Camilla Long in today’s Sunday Times, on the Greens:
I wasn’t going to write about the by-election — the Greens, “F*** your bins”, campaign videos in Urdu. But there was one question that was bothering me. It was: what does the Green Party stand for? If, for example, you look through their hundreds of laughing TikToks, podcasts, cool memes, leaflets and press releases, you’ll struggle to find a single solid thought.
It’s not, I think, that they don’t have them. It’s just we seem to have reached a peculiar state in politics, in which we lap up any old abstract, syrupy “beliefs”.
On the economy, for example: Hannah Spencer, the Green candidate who won on Thursday, hates “billionaires”. That’s her whole policy.
On women, there’s a clip of her sounding tearful over “the power of hope”.
As for green issues, good luck with those. Occasionally she’ll mumble something about bringing “water back into public hands”.
But somehow, over the past 18 months, the Green Party stopped being the party of the environment — of serious, practical solutions. It became the party of something else; something darker. And this is what it is.
It is now a party that thinks nothing of promoting an antisemitic world-view. It is a party that repeatedly accuses the Jews of genocide. It fields a candidate who condemns Israel’s actions as “ethnic cleansing” and “apartheid”, while dispensing leaflets in Urdu with the claim “Labour must be punished for Gaza”.
It’s a party whose leader, Zack Polanski, himself a Jew, says he will happily support the extremely antisemitic party motion that “Zionism is racism”. (This makes the Green Jews feel “unwelcome”.)
It’s a party whose joint deputy leader, when he won a council seat, bellowed “Allahu akbar” and “We will raise the voice of Palestine”. He also appeared to celebrate October 7.
It’s a party that will speak of its opponents in crushing, livid, angry, dehumanising terms, but fail to blame actual terrorists, such as the perpetrators of the Manchester Arena bombing. That attack, according to Spencer, was in fact caused by “extremist” people like her opponent, Matt Goodwin of Reform, “dividing people”. What sort of person says that?
It is a party in which all other issues — the economy, women’s rights, energy, infrastructure, education — fade in comparison with one single, monstrous but strategically obfuscated obsession. Anti-capitalism and, by extension, Gaza. When people now ask what “Green” stands for, the joke goes: it is the green of the flag of Palestine. It seems strange that can happen in this country.
The party is now a bizarre alliance of two types of people: misogynistic, intolerant men and rich, liberal cat-lady women. It is Jeremy Corbyn’s escaped mad fringe 2015-19. It seems incredible to me that a man like its deputy leader Mothin Ali, whose wife wears a full burqa, would share a platform with ultraprogressives who believe in legalising prostitution, heroin and trans self-ID. But what can you say? Maybe he just really hates carbon emissions.
Well yes. As I noted yesterday, these things happen in by-elections. We have to hope this is one of those weird occasions when people just vote against the current politics to show how fed up they are.
And yes, here’s the Greens deputy leader, with wife:
Mick Hartley 
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