A plea to the Greens and to whatever emerges from Your Party

Why grassroots by-and-for organisations must be central to any renewed left political project. By Frances Northrop and Nick Mahony

2025 signalled a new wave of progressive party political organising which is likely to gather pace in 2026. The election of Zack Polanski as leader of the Greens and the Party’s subsequent surge in the polls, taken alongside the launch of Your Party - however chaotic and bumpy - has opened up new and much needed possibilities for left movement building, democratic renewal and progressive change.

What will it take for such progressive alternatives to the hollowed-out, top-down politics of the mainstream parties to further develop and grow in terms of their strength, organisation and support in 2026 and beyond?

The original vote of confidence in ‘Your Party’ was given by the 700,000 people who signed-up to this initiative before it had officially been launched. Since Zack Polanski became leader Green Party membership has soared to over 180,000.

So what’s happening? Two people heavily involved in setting up Your Party - Zarah Sultana MP and Labour’s former Communications Director under Jeremy Corbyn and co-founder of Momentum, James Schneider - have both emphasised how Your Party aims to be responsive to the people and groups who currently feel most unrepresented. This includes the large sections of the British population who, they say, have been left most voiceless and least served by the main political parties. 

Sultana has experience beyond party politics working for Labour’s (now disbanded) Community Organising Unit, which had some success working at grassroots level during Corbyn’s leadership. Encouragingly, Sultana now talks about the need for a democratic party of the left in Britain that’s based on ‘community power’ and that can more effectively hold its politicians to account.

Polanski, the Green’s leader, has also said he wants to prioritise ‘community power’ because “you don’t just transform society in Parliament”. Seeing his party’s future beyond Westminster, he says he is prioritising community organising in order to tap into “grassroots energy” and “to win people over”.

There’s undoubtedly an urgent need both for new voices on the left and for fresh community based approaches to progressive political organising. However, in the case of the Greens and Your Party, it is still far from clear who exactly these new voices are speaking for, let alone what practical and material differences these newly (re)configured ‘community-based’ parties can make to actual communities around the country.

For us, a vitally important issue is organisation - one that’s shaped by cultural and other power dynamics that demand careful discussion and negotiation.

For example, in our experience, organising means working through how to balance relationships between community-based and more centralised forms of leadership; it means prioritising deliberate consideration about how local groups federate and collaborate; and it means giving the time and space needed for inclusive conversations about how to use an organisation’s limited resources to build the infrastructures needed to sustain these vital processes of collective working. 

Decisions about where power sits, how it’s distributed and exercised and whose knowledge and representative power is recognised and incorporated all profoundly shape how any organisation on the left builds itself - it will shape how solidarity, decisions, its political culture and its programme for change emerge.

These are all issues that require ongoing collective attention — especially if a party or movement seeks to genuinely speak for, and act alongside, those who are most often marginalised or excluded. There is no technical, virtual or procedural quick fix. 

As these would-be parties of the left attempt to organise themselves in new ways, tensions such as those between grassroots communities and more centralised forms of leadership are almost inevitable. How these tensions are addressed—whether they are suppressed or worked through democratically—will be critical in deciding both the Green’s and Your Party’s future.

The missing piece: Grassroots community development

While we are broadly supportive of many of the overall aims being articulated by Sultana, Schneider, Polanski and others, we are currently concerned about the relative absence of the detailed approaches and allied allocation of resources that substantive and sustained engagement with grassroots groups will inevitably need.

We understand that grassroots community organisations are still frequently dismissed by parts of the left, either as insufficiently political, as politically naive, or as extensions of “Big Society” volunteerism. 

These suspicions persist despite many contemporary community groups operating on principles of mutual aid, collective self-organisation and on the basis of structural critique — not Victorian paternalism.

Part of the fragility of the Corbyn-McDonnell led Labour Party between 2015-19 (which is still under-examined) was the weakness of the Party’s internal democracy and its limited reach into many parts of civil society (particularly beyond unions, some councillors and the M25). This meant that the base of the Corbyn-led Labour Party was never sufficiently strong and that members and allied community groups didn’t drive the party as much as they could and perhaps should have done. We think there are lessons to be learnt from this experience.

Focusing on internal party democracy and member participation, as the Greens and Your Party currently are, is really important. However, without recognising and working with progressive civil society beyond the party structures — particularly grassroots “by-and-for” community development groups — there is a serious risk of repeating the mistakes and missed opportunities of the Corbyn period.

What do grassroots ‘by-and-for’ community development groups offer?

We take our cue here from a recent New Economics Foundation report examining organisations run by and for the communities they serve. One of the authors of this piece, Frances Northrop, was closely involved in that research.

While there is no single definition of “by-and-for” organisations, the report identifies common characteristics - these groups are typically:

• genuinely representative of the marginalised communities they serve
  

• explicitly committed to tackling inequality and structural injustice
  

• embedded in meaningful, ongoing relationships with local communities
  

These groups are already enacting, on a routine basis, many of the values and practices that the resurgent left parties of the current moment are still only aspiring to realise.

The vitality and legitimacy of these community groups stems from their organic and symbiotic relationship with local conditions and concerns. Their actions are grounded not only in their own economic, political and cultural analysis of their situation, but also in the lived experiences, self-organised forms of practice and the people they are led by.

Across Britain there are thousands of such organisations, representing the full diversity of the country. They provide essential services, advocate for material improvements, and give voice to those who are often excluded from mainstream institutions and their associated modes of policymaking and politics.

The New Economics Foundation report demonstrates that by-and-for organisations can be transformative, not just for those directly involved but also for the wider communities they support. They play a vital role in speaking truth to power and are often the lifeblood of local social infrastructure.

Yet these groups are overwhelmingly small, under-resourced, precarious and still mostly operating under the radar of more mainstream forms of politics. They also face stark power imbalances within the wider voluntary, community and social enterprise sectors, where larger, professionalised institutions dominate. Many have suffered for years from chronic underfunding and from being subsumed into a depoliticised “Third Sector” framework, now being referred to as the ‘Impact Economy’.

Under the current Labour government, these organisations continue to be starved of resources and sidelined by policymakers and funders. The damage is being felt daily at community level.

Why this matters politically — now

If one of the benchmarks for the effectiveness of progressives in the next few years is the prevention of a Reform-led government in 2028, then stronger relationships between progressive political parties and grassroots by and for groups are not optional — they must be essential.

Defeating the far right will require much more than electoral messaging and good campaigning - it will depend on a movement that can help collectively build the strength, visibility and credibility of community-based (as well as national level) alternatives. Alternatives that can meet immediate material needs, collectively contest reactionary narratives and build trust and solidarity across differences on the ground. 

Although there is no ready-made template for how parties of the left should relate to such groups, there are principles that, if followed, could help left parties avoid repeating past failures.

Principle 1: Build genuine solidarity with the by-and-for community development organisations already working progressively and effectively at the grassroots

The Green Party and Your Party must avoid the temptation to instrumentalise grassroots groups for short-term electoral gain. 

Instead, they will need to prioritise listening and doing everything they can to learn from how these progressive grassroots groups work. 

In many cases these groups already embody the forms of directly democratic and radically progressive community-based politics that The Green Party and ‘Your Party’ can learn most from, especially when it comes to pushing back against the right and building alternatives.

Principle 2: Help build infrastructure that will foster networking and relationships building amongst progressive grassroots groups and between them and broader left movements

If Britain’s by-and-for groups are to have any kind of substantive role in decision-taking, policy making and in the governance of the wider left, the parties will need to support these processes and support progressive by-and-for organisations to come together to represent themselves. 

What grassroots groups don’t need from the parties of the left are new ‘invited spaces’ that are firmly under the control of The Green Party or Your Party’s power-holders.

What they need instead is help with securing more resources, so these groups can do more of what they already do; and assistance securing spaces which bring these groups together to articulate their collective priorities. These priorities can then be recognised and fed into institutional policy making in ways that can have a positive impact on communities on the ground.  

Conclusions

With mistrust in politicians at extremely high levels, building a new political bloc or alliance among the diverse groups losing out from extractivism and the insurgent far right — and who believe a more progressive politics is possible — will be a significant but worthwhile challenge.

Progressive communities, constituencies and movements do not exist in stable or ready-made forms, waiting to be activated by charismatic leaders or refreshed progressive parties. They are built through sustained investment in long-term processes of local meaning-making, relationship formation and solidarity building, and by forging the cross-community alliances, positive identities and campaigns needed for effective progressive action.

By-and-for groups understand that effective engagement requires an in-depth understanding of local dynamics and contextually responsive approaches to constituency building that can be responsive to the differing needs and changing priorities that exist in any one place.

They recognise that processes of relationship building are grounded in care, trust and solidarity, which are themselves just as important as more formal processes of representation, democracy and collective accountability. Many such groups have direct experience of how communities can organise on this basis across racialised and other differences to fight for their collective good.

The Green Party and Your Party could therefore benefit from working much more closely with grassroots by-and-for groups because of their valuable experience, expertise and ongoing involvement in community development, self-organisation, democratic governance and alliance-building at local level.

“To bring together these two emphases - on the cultural struggle for actual social identities, and the political redefinition of effective self-governing societies is, I believe, to indicate a new and substantial kind of socialism which is capable both of dealing with the complexities of modern societies and also of re-engaging effective and practical popular interests.” 

(Raymond Williams quoted in Who Speaks for Wales? Nation, Culture, Identity p203. Edited by Danial Williams, 2003)