This article is taken from the May 2026 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Get five issues for just £5.
The Green Party now has more members that the Conservative Party. It has won a by-election convincingly and continues its upwards trajectory in the polls. Yet, not everything in its garden is in leaf. For a start, the Greens aren’t green any more.
It is not just critics on the right who have noticed the party’s turn from soft-left environmentalism to what appears to be net-zero communism. Nicholas Beuret, writing in openDemocracy, highlighted the growing tension between the ecological identity of traditionalist Greens and the motivations of the party’s many new supporters. Some old-school Greens fear that leader Zack Polanski’s economics and radicalism risk turning the party into an anti-establishment outfit rather than an organisation whose prime focus is the environment.
The repositioning leaves some of the party’s traditionalists feeling politically homeless. These so-called Deep Greens are generally rural dwellers, the antithesis of Polanski’s urban “watermelons” (green on the outside, red on the inside). Deep Greens are the sort of folk who shun Sharia and public dance gyrations in gay bondage gear. They favour patrolling roadside verges picking litter, and they know the Latin names for wildflowers. These earnest souls are the ones now left behind in the backwash of the Polanski surge.
One such example is Michael de Whalley, a district councillor and founder of the Green Party’s West Norfolk branch. He resigned from the party in March, telling the Eastern Daily Press: “I was always impressed that the Greens seemed to be informed by science. The party has now moved away from that to more dogma and ideology.” Having campaigned for better waste management and helped block the construction of an incinerator near King’s Lynn, de Whalley laments that the Green Party “is now moving to a leftwing populist stance; our policies have less substance to them”.
Notably, in the last general election, the Greens won two of their four seats (now five since the Gorton and Denton by-election) in rural and agriculturally dependent areas. These constituencies — held by Adrian Ramsay (Waveney Valley) and Ellie Chowns (North Herefordshire) — boast similar demographics to many of the 43 new council seats the Greens won in the 2025 local elections.
Green breakthroughs in counties such as Leicestershire, Cambridgeshire and Staffordshire came largely on the back of localised environmental issues. Campaigns included challenging local building development, increasing public access and — oxymoronically to many — railing against renewable energy infrastructure construction. The Green Party of old cultivated a reputation as the champions of the natural world, becoming a preferred choice for disaffected establishment party supporters, particularly amongst suburban émigrés to rural areas. It is increasingly difficult to imagine this cohort finding much affinity with the Polanski rebrand of socialist cosmopolitanism.
Rosie Pearson is one such example. The founder of the Essex Suffolk Norfolk Pylons action group, she has led a tireless campaign against the proposed 111 miles of overland pylons planned by National Grid. If built, the Norwich-to-Tilbury line will carry wind-generated electricity to the great conurbations of the South East. Crossing swathes of East Anglian farmland, heath and woodland, the pylons will undoubtedly negatively impact farm businesses and cause long-lasting biodiversity damage.
Pearson admits she generally voted Green locally and Conservative nationally, yet feels that “the Green Party has now lost its way due to their exclusive focus on climate change and renewable energy. They seem to positively hate farmers and landowners.” This, she believes, has led to the countryside being roundly ignored by the party’s leaders. “They are like Miliband on steroids. The climate has become an overriding obsession and all to the detriment of nature. Local rural Greens involved in the pylons campaign may like the increased profile the party now enjoys, but they are in despair at the route it is taking.”
Is there an opportunity for a challenger to don the old Greens’ mantle as champions of the British countryside and nature? “There is a massive gap emerging for a real ‘countryside party’ — something the Conservatives once believed was theirs by right. I have spoken to Reform UK’s Richard Tice about the Norwich-to-Tilbury pylons and he did a lot of listening,” Pearson says.
Tice has now guaranteed the pylon project will be scrapped should Reform come to power at the next general election. The Deep Greens may scratch their heads at the seeming incongruity of Reform being simultaneously both the Village Green Preservation Society and the party avowed to reindustrialise Britain. Yet the Reform brand of being “green” does have its own logic.
Britain is overwhelmingly farmland. Over 70 per cent of the landmass remains dedicated to agriculture. Nigel Farage has frequently repeated that if British farming isn’t in the black, the country cannot be green. The Green Party, on the other hand, has a less-than-cordial relationship with British agriculture: advocating rewilding, demanding a wholesale reduction in meat and dairy production and imposing draconian subsidy conditions to reduce agricultural chemical usage. They blame the industry for “damaging nature” and “contributing heavily to pollution”.
Reform wants farmers to produce more food, with a target of 70 per cent food security. The party believes that if money flows into agriculture once more, this will organically improve the rural economy, which in turn will fund greater levels of environmental stewardship.
This view is reflected in a recent report by Lloyds Bank, British farming’s leading financier, which concluded that financially secure farms are more likely to adopt biodiversity-positive systems. Reform’s anti-net-zero position may run counter to the hopes of those Green voters who view environmentalism through the prism of climate change and renewables, yet the holistic approach of “healthy farms, healthy nature” could land well with the many rural constituents who merely loaned their vote to the Greens last time — particularly those with an interest in native flora, fauna and locally grown food. The Reform message is clearly landing with Britain’s farmers: 40 per cent, when polled by Farmers Weekly, backed Nigel Farage to be given the keys to Number 10.
A resurgent agricultural sector equates to a greener, pleasanter land
With the general election still three years away, Reform’s policies for farming and the environment remain a work in progress. However, senior Reform figures confirmed to me they “will scrap net zero within the first one hundred days of coming to power”. This, they say, will “alleviate the severe environmental degradation of land caused by solar and wind farms, halt the disruption to migratory birds and marine life and reduce the environmental impacts when such projects are commissioned and decommissioned”.
Such a policy would naturally lead to more land returning to food production. Whilst no guarantees have yet been made about how consumer food will be subsidised (which is essentially what the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy facilitated), there is a promised “massive reduction of DEFRA red tape; reduced fuel, fertiliser and energy costs, funded through the cancellation of green levies, carbon taxes and VAT on red diesel”.
This would lead to significant reductions in input costs, thereby improving farm margins. Whilst this is clearly good news for farmers themselves, wavering voters may need more persuading that a resurgent agricultural sector equates to a greener, pleasanter land.
Reform makes the case for its dovetailed farming-and-environment approach in its manifesto for the Welsh Senedd elections. David Jones, the former Conservative Secretary of State for Wales who defected to Reform last year, explained the party’s thinking: “In Wales, the countryside means farming. For too long the Welsh government has placed environmental goals above food production. Our farmers are great at growing food; they want to grow food on their land, not be told by bureaucrats in offices that they must plant trees on it.”
Jones points out that Wales’ net contribution to global carbon emissions is negligible, yet the current Labour administration has legislated a series of swingeing agri-environment policies that have, in his words, “left farming to die”. Reform is clearly coming out swinging as the farmer’s friend in Wales, stating: “Welsh farmers are central to our food security, the rural economy and national resilience.” A similar mantra is deployed in English rural constituencies for the council elections.
This is slightly risky. Whilst the people of Wales retain a strong connection with the land, the rural shires of England have seen an influx of urban incomers since the pandemic. Many of these new arrivals have been convinced by Green Party rhetoric that farmers, gamekeepers and land managers are destroyers of the environment rather than custodians of it.
If Reform is to become the party of the countryside, it will not simply have to make its own case to the public; it will have to become the PR agency for UK Farming PLC as well.
