My weekend at the Edinburgh fringe continued with Iain Dale’s All Talk event with the Leader of the Green Party of England and Wales, Zack Polanski.

I’m usually one of the younger people at Iain Dale’s shows. This time I felt positively geriatric. The audience was very young. The event didn’t have to be moved to the bigger theatre, like Nicola Sturgeon’s earlier that day, but the smaller theatre was full.

Polanski talked about his decision to change his name to one that reflects his Jewish heritage. He had thought originally that his family had changed their surname because of the persecution they faced in Nazi Germany. In fact, he said, it was because of anti-semitism in the UK.

He also talked about the tensions of his childhood and the impact of his parents’ messy divorce had on him.

I found it quite strange that someone who has barely been out of the public eye in the past year spent a good while whinging, Lib Dem style, about the Greens not getting decent media coverage. He said that he was frequently booked to appear on shows, cancelled at the last minute and the same stations would run stories about how he had disappeared.  He did say that Sky and LBC (two of the biggest broadcasters in the UK) were better at giving them a fairer amount of coverage, which feels like more than we get.

The impact of being in the public eye, though, had taken its toll on him and his partner. He talked about his housemates being worried for their safety because of his presence and his decision not to go on the electoral roll because he was worried about his address being circulated to all political parties.  It is awful that any politician should have that sort of fear and that those around them felt threatened.

They had quite a sensible conversation about the gender identity issue. Iain Dale mentioned that when he interviewed prominent “gender critical” campaigner Kathleen Stock that she was unable to give any evidence of trans women causing a problem in women’s toilets which makes his own views on the issue perhaps surprising. Zack was robust and reasonable in describing the impact of the new EHRC Code on trans people for no gain for anyone else. They did talk about the increasing amount of targeting of certain groups of people. Zack Polanski expressed solidarity with Wes Streeting, who had earlier said that he had had more homophobic abuse online since he had become defence secretary than he had had at all before.

I was a bit surprised that the Green leader did his usual talking up of wealth taxes, but didn’t back it up with the why, didn’t cite the many resources that suggest that more equal societies are happier.

He’s all in favour of spending more on defence – as long as the costs of tackling climate change are included in that, rather than it being done at the behest of Donald Trump.

Given that the event was going to be a podcast listenable to for all time, I don’t think Polanski used it to its full potential, to break out of  the Green bubble and attract more supporters. He is not alone in that mindset, as anyone who reads my constructive feedback to our own party will know, but breakthroughs, if they are to last, depend on building a much wider group of people willing to vote for you.

That said, he clearly has the support of a younger audience, and I don’t see enough effort in this party at trying to do something about that.  We have a mountain of policy that should appeal to younger people and would undoubtedly make their lives better – on housing, human rights, cost of living, employment opportunities – but we don’t talk to them nearly enough, if at all.

Unfortunately, we didn’t get to chat to him afterwards as he had to rush off to catch a train.

* Caron Lindsay is Editor of Liberal Democrat Voice and blogs at Caron's Musings. You can find her on Bluesky at caronmlindsay.bsky.social