You have to feel sorry for the people of Brighton. No, seriously. In the last two weeks they’ve been subjected not just to a deluge of Lib Dems but now also the entirety of the Green party. Even for the residents of Britain’s progressive Mecca – or should that just be Mecca – that might be a bit much.
Today was the opening of the Greens’ conference. Sian Berry spoke first, with a deranged rant about the A23 and ‘showing arses’ to fascists. If we thought we’d had the full gamut of patronising nonsense, we were wrong: Hannah Spencer was on next. ‘I want to make sure that there are more people like me in Parliament,’ she cooed, which might well have been a threat.
There’s at least something faintly naive about Spencer’s breathy nervousness. Compare and contrast with the malign condescending tone of Lucy Powell, Emily Thornberry, Bridget Phillipson et al. Indeed, it was Labour who were set to be the main villains of the speech to come. Enter, stage quite far-left, Zack Polanski.
Polanski made a gangly stroll onto the stage and waved dopily at the audience. He has the air of a character cut from initial pilots of the Inbetweeners for being too explicitly dorky. He began with a list of Green electoral successes of late, calling out congratulations to various places for being mad enough to give his colleagues a chance. ‘Go London’, he whooped unconvincingly at one point.
You can always be out-nuttered by the Green party
Then we got to the policies. It was a reminder to the other parties that if you go loony Left, you can always be out-nuttered by the Green party. We had all the progressive tick-boxes but with Polanski’s trademark awkwardness and a lovely dose of middle-class hypocrisy. There was a particularly delicious moment when Polanski went on at length about the evils of private landlords and then in the same breath praised his two deputy leaders – John D Rockefeller and Ebenezer Scrooge, sorry, Mothin Ali and Rachel Millward – both of whom are private landlords.
Alongside specific policies on housing and climate we got the more generic progressive buzzwords. ‘We stand with everyone who is under attack’. Polanski listed a bunch of protected characteristics, straight out of a Roy ‘Chubby’ Brown parody of progressivism. Tellingly absent from Polanski’s list of the downtrodden were taxpayers, biological women and Jews. But then again, no one goes to the Green party conference for a dose of reality, do they?
Oh no, wait. What inevitably came next..? In fairness to Polanski, he had up until this point made a pretty good fist of pretending to be concerned about day-to-day issues which actually affect British people. He spent a good five minutes on housing but really, it was all leading up to this; a big mad rant about Palestine Action which got by far the biggest cheer of the afternoon. It received levels of applause last seen at Stalin’s birthday parade. After making everything about Israel, Polanski then amusingly had the audacity to say that ‘politics is all about priorities’.
He’s not entirely wrong here; Labour’s draconian instincts are absolutely on show at the moment, their MPs craven and hypocritical as they again and again vote to make arresting people their first port of call whenever they say anything they disapprove of, whether it’s from the Left or the Right. It’s just that if I were a party seeking to be taken seriously and win an imminent by-election, I probably wouldn’t nominate a fringe foreign policy interest group as the biggest issue facing Britain at the moment. That said, the tragic reality of the British electorate now is that in places like Holborn and St Pancras this may well be a sensible course of action.
The main theme of Polanski’s speech was an evisceration of Labour
But much more than the predictable obsessions of the Greens, the main theme of Polanski’s speech was an evisceration of Labour. Almost all of his remarks were dedicated to savaging their record in government – on free speech, on energy, on Burnham calling a COBRA meeting to announce the banning of portable barbecues over the summer. He also raised multiple examples of Labour’s spineless flip-flopping and equivocation, specifically because they were worried about losing votes to the Greens. ‘At general elections the government changes, but between general elections we change the government.’ Where Labour had promised to seize unoccupied property after six months, Polanski offered rent controls and war on landlords. His overall message was this; if you like this sort of thing, why not go for full-fat nut milk rather than the semi-skimmed variety?
By contrast Polanski didn’t mention Reform and Farage once, didn’t mention the Tories or the Lib Dems. Labour was the real enemy. This is intelligent electoral maths by Polanski; unlike Labour, he realises that just trotting out tropes about Reform won’t win him a shot at power, but shaving voters from the party of government will. He isn’t as dorky as he looks.
Much hangs on the Holborn and St Pancras by-election; if Polanski loses that, Labour will invariably write him and his party off. However, if he can leech enough votes off their progressive flank then he still has the potential to cause them a great deal of trouble, especially if a winter of discontent beckons. He might have some crackpot ideas but if Labour aren’t scared of him, then they should be.
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