Kos Samaras@KosSamaras
This is why the UK Greens are succeeding. And it’s a lesson the Australian Greens need to learn.
Meet Mothin Ali. Deputy Leader of the Green Party of England and Wales. Son of a Bangladeshi immigrant who came to the UK in the 1960s and worked as a unionised steelworker in Sheffield. Mothin grew up in that world, the world of shift work, union solidarity and communities holding each other together. He’s now a Leeds councillor in Gipton and Harehills, one of England’s most deprived wards, where 40% of residents are Muslim and the cost of living is a daily crisis.
He’s not the stereotype of a working-class northerner. But his family has been in those communities just as long as anyone. His father worked the same steel. Paid into the same union. Felt the same deindustrialisation tear through the same streets. Mothin Ali is working-class Britain, as it actually exists in 2026, not as a sepia photograph. We could say the same about the working class in Australia in 2026.
That’s what the UK Greens under Zack Polanski have understood. Working-class communities are diverse. They always were. But they share the same material reality: rents going up, wages going nowhere, streets hollowed out, and a political class that stopped listening decades ago. The UK Greens are speaking to that shared experience, in English, Urdu and Bangla, and putting leaders who come from it at the front of the room.
Now contrast that with the Australian Greens.
The Australian Greens remain culturally anchored to the inner city. Fitzroy. Newtown. University-educated, professionally progressive, and genuinely well-meaning but culturally legible only to a narrow demographic slice. When they go to the outer suburbs, the places actually doing it hardest, they have historically struggled.
The difference isn’t ideology. Both parties want economic justice. The difference is who is seen to speak for working people and where those people feel the party actually comes from.
Mothin Ali spent decades in one of England’s toughest communities before he ever stood for office. That matters more than some appreciate.
youtu.be/VPsR1hfTaAA?si…
