The Green Party of England and Wales is caught in a structural trap of its own making. A motion declaring "Zionism is racism" and backing a single Palestinian state passed at annual conference with roughly 1,000 votes — approximately 0.4% of total party membership. That vanishingly small fraction now dictates official policy on one of the most incendiary questions in British politics, and the fallout is consuming the party from the inside. Ellie Chowns, the party's Commons leader, diagnosed the problem plainly on BBC Radio 4: the party's decentralised policy-making structures are not working. A "significant and damaging policy" sailed through a process designed for a much smaller, more ideologically uniform organisation. Chowns stopped short of calling the motion racist, but said she wanted to ensure the party was not "vulnerable to capture by extremists and racists" — a remarkable statement about one's own party. The leadership vacuum made things worse. Zack Polanski, the party leader for England and Wales, missed both the debate and the vote at conference to campaign in the Holborn and St Pancras byelection — which he then lost, taking just under 33% of the vote against Labour. He now says he would have voted against the motion had he attended, a retroactive position that satisfies nobody. The chair of Jewish Greens, Vivien Lichtenstein, called for his resignation, though others in the group say her view does not represent the majority and have tabled a no-confidence motion against her. The timing compounds every wound. UK-Israel relations are already strained after Labour imposed sanctions on illegal settlements and Israel retaliated by attempting to close the British consulate in Jerusalem. Research conducted before the conference vote found that Jewish Green voters' attachment to Israel had weakened, even as the percentage of British Jews identifying as Zionist rose between 2022 and 2025. The motion landed in this volatile gap. Deeper currents are visible. Deputy leader Mothin Ali's post-October 7th call to end "white supremacist European settler colonialism" sits alongside the Zionism motion as evidence that one wing of the party has consolidated influence over conference mechanics while the broader membership and leadership looked elsewhere. This is a classic entryist dynamic: organised minorities exploit low-turnout democratic processes. Polanski insists he will stay as leader, with the next scheduled leadership election not until summer 2027. That two-year gap means the party faces a prolonged period of internal warfare with no structural release valve. The choice is stark: reform the policy-making process to require higher participation thresholds, or accept that a few hundred committed activists can set the party's public identity. Chowns framed the core question correctly: the issue is not whether individual extremists exist in the party, but whether the party's structures make it systemically vulnerable to capture. That distinction — between personnel problems and design problems — is the one that matters. The Greens built a direct-democracy machine for a party of activists; they now have a membership of roughly 250,000 and no guardrails scaled to match.
