Natasha Walter: why young women are flocking to the Greens

A few days ago at the Green Party conference in Bournemouth I found myself talking to a confident 22-year-old woman who had recently joined the party. ‘Why did I join? Because I thought, maybe I don’t have to compromise,’ she said, ‘I used to think that politics was all about compromise, that I had to vote for whatever party would keep out the Tories. It feels good – it feels quite strange – to think I could vote for what I believe in…’  

Many would think such a view absurdly naive, but I heard similar opinions time and again in Bournemouth.  So much commentary on the collapse of support for the Labour government focuses obsessively on the rise of the right. For sure, the Green Party surge is far smaller than Reform’s, but it is worth looking more closely at what is growing on the left as well as the right now that more and more people are no longer held captive by the centre. 

The new leader, Zack Polanski, is making a clear pitch for some traditional left-wing ground, particularly on wealth redistribution. While he’s coming in for mockery from the usual sources, the pitch seems to be working, in that membership numbers are growing fast – faster right now than for any other party. Full disclosure: I’m one of those new members, so my interest in the party is not just that of observer. 

If it’s going to get beyond its old base, a key weakness for the Green Party could be its own history. Parties with no back story - Reform and ‘Your’ Party - have the freedom to drive into the imagined future with no failures to weigh them down. I don’t know if the Green Party can move fast enough to outrun its past as the eternal outsider, but it looks as if its members are going to try. Who are these new members? The majority of them are women, I am told, and a quarter are under 30.  Young women’s voices were certainly centre stage during the time I spent at the conference. 

What did I hear from them? A lot of love for the party’s unyielding stance on Palestine and on refugee rights, for starters. The Green Party has remained resolute in defending migrants even as the general political climate has shifted towards xenophobia, and cries of ‘Refugees are Welcome Here’ from the stage were met by cheers and standing ovations from the audience. And while the party gathered in Bournemouth the day after the horrific attack which killed two Jews in Manchester, all the people I spoke to agreed that protests in solidarity with Palestine should continue – including one that went ahead on Bournemouth beach on Saturday.

But in my conversations with the young women milling through the conference centre I found that constantly, and unsurprisingly, they returned to economic injustice. Polanski’s pitch is clearly resonating for a generation sick of precarity. In the queue on the way in, I found myself talking to a young woman who had wanted to stand as a councillor in north London, but had to give up that idea when she was suddenly evicted and had to move way across town. It was workers’ rights and renters’ rights that she wanted to talk about with me, and on the panel on trade unions that she was heading to.  

Another theme that kept flaring was their dismay at the authoritarianism that has been such a disheartening part of Labour’s behaviour in power. These passionate young women are Greta Thunberg’s generation, and they share her unyielding gravity and emotional directness.  At a panel on protest rights, I saw young women from the environmental and Palestine solidarity movements with first-hand knowledge of police stations and prison cells greeted as heroines by the audience. One of them, a Just Stop Oil activist called Cole Macdonald, asked the audience to speak the names of those still behind bars back to her in a deeply emotional call and response. It made me wonder if Labour’s leaders really understand, even now, how its repression of protest has united so many passionate young people against a government who not only refuse to listen to their concerns on climate or foreign policy, but also criminalise them and their friends. 

Those women’s deep disillusionment with the current government resonated with me, but I’m well aware that I’m not the person that the party needs to win over. If the Green Party is to speak beyond those who are already committed, they will need to connect on more shared ground with much wider communities. So, given the preponderance of women at the conference, I was surprised that I heard so little about grassroots women’s issues from care to equal pay, from online misogyny to violence against women. 

I couldn’t help wondering if some of those women who would stand up for those issues  more passionately have been made unwelcome by the Green Party’s absolute stance on trans rights. The Green Women’s Declaration and the Greens in Exile group were being battered by Storm Amy outside the conference centre when I arrived, explaining to everyone who could stand upright in the wind how their views are not welcome inside. 

Can the greens – and the left more widely - now find the courage to bring those women inside rather than leaving them out in the cold?  Rachel Millward, the new deputy leader, is someone I know from our shared commitment to women’s rights. I was glad to hear her reference her feminist conviction in her first speech as deputy leader, ‘Women have the power to change the world,’ she reminded the conference. When women are facing a backlash on so many fronts, and with Reform making such a fierce play for women’s votes by weaponizing women’s safety, that has to be more than a slogan.  

And still, as it leans outwards, looking for new connections and conversations, the old green heart of the party beats on, and is even being given adrenaline shots by younger members. In a debate about the rights of nature, I saw 38-year-old Danica Priest talk about how she had been drawn to the party because of her fight to save a local Bristol nature reserve from development. Danica is all over TikTok, getting stuck into discussions about nimbys and yimbys, putting the gnarly old conundrum of housing versus nature into stories and reels for her growing audience. 

Watching this charismatic young woman talking about her love for old meadows reminds me that passion for nature is something that the current government has completely fumbled. Maybe they think they don’t have to play to it, that we have nowhere else to go, we who love the forests and rivers, the seas and birds of Britain. But for some this is a deeper patriotism than one that waves flags, and it has the power to connect across different political traditions. In its rush to forge a new future, it’s vital the Green Party doesn’t pull up those roots.

Natasha Walter is an author and the founder of Women for Refugee Women, her next book, Feminism for a World on Fire will be published in 2026