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The Green Party of England & Wales has never polled as highly as they are polling right now under Zack Polanski’s leadership.
And in the recent by-election in Gorton & Denton, the swing from Labour to the Green Party was an unprecedented result for a party that has never held a seat in Northern England.
Hannah Spencer rode multiple waves to victory in the suburban Manchester constituency that she now represents as an MP. Her much-touted credentials as a ‘local plumber’, Labour’s unwillingness to allow Andy Burnham (the popular Greater Manchester mayor) to stand, and the polarising anti-Islamic rhetoric from the Reform party candidate Matt Goodwin (in an area with a significant Muslim population) likely all played a role.
But Hannah Spencer’s election was also the test case for the narrative strategy under Zack Polanski.
‘Green populism’ is a new position for the Greens, whereby their pro-environmental advocacy plays second fiddle to ‘populist’ economic ideas that acknowledge the precarious financial situation so many people find themselves in.
This brand of populism seeks to redirect people’s anger and frustration towards the ‘super wealthy’.
But in embracing the political dynamics of the moment, has the Green party thrown climate and nature under the economic bus? And would people object if they had done?
Three questions help unpack this:
What the Green Party is (and isn’t) talking about
We conducted a rapid analysis (with Climate Outreach) of the language used in 21 Green Party leaflets since Zack Polanki’s first conference speech as leader last year (most of which had been uploaded to www.electionleaflets.org). Across 10,026 words covered in over 40 pages, we found that there was only one mention of climate change and no mentions of ‘net zero’. ‘Environment’ was mentioned seven times and ‘nature’ just once.
Zack Polanki’s party conference speech in October contained five mentions of ‘climate’ and two of ‘nature’.
In the available leaflets from the Gorton & Denton by-election specifically, we found no mentions of climate change at all.
But this isn’t the full picture.
Climate, nature and environment did emerge as key talking points in the Green’s media interviews and debates during the campaign. For instance, during the BBC’s candidates debate, Spencer linked the cost of living with energy prices, highlighting how the Greens would nationalise energy industries, while challenging the other parties on donations from fossil fuel companies.
In other media appearances, Spencer talked about a range of local and national environmental issues, from poor air quality in Manchester, to insulation and fuel poverty – framing nature and environment as ‘every day parts of life’. She emphasised how she will be ‘really firm’ on the climate emergency, particularly on climate impacts like flooding and impact on green spaces.
In the leaflets we analysed, there was a clear focus on local-level green policy issues, like waste and water, including fly tipping, recycling and water companies (52 mentions); local transport and planning issues – such as bus services (19); as well as the need to protect the local environment, green spaces and wildlife (18).
And what the Greens have consistently talked about are themes of local community action, collective agency, building hope, and standing up for people’s concerns and worries. Across the same 21 leaflets, the word “local” was used 74 times, “residents” 65 times, “people” 59 times, “services” 28 times, “community” 27 times, and “hope” 17 times.
These themes are crucial precursors to rebuilding trust and showing public audiences that climate and net zero policies can be fair and affordable: as Professor Mat Paterson at the University of Manchester put it in his own analysis of Green Party literature in the by-election, “Perhaps this tells us that the way to communicate climate action effectively is through focusing on everyday lives, on enabling people to thrive, and how climate action contributes to that.”
In fact, rebuilding the ‘salience’ of climate change as an issue depends on getting this right.
Rebuilding climate salience – getting the balance right
In one sense, the focus on building trust and the economic credibility of a Green candidate is a positive step: the Green party still has strong Green policies after all, and a vote for a party named after its environmental credentials is difficult to interpret as an anti-climate position.
If climate change becomes implicit in voting patterns, is that a sign of failure or of progress?
We certainly need more ‘trusted messengers’ to communicate climate policies.
But in one way or another they do need to communicate about them, to ensure climate change doesn’t drop down the political priority list, or signal to voters that climate change isn’t an urgent challenge.
If the Green party is choosing to do this less in their narrative (taking the support for climate policies among their audiences as a ‘given’), is a bolder positioning on climate change a space other parties can and should move into?
The Green Party’s communication strategy could be viewed as both a cause and a consequence of the dwindling ‘issue salience’ of climate change in the public mind. In the period spanning 2019-2021, nearly a third of people selected climate change as one of the top three most important issues facing the country. Today, that number is closer to one-in-ten.
But what does this mean? Have people stopped caring about climate change? Or does caring about climate change manifest in different ways?
The evidence here is not difficult to decode. Britain Talks Climate & Nature shows unequivocally that people care about nature, green spaces, wildlife and preserving a healthy environment for future generations.
Framing messages using these kinds of issues – alongside saving money on energy bills, or building energy security through homegrown renewable power – are all well-established ways of linking the ‘why’ and the ‘how’ on net zero policies, and are also crucial to rebuilding climate salience.
It isn’t a binary choice between turning up the volume on climate change as an issue, and doing the work needed to improve the economic T&Cs of the transition. What the Greens’ success tells us is that right now effective public engagement involves doing both, and doing both together.
It’s not the economy vs the environment
It is unrealistic to think the country’s net zero goals will consistently be front of mind for people in the 25 years between now and the deadline for achieving them. But there are real risks in vacating the pitch on the benefits that climate and nature policies can bring: it becomes too easy to paint it as an unnecessary political project, or something that is in competition with fixing the economy.
And for the Green Party, there’s no political gain in this trade-off.
In Climate Barometer tracker data from Oct 2025, potential Green and Labour voters were the most likely groups to disagree with the idea that fixing the climate or economy is a binary choice (“we can either fix the climate or fix the economy”), when they have heard this message being said. These groups are more likely to view the economy and the environment as having shared importance, and as interconnected. Now is the moment for climate and nature communicators to really seize this in their communications.
The question isn’t ‘whether’ to communicate about risks of climate impacts and the benefits of climate policies but ‘how’
In the wake of a prolonged cost of living crisis, a deep loss of institutional trust, and the rise of the Reform party, keeping decarbonisation targets on track is going to involve a lot of hard work on issues that aren’t always explicitly badged as ‘climate’ (as well as a renewed focus on climate, nature and net zero policies where there is the opportunity to do so).
Continuing to understand and make sense of the nuance of public opinion is critical for landing effective climate communication over the coming years, and getting the balance right.
The government’s newly published Local Power Plan points the country in a direction that the British public support: clean energy that’s transparent, affordable, and delivers real benefits to communities and their local environments.
When we asked about the three most important factors for involving local communities on infrastructure proposals, both the public and MPs were most likely to select “clear, plain language information about the project and its impacts” and “being asked for views early, before decisions are made”. These were followed by “a clear explanation of how views influenced the final decision” for MPs and “independent or trusted organisations running the process” for the public.
When we asked which 3 factors people felt were most important in terms of influencing their support or opposition for local infrastructure projects, they picked: the project’s impact on the local environment, on energy bills and on the local community as the top considerations.
These three priorities are consistently the highest for all groups across age, gender, region, social grade, housing tenure, political support, education level, ethnicity, and whether they live in urban or rural areas; a rare point of alignment between these different subgroups of the public.
Strikingly, what made much less of a difference were people’s views about climate change and net zero.
This doesn’t mean that belief in (or concern about) climate change isn’t a critical foundation on which to build engagement around clean energy in general (this is the core idea behind linking the ‘how and the why’ on net zero, as we argued in our recent message testing work with Public First).
But when it comes to specific clean energy projects, the local impacts and financial considerations loom larger: as the transition becomes ever more place-based, this trend is only likely to accelerate.
A divisive COP30 ended last week with tripled funding for adaptation (though a delay on timeline), and roadmaps to end fossil fuels and deforestation being channelled to processes outside of the UN.
Despite the absence of the USA and China not wanting ‘to lead alone’, Climate Barometer data, featured in Business Green last week shows that the UK public continues to think that the UK should be one of the most ambitious countries in the world when it comes to addressing climate change, regardless of what other countries are doing (43%). 31% think that the UK should not take steps to address climate change until other bigger countries like the US and China agree to do the same.
And on the whole, MPs and the public still recognise that climate change is a shared global responsibility. 61% of UK MPs and 44% of the public say that when it comes to climate action, countries that individually account for less than 1% of global emissions, collectively have a broadly equal responsibility to big emitters like China.
There is a noticeable perception gap between Conservative MPs and their constituencies, where only 18% of MPs believe that (individually) ‘lower emitting’ countries have a (collective) responsibility equal to China, compared to 42% of their supporters. By contrast, Labour MPs and supporters largely agree on shared responsibility.
“The UK might ‘only’ account for under 1% of global emissions, but we are also less than 1% of the global population – that’s the kind of basic principle of fairness that most people can get behind”.
Adam Corner (quoted in Business Green).
Signal in the Noise: Climate opinion trends for 2025/26
Signal in the Noise is Climate Barometer’s annual publication that monitors and makes sense of patterns and trends in opinion on climate change