Polanski to stay on as Green leader after Holborn and St Pancras defeat
Zack Polanski said he will stay on as leader of the Green Party of England and Wales after defeat in the Holborn and St Pancras by-election.
He told BBC Breakfast he would "absolutely" stay on despite finishing second to Labour. The interview was reported on 9 October 2026 BBC.
The by-election result
Labour candidate Sagal Abdi-Wali won with 45% of the vote. Mr Polanski took 33%. The result left the Greens in second place.
The party said the result was a sharp advance on its previous Westminster performance in the seat. It said the Green vote share was up by 22% on the 2024 general election.
The defeat has prompted open criticism of Mr Polanski's leadership. Vivien Lichtenstein, leader of the Jewish Greens, said he should resign.
The row over party policy
Ms Lichtenstein said it was a "big mistake" for him to have avoided debate on the conference motion that described Zionism as a form of racism. Former leader Caroline Lucas also said he had failed to show leadership over the row.
Mr Polanski was absent when Green members voted to adopt the Zionism policy at conference. He later said he would not have voted for the motion.
The motion defined Zionism as an ideology supporting "an ethnonationalist Jewish state". It backed a single democratic Palestinian state in all of historic Palestine BBC.
It was passed by rank-and-file members, ordinary members with a conference vote, to become official party policy. Four of the party's five MPs and one of its two deputy leaders opposed it.
The vote showed a division between the conference floor and much of the party's Westminster group. The leadership's handling of the debate has since become the focus of internal dispute.
What happens next
Mr Polanski was elected leader of the Green Party of England and Wales in September 2025. He had served as deputy leader since 2022 and sits as a member of the London Assembly, the body that scrutinises the Mayor of London.
He addressed the party's autumn conference at the Brighton Centre on 2 October 2026. The party website subsequently published a statement on his reaction to the motion.
Under party rules, the next scheduled leadership ballot takes place in summer 2027.
Looking at what this means for the Greens, the sequence matters. A by-election where the leader is the candidate squeezes questions of strategy, message discipline and internal management into a single result. A 22-point rise in share can be presented as momentum. A 12-point deficit to Labour can be presented as a ceiling.
The broader context here is the party's policy-making structure. Conference sovereignty, the principle that members have the final word on policy, means parliamentary leaders must then defend positions they did not support. That tension is familiar at Westminster, but it is sharper for a party with five MPs seeking to expand its vote in Labour-facing seats.
For now, Mr Polanski's position rests on that ballot timetable. With no contest due until summer 2027, his critics have voice but no immediate mechanism. The question for the intervening period is whether MPs, deputy leaders and affiliated groups accept collective discipline around a policy they opposed, and whether voters distinguish between the leader's personal view and the party's adopted position.
