Green Party leader Zack Polanski used a round of local radio interviews this week to sharpen his attack on Labour over Birmingham’s long-running bin strike, saying the council had left workers waiting too long for a deal and was trying to use the dispute for election advantage.
On Radio WM, Polanski said he wanted to see the details of the proposal announced on Monday by Birmingham City Council Labour leader John Cotton, after the authority and Unite said they had agreed a deal to be put to union members for a vote. “How cynical of this Labour council, they should have done this 10 months ago and do they really expect people to believe 10 days before a local election, they’ve just finally managed to make a deal?” he said.
He added: “Councillors across Birmingham will support a fair deal. But we don’t want election gimmicks, and we don’t want people playing politics with people’s lives.” Polanski said the answer was to pay employees fairly for their time and treat them with dignity, and said Labour had treated bin workers with contempt and failed to negotiate. “That’s not the way to treat workers who run your city,” he said.
The interviews came in the final run-up to the local elections in England on 7 May, described as the biggest set of elections since the last general election, with voters in Scotland and Wales also choosing representatives to their national parliaments. The invited the Conservatives, Labour, Liberal Democrats and Reform UK to take part in interviews during the same week.
Across the sessions, local radio questioned Polanski on high streets, buses, housing, social care, asylum policy and drugs, giving the Greens a chance to set out a platform that was less about green symbolism and more about everyday bills and services. Polanski said the party wanted drugs treated as a health issue rather than a criminal one, though he added he did not want people “smoking weed in the chamber either.”
He also said it would not be acceptable for teachers or nurses to drink at work, and argued that the Greens’ priority was to back ordinary people struggling with the rising cost of living. Millionaires and billionaires, he said, needed to pay more tax. He said the party wanted to tackle air pollution and increase the use of public transport.
The shape of the campaign points to where the Greens think they can cut through: social and economic issues, plus Polanski’s profile, rather than an appeal built mainly around the environment in practice. In Birmingham, that means the bin dispute has become more than a labour row; it has turned into a test of who can credibly speak for workers, voters and a council under pressure days before polling.
What happens next is straightforward: Unite members will vote on the Birmingham deal, and Polanski has already signaled he will keep pressing Labour on whether the timing was driven by the election calendar or by a genuine attempt to settle the dispute.
