The enormous fun of Crufts has reminded us that Britain is a nation of dog lovers. Or maybe we’re kidding ourselves? Because policy documents on the Green party website reveal that they are ‘opposed to the wholesale breeding, manipulation and destruction of those animals who are chosen as companions to the human race’. What marvellously grandiose language! The next time I give the cat a treat I shall cackle evilly about choosing it as my companion for wholesale manipulation.
The Greens continue: ‘We will introduce measures to regulate the care and conditions for such animals, including a two-tier system of dog-licensing (breeding and non-breeding), licensing of all animal breeders and dog owners.’
The stern and authoritarian tone of this stern and authoritarian policy is yet another example of the curious mismatch between different parts of the Greens’ policy portfolio. Dogs must be licensed, but illegal immigrants can come on in. Famously, they are also pro the legalisation of all recreational drugs, but plan to come down very hard on cigarettes.
In the event of a Green victory, we could have a situation where you wake in the morning in your state-leased apartment, because the private property of landlords has been confiscated (legally, somehow). After a refreshing breakfast – oat milk porridge and a shot of heroin – you check your state account to find that your universal basic income – an inexhaustible bounty redistributed from evil billionaires, boo hiss – has been paid in. You book an instantaneous GP appointment, and then take the dog for a walk. As you saunter in the park, relishing the public broadcast of the Islamic call to prayer, and taking a little puff on your crack pipe, an officer of the law swoops to ask ‘Do you have a license for that animal?’
It is all glaringly, obviously mad. But I think this is a great part of its appeal. Pointing the barminess out to its adherents is merely applying reason to a situation where reason does not apply. In fact, trying to pin the Greens down on detail is wholly pointless, rather like getting a spokesperson for Edward Lear on to a Sunday morning news show and demanding to know if it is really credible that the Owl and the Pussycat sailed to the land where the Bong Tree grows.
I think the Greens are benefitting from anybody-but-Starmer-ism. He is so uniquely awful, and one just wants rid of him so badly, that literally anybody or anything else begins to seem preferable, at least in the abstract. This is true of those of us on the right, and even more so for people on the progressive side of the aisle. ‘Sod the bloody lot of you then,’ is a more powerful electoral motivator than ever, in this era where the old parties can barely scrape 40 per cent in the polls between them.
What is behind the Green door in particular? The policy offer seems to be the distillation of what is often referred to by right-wingers online as the progressive ‘omnicause’, the bundling together of every perverse (but high status) position for no other reason than because they are perverse and high status. The most evident of these agglomerations is the idea of ‘queers for Palestine’. The Greens’ dream of globalising the intifada while simultaneously celebrating homosexuality is magnificently potty.
Zack Polanski is the perfect figurehead for this party. Not so much a useful idiot, but a new category: the useless idiot.
He’s one of those people who reacts to criticism by saying ‘ooh somebody’s rattled’
He is quite prepared to say anything, however nuts, to make his tribe happy. Since he became Green leader, he has suggested that illegal immigrants are necessary to wipe the bottoms of the elderly, advanced a defence strategy of asking Vladimir Putin politely to stop it, and suggested negotiating with Colombian drug barons to get a really good price for pure hard stuff. Other wheezes include totally open borders, closing zoos and cutting off friendly relations with the United States.
Polanski has the Obama-like knack of getting people to hang their own high hopes on him. It simply doesn’t matter to them that limited intelligence radiates from him, and that everything he says is bananas. In fact, it makes them like him even more. Another plus point is that he’s one of those people who reacts to criticism by saying ‘ooh somebody’s rattled’, or that ‘the establishment are frightened’. Progressives love that stuff because it makes them feel quite the rebels. In that respect, he is indeed strangely similar to Nigel Farage.
And Farage is such an anathema to a section of the electorate that they just might elevate Polanski and the Greens at least to an adjacent position of power. At which point we – and our dogs – might suddenly be glad of the British civil service’s unmatched ability to frustrate elected politicians from actually doing anything.
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