After speaking with a newly-elected Green councillor while selling The Communist in Norwich, I sat down to interview him.
Niall Adams is part of a whole layer of young people who have been drawn to the Green Party. A young socialist with a history of activism, he’s now the Norfolk County councillor for University Ward.
“So I initially became political around 18 or 19, like most people… I suppose my first group [I joined] would have been Socialist Appeal [the forerunner of the RCP], about four years ago.
“In Norwich, when the elections were announced, I wanted to vote Green, because it was the most progressive group that was on the ballot. But no one was running for county council in my district. So rather than voting for a different party, I put myself forward to run as a Green candidate.”
While the Norwich City Council is dominated by Greens, Norfolk County Council has a Reform led majority, along with the Liberal Democrats, Greens and Conservatives in opposition.
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Once he became a councillor, a central issue Niall came up against was money. Norfolk’s budget is set by the national government, and is criminally low. Every year, they are handed smaller and smaller budgets, and are forced to make cuts.
“After 10 or 15 years of making tens of millions of cuts every year, you run out of anything reasonable to cut”, Niall told me.
For example, the council will spend £134 million in 2026–27 on highways, waste, and transport. But this is “a drop in the ocean”, Niall tells me. The backlog of road and highway maintenance alone would cost £80 million. The result is highways that are maintained in the cheapest way possible.
Niall explained that inconsistent budgets make planning impossible, so the council depends on contractors. He estimated 40–45 percent of their budget goes towards contractors, more than any individual department, and these companies are less than reliable, to say the least.
Even using the budget they are given, it is still a struggle to get anything through the council due to the manoeuvring of the other parties. “You don’t realize how undemocratic it is until you’re involved”, Niall told me. At a recent meeting Reform filibustered for three hours so the Greens couldn’t even put forward one of their motions.
Another example: Reform moved to get rid of political assistants, in what looks like a deliberate effort to sabotage the more radical, younger councillors:
“If you want to make a group of new councillors struggle to do anything with their job, you take away their political assistant, right? Because we had the most new councillors that Norfolk has seen since the 1920s. And what better way to stifle any progress than make it increasingly more difficult for them to be informed on what they’re voting on?”
Niall explained that, in spite of the surge of young anti-capitalist Greens, the Green Party itself is split on the question of how to deal with the big businesses that are attacking living standards while destroying the planet:
“It’s quite a highly contested topic, because there’s obviously different groups within the Greens who believe there’s different approaches to it. I still find it strange that there’s certain groups within the Greens that are still accepting of capitalism, especially when it seems almost too obvious that capitalism and the environmental crisis go hand in hand.”
“We need to look at who controls the wealth in the country”, Niall continued. “50 families own half of our wealth, many of them are title holders… These families are stupidly wealthy, and they have built our system in a way that allows them to preserve that wealth”.
