Owen Jones' Empty Wards

He built a fund to elect socialists, cross-party. By May its map was a Green ward list, 191 nameless.

Owen Jones left Labour in 2024 after twenty-four years and built We Deserve Better to do one thing: fund socialist candidates regardless of party, judged on whether they would tax wealth and take utilities into public ownership and oppose the war on Gaza. Party-blind, candidate-first. That was the promise, and for a general election it more or less held: Green and independent names, Corbyn and Carla Denyer among the winners, Leanne Mohamad a few hundred votes short of Wes Streeting. Eighteen months on, the promise has a shape, and the shape is the Green Party.

Watch how he got there, because the route matters more than the destination. In July 2025, with Corbyn and Sultana’s new party barely announced, Jones was already arguing that first-past-the-post left the left no choice but to combine, and that combination meant electoral pacts between the new party and the Greens, the French New Popular Front offered as the template. By November the new party had become, in his own phrase, a bit ‘Fyre Festival’: too much drama, too many collapses, the energy draining out of it and towards Polanski’s Greens. He had watched Your Party trip over its own feet and drawn the conclusion any organiser would. The vehicle would be the Greens.

The map his fund published for the May local elections is that conclusion rendered as data. 313 entries. 269 of them Green, more than four in five. And of those 269, only 78 name an actual person or slate. The other 191 read ‘Green Party Candidates’ and stop there: no name, no biography, no organising record, a party label dropped on a ward and called an endorsement.

Type a Manchester postcode into it and the pin that surfaces carries a ward, a party, and nobody’s name. Burnage. Hulme. Moss Side. Sixteen wards across the city, every one of them a blank.

Set that against the test Jones’s own fund set itself. To be backed, a candidate had to show a ‘proven track record in organising locally’ and be well placed to contest the seat. Those are tests you run on a person. You cannot run them on a pin. A proven local organising record means precisely nothing applied to a rosette dropped on a map. On the fund’s own published criteria the 191 are un-vettable, and the candidate-first fund has quietly become a party-first fund that resolves its own contradiction in the Greens’ favour 191 times over.

Jones is capable of precision when he wants it. He has named the four Labour MPs he would never run a candidate against, John McDonnell, Richard Burgon, Clive Lewis, Nadia Whittome, his surviving front, and he has named Polanski as the man who could turn the Greens into a mass party of the left. At the top of the ticket every figure is individuated and weighed. At ward level the weighing stops dead. The same instinct that protects four named socialists in Parliament cannot bring itself to name one in Burnage.

There is the matter of the words themselves. In April the Green Party launched its own local-election fundraiser under the slogan ‘we deserve better’, Polanski telling supporters that from Manchester to Margate people were already saying it. Whether Jones lent the party his fund’s name or the party reached for it on its own I cannot tell you, and I will not manufacture a coordination I cannot evidence. But when the cross-party socialist fund and the party it now serves are campaigning under the same three words, the regroupment has happened in the branding before a single member has voted on it.

The charitable reading deserves its hearing. Most likely the 191 blanks are speed rather than strategy: somebody had a list of Green New Deal Rising target wards and pasted it in faster than names could be gathered, and the placeholders are the residue of a fund moving quickly rather than a fund hiding anything. Grant all of it. Laziness still runs downhill, and here it runs towards the Greens. James Meadway got a name on the map, in Tower Hamlets. Jamie Driscoll got one in Newcastle, Zoë Garbett in Hackney. The profiles got named; the wards got rosettes; when effort ran short the default it reached for was the party.

And the party is not one thing, which is the point the whole exercise depends on. The Greens Organise pledge to oppose austerity in local government, an eco-socialist current’s public commitment for these very elections, was signed both by candidates who mean to fight every cut and by Greens already sitting in council cabinets administering them. A rosette on a ward guarantees you neither. So which Green is the pin in Burnage? The map will not say, and the fund did not ask.

There is a tell, though, in the names the fund did print. Run its named Green candidates against that same pledge and a clear majority of them are signatories: James Meadway in Tower Hamlets, Nate Higgins in Newham, Zoë Garbett in Hackney, Khizer Qayyum beside Mothin Ali in Leeds, Jamie Driscoll’s Newcastle slate, the Southwark bench almost in full, much of Haringey. When We Deserve Better troubled to name a Green, it named the Greens Organise anti-austerity left with something close to precision. Which is what damns the blanks. The fund could find that wing when it looked; it chose, 191 times over, not to look. The placeholders are not a sourcing gap. They are the moment the vetting stopped, at exactly the point vetting would have meant something.

None of this makes the endorsed Greens the enemy or the backed candidates the wrong ones; the named ones, as the pledge shows, are largely the right ones. The harder point is the one the fund used to understand and has stopped acting on. An endorsement that cannot name its candidate is not an endorsement of a candidate. It is a bet on a colour. What scrutiny did the 191 receive before the money was directed their way? The map records none, and the man who built the thing to look past party has ended by leaving the party the only thing on it you can see.