Zack polanski

When Sir Keir Starmer announced that he was standing down as an MP on Tuesday, jubilation erupted among Green activists. Zack Polanski’s party has already proved it can take on Labour’s campaign machine in ethnically diverse parts of Manchester; Starmer’s resignation now presents the perfect opportunity to do the same in London. At the time of the 2021 census, the constituency of Holborn and St Pancras was 21 per cent Muslim and 45 per cent non-white. At the 2024 general election, Starmer received almost 50 per cent of the vote, while the Green party and the independent pro-Gaza candidate Andrew Feinstein secured a combined 29 per cent.

Every twist in the winding road of our politics brings a latest thing to say. These wisdoms usually survive a season or two before succumbing to the new thing to say, which often asserts the opposite. This summer we have ‘Britain is moving into an era of multi-party politics’. Allow me, therefore, to leap ahead with my candidate for its successor: ‘Reports of the death of two-party politics are greatly exaggerated.’ I don’t say our current governing party and principal opposition must always be the two parties in question. Labour may be dying. The Tories may be showing signs of life. In both cases I fervently hope so. But whether or not these remain our two options in elections to come, the tendency will always be for the choice to boil down to two.

As Keir Starmer struggles to keep his crown, another leadership battle is raging. Away from the media spotlight, there is a fight for the future of the Green party between its various official ‘Special Interest Groups’ and its leader, Zack Polanski. What are they fighting about? Why, Palestine and racial politics of course.  On one side, Polanski and his officials are at least trying to appear to be dealing with allegations of anti-Semitism and extremism within the party. On the other, a powerful affiliate group, the Global Majority Greens (GMG), is accusing its leader of creating a ‘hierarchy of racism’, with allegations of anti-Semitism taken more seriously than other complaints.

‘Back us to stop the far right,’ say the Greens. But what if parts of the Greens are the far right? Saiqa Ali, a Green candidate in next week’s elections for Streatham St Leonard’s, Lambeth, posts on her Instagram account a picture of the Earth suffocated by a giant serpent with the Star of David on its skin. She thinks that the British government includes too many ‘Zionists Jews’, and that Donald Trump is ‘owned by Jews’. Not even the Z-word, that last one. Not even Israel. Just… Jews. Ali also posts a picture of an armed man in what looks like a Hamas headband, captioning it: ‘Long live the Resistance.’ If it is a Hamas headband, this may actually be a criminal offence.

You might describe it as the Polanski paradox. The party which calls itself Green, which has concern for the environment as its raison d’être, has never been more popular. Four Green MPs returned at the last general election. Victory in the recent Gorton and Denton by-election. Local election gains in May predicted to be sweeping. Running second in many national opinion polls, and in the projected seat tally for the Scottish parliament. And yet while the Green party surges ahead, green issues fall by the wayside. As Angus Colwell explores in this week’s cover piece, Zack Polanski has focused the Green party away from the environment and turned it into a movement of the populist left.

Freed from the burden of choosing a prospective government, by-elections are an opportunity for voters to tell the political class how they really feel. It is therefore no great surprise that the people of Gorton and Denton, until now a solid Labour heartland, have called on the uber-left Greens to give the status quo a kicking, with Reform coming in second. For the Conservatives, the more interesting story is not the Greens’ success in outer Manchester, but what the Green surge at the national level says about the voters who have been drifting into Zack Polanski’s orbit. The Greens have previously benefited from the agreeable vagueness of their brand. Green is a comforting word, smelling of cut grass and virtue.

Nigel Farage is signing football shirts when I arrive at Reform’s campaign headquarters in Millbank Tower, the building where New Labour prepared for power before 1997. The black shirts are emblazoned with ‘Farage 10’ in gold. ‘Someone called them Nazi colours,’ the leader complains. ‘This always happens when we do well.’ As favourite to be the next prime minister, Farage is sanguine. ‘They’re a special edition, £350 each.’ How many is he signing? ‘—king hundreds,’ he says, pulling his punches on the profanity. Seven hundred to be precise, a cool £245,000 for party coffers. This is the same week the party registers a £9 million donation from the crypto millionaire Christopher Harborne, the largest single donation in British political history.

Ayoub Khan seemed delighted. Last Thursday, it was announced that fans of the Israeli football club Maccabi Tel Aviv would be banned from attending their match against Aston Villa next month, an outcome that Khan, the MP for Birmingham Perry Barr, had been lobbying for since September. That night, Khan took himself on a broadcast round to celebrate. Keir Starmer had said the ban was the ‘wrong decision’, but on Newsnight Khan told him to back off. ‘The Prime Minister should stay out of operational matters,’ he said. ‘That’s not a matter for him, sitting in No. 10.’ It has been a satisfying 15 months for Khan since his election.