Former senior Green politician denounces ‘Corbynite takeover’ of party

According to Johnson, he did not leave the Greens, the party left him.

When he joined the Greens as a youngster, the 60-year-old said it was because of their stance on environmental issues rather than far-left politics they had embraced today. “It was a more radical alternative to Labour at the time. But the reason I joined wasn’t because I didn’t think Labour was left-wing enough, it was very much motivated by the green agenda,” he said, adding: “I was always virulently anti-communist.”

“At the time the militant tendency was getting strong back in the 80s, and the SWP and the Communist Party were still going, so it was never about that. It was about the environmental agenda, animal welfare, gay rights, stuff like that,” which he said was representative of his politics.

“I think I’ve been generally consistent,” said the former councillor as he recalled his work to get conspiracy theorist David Icke, previously the party’s national speaker, banned from the Greens’ annual conference in 1994. “I will freely admit my initial motivation for wanting to get him banned was because he was a nutter that would just be a pure embarrassment” to the party, he said. He added: “It was only after I spoke to Jewish members, and then started to see the real hurt and outrage, and genuine upset that this was causing, I then realised how serious this was, so I’ve always been quite finely tuned to that ever since.”

Darren Johnson (centre) alongside human rights campaigner Peter Tatchell campaigning against cleric Yussef al-Qaradawi after he was hosted by then-London Mayor Ken Livingstone (Image: Getty)AFP via Getty Images

In 2024, he was suspended from the Green Party for objecting to the party’s unwillingness to accept the findings of the Cass Review into gender identity services for children and young people. He resigned shortly afterwards. In March this year he joined Labour, saying that his politics were “now far closer to Labour than the increasingly radicalised Greens and are much better reflected in the work of people like Ed Miliband and Sadiq Khan than by Zack Polanski or [deputy Green leader] Mothin Ali.”

For him, the situation in his former party is worse than it was in Labour under Jeremy Corbyn.

“Even at the high point of Corbynism and the most appalling behaviour going on with antisemitism and so on, there were still some moderating influences through the parliamentary party, through a very large, long-standing membership and trade union link,” which he says is largely absent in the Greens. He added the party was unable to cope with the scale of Corbynites and left-wingers flocking to join.

“There’s just been this huge group of new members who come in from the hard left, and there aren’t those balancing forces to try and moderate them at all. The parliamentary party is tiny; the leader is egging them on.”

He accused Polanski of being more “cowardly” than Jeremy Corbyn ever was in terms of confronting offensive comments. “At least Corbyn sometimes would stand up and say, ‘this is unacceptable’, we don’t hear that at all from him, you know how he is a prisoner. I don’t even think he believes half this stuff. I just think he saw his opportunity that, you know, that by reinventing the Green Party as a left populist party it could deliver tons of votes and tons of activists”.

Has there been a Corbynite hostile takeover of the Green Party? “Yes, although the direction of travel has been clear for a while,” he said. “Obviously there’s always a hard left in the Green Party … but it was comparatively small, not particularly influential. People like Caroline Lucas as leader and myself would often say ‘no’, and speak against some of their extreme motions at conference”, he added.

What does he make of Polanski himself? “When he first joined from the Lib Dems, I thought he’s taking on the antisemites in the party … he was saying all the right things. I thought, he seems pretty pragmatic and switched on. I thought, oh, this guy’s great. But then you look at his sort of political career … like a colour chart.” Polanski, he said, went from an “austerity coalition-supporting Lib Dem, to a moderate Green to a left-populist … it seems purely driven by opportunity”.

He said: “He reminds me a lot of Boris Johnson… Boris first got elected as a true-blue shires Tory, and that was very much his approach and his persona, and then reinvented himself as this liberal mayor and won two elections with that. That was coming to an end, so he reinvented himself as this Red Wall Tory Brexiter. Zack Polanski seems to have a similar journey with a similar level of opportunism and a similar level of self-belief.”

He thinks the party’s deputy leader Mothin Ali represents a growing element within the party pursuing what he described as a “pro-Islamist agenda”. He noted Ali’s presence at a rally where flags of the Iranian regime were waved and his comments that October 7 marked the “end of white settler colonialism” – which he has since apologised for.

He foresees a “culture clash between the uber liberal stuff that the party is saying” and more socially conservative supporters, many of whom will be Muslim, attracted by the party’s stance on Gaza.

A Green source said: “Over 160,000 new members have joined the Green Party, and millions of former Labour voters are backing us, because we offer a genuine alternative. Green Party policies have not fundamentally changed under Zack’s leadership – he’s just very good at communicating them. Darren Johnson is an outlier. There is no real divide between longstanding and newer Green Party members and supporters. Most of us agree on what’s wrong with our country under this failing Labour government, and on what needs to be done to fix it.

“Most people also agree with our respect for human rights, opposition to genocide and war crimes, and other foreign policy stances. The term ‘hard left’ is an attempt to discredit widely-held, common sense positions.”