The Zionism is Racism motion was a mistake

Maximalist policy motions do not equal a socialist Green Party

At Green Party Spring Conference two weeks ago there was only one thing anybody was talking about: Zionism is Racism.

Backed by hundreds of members and attracting more amendments than any other motion, it was promoted heavily by activists in the run-up, bounced the leadership into a difficult position and attracted the attention of the Times, Telegraph, LBC and the Spectator, all eager to manufacture a new Green anti-semitism crisis.

I made the case against these maximal policy motions on the podcast a few weeks ago and the post-conference fallout makes me even more confident they’re a dead end.

My argument is roughly that:

• Provocatively titled policy motions like Zionism is Racism and Abolish Landlords aren’t really about influencing the policy process. The manifesto is mostly determined in policy working groups and conference policy motions only stand for two years. Their purpose is to provoke media attention, bounce the Green leadership into backing them and shift the conversation leftward. The cost is negative media coverage, public infighting and, in the case of Zionism is Racism, a polarisation of the membership that could easily result in the public resignation of Jewish councillors and another round of the anti-semitism doom-loop that undid Corbyn.

• This attention-at-any-cost form of politics might make sense for a pop-up protest group like Just Stop Oil, but is actively damaging for an enduring political party that aims to form a government. We need a mindset switch from a minoritarian, single-issue politics of attention to a majoritarian, programmatic politics of power. We need to obsess over getting the Greens to 30%. This will mean attracting voters who could easily swing back to Labour, which will take discipline, unity and a relentless focus on issues that people actually care about (hint: it’s the cost of living, and has been for years).

• Anti-zionists pushing these motions should be more invested in this majority-seeking approach than the average Green member, and more sensitive to anything that might derail it. This is because only a Green majority government will actually do any anti-zionism. If the Greens are a junior partner in coalition with Labour - which is what will happen if we stay below 20% - any anti-zionism that makes the manifesto will die on the Labour/Green coalition negotiating table.

• It’s worth noting that motions maximalism sits in contrast to the manifesto minimalism of successful left electoral projects of late. Mamdani ran on fast and free buses, free childcare and rent caps. Die Linke’s 2025 comeback featured a two page manifesto. The Belgian Worker’s Party have a disciplined focus on popular, bread-and-butter issues, and are currently topping the polls.

• This focus on conference policy motions is downstream of a left influenced by humanities graduates and social media, where politics is reduced to discourse, and debating the precise wording of a motion is preferable to building organisation or grappling with power. Passing a conference motion won’t make the party anti-zionist. Party documentation often means very little. Labour still self-describes as a democratic socialist party. The real task is identifying sites of power in the party (such as the leadership, MPs, staff and membership) and pursuing efforts to change them.

• In this spirit, I’d suggest two anti-zionist efforts that would be more influential and less destructive than provocative conference motions. The first is scaling political education. The Green Party now has 200k+ members, many of whom don’t have a coherent socialist politics, never mind an anti-zionist politics. Given the party’s highly democratic structure, the membership are very powerful and can hold the leadership accountable in government (as demonstrated when Scottish Green members brought an end to the SNP-Green coalition in 2024 by threatening a confidence vote). Educating the members on the history and theory of the Palestinian struggle builds an important counter-weight to under-pressure Green MPs in government.

• Another idea: find and support anti-zionist candidates to run for selection in Green target seats at the next election. Obviously Green MPs have power in the party, and as the polls improve more seats become viable targets. The Greens have an admirably open culture when it comes to candidate selection, and unlike in Labour the selections won’t be stitched up. If you can identify charismatic, local candidates with a compelling story who also happen to be anti-zionist - they’ll stand a good chance of getting selected and elected. If this doesn’t happen, it’s likely a lot of Green candidates will be drawn from a pool of well-meaning but often liberal councillors who have been around the party for years, and are less likely to take a strong line on Palestine and anti-zionism.

I have to take my share of the blame for this. When I was working at Momentum in 2018 we pushed a similar set of provocative policy motions, Abolish Private Schools being the most feted. We were hubristic after the near-win of 2017, implicitly assuming the next election would run on a similar script and instead focused on making our programme for government as radical as possible. We ignored Corbyn’s subterranean approval ratings and the obvious rehabilitation of the Tories under Johnson and Cummings. And our beautiful, radical manifesto wasn’t worth the paper it was written on.

As the Zionism is Racism motion wasn’t heard at Spring conference, it’s sure to come back in the Autumn. I really hope we have an alternative approach by then.

For an extended discussion on motions maximalism listen to the podcast below from 33 minutes in, where Shanice offers the other side of the argument. I’ve also pasted a transcript of my take below too.

Lightly edited transcript:

Joe: Okay, so I’m definitely thinking aloud on this one - and it might be a bit of a long one - but it’s related to the Green Party Spring Conference coming up at the end of this month.

My hot take is that so-called “radical” policy motions are not the way we build a socialist party and win. And I actually think they’re a bit of a dead end - and I’m going to explain why.

Just to give some context: there are lots of motions going to conference, some about party rules, others about party policy. The big one that’s been trailed is “Zionism is racism”, which has hundreds of backers - more than any other. Content-wise, it’s very good: calling for a single democratic Palestinian state, the right of return, unbanning Palestine Action, releasing Palestinian political prisoners. All very sensible.

There was a similar motion last year - “abolish landlords” - which again contained really sensible policy. In fact, all of the policy in it was already Green Party policy: rent controls, scrapping Right to Buy, taxing empty properties, ending buy-to-let mortgages, and so on. So my problem is not with the content of these motions at all. I think the content is good.

My problem is with the framing - and the logic behind them.

Both of these motions are titled in deliberately provocative ways. “Zionism is Racism.” “Abolish Landlords.” I agree with both statements - but they’re clearly designed to generate attention. The intention is to create a bit of a media storm, get picked up by national outlets, and push Green spokespeople into public debates that shift the conversation.

I understand that logic. It’s very of our time. We live in an attention-driven moment where being seen to be doing something can feel like power. You can see that most clearly in groups like Just Stop Oil, who have essentially bathed themselves in attention as a way of accruing influence.

But I think this reflects an unambitious theory of change.

It starts from the idea that we need to change the conversation, rather than from the question of how we actually build the power to do the things we’re talking about - abolishing landlordism, or reorienting the British state on Palestine.

So the politics becomes quite discursive: it’s about generating debate, getting coverage, shifting perceptions. But to what end? Does that actually help us win - and help us win in a way that would allow us to carry these policies through?

If you start instead from the question of what it would actually take to do these things, you end up somewhere different. It would take many things, but one of them - electorally - is a Green majority government made up of MPs who are actually committed to doing them.

Right now, the Greens are polling somewhere between 11% and 19%. To get a majority, we’d need something like 30%+. That’s a huge jump. And if we’re serious about making it, we have to think about the voters we don’t yet have.

Most of those voters are currently voting Labour, or not voting at all. Research from Persuasion UK - based on interviews with around 9,000 potential Labour leavers - suggests they’re often younger, in service-sector jobs, and lower-middle income. Crucially, they’re also quite open to moving back to Labour if it looks like the more viable option.

So we have to take those voters seriously.

I’m not making the argument that we should rein in radicalism - I don’t believe that at all. We should be radical relative to the status quo. But it needs to be a radicalism that’s rooted in how people actually speak and what they experience in their everyday lives.

Take Zohran Mamdani, who we always use as a crutch on this podcast. He didn’t campaign on “abolishing landlords”. He campaigned on freezing rents. Partly because it’s something he could actually deliver - but also because it makes immediate sense to people. “Abolishing landlords” is much harder to translate into something concrete on the doorstep.

And there’s no real separation between “media politics” and local campaigning. Most people experience political parties through the media, not through conversations with activists. So if we generate messages that are designed purely for attention, but can’t be communicated in everyday terms, that creates a real problem.

If we want to build a socialist Green Party that can actually win and govern, I think there are more important places to focus.

Selecting large numbers of genuinely socialist candidates. Increasing the activity levels of members. Getting members more deeply embedded in their communities. And, on policy, doing the slower, more sustained work through long-term policy processes rather than one-off, high-profile motions.

That’s not to say conference motions don’t matter. They do. But I think their most useful role is often in shaping the internal rules and structure of the party.

For example, there’s a motion this year proposing that MPs should only take a worker’s wage. I think that’s excellent. It cuts against careerism, signals something very clear to the public, and changes who is attracted to standing in the first place. There’s also good evidence it cuts through politically.

That, to me, is the kind of thing that helps build a socialist party.

Whereas a lot of these more provocative policy motions don’t actually make the party more socialist in practice - they just create moments of attention. And I think there are better ways of building the kind of party we need.