They say you can never go home again, but if I think of my hometown of Bristol – and my adopted hometown of Brighton and Hove – the similarities are striking. The rise of the Green Party has much to do with this. When I was growing up in the beautiful, but quiet, West Country city in the 1960s and 1970s, I couldn’t wait to escape to somewhere buzzier. Well, they say be careful what you wish for. Now the two cities share ‘progressive’ politics of the most regressive kind; that distinctive Veruca-Salt-joins-the-Stasi brand which is obsessed with the evil of Israel and the transcendent wonder of ‘trans.’ Voters in Gorton and Denton who helped the Green party win its first by-election this week will come to regret what they’ve done.
The Greens have formed the ultimate coalition of the silly and the sinister
It’s funny to think that Friends Of The Earth were once considered quite ‘out there’; the Greens, with their crazed support for Net Zero, sometimes appear to believe that the ideal lifestyle should be lived by candlelight, in a cave, cross-dressing, puffing on the crack-pipe and yelling ‘Allahu Akhbar!’ on a regular basis.
The recent alliance between the anything-goes Greens (led by the Jewish Zack Polanski, as he never fails to remind us so he can’t be accused of being anti-Semitic. Has he never heard of Karl Marx?) and hyper-reactionary Islamism, is one of those outlandish things which would have stood out like a sore thumb a decade ago, but now just seems like a natural part of the whole crazy paving that the modern world has been tarmacked over with. Gorton and Denton has a high Muslim population, so the triumph of the Greens does not come as a surprise. It is, however, a shock of the seismic kind.
When I moved to Brighton in 1995, it was still a happy-go-lucky place full of people who were no better than they should be, whooping it up. Then, in 2011, the Greens became the largest party on the council for the first time, leading a minority administration until 2015. They were back again in 2020, until Labour took over in 2023. It was plenty long enough for them to make a right dog’s breakfast of this once-fair city by the sea.
Many parts of our country look what I think of as ‘post-hope’. But there’s a special scruffiness which seems to glory in itself rather than look crestfallen that you get where the Greens are strongest. You can tell they think they’re ‘re-wilding’ like in The Archers, because being tidy is probably ‘racist’; what it meant in reality here was not getting the rubbish collected because of strikes – and streets overgrown with weeds.
There was a right royal ruckus when Labour got back in and voted to reintroduce the chemical glyphosate (banned after it was linked to a decline in bees), with the Greens pointing out that Labour had brought in the ban themselves. But the new local overlords weren’t having any; as Labour councillor Tim Rowkins, chair of the environment committee, pointed out of the Triffid-like damage wrought by Mother Nature: ‘We have a backlog of repairs totalling £60million…uncontrolled weed growth is one of the primary causes of damage to our pavements…we currently spend £50,000 a month on reactive repairs to pavements….parts of the city are completely wild and many of our residents – wheelchair users, parents and carers with buggies, those with visual or mobility impairments – simply can’t travel the distance of their own street safely.’
Like George Monbiot with his crazed ranting about mild-mannered sheep being ‘the white plague’ you sometimes get the feeling that Greens feel that we pesky humans are little more than a blot on the landscape, unless we’ve subscribed to their nutty manifesto and thereby done our penance. (An exception was the construction of the extremely modernistic and phallic i360 seafront tower – £48 million down the dunny.)
You can tell they think they’re ‘re-wilding’ like in The Archers, because being tidy is probably ‘racist’
On other issues, you couldn’t get a Rizla paper between Labour and the Greens. Both conduct/ed a major war against cars, making parking prohibitive, ruinous for a town wishing to attract day-trippers. If the plan is to deter visitors, it’s certainly worked, with the historic Palace Pier looking for a buyer due to low footfall.
The cyclist is king here, even though so many are clowns; a fortune has been spent on cycle lanes but many of these inadequate men still ride bikes the size of motorbikes on the pavements. Hove seafront, once so lovely, looks like a bomb has hit it, with broken railings and rusted shelters; ‘tent cities’ and caravan convoys are a constant eyesore, the council letting them get away with it in case they be accused of being unfair to ‘travellers.’
Bella Sankey, leader of the Labour council, is very keen on the phrase ‘City of Sanctuary’ which translates to very Green ‘Let ‘em all in!’. ‘Brighton and Hove is no place for hate’ is another phrase you hear a lot of round here, which always makes me wonder where those who insist on it is a place for hate. Worthing, perhaps, or Goring-by-sea?
There certainly seems to be a place for hating Jews here; our tiny community will be getting even smaller this year, as several I know are currently planning their move to Israel, due to the repeated destruction of hostage memorials last year, and the current sinister campaign whereby a group calling itself the ‘Brighton and Hove Apartheid-Free Zone’ go door to door with clipboards and checklists noting down whether or not residents boycott Israeli goods; understandably, some Jewish residents find this a campaign of intimidation. They’re mostly student-types cos-playing in keffiyehs; you can bet they’ll be voting Green.
Ironically, the Greens took their second turn on the council as Labour lost their majority when councillors were accused of anti-Semitic social media posts; the then-leader of the Brighton Labour group, Nancy Platts, issued an apology to the Jewish community, stating the posts brought ‘shame on the whole Labour Party.’
I personally think that one more Green MP – bringing their parliamentary presence to a fearsome five, including their leader Carla Denyer who ‘represents’ Bristol Central – is far less to worry about than a Green local council, when the crazies actually get their hands on our cash.
Seeing Keir Starmer beaten by a party which believes in legalising date-rape drugs must surely hasten his exit, so that’s one good thing about it. But on the whole, this is a dark day for our baffled, beleaguered nation, with one more small but sure step for this ultimate coalition of the silly and the sinister.
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