Green Neoliberalism

The contradictions in Zack Polanski's Green Party

“The contradictions and vested interests of the liberal left reveal its identifications: a combination of the liberal identification with free marketeers wanting to escape the tyranny of the right, and the left’s identification with the underdog.”

(Renée Gerlich, Out of the Fog, 2022)

Neoliberalism surfaced in reaction to the welfare capitalism that was established in the aftermath of the Second World War. Its central arguments are that free markets guarantee both economic efficiency and individual freedom, and that regulation by the state inevitably interferes with both those goals.

Economically, neoliberalism is based on mathematically elegant models that ignore the physical stickiness of real world production and logistics, take little account of differentiated products and the dominance of large suppliers, and underestimate the fragility of global supply chains.. It assumes, wrongly, that equilibrium is normal, and that market forces automatically restore equilibrium after any shock. Politically, it assumes that shocks, whether natural or political, can be used to impose cuts in public spending, and enable privatisation. Growing inequality is accepted as necessary, and the use of taxation or regulation to limit it is resisted.

In the UK, political parties vary in how strictly they implement neoliberalism, but neoliberalism is, with one partial exception, what their policies are based on. The partial exception is the Green Party of England and Wales, particularly since Zack Polanski became its leader in September 2025. Polanski recognises that growing inequality and a deteriorating quality of life are inevitable consequences of neoliberalism. He insists that a more caring alternative, oriented towards enhancing wellbeing, is possible.

So far, so progressive. But Polanski’s opposition to neoliberalism vanishes when he uses it to promote the commodification of human bodies and body parts.

Polanski favours the decriminalisation of prostitution, he encourages the proliferation of pornography, and he promotes the commercial development of synthetic sex identities. These are core components of his political philosophy, and he has worked tirelessly over the years to ensure that they have become central aspects of his party’s policy offer to voters.

Bold Politics

Polanski’s opposition to a neoliberal economy is based on his understanding, unique among UK political leaders, of MMT (the mis-named Modern Monetary Theory, which is not so much a theory but a description of how a government with its own currency creates money to finance its activities, and removes money from circulation when it taxes).

MMT explains how such a government can use its spending to activate resources which would otherwise be idle, and use taxation to take some of that money back to curb the inflation which occurs when there is no spare capacity. It also explains how public sector deficits are balanced by private sector surpluses, which means that, unlike households, governments with their own currency don’t have to balance their books.

Polanski is an excellent communicator, and he uses his podcast, Bold Politics, to listen to what his guests have to say, and discuss with them the implications for what is to be done. In an era when trust in what political parties have to offer is in short supply, and it’s hard to get any sense of what their leaders actually believe, his is a refreshing approach. Subscribers get a real sense of someone who is keen to learn, and incorporate that learning into his politics. His choice of who to interview, and his curiosity about how government action can improve people’s quality of life, show how much he has taken on board the can-do approach that MMT makes possible.

Polanski’s approach contrasts with that of the Labour Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, whose conformity to self-imposed ‘fiscal rules’ has become an obsession, and whose curious lack of curiosity when it is needed could well bring about his downfall.

Polanski sometimes describes himself as an eco-populist, and sometimes as an eco-socialist. There’s a lot of populism in his Bold Politics podcasts, and some socialism, but so far little that is ‘eco’, except in the intros that advertise Chris Packham’s Ecotalk mobile network. Polanski suggests that everyone knows the green credentials of his party, so his job is to emphasise that green politics is about social justice as well. It’s hard, though, to detect in his Bold Politics podcasts much concern about the violation of wild nature.

This lack of involvement with the nature crisis is particularly apparent in the leadup to next month’s local elections in England. The pre-Polanski Green Party was notable for its local councillors who would identify damage taking place in their local environment, and tackle it. That this is no longer a priority is evident in a performative online campaign video for one of next month’s local elections. The video features would-be Green councillors in Haringey (a London borough where for many years I lived and voted). They are shown standing in a park, but not to explain how they will improve local recycling or protect local nature reserves (the sort of issues that are important locally, that can be acted on by local councillors, and that can also stimulate wider discussion of the forces that are destroying the living planet). Instead, these would-be Green councillors proclaim that if elected they will, with one robotic voice, support Palestine and oppose Israel.

Support for the commercialisation of sexual exploitation

Polanski is short on detail about how he would use MMT to improve peoples’s quality of life. He is quite specific, though, about how he would support the sex trade, with policies that are clearly neoliberal, support the commercialisation of sexual exploitation, and have nothing to do with either social justice or the environment. “If someone wants to be a sex worker,” he says, “then that is their right to do it, as long as it’s their choice and they’re not coerced into it.” His understanding of choice and coercion is clearly individualistic, not systemic. As Renée Gerlich notes in her book Out of the Fog ( 2022), the term ‘sex worker’ is a euphemism which “suggests that prostitution does not exist because of rape and men’s exploitation of women’s imposed economic dependence, but because women want and choose it for themselves as entrepreneurs.”

Polanski opposes the Nordic Model approach to prostitution,, which aims to reduce the exploitation by criminalising the male buyers instead of the women who have to endure their abuse. Instead, he wants to legalise all aspects of prostitution, a policy that would further normalise the oppression of women.

Pornography is another of Polanski’s concerns. Not concern about the overwhelming evidence, assembled by Jo Bartosch and Robert Jessel in their recent book Pornocracy (2025), of the multi-layered and escalating harms of pornography, for performers and consumers, for our brains and our relationships, for how children learn about sex, and for our culture. Instead, Polanski is concerned to normalise pornography by removing restraints on it. Apart from one exception (where the images are of children being sexually abused) he sees restraint as interference with individual freedom to consume ’explicit’ material, and as a barrier to its normalisation.

Opposition to sex-based rights and promotion of synthetic sex identities

Polanski is keen to declare his support for the ‘trans’ lobby. Such support, he insists, is “unconditonal” and “non-negotiable”. He has actively suppressed party members who criticise the party’s denial of sex and promotion of ‘gender identity’. He regards as “thinly disguised transphobia” the Supreme Court ruling which clarified that sex protections in the Equality Act refer to biological sex, not ‘gender identity’. The implication is that he favours changing the Equality Act to remove sex-based rights.

The campaign to normalise synthetic sex identities is, of course, yet another neoliberal project, pushed by transhumanist tech billionaires, big pharma, and the fertility industry. It’s hard to imagine anything further removed from what most people associate with green philosophy. It’s hard, too, for Green politicians to avoid accusations of hypocrisy if they challenge politicians who deny the findings of climate science yet support deniers of biological science who believe it is possible for humans to change sex.

As Renée Gerlich demonstrates, the commodification of human bodies brought about by the trans lobby mirrors the ‘structural adjustments’ imposed on governments in the global south by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. Both, she argues, are justified by the same neoliberal doctrine:

“The mantra ‘transwomen are women’ announces womanhood itself as a frontier for commodification. Now neoliberalism’s ‘structural adjustments’ can be applied to human biology ….. the silicone implants mimicking female breasts while parading them as sexual accessories rather than living tissue and part of the bond between mother and baby; surgical castration providing men with fake ‘vaginas’; breast binders stunting growth so that teenage girls can pass for boys and avoid objectification; mastectomies that remove any breast tissue that develops; testosterone lowering girls’ voices irreversibly; forearm skin removed to fashion a ‘penis’ in phalloplasty; puberty blockers warding off normal adolescence and weakening bones. With the advance of transgenderism, the fact of biological sex is rhetorically ploughed over and substituted with the cash crop of ‘gender identity’ “

(Renée Gerlich, Out of the Fog, 2022)

Polanski supports all of this, and he insists that the Green Party supports it too. Based, he imagines, not on neoliberalism but on ‘social justice’.

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Many years ago, before the UK left the EU, I had an interaction on Twitter with my Green MEP (Member of the European Parliament), Molly Scott Cato. This interaction confirmed my growing unease with the direction the Green Party was taking. I had posted that the Party’s denial of biology, expressed in its constant repetition of the ‘Transwomen Are Women’ slogan and manifested in its promotion of synthetic sex identities, was making it impossible for me to continue voting Green. Scott Cato replied that I didn’t have to agree with every one of the policies. She suggested that if I supported Green policies on the central issues, that’s what should determine my vote. I hadn’t expected this implication that sex and sex-based rights are fringe issues, too unimportant to affect anyone’s vote.

In the 2025 Green Party leadership election campaign, Molly Scott Cato, by now the Green Party’s External Communications coordinator, supported Ellie Chowns and Adrian Ramsay to be joint leaders. She supported them rather than Polanski because, as she put it “they understand what power is about. Not influence, not campaigning, but real power.”

Scott Cato didn’t explain what she meant by ‘real power’. If, as I suspect, she meant disguising aspects of Green Party policy that might frighten potential voters, then perhaps Polanski’s openness about where he and his party stand should be appreciated for its transparency, if not its content..

A disastrous Labour performance in next month’s local elections in England and devolved government elections in Scotland and Wales seems almost certain. This will likely boost the Green Party’s chances of doing well in the next UK General Election. Voters have a right to know what they are voting for. With Polanski’s Green Party, this may include bold economic policies aimed at improving wellbeing, but they will probably be accompanied by policies to weaken sex-based rights and promote prostitution, pornography, and synthetic sex identities. With all this on Polanski’s agenda, tackling the climate and nature crises is unlikely to be a priority.