Does the Green Party need a youtube channel?
The Green Party needs to seize the means of media production.
I haven’t written anything here for a year. Sorry.
I wanted to write this down, mostly to cohere my thoughts somewhere. The Green Party, my political home of 11 years now, has moved so far from where it was when I joined, mostly for the better.
Writing this down, we’ve just had the biggest year in terms of growth the party has ever seen. The 2024 election was a massive success, quadrupling the parliamentary representation and achieving all 4 targets. After an entirely predictable lull in activity and vibes, as the 4 MPs disappeared into the bowels of Westminster to fulfill their dreams of backbenchering, we saw the full emergence of Zack Polanski, who unless you were Adrian (sorry Adrian, I had to) launched his totally obvious and successful leadership bid. The campaign itself brought more attention to the Green Party than any exercise by the national party than I can remember. It generated excitement and hype, it brought in more members and it did what the broad unorganised faction that I will refer to here as the Lucasites, (Lucasism?) never could do, which is to excite the Green Party’s base.
Winning the Leadership was only the first step, our Autumn Conference showed just how much the party’s public image has changed, not just in terms of attendance numbers. In conferences gone past, the people at the front of the leader’s speech filming it was confined to me. That’s it, just me. Even as late as Autumn 2023, there wasn’t a scrum at the stage for space with photographers and videographers, cameramen shouldering each other for space and placing microphones on the podium. But that was my experience of Autumn Conference 2025. That’s a change, people want the visuals, the pool clip isn’t enough. And Zack spent that conference in back to back interviews and media appearances, fairly, although I do maintain the Leadership should be involved with the business of conference and not purely sticking to press.
And it’s only gone further, the party membership has almost tripled in the span of almost a year. That means activists, money, a larger pool of candidates and officers. It means resources to fight elections.
And then a by-election comes around. In the update to the party’s Political Strategy, passed by Conference in Autumn 2025, the party committed to “Be by-election ready to win strategically important Parliamentary by-elections.”. I think we’ve proven that it’s capable of that much earlier than expected. Led by the national party, but on the bedrock of two strong local parties, Manchester and Tameside, the Green Party successfully won its first parliamentary byelection in Gorton and Denton, achieving a 27% increase in the vote and beating Labour into third place. This is a monumental achievement, and shoutout to Miles Thorpe the campaign manager, a lovely, experienced and highly organised guy, which is what you want in a political knife fight.
But for all the change, some things stay the same. For years, I’ve talked internally in Green spaces, about the need to take digital communications and social media seriously. The problem with Green Comms was never simply the Leaders and MPs saying boring sensible things in a boring and sensible way, never attacking or provoking, never ragebaiting and never being particularly radical and being terrified of being attacked in the mainstream press. On this front, everything has changed, and that is down to Zack and Zack alone. This is the power of the Leader of the Green Party, changing what the party communicates and how you say it.
The other side is the investment in the party itself, and this isn’t on Zack, alone anyway he’s still a member of GPEx, it’s on GPEx. The pure lack of investment in the party’s ability to communicate really should be studied. In the last year, we’ve gone from a singular social media staffer to 4, with only one of them focussed on content creation, and 2 as Community engagement officers, whatever that means.
The Party has produced, with Zack, four high quality party political broadcasts, following on from the videos Zack made during his leadership campaign. These are beautifully shot, emotive and attention capturing pieces of work, shot by Jeremy Clancy. They focus on the cost of living, and how it makes a normal person feel, and that there is an alternative out there.
The Green Party has a message, that message connects with the public, it has a messenger, indeed a few of them who connect with the public and come across as authentic and believable. What it doesn't possess is the infrastructure and means to effectively communicate that message, day in, day out, in the manner it wants to, and regardless of the tides of political change.
The mainstream media is fickle, and world events are not in our control. If we want to communicate our message over the cost of living, and an American-Israeli war of aggression is breaking out in Iran, for sure we can talk about how bad it will be for the cost of living with rising oil prices due to the Strait of Hormuz being closed, but there will be no guarantee that that will be clipped out to the public. Indeed, having a spokesperson speak to camera, in a calm and empathetic manner, and talk plainly to people on their own channels. This will connect better than just endlessly clipping news segments. For one thing, it relies on being invited onto the news segments, something the party cannot guarantee.
The aftermath of the Gorton and Denton by-election has been interesting to watch. I’ve seen more of Matt Goodwin crying over his loss than I’ve seen Hannah Spencer on the airwaves and papers, talking about the party’s victory. It has, understandably, been framed almost entirely around Keir Starmer’s position as Prime Minister. Even Hannah being sworn in as an MP garnered little coverage in the press. The party itself has shot some clips of a press photo op outside Westminster, and then a short to camera clip of Hannah on the bridge. Hannah has herself shot a short vlog of her first day in the commons. (I wonder who thought of that.)
It’s clear that Zack himself has recognised this, he has developed a personal platform in Bold Politics, a podcast that he himself controls, independently from the Green Party. This is smart, although I personally think the format of just a podcast is restrictive. What the party at large needs to recognise is the need to think in the long term, Zack will not always be leader, he is term limited by the constitution. He won’t be leader in a decade. Greens need to plant trees our children can shelter under, not just in terms of the country, but also in terms of our party. But Zack’s personal feeds are not full of Zack posting, the main party is not supporting Zack to produce content, it’s full of collaborations, and I’ve made a few of those posts, local parties, relying on volunteers, making content and collaborating with Zack. All of those parties have different gear, a different look to their content and there isn’t a narrative,
So what would I do? It’s all good to complain, but you need ideas. That applies for us as a party deriding the government as it does for me criticising party mismanagement. The answer is simple, invest in the Party infrastructure.
I would build a Green Party media ecosystem, with content, short and long form being published every day. We need to show the country the Green point of view, we need to explain ourselves in an engaging and cinematic fashion, we need to have a laugh. When a Green Council does something good, or indeed does something necessary and unpopular, we should be publishing videos and content highlighting it, showing what Green Councillors do, attacking the government austerity agenda. Look at attacks on our Drugs Policy, I would bring in the Drugs Policy Working Group to explain the policy, I would bring in health experts from outside the party, so we can explain the policy, all the nuance in our own time and on our own dime.
We currently have 5 MPs, and 1 PMQ every 11 weeks, and perhaps 1 Green MP in a newsroom. So you’ve got 3 MPs spare to run a PMQs react stream. Build a studio corner in a parliamentary office, or the GPEW headquarters.
There should be a videographer assigned to follow Zack Polanski around day and night. And we could do things actual Zohran style. And that’s a start.
I want to see vlogs of all the MPs, what are they doing? Why are they doing it? What are their stories and their priorities. How does Parliament work? Have the MPs explain that in all its boring detail. Because there will be an audience and it will be watched.
Every piece of content should have a call to action, we can signpost activists where want them, to target campaigns around the country. And most important of all, to donate to the party, this will be expensive, it will require funds, buying the kit necessary will be an upfront investment, but it will pay dividends both financial but also political.
When Greens enter government, hopefully not the next election but eventually, we will need a media ecosystem, not just the highly individual personal platforms of its MPs, but also the collective platform of the party, to fight back against the mainstream and rightwing media onslaught. We cannot be complacent, we cannot look at the polling numbers where they are now, the success we have with a relatively small amount of effort in this arena and assume that that’s okay and enough and we shouldn’t push further. We cannot allow the Party to be comprised of individuals, each with their own platform, we must build a collective platform, surely the point of being in a party.
We must hire videographers, editors, graphic designers and motion graphics designers. We need a professional team, we must buy kit, I want a shelf of FX3s producing party content. Hiring freelancers, all with different cameras with different looks that editors have to deal with in post, is expensive and inefficient. We need an executive and comms team that cares about it.
There will be those that reply to this saying “but that’s not our job, that’s the media’s job” or “MPs are busy they’re not influencers”. And I want to say it plain. That is hopelessly naive. We do not have an associated media, or an affiliated media, the leftwing media outlets are friendly to us, for now. But there will be no media out there that is as friendly to us as the media we ourselves create. We have 5 MPs, without the ability to rile up the public and activate them, we cannot force a Government u-turn or defeat. We do not in fact need a Green MP sitting in every Commons debate, Westminster hall debate or at every parliament reception. We need them talking to the public, we need Influencer MPs.
The Green Party must collectively seize the means of media production.
So the call to action, I said the party needed one, so here’s mine, and that is to vote in the Annual Ballot, to lobby GPEx and the CEO for the investment needed, when the Annual Ballot comes around ask the candidates what their plans for social media are, what are their criticisms of the current strategy, and how would they change it? We desperately need a better internal debating culture and space inside the Green Party, that is true. But demanding that is the first step
The second call is to get building if you can, on this I bear some weight of hypocrisy. Because I have the tools and also a fair amount of imposter syndrome. I’m a barista without a politics degree, I’m not a politician, I’ve just been in the party for 11 years and have spent a lot of time talking, thinking and reading about politics. I know that in the real world, political commentary doesn’t require qualifications, it requires political analysis and clout. But if you can, build a platform, talk about politics, educate your fellows and build a wider Green Party movement.
If you want to hear more from me, if you found these insights and ideas helpful, telling me that is nice? If you think I’m wrong, tell me that too.