to give personal backing to Polanski — and she came with the sharpest attack of the afternoon.
“We have a few days to bring about change,” she said. “Two years ago you voted for change and voted for Sir Keir Starmer in the hope of that chjange. What have we seen? Our government aiding and abetting genocide in Palestine.”
She linked the by-election to the national picture. “If it hadn’t have been for Hannah winning in Gorton and Denton we wouldn’t have had Andy Burnham.” And she went further: “Labour MPs went along with taking money off pensioners and threatening to cut disabled people’s benefits. They talk radicalism but it’s business as usual.”
The Feinstein factor
Andrew Feinstein’s presence at the rally mattered a great deal. A former ANC special advisor to President Nelson Mandela, in 2024 he stood against Starmer as a pro-Palestine independent and cut deep into the Labour vote. Now he is backing the Greens.
“In a six-week campaign we knocked on 52,000 doors,” he said. “If someone wants to represent you, don’t you think they should be engaging with you?”
He described the scale of what happened last time: “Most people didn’t even know who their MP was. Together with the Greens we cut Keir Starmer’s vote by 50% — the first PM to see their vote share fall before entering Downing Street. Their hegemony will end if we can do it again.”
And he drew the contrast the Greens want voters to remember: “We don’t have billionaire donors. What we have is you.”
Polanski’s closing argument
Polanski’s own remarks were calibrated for a seat he knows he may not win — but needs to come close in.
“It’s always impossible until it’s done,” he said. “This is what progressive movement building looks like.”
He acknowledged the fatigue he is encountering. People are “tired of politics,” he said of the conversations he’s been having. “They just want hope.” And he made a direct appeal to voters tempted to give Burnham more time: “Even if you want to give Andy Burnham a chance, the worst thing that can happen is a Labour MP. If people vote Green they will send a progressive independent voice into Westminster.”
He also addressed the question of his own leadership directly. “Keir Starmer was always ‘very busy.’ I’d be the sixth Green MP. The first thing I need to do to see more Green MPs is be a great MP here. I will be visible and out there representing the people of Holborn and St Pancras.”
“Us five Green MPs are already drawing up a list for Zack”
Hannah Spencer, one of the party’s five MPs, closed the rally with the argument that Green representation changes Labour behaviour.
“We’re out every day talking to hundreds of people, they’re all saying the same thing. They’re struggling to support people,” she said, citing women living with endometriosis and other conditions whose calls for workplace adaptations go unheard.
“We woke up in February realising we made history. Because we did that, we put pressure on a Labour government. We’ve got 10 days.”
No negative campaigning
Notably absent from the afternoon was any personal attack on Abdi-Wali. The Greens have made a deliberate decision not to campaign against the Labour candidate as an individual — a discipline that contrasts with the tone of much recent by-election coverage.
Instead the argument is structural: that Labour, in office, will not change course on the four priorities the Greens have identified. “PM, MPs and Camden council. All Labour — things won’t change,” was how one speaker put it. Gorton and Denton changed the Prime Minister. The Greens are asking whether Holborn and St Pancras can change the opposition.
The Greens are making the pitch for why it should be him elected next Thursday: “He’s a Londoner, five years doing the work at the GLA, more than twenty years living in the area.”
Ben Stevenson is the host of RedStar’s politics podcasts
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