The UK Greens Are Doing Stage Green Politics — And That's Both Their Strength and Their Ceiling

Published: March 18, 2026

Zack Polanski gave what was billed as his biggest policy speech since becoming leader of the Green Party of England and Wales, delivered this week to the New Economics Forum in London. It was a confident, energetic critique of privatisation and economic inequality — and it was almost entirely Stage Green politics in the Spiral Dynamics sense. Which is both exactly right for this moment and worth examining honestly.

For those unfamiliar with Spiral Dynamics: it’s a developmental framework describing how individuals and societies organise their values and worldviews through a series of stages, each more complex than the last. Stage Green — the communitarian, egalitarian stage — is characterised by solidarity, systemic critique of exploitation, and the restoration of collective ownership and shared goods. Stage Yellow, which follows it, is characterised by integrative thinking, comfort with complexity and trade-offs, and the capacity to work with perspectives from across the value spectrum rather than against a defined antagonist.

What Polanski Got Right

The diagnosis is accurate and important. Decades of privatisation have taken essential services — water, energy, housing — out of collective governance and returned them to citizens at profit-extracting rates. The framing of “the basics of life sold for profit and rented back to us at crushing cost” captures something real about the structural shift in the UK economy since the 1980s. Green-stage politics does this well: it names the systemic injustice and mobilises people around it. That’s a genuine and necessary political function.

The surge in Green membership and polling suggest this message is landing. Polanski is an effective communicator, and he’s surfing a real wave of public dissatisfaction.

Where the Stage Shows

The speech is identifiably Green-stage in a few specific ways.

First, the adversarial framing: “rip-off Britain: an economy built to reward the few off the work of the many.” This is Green’s characteristic rhetorical register — naming a victim class and an antagonist, building solidarity around the opposition. There’s political truth in it, but it’s not the complexity-embracing, systems-thinking stance that marks Yellow. Yellow is notably reluctant to assign villain roles; it tends to see structural incentives producing bad outcomes rather than bad actors producing structural harm.

Second, the solutions: re-nationalisation of water, rent controls, windfall taxes. These are well-established Green-stage responses to Orange-stage problems. They work within the existing institutional frame — taking back ownership within the existing property rights structure, regulating markets rather than redesigning them. A Yellow-stage question would be different: what governance and ownership structures actually produce the outcomes we want, sector by sector, and what mix of public, cooperative, mutual, and regulated private forms achieves that most reliably? That’s harder to put in a speech, which is partly why even politicians with Yellow tendencies often speak in Green.

Third, the Brexit critique — “a sledgehammer to an already weak economy” — is accurate but frames economic integration purely in terms of what was lost rather than exploring what a genuinely different relationship with European neighbours might look like going forward. Yellow would be curious about new forms; Green tends to want restoration of what was.

Where Yellow Flickers

One passage stands out from the rest: “The human spirit is such that compassion and care will always remain, and it’s our job as politicians to harness that potential.”

This is quietly different. It’s not a moral claim about who deserves what — it’s a systems claim about latent social capacity. It recognises that care and contribution exist independently of economic structure, and that policy’s job is to activate rather than create them. That framing has a distinctly Yellow quality: society as containing untapped adaptive resources, politics as a catalytic function rather than a redistributive one.

The choice of the New Economics Forum as venue is also a signal. NEF is one of the few think tanks explicitly working on post-growth economics and alternative measures of wellbeing — intellectual territory that is genuinely Yellow-adjacent. That Polanski spoke there, rather than to a more conventional left-labour audience, suggests at least an awareness of second-tier economic thinking even if the speech itself stayed mostly within Green’s frame.

The Structural Constraint

Spiral Dynamics predicts that Yellow political expression will be rare not because Yellow thinkers don’t enter politics, but because democratic politics is structurally constrained by the developmental centre of gravity of its audience and activists. A Yellow speech — integrating, non-adversarial, refusing easy villains, comfortable with complexity — doesn’t mobilise the Green activist base that the UK Greens are currently energising so effectively. Polanski is doing what a skilled political leader does: speaking in the language his coalition understands and responds to.

The more interesting question is whether the Green Party’s remarkable membership surge will shift its intellectual centre of gravity over time. If it attracts second-tier thinkers alongside Green activists, the solutions the party develops may become genuinely more integrative even if the rhetoric remains accessible.

An Alternative Frame

It’s worth noting that some of what Polanski is trying to solve — people unable to afford the basics of life even while working — has solutions beyond re-nationalisation. A guaranteed income floor that makes currently unaffordable basics survivable is an alternative response to the same problem, one that doesn’t require getting the ownership structure of water companies right before people get relief. Adaptive Universal Basic Income, as I’ve argued elsewhere, is precisely this kind of catalytic policy: it doesn’t redesign the whole economy, it changes the conditions under which people navigate it.

De Schutter’s March 2026 roadmap for eradicating poverty beyond growth — which the New Economics Forum audience will know well — is edging international policy conversation in exactly this direction. Whether Polanski’s Greens engage with that conversation or remain focused on the ownership question will be revealing.

For now: a party doing Green well, with Yellow flickering at the edges. That’s genuinely better than most of what’s on offer in British politics. The question is whether it’s the ceiling or the beginning.