Holborn and St Pancras is home to the UCL campus and many of its students. It is also in a borough where the Greens have already made strides in local elections.
Zack Polanski was elected a London Assembly member in 2021 and received the nomination to stand in this by-election after surviving a challenge by local Green council Hamza Chowdhury who claimed that the constituency did not need "another MP who arrives during an election campaign" and then "disappears once the votes are counted.”
The promise to students
“A vote for me in Holborn and St. Pancras is a vote to abolish tuition fees,” Polanski told The Cheese Grater in an exclusive interview ahead of the October 8th by-election.
Polanski took care to emphasise Green Party positions on student-specific matters such as the high cost of student accommodation and transport and a mass NEET (not in education, employment, or training) crisis that includes 751,000 18-24 year olds
“For any young person who’s graduating from university, it’s an unacceptable broken social contract where young people are doing everything they were told to, everything that was explained to them would lead to a secure future where they could have a decent job, a secure home, and, indeed, live on a liveable planet.”
Polanski came out particularly in support of international students alleging that Keir Starmer “created incredibly toxic and divisive rhetoric on immigration” and that changing rules around indefinite leave to remain “feels fundamentally un-British, unfair, and not the way we do things”.
“International students are an incredibly important part of our economy, both in terms of the skills that they may contribute when they graduate here, and the fact that they’re often paying so much more in tax than they’re taking out in tax.”
Polanski went on to say that international students add to the UK’s diverse populace and were “one of the things that make this country great”.
“In terms of what I would I do for them, I think it’s the same as a student who was born here or who’s made this country their home, is make sure that they have the same opportunities and are offered the same skills, resources and support in order to be able to improve themselves in this country.”
Housing
Polanski took the time to elaborate on his Green Party vision of rent controls and how this relates to constituency residents.
“If we’d frozen rents in 2022, that would be saving the average UK household and average UK renter in Holborn and St.Pancras £200 a year.
We would also be saving the government 2 billion a year that they could be investing in council and social housing instead .”
When asked about how to cut rough sleeping levels in the constituency, Polanski stressed a need to build more council houses and end “feudal leasehold arrangements for presently housed people”.
“What we need to do is build houses to make sure that people have a roof above their heads,” Polanski said on the matter. “We also need to make sure that people get the support that they need when they're on the streets.
We [The Green Party] have a compassionate and humane approach to recognise that, ultimately, we're talking about people's human lives and people aren't statistics or numbers.”
A check on Labour power
Polanski’s main rival, Sagal Abdi-Wali (formerly a refugee from Somalia) is also pledging to eradicate rough sleeping and has been Camden Council’s leader for three months.
While Polanski has previously stood in solidarity with Ms Abdi-Wali over comments made by Reform spokesman Zia Yusuf concerning her heritage, he critiqued her over the party she is standing for.
“If Labour win here, there will still be a Labour MP who is part of this Labour government. And that’s the Labour government that has the same tired old ideas, has run out of solutions, and doesn’t have what people in this constituency or in the country need. And I think that’s the reason why people should vote Green.”
Polanski’s self-depiction as a check on Labour’s power rather than an alternative may be based on Burnham’s current popularity.
YouGov has predicted 0 Green MPs in London could be returned to Parliament in the next general election if current trends hold, so Polanski appeared to be tempering his own 10 Downing Street ambitions in his bid for Starmer’s former seat.
Throughout the interview, the Green Party leader emphasised that a vote for the Green Party in Holborn and Saint Pancras would be a vote to keep the Labour government in check and present another progressive voice in Parliament.
Polanski argued that “If the Green Party loses here, I have no doubt that very quickly Labour will approve oil and gas companies, because they will be more worried about losing votes to the Reform Party than they are to the Green Party.”
Polanski presented himself as being in a position to put pressure on the Labour party in two major areas: Jackdaw and Rosebank, and policy relating to the Middle East.
Jackdaw and Rosebank are two oil and gas sites in the North Sea that have been proposed under Andy Burnham’s premiership.
As Polanski put it “We’ve just lived through several heat waves. The UK Health Security Agency says that up to 3000 people have died because of the excess heat. And we know that this is the planet that young people are going to be inheriting.”
Similarly effusive about the Palestinian cause, Polanski accepted the recent sanctions against illegal West Bank settlements made by Ed Milliband but called them “necessary … but not sufficient.”
He called for an end to arms licenses to Israel and emphasised that “A Green Party win here sends a very clear message to the government.”
Against the right wing
Polanski pledged that his method to keeping the constituency’s residents safe would be an “absolutely zero-tolerance approach to any form of hate crime; whether that’s Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, disablism … to make sure that ultimately, politicians- certainly, elected representatives- should communicate with sensitivity, care and inclusion.”
Polanski pointed to a lack of shared community spaces where “people can eat together, pray together, even disagree together” which had been accelerated through “decades of austerity and underinvestment”, leading to the far-right allowing for ideological capture of online spaces.”
As part of his material commitment to this policy, Polanski released videos while campaigning of him speaking in Urdu, Bengali and French.
While the videos have been critiqued (including by Mayor of London Sadiq Khan in a London Assembly meeting with the Green Party leader), he said that he could accept that “my pronunciation wasn’t great” but defended the videos as being part of a “basic tradition in this country of communicating with communities in the best way you possibly can”.
His main concern was with the reaction of a Labour MP who claimed that the videos made him “deeply uncomfortable”.
“What that is doing is echoing some of the worst rhetoric of the far right, and once again demonstrates how this Labour Party and Labour government are more worried about the votes of racists than they are about actually making sure communities are included.”