Polanski will do nothing for the Tiktok generation who love him

The Greens’ leader is a soundbite politician for the Tiktok generation – but he won’t improve their lives

My social media feed has changed since Zack Polanski was elected leader of the Greens. Evenings spent scrolling Instagram reels are frequently interrupted by party-political adverts: clips of Polanski walking down a corridor, Polanski jogging across a street, Polanski dancing towards me with a microphone shouting “WHO’S READY TO MAKE HOPE NORMAL AGAIN?!” It’s become so relentless that I walked home last night fearfully glancing over my shoulder, half expecting to see him running after me.

There’s no point in complaining to Meta. I fit every possible metric for Green Party support. Young? Tick. Female? Tick. Extremely online renter with minimal savings and a pile of university debt? Tick, tick, tick. The Gorton and Denton by-election appeared to show that the party is capable of picking up votes from a wider section of society than Jeremy Corbyn ever managed but, like the former Labour leader, Polanski’s core base of support is instantly recognisable. It’s only in a Green Party canvassing photo that you’ll see so many white faces in Newham – Polanski’s advocates are the same progressive precariat who thought Corbyn was their political saviour.

But why? We are told that the unashamed radicalism of policy under Polanski’s direction is what attracts so many of this group to his cause. This might be true for perennial Leftist concerns like transgender rights and Gaza. But Polanski is also at pains to show that his economic message is the really revolutionary side to his party, with a strident class-war rhetoric galvanising downwardly mobile, still-renting millennials and Gen Zers.

Indeed, Polanski is just the latest on the Left to identify the rank unfairness of the divide between those who hold assets and those who do not. The former group has been mostly insulated from two decades of lacklustre economic growth, while the latter has faced the full effects of wage stagnation and rising living costs without other investments to fall back on. Few trapped in this unhappy situation have a reason to support the established parties unless they expect an inheritance to arrive.

The trouble is that the Greens’ actual policies would make this group’s situation worse. Take tax. The median wage in London is just shy of £50,000. Given what we know about where the Green vote is based, we can expect that a significant proportion of them will fall around this income bracket. A person making £50,000 in London will not feel rich. But they are high earners, according to what appears to be Green Party policy, to be penalised under a plan to remove the upper earnings limit for employee National Insurance contributions. For this group, it would raise the marginal tax rate dramatically, especially if they’re paying off their student loans.

Housing is an even thornier issue. The Greens are not fans of the private rented sector. To them, the only housing worth having is owned by the council, and so it appears the party will give local authorities priority to buy private homes at “reasonable” (belowmarket) rates if the social housing development target is not met. But the development target will never be met because the Nimbyism advocated by the party will make both private and state-controlled development unbelievably slow and costly.

Add in rent controls (which will drive even more private landlords out of the market, pushing up rents) and who will pay the highest price? The progressive precariat. Polanski would also impose a wealth tax on the richest one per cent to fund universal free childcare, nationalise water, energy and rail, and ramp up Green New Deal “investment”. None of this will directly improve the lot of younger voters. This is where Polanski is different from Corbyn. The latter was seriously socialist, existing within a long tradition of the Labour Left. His mode of politics, while unworkable, at least appealed directly to the material interests of his voter base. While Polanski occasionally mentions the name “Tony Benn”, really he just wants to #Bekind. His politics can be communicated through algo-friendly slogans – Free Palestine, Eat The Rich, No Borders No Nations. He is the perfect soundbite politician, being just-about-plausible for the 20-second clips through which much of the population receives its news.

Can’t get a house? The rich have bought them all and decided to leave them empty. Stabbing on your road? Nasty billionaires shut down all the youth centres because of austerity. Your pay cheque isn’t going as far as it used to? Guess what: the rich are hoarding all the money in overflowing treasure chests.

If you think it insults your intelligence, that’s the point. The Greens are the first political party to renounce politics and revert back to the critical thinking of a pre-modern conspiracy theorist. The sun won’t rise in the morning because the rich stole it.

Forgive the progressive precariat, for they know not what they do. Lacking the organisational capabilities of ethnic interest groups and the entrenched power of older degrowthers, their priorities will be the first to be ditched should their leader ever dance his way into No 10.