“First they ignore you. Then they ridicule you. Then they attack you and want to burn you. Then they build monuments to you.” These words, spoken more than a century ago by trade union organiser Nicholas Klein at a Baltimore garment workers’ conference, seem to capture perfectly the political moment facing the Green Party in the United Kingdom today. After years of relative obscurity, the Greens are moving from the “ignored” to the “ridiculed” phase-and the next stage, Klein warned, is always the hardest.

For much of the last decade, the Green Party existed on the margins of British politics, often dismissed as idealistic but ultimately inconsequential. Even when their policies addressed issues that mattered to ordinary people-climate change, social inequality, affordable housing-the mainstream media either ignored them or treated them as a political curiosity. The election of Zack Polanski as the party’s first “eco-populist” MP last year signaled a shift, yet the early attacks on him were largely flippant, focusing on an article from over a decade ago in which he was reported to offer a hypnotherapy service to enlarge women’s breasts.

But with the Green Party’s recent stunning victory in the Gorton and Denton by-election, the tenor of attacks has changed. This is no longer a fringe party to be laughed at; this is a political force that threatens the carefully constructed settlement maintained by Britain’s political elite, a system where ordinary families struggle while the profits of their labour flow ever upward into the hands of the already wealthy. The establishment-spanning Labour, the Conservatives, and even Nigel Farage’s Reform-suddenly has a reason to be concerned.

The by-election victory saw Hannah Spencer, the Green Party’s fifth and newest MP, take the Gorton and Denton seat from Labour. Spencer is Parliament’s only plumber and plasterer, an embodiment of the........

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