Saiqa Ali, the woman who allegedly said that Donald Trump is ‘owned by Jews’, became a Lambeth councillor yesterday, elected under the Green party banner. Like so many celebrated liberation activists before her, Cllr Ali has gone from police custody – she was arrested last week for stirring up racial hatred – to public office, though her story may not end quite as happily as, say, Nelson Mandela’s. But then Mandela never allegedly posted pictures of the Earth crushed by a giant serpent with the Star of David on its skin, or allegedly wrote ‘Long live the resistance’ next to a picture of what looks like a Hamas terrorist. Or, for that matter, allegedly opined that ‘England has a government overrepresented with Zionists Jews’.
Ali’s racism, revealed by The Spectator, did cost her some support – she got a third fewer votes than the top-ranked Green candidate in her ward – but, as we predicted, with the Green label by her name she was always likely to win what was the party’s best area. A second noxious Green candidate exposed by The Spectator, Ifhat Shaheen (she justified 7 October as an act of self-defence, accused Israel of harvesting Palestinian organs and asked whether ‘Zionists’ were behind Tommy Robinson) is also a councillor this morning in Hackney.
The continued presence of the ‘Greenshirt’ wing would make cooperation with a liberal party difficult
At the time of writing we still don’t know the fate of Lambeth’s other arrested Green candidate, Sabine Mairey (who, as The Spectator also revealed, allegedly promoted a video claiming a terror attack on a synagogue was ‘not anti-Semitism’ but was ‘revenge’ on Israel.) There was a recount in her ward and it is yet to declare. Nor is there yet a result for Rebecca Jones, the Blackheath Green candidate, NHS GP and vegan activist whose non-bloodshed towards animals did not, we found, stop her wanting to ‘burn Zionism to the ground’. Bournemouth’s Feda Shahin, the Green candidate who thinks ‘the Zionists killed 20 million Christians’, did lose – as did all the Green candidates in Walsall, including the one who called Jews ‘cockroaches’.
What will the Greens now do with Cllr Ali, Cllr Shaheen and all their other haters? Nothing, probably. Sabine Mairey, though supposedly suspended, was seen at the Lambeth count on Friday. Ifhat Shaheen was never even suspended. Hackney Green party’s official account posted a congratulatory Instagram reel of her victory, complete with green rosettes and slightly tentative embraces from the other Greens, last night.
This is entirely in keeping with the party’s behaviour throughout the campaign, when it refused to disown most of its at least two dozen racist and extremist candidates for weeks, or in most cases at all. The Corbynista faction, which now dominates the Greens, has always argued that Jezza’s error when similar scandals hit Labour was taking any action whatever – yielding, as they saw it, to pressure from the right-wing media and giving the issue oxygen.
This attitude is probably a mistake, though. It seems likely that the anti-Semitic candidates and Zack Polanski’s inflammatory comments about the arrest of the alleged Golders Green terrorist did damage the Greens. As the London politics guru Tony Travers of the LSE said last night:
The Greens haven’t done perhaps as well as they were expecting, with the sense of that momentum that was gathering around the party in the capital seeming to be fizzling out slightly.
The Greens did do extremely well in some places. They now control Waltham Forest, with 31 councillors in a borough where they’d never won a seat before last night. The Muslim Vote, the highly controversial group behind the election of four pro-Gaza independent MPs in 2024, ran an endorsement campaign for the Greens in Waltham Forest this year. (The Muslim Vote has also strongly defended Polanski against the anti-Semitism ‘smears’ supposedly ‘masterminded’ by a ‘pro-Israel cabinet minister’ with ‘£730k in hidden pro-Israel donations’. It all comes back to Israel, you see.)
The Greens did very well in Hackney, another council they now control (The Muslim Vote also endorsed them there); in Haringey, where they went from nil to 28 seats, one short of a majority; and in Lewisham, where they won the mayoralty. Outside London, there was organic growth to take control of Norwich and Hastings.
But they fell significantly short in some key targets, including Islington, Oxford and Cambridge. In Hammersmith & Fulham and Richmond, they actually lost seats. Sky News’s calculation of the Greens’ ‘national equivalent vote’, the share they would have received had this been a general election with everyone in the country able to vote, puts Team Polanski on 14 per cent. This is significantly below their pre-controversy, early-April polling average of 18 per cent (though the BBC’s version of this calculation, to be fair, puts them exactly in line with the polling, on 18 per cent.)
To make a slightly artificial distinction, the Greens underperformed in many middle-class liberal places (such as Richmond and Oxford). They performed in line in many middle-class left places (such as Hackney and Haringey) and overperformed in middle-class left places with lots of Muslims, like Waltham Forest. Recent polling by Policy Exchange shows strong support among Muslims for the Greens’ radical pro-Gaza policies.
How the Greens deal with their racists may also determine how much they can progress by building links with other parties. In Southwark, for instance, they came a strong second, going from nil to 22 seats and depriving Labour of its majority. Both here and in Haringey, they could run the council if they joined with the Lib Dems. But the continued presence of their ‘Greenshirt’ wing would make cooperation with a liberal party difficult.
Something for Zack Polanski to think about, if he ever does any thinking.
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