Emil Kunna
Far Left Politics in Britain: The Case of the Green Party
On the 3rd of July 2025 the former Labour MP for Coventry South Zahara Sultana announced that she would be forming a new party with the former Leader of the Labour Party and current Independent MP for Islington North Jeremy Corbyn. This new party would, it seems, be positioning itself to the left of the current Labour party line.
As no polling for this new party is published and as of writing it seems unclear as to the existence of this new political formation as anything more than conceptual. I thought it would be a good time to engage with the electoral history of the only currently extant electorally significant political party to the left of Labour, The Greens.
A light and breezy tour through the electoral fortunes of the Green Party 2016 – 2025
The Greens began to become electorally relevant on the national stage around 2010 with the election of Caroline Lucas as MP for Brighton Pavillion. The earliest polling in the archive from 2016 demonstrates Green’s growing relevance in national polling with 7.8% of the vote.
Fig 1: Voting Intention for August 2016
Voting Intention 18-35, August 2016
The stereotype of the average Green voter as a younger member of the metropolitan elite took a battering between 2017 and 2019. Then, the majority of the youth vote was going to Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour party which as the poll below from 2017 showed held the lion’s share of 18-35s. The Greens were left with just 2% of the vote in both the 18-24 and 25-35 demographics.
Fig 2: Voting Intention for June 2017:
Fig 3: Voting Intention for September 2022:
Voting Intention 18-35, September 2022
Following the 2019 election and the replacement of Corbyn as Labour Leader a slight but noticeable change in voting intention saw the Greens reclaim some ground in the polling. This poll from the beginning of the Truss premiership in September 2022 showed their polling numbers rising to 4 percent nationally.
Fig.3 Voting intention for May 2025
Jumping ahead again to May 2025 we see the Greens presenting a strong showing nationally with a clear preference among younger voters. This comes on the heels of the Green’s best electoral result ever with 4 MPs.
Summing up
Voting Intention 18-35 April 2025
From the above polling it seems clear that the Greens position to the left of labour has allowed them to secure voters disillusioned by the rightward shift of the labour party post Corbyn. For a period in the late 2010s labour held a monopoly on left wing politics and former green voters undoubtedly contributed to Corbyn’s 2017 success. In 2025 the Green’s electoral coalition is supplemented by new supporters from the Lib Dems, Labour and non voters.
Traditionally political parties and ideologies were seen as fairly implacable, however in today’s particularly protean political environment and especially toward the ideological fringe of mainstream politics this is not really the case. It is hard to see how the Greens could fail to be influenced by a Corbynite labour politics even as that politics was being banished to the political hinterland. Electorally third parties who lose their electorate appear to lie dormant until they are ideologically revivified by an influx of new members. The Greens simply by placing themselves to the left of labour were the logical recipient of disaffected left wing voters.
This situation is highly unstable and subject to revision at any time. Could a new party recapturing the heady days of 2017 bring the energy of labour’s former Momentum fuelled rush to the edge of electoral victory? Or could a shift by Labour back to the left annex this dissident fringe? What it means to be a Green, a Corbynite or a left wing Labour voter is defined broadly by political happenstance with these loosely defined affiliations providing institutional voice to a singular core electoral demographic. It is worth noting that a similarly fractured left wing politics in France led to the creation of broad based electoral coalitions NUPES (Nouvelle Union Populaire Écologique et Sociale) in 2022 and subsequently the NFP (Nouvelle Front Populauire) in 2024. Both of these formations achieved impressive electoral success but suffered from infighting and a lack of credible organisation post-election.
References:
All polling data from Verian available here: https://amsr.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/Verian
Emil Kunna
November 2025