As Tali Fraser points out in this week’s magazine, with the Greens on around 11 per cent in the polls and Restore on 4 per cent, around one in seven British voters support a party that is at least comfortable with anti-Semitism.
By switching the Greens from ecology to extremism Polanski has unleashed a monster he both cannot and will not control
That is salutary enough a statistic. But the result of the Holborn and St Pancras by-election is even starker. Opinion polls merely require voters to answer a theoretical question on the phone or online, whereas in a by-election they have to make the effort to go and vote. And yesterday, 33 per cent of voters in Holborn and St Pancras decided to support a party which, just four days ago, enshrined Jew hate in its platform.
On Sunday the Green party’s annual conference not only passed a motion labelling Zionism as racism but also rejected an amendment making clear that Jews who go to synagogue – all mainstream synagogues are avowedly Zionist – are explicitly not being accused of being racist. In other words, the Greens formally believe that the vast majority of mainstream Jews are racist. The Greens are now a formally anti-Semitic party.
The record vote by a far-right party in Britain is the National Front’s 16 per cent in the 1973 West Bromwich by-election. The Greens’ 33 per cent is more than double that. Unlike the National Front, their support comes from the self-described progressive left. But the Greens are the perfect example of how meaningless such terms now are. The party is now best thought of as an Islamo-leftist party.
Much of the coverage of the Holborn and St Pancras by-election has focused, understandably, on Zack Polanski’s future. It now seems more likely than not that, just as he arrived last autumn out of nowhere (well, from the Lib Dems), so this autumn he will disappear into deserved obscurity when his deputy, Mothin Ali, deposes him. The Greens regularly dispense with their leaders; in the past decade, they have had Caroline Lucas, Jonathan Bartley, Siân Berry, Carla Denyer, Adrian Ramsay and now Polanski.
He will soon become the latest political figure to discover that, having thought he could ride the sectarian Muslim wave to his advantage, he is being disposed of as soon as he has served his purpose. A Green source told the BBC’s Chris Mason that Polanski, ‘has created a monster he either can’t or won’t control.’ That’s almost right. By switching the Greens from ecology to extremism Polanski has unleashed a monster he both cannot and will not control.
He will not control the monster because the Greens’ hard left, Islamo-leftist, extremism has been Polanski’s ticket to the leadership and national prominence. It is all he has ever had to offer. But in welcoming the Jew haters and Islamists forced out of Labour after Jeremy Corbyn’s resignation as leader, Polanski has created a new party that no longer resembles in any way the one he took over last year. The entryists are now the Green mainstream and he couldn’t control them even if he wanted to.
Polanski is sometimes described as politically shrewd for having spotted this gap in the market – a risible idea. His is the shrewdness of the man sees a gap in the traffic and so runs across the road, only to be mown down by an HGV.
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