The Green Party of England and Wales is splitting along a fault line that has nothing to do with climate. A conference motion declaring "Zionism is racism" and calling for a single Palestinian state in place of Israel has triggered a chain reaction: Labour issued ultimatums to its own local parties to terminate power-sharing deals with Greens who don't disown the policy, and now former co-leader Adrian Ramsay — one of the party's five MPs — is publicly urging Green council groups to reject the motion to preserve their governing coalitions. Ramsay's intervention puts him directly at odds with current leader Zack Polanski, who has said he will not seek to overturn the motion but wants to amend it to remove the single-state clause. The official party line — that the Greens will "not take lectures" from a Labour government supplying arms to Israel — is being quietly contradicted by council groups in Lewes, Warwick, Rother, and Southwark, all of which have already distanced themselves from the policy. The structural dynamic here is straightforward. Green councillors hold real governing power in a handful of local authorities, almost always through coalition arrangements with Labour or the Liberal Democrats. That power is now hostage to a conference motion that most members likely don't support, according to Ramsay. Labour's ultimatum — disown or we walk — converts an internal policy dispute into a binary choice between ideological purity and material governance. Ramsay frames this as a pragmatic question: Green-run or jointly run councils are "making a real difference" on services, and the alternative to these coalitions is often a right-wing majority that would cut those services. His advice to undecided groups is blunt — reject the motion, reassure your communities, keep governing. He also acknowledges the emotional dimension, noting it is "understandable" that councillors don't want to be "bullied" by Labour diktat. Polanski's position is a careful straddle. He defends the motion as democratically adopted and says party rules mean it stands for at least two years, but simultaneously signals he wants to amend the single-state element at the earliest opportunity. This satisfies neither the pro-Palestine activists who passed the motion nor the councillors who need it gone yesterday. The deeper problem is institutional. Conference sovereignty — the principle that members set policy through democratic votes — is colliding with the practical requirements of coalition governance. If council groups can simply disown conference motions that inconvenience them, the conference becomes advisory. If they can't, the party's actual governing capacity is held captive by whatever a conference majority decides on any given weekend. Labour's role is cynically efficient. The ultimatum costs Labour nothing — the Greens are a minor coalition partner at best — while forcing them into a visible internal crisis over a policy that polls badly with the general public. Whether Labour's own record on arms exports to Israel withstands the same moral scrutiny is, conveniently, not the question being asked.
