The Labour Party has instructed its local council groups to terminate power-sharing arrangements with the Green Party unless the Greens explicitly reject a conference motion equating Zionism with racism.
The binding motion, passed at the Green Party conference at the Brighton Centre on October 4 by 1,022 votes to 813, declares the party anti-Zionist.
It defines Zionism as an ideology supporting “an ethnonationalist Jewish state in historic Palestine to the exclusion and/or domination of the non-Jewish population” and states that it should be “treated as any other form of racism”.
The motion also supports a single democratic Palestinian state in historic Palestine with Jerusalem as its capital, rejecting a two-state solution, and reaffirms commitments to the right of return, Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) and an arms embargo on Israel.
Delegates also rejected an amendment that would have stopped the policy being used to pressure, proscribe or discipline members over their affiliation with Jewish community institutions.
Four of the party’s five MPs opposed it: Adrian Ramsay, Ellie Chowns, Carla Denyer and Siân Berry. Hannah Spencer abstained.
Leader Zack Polanski, who is Jewish, did not vote. He was campaigning in the Holborn and St Pancras by-election, held on October 8, which Labour’s Sagal Abdi-Wali won with a majority of 3,364 on a turnout of 38.6 per cent.
Polanski has said he would have supported an amended version of the text but not the original. He has maintained that anti-Semitism and criticism of the Israeli state must remain distinct.
The European Green Party, to which the British party is affiliated, condemned the motion and noted that fewer than 1 per cent of the membership had taken part in the vote.
Prime Minister Andy Burnham condemned the motion in the House of Commons as “wrong” and “antisemitic”, stating that Labour would have “nothing to do with it” and ruling out any partnership while the policy remains in place.
Labour chair Bridget Phillipson, who is also Minister for Women and Equalities, has now written to local Labour groups that share power with the Greens, requiring their Green counterparts to issue a clear rejection within seven days and to call on the national leadership to reconsider.
The party said 18 councils were affected, 17 in England and one in Wales. They include Sheffield, Lewes and Warwick, where Labour governs in coalition with the Greens.
Labour said that failure to do so would end the arrangements. Phillipson said that where Green groups could not give that assurance, “Labour will bring any such local arrangement to an end”.
The Greens responded that Labour was conflating criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism and that intervening in local arrangements was “undemocratic”.
The motion has drawn criticism from British Jewish organisations, including the Board of Deputies of British Jews, which called the Greens “an extremist party”, and prompted Israel’s foreign ministry to bar Polanski from entering the country, describing the text as anti-Semitic under the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition for denying the Jewish people’s right to self-determination.
More than a dozen Labour MPs have reported the Greens to Sussex Police and to the Equality and Human Rights Commission over the motion.
Three Green councillors, in Babergh, Sefton and North Yorkshire, have resigned from the party, and a group of former Jewish members is preparing legal action against it.
Some Green local groups have already distanced themselves from the national policy to preserve existing coalitions.
A Green Party spokesman said: “For the Labour Government to conflate criticism of Israel with antisemitism is disappointing and wrong.
“Trying to tell local parties what to do and who they can work with is undemocratic. Whilst Labour continue to try to meddle in our internal democracy, arm a genocide and lock up protesting pensioners, we will not take lectures from them.”
Coalition negotiations in the German state of Berlin have been thrown into uncertainty after the Social Democrats (SPD) and the Greens suspended preliminary talks with Die Linke on Tuesday, 13 October, amid concerns that commitments to combat anti-Semitism may no longer be…
— Brussels Signal (@brusselssignal) October 15, 2026
