The Hijacking of Britain’s Green Party - And What’s Really Behind It
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The Green Party in Britain is no longer a well-meaning movement for people who care deeply about the environment. It’s been hijacked by extremists and has become a Trojan Horse for much darker undercurrents in British society.
That is the key, indisputable fact that’s emerged in recent days and weeks as Britain braces for a crucial set of local and devolved elections later this week.
On the surface, what’s become clear is that the Green Party is now riddled with antisemites and conspiracy theorists.
In fact, there are now so many examples it’s hard to know where to begin.
How about the two Green candidates who were arrested last week for stirring up racial hatred - one of whom posted a picture of a man holding a placard that read “ramming a synagogue isn’t anti-Semitism, it’s revenge”.
The other, Saiqa Ali, posted an image on social media of an armed man in a Hamas headband, an Islamist terror organisation, with the slogan: “resistance is freedom”.
That candidate had also deleted Facebook posts which claimed the 9/11 Islamist terror attacks on America had been a “false-flag attack” operation, created by Israel.
Astonishingly, one of those candidates was then also seen campaigning for the Greens after her arrest, showing how seriously the Green leadership takes all this.
Or how about the candidate in Newcastle, who published posts calling for “every single Zionist” to be killed, and describing them as “vermin” and “rats”. Or the candidate in Walsall who posted on social media about “Jewish cockroaches”.
Or the candidate in London who claimed the terror attack on ambulances in a Jewish community had also been a “false flag” operation by Israel.
Or the candidate who reposted a tweet claiming that the October 7th attacks had been carried out by Israel, and called Israel a “colony of inbreds, rapists, and thieves”.
I could go on. And on. And on. And on.
The now undeniable fact is that the Green party - the same party that lectures everybody else about the need to ‘be kind’, ‘be tolerant’, and ‘tackle the far-right’ - is riddled with antisemites and conspiracy theorists who would have a lot in common with … the far right.
And what’s clear is that this infection has spread to the head of the snake, too, with leader of the Greens, Zack Polanski, now routinely using his Jewish ancestry as a shield to protect him from accusations of racial hatred while openly enabling if not encouraging the very worst impulses in British society.
After the horrific terror attack in Golders Green last week, which saw a terror suspect who was born in Somalia go on a stabbing rampage through a Jewish neighbourhood, Polanski’s first instinct was not to align himself with the brave officers who had put themselves in the line of fire but to express concern for … the terror suspect.
In what was a very revealing insight into Polanski’s instincts, he retweeted an account that was critical of how police officers, who had already used their taser and did not know whether the terror suspect was laced with explosives, kicked the suspect in the head as they tried, desperately, to disarm him.
In one fell swoop, Zack Polanski showed Britain whose side he is on. What would Polanski have said in the aftermath of the terror attacks on 9/11, the London bombings of 7/7, the beheading of British soldier Lee Rigby, or the attacks on Westminster, many will wonder? We don’t really know. And that’s the point.
And nor is this the only example of Polanski indulging the very worst and most ugly of hatreds. Far from it. Astonishingly, only a few days before the terror stabbing in Golders Green, Polanski wondered aloud if Jews were suffering “actual unsafety” or merely the “perception of unsafety”.
Yes, he actually said this. After the Muslim maniac Jihad Al-Shamie murdered two British Jews and attacked a synagogue in Manchester. After the murder of fifteen people at a Hanukkah celebration on Bondi Beach, Australia. After the Community Security Trust recorded 3,700 incidents of anti-Jewish hatred in Britain, which is the second-highest figure, after 2023, since records began in 1984. And after a string of fire-bombings and arson attacks against the British Jewish community.
Nor did he stop there. On Sunday, during the final weekend before a crunch set of elections across England, Wales, and Scotland on Thursday, Polanski refused to support banning the “globalise the intifada” chant, which clearly incites the same kind of violence against Jews we’ve seen in Manchester, Golders Green, Bondi Beach, and elsewhere.
Would Polanski feel the same way about a chant that called for violence against Muslims? Would he similarly stress the importance of “context” if, say, thousands of white people were marching through the streets of London, implicitly calling for the murder of Muslims? Of course not. Again, that’s the point. It’s one rule for Jews, another for everybody else.
What Zack Polanski and the Greens are also doing, which is what makes them so insidious, is not just ignoring but actively mobilising something that is much deeper and far more threatening to Britain, something that most commentators and politicians would rather we not discuss at all: Muslim sectarianism and Muslim anti-semitism.
I was one of the first people to see this dangerous new threat up close, when I recently stood at the Gorton and Denton by-election, finishing second to the Greens. The writing, as I pointed out at the time, was already on the wall.
Green leaflets and attack videos that were written not in English but Urdu and Punjabi. Blatant attempts to whip up tension between Muslims and Hindus. Widespread rumours of backroom deals between the Green campaign and self-anointed ‘community elders’. An extraordinary attempt by the Green candidate to blame me for the Manchester Arena bombing, in 2017, not what was actually responsible: Islamism.
And then, after the polls closed, the shocking finding, by an independent monitoring group, that some 68 per cent of polling stations in the seat had experienced blatant sectarianism in the form of illegal ‘family voting’, whereby a husband or father tells their family how to vote in what is supposed to be a free and fair election.
For many Brits looking on, this was the first shocking sign of what Polanski and the Greens are now actively mobilising.
But as I said at the time, it should not have surprised anybody. Because the truth, the truth many would rather ignore, is that what we are witnessing in Britain is not just the extreme ramblings of Green party candidates and their leader but the downstream effect of deeply destabilising demographic changes that have been unleashed on Britain for decades.
For years now, the ruling class in this country has been importing millions of people from Islamic nations that have a completely different view of democracy and, as it happens, Jews. Westminster columnists might like to comfort themselves by pointing the finger only at Polanski and his extreme band of antisemites but this is misleading.
Because what is now bubbling to the surface in Britain is much deeper and much broader than many people care to admit.
Britain’s Muslim population has more than doubled from 1.6 million, in 2001, to more than four million today.
By 2050, according to the Pew Research Centre, the ratio of people in Britain who are Muslim will shift from one in seventeen people today to one in eight. By the end of the century, it will be one in four.
Migration is not only about the movement of people; it is about the movement of cultures. As Tory MP Nick Timothy pointed out this week, albeit while ignoring his party’s role in accelerating these trends, Britain has been importing far too many people from deeply antisemitic cultures - from Pakistan, Somalia, the Middle East, among others.
Clearly, not everybody who comes from these countries is antisemitic. But many are. Just look at the evidence.
Recent surveys of Muslims in Britain, which we have covered, speak for themselves.
Large numbers of Muslims in Britain endorse antisemitic tropes and are far more likely than anybody else to do so.
Many think ‘Jews have too much power’. Many think positively about Hamas, or deny the events of October 7th. Many voice strong support for the Iranian regime, which has not only called for attacks against Britain but is almost certainly behind attacks on British Jews.
Only yesterday, another survey by JL Partners found that one-quarter of Britain’s Muslim population hold favourable views of the terrorist group Hamas, and are more likely to hold favourable than unfavourable views of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards.
One in seven Muslims in Britain openly say they hold favourable views of Islamic State or al-Qaeda. Close to one in eight say their postal vote at elections has been collected by a campaigner. And close to one in ten say they handed their blank ballot paper to another person to fill in.
None of this should be happening in a supposedly modern, mature, civilised democracy like Britain’s. But it is. While politicians and journalists prefer to look the other way, these are the attitudes and beliefs they have been importing into Britain at scale, alongside a deeply engrained sectarian approach to politics that puts clannish, tribal, and religious loyalties above a national loyalty to Britain.
And while Labour politicians complain about how Polanski and the Greens are now mobilising these dark currents for their own ends, the reality is that Labour willingly exploited the same sectarian networks within Britain’s Muslim communities for decades, while also turning a blind-eye to anti-semitism and turbo-charging mass immigration.
In recent weeks, Zack Polanski and the Greens have certainly revealed who they really are. As writer Douglas Murray pointed out, there are moments in politics when a flare goes up and suddenly you can see where everybody stands - what they really believe, what they really think, and where their instinct really lies. Well, the flare has certainly gone up and everybody can now see Polanski and the Greens for what they really are.
But make no mistake: this isn’t just about the Greens. The radicalisation of the Greens, the hijacking of the party, is merely one symptom of much deeper, much broader, and longer-term undercurrents in British society that are bubbling to the surface as the dire effects of mass immigration and rapid demographic change become impossible to deny.
The result is what we see emerging around us at blistering speed: a dangerous new form of sectarian mobilisation and virulent antisemitism, whereby global conflicts, tribal allegiances, and a deeply engrained antisemitism are being imported directly into Britain, undermining our once civic political culture and country.
The direction of travel is unmistakeable and will be confirmed in many areas of the country at the elections on Thursday where, inevitably, the Greens and the undercurrents they represent will become more firmly entrenched in our politics.
And while the ruling class in Westminster will draw a straight line from this growing threat to Polanski and the Greens, in reality they will have only themselves to blame. Because the choice facing Britain is simple. We can either have a policy of mass immigration that is bringing people from radically different cultures into Britain, or we can stand a fighting chance of defeating homegrown antisemitism here in Britain and giving British Jews what they deserve: the right to feel safe in their own home.
We cannot have both.
Fantastic piece Matt. Far more people need to be woken up to what the Green Party has become with Zack Polanski as the epitome of the useful idiot. But in a way, the Greens are a symbol of what is happening across the West. Islamic radicals are infiltrating every institution, organisation and centre of power. It’s a pattern that has repeated itself in many other countries ever since the Muslim Brotherhood was formed in order to raise money to build mosques everywhere and radicalise new generations by more subtle methods of jihad. It’s not just Jews who have to fear what is happening, it’s women and children, it’s all of us. Perhaps the Greens are doing some good in the sense that they might wake up a few more people to the threats. Let’s hope so.
If we get to one in eight being Muslim, we won't have a country. We'll have Lebanon.