It’s no shock that the Green Party has risen to higher prominence than in any time since their foundation in 1972.
With the gradual exit of Labour’s left-wing since 2024 (enforced both by whipping and internal discontent over Starmer’s reheated Blairism), the Young Greens had already become the largest youth branch of any political party by November 2025, especially with Zack Polanski’s strident commitment to anti-austerity and pro-Palestinianism.
With a charismatic leader willing to fight on the same anti-establishment turf as Reform UK, the Greens have soared under a new social media strategy and the recent by-election victory in Gorton & Denton made hopes for a “true” left-wing government all the more tangible.
The Greens now stand at 15% of overall voting intention according to YouGov and, according to respected pollster, Lord Ashcroft, could be on course to form the next government.
Only recently has unpopularity spiked following Polanski’s Twitter repost about the horrific Golders Green terror attack, with 47% of the public now viewing him unfavourably. This halt in momentum seems to not be so true among the Camden Young Greens.
Lilac Carr is a final year Politics and International Relations student at SOAS and the Green Party candidate for Bloomsbury — the ward in which UCL, SOAS and the University of Birkbeck are all located, as well as Keir Starmer’s constituency of Holborn and St. Pancras.
She described her involvement in the London Young Greens as caused “by my desire to be actively involved in student issues.
“Being a student, you have a lot of time on your hands to worry about the state of the world.”
Committed to “positive change on day one”, she has pledged to oppose local government funding cuts and “uphold the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people”. The Bloomsbury ward is also Rishi Madlani’s (Camden Council’s head of pensions committee) seat, who she noted as maintaining stocks in arms companies complicit in Israeli war crimes in Gaza and described this as “completely morally bankrupt”.
“If we won here, it would really show that people care about this and they’re not going to just allow this money, our taxpayer money, to be put towards these unacceptable moral violations”, Carr told The Cheese Grater.
Kai Nixon, meanwhile, is a former UCL student and one-time contributor to The Cheese Grater, standing in Kentish Town South alongside Ashoka Bandi-Phillips (a current SOAS third-year student).
He described his political motivation as stemming from his mixed-race background, learning the value of multiculturalism and tolerance from a Japanese mother and a working class Irish father.
His History degree introduced him to the 1848 revolutions and Latin American revolutionaries like Che Guevara, but he remained apolitical and non-partisan — until “the Zack surge”, that is, where he saw “a genuine progressive party” committed to intersectionality between economic issues, racial injustice, and the climate emergency.
Now he campaigns on an anti-gentrification position for Kentish Town South and divesting the council’s pension funds away from arms and fossil fuels companies.
Despite the differing electoral priorities for their electoral wards, both candidates emphasised that the Greens would not be where they were today if it was not for the students that have helped them.
“I think in many wards, if we win, it will be because of young people who’ve gone out and went door-knocking and leafleting,” Carr said. “Not always fun work, or easy work, but rewarding work, that I think will be what decides a lot of elections. Certainly in my case it will be.”
Nixon also took the time to thank “all the student activists who are still pushing hard” in the week leading up to the local polls and who provided a groundswell of support in Camden from various London universities, particularly from SOAS.
The reasons why students like Carr and Nixon were so involved in the Young Greens were various, but both settled on a theme of diversity, tolerance, and economic hardship. While environmentalism has decreased as the primary reason for Green Party support, the experiences of student renters and “living paycheck to paycheck” (as Nixon put it) prevented a wider focus on dealing with the climate crisis, especially on a national level.
Carr, in particular, felt her choice to run was due to her poor experience renting in her first and second years and Camden Council’s lack of interest in dealing with tenant complaints. “Please come to me if I get elected and I will deal with your housing problems with your awful student accommodation provider. They [Camden Council] don’t treat it like it's their job because they treat your votes as non-existent and your political voices as unimportant.”
Both also had less than positive things to say about universities’ roles in encouraging political participation. Carr was open to collaborating with universities (which Camden Council has previously done with UCL, such as in the pedestrianisation of Gower Street) but said that, “I don’t think that universities should be treated as corporate partners of councils. I think councillors should collaborate with universities in so far as they help make the lives of residents better.”
Nixon described UCL’s political culture as much more “controlled’ and “sterile” than at SOAS, preventing political awareness and expression in order to perpetuate an investment-friendly image. In light of last month’s news that UCL and SOAS were among 12 universities that paid a private security firm to gather information on pro-Palestinian students, Carr told me that “I think it’s disgusting. I wish I could say it was surprising. As to why they do it? Well … money. The answer is money.”
Many of the difficulties faced by UCL Greens — who Kai often pointed out found it much more difficult to set up a stall or put posters around campus than at SOAS — were said by Nixon to be due to their unapologetic pro-Palestinian position “and because we are a genuine anti-establishment party”.
Yet they still believed that the student experience — of dodgy landlords, mouldy accommodation and political activism on campus — could still overcome what Carr described as “the privatisation or marketisation of university, of them turning into businesses and education being turned into a commodity instead of what it is, what it should be, which is a right” and let students vote Green at the ballot box.
There is a question, of course, of whether the Greens are merely channelling the leftist student movements of yesteryear. Corbyn’s election as Labour Party utilised the same demographic to propel him to victory, who in 2011 voted against the much-maligned AV referendum due to the Liberal Democrats reneging on a manifesto promise to not increase student fees.
Yet fate is a cruel mistress and British political history often shows that progressive hope at the ballot box is a persistent failure nationwide. And as previous The Cheese Grater reporting has identified, apathy is often the clear winner in Student’s Union elections, so the notion of that translating to voting in boroughs which students may only regard as term-time residences can seem unlikely.
But there is also something distinct about the Camden Green Party members running during the May local elections. The students voting for them are those not just concerned about social justice, but tangible economic effects on them; crises of employment, renting markets and piling student debt, faced alongside all the other facets of university life. So for both councillor candidates, the stakes had only increased.
Those political issues are not something to be dealt with after an established career- as has often been the case for many British political candidates — but pressing enough to be confronted alongside or soon after their education.
“I think people are really tired of not feeling like they have a genuine choice, whether that’s on the local level or the national level”, Carr reiterated. “You have a right to decide and be part of what happens in the place that you live and the place that you study.”
And it’s not only that she plans to stop at local government, aiming to bring a cross-party anti-austerity pledge to Westminster regardless of election result.
Both candidates had a large faith in students to motivate change. Only time (and the vote-counters) will tell if Camden can remain ever Green due to the efforts of its student activists.