Green activists want to take Polanski down a dark road
The Greens’ absolutism is bad for politics, and Polanski too. Those who police dogma see heretics everywhere, even at the top, writes Eliot Wilson
Zack Polanski, leader of the Green Party of England and Wales, is easy to dislike. There is something preposterous and confected about him, and it is no surprise that he has a background in acting.
He is suffocatingly earnest and demonstrates armour-plated self-belief even when pronouncing the most implausible silliness. He once explained that, as Prime Minister, he would “keep pushing for negotiation” with President Vladimir Putin to end the war in Ukraine; last November he told Sky News’s Trevor Philllips that “we should never leave the negotiating table” and that he would persuade Putin to give up Russia’s nuclear weapons.
It is not easy to imagine the former KGB colonel who has ruled Russia since the last millennium being outfoxed by a man who once taught at the National Centre for Circus Arts, but Polanski continued crossly that “you could have laughed at the point of Nelson Mandela negotiating with the ANC”.
Yet many voters have listened to Polanski and like what they’ve heard. With politics held in such low regard now, party leaders compete not for popularity but to minimise their unpopularity. Last November, Polanski recorded a barely-there -2, and was still only on -7 in mid January. At the same time Kemi Badenoch was at -26, Nigel Farage logged -37 and Sir Keir Starmer was preparing to sleep with the fishes at -57.
Similarly, the Green Party, sitting on 10 per cent of the vote when Polanski won the leadership last September, rose to 16 per cent in two months. In March this year they polled second overall on 21 per cent, only two points behind Reform UK. In recent months, however, the party’s position has begun to slide.
Why are the Greens losing support?
Some of this may be attributable to mishaps. In April, Polanski retweeted criticism of the force used by the police to apprehend the attacker of two Jewish men in Golders Green. Then it was revealed that elements of his professional career were exaggerations or outright falsehoods.
In the Green Party, there are activists who regard Andy Burnham’s premiership as the principal cause of their ebbing popularity. Their candidate in last month’s Greater Manchester mayoral by-election, Geraldine Coggins, was barely a factor: Labour’s Bev Craig, leader of Manchester City Council, strolled to a two-to-one win over Sian Astley of Reform UK, while Coggins had been eliminated in the first round with only 12 per cent.
How is the Green Party to stop this leakage? A group of activists including Animah Kosai, a member of the Green Party Council, has submitted a five-page motion to the party’s annual conference, being held in Brighton (where else) in October. Its diagnosis is that which activists always reach: to be more popular, the party must embrace more enthusiastically the kind of radical policies which excite activists.
It is a dismally familiar roll call. Campaigning should underline the party’s pledge to introduce a wealth tax on the richest one per cent, the revenue from which Polanski has already announced will fund, variously, universal free childcare, the nationalisation of water, energy and rail, and rent controls. It matters not at all that France, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, the Netherlands, Ireland and Australia introduced wealth taxes and all quickly scrapped them because they were unworkable, economically harmful or delivered much less revenue than expected. It is all about those on whom the burden wall: the monstrous rich.
The motion also recommends placing more emphasis on national and international issues: its authors want to attack Labour for continuing to sell arms to Israel throughout the conflict in Gaza (UK arms sales to Israel are extremely small and limited, representing well under one per cent of the country’s defence imports). The Greens have already agreed resolutions to designate Israel’s government as an “apartheid” state, and they appealed to voters in the Gorton and Denton by-election in February to “punish Labour for Gaza”.
The Green worldview is all black and white
In April I described the Greens’ policy platform as “familiar from any 1990s or 2000s student common room: environmentalism, social and racial justice, soak the rich, strong trades unions and opposition to NATO”. It shares with student politics one other aspect: it is uncompromising yet unrealistic, make-believe yet Manichaean. It is the tone of “debate” so common in the public forum now: refusing to engage with other viewpoints, demanding safe spaces, screeching for deplatforming.
This is a form of civic behaviour that believes in moral absolutes rather than debate. After all, how can you be against protecting the environment or reducing inequality? How can you be in favour of genocide or apartheid or poverty? These are the questions over which Green Party activists want to do battle: they are simple, they are binary and people know instinctively which side they are on. Its counterpart on the right is the “wedge strategy” pursued by Sir Lynton Crosby: find an issue on which your opponent is divided, and exploit it ruthlessly to peel off some of their natural supporters.
Rory Sutherland, vice-chairman of Ogilvy UK, talks about “album politics”. “A kind of artificial worldview where you have to buy the entire album, as it were… in other words, it’s not just that you have left-wing opinions, you have to buy into every single opinion”.
It is not politics so much as theology, and soi-disant “progressives” are as certain as any mediaeval cleric of St Cyprian’s mantra, extra ecclesiastical nulla salus. If a political party concentrates on these deeply emotive issues on which they see voters as saved or damned, friends or enemies, wanting to force repentance rather than descending to the dust in the arena of persuasion, we should expect a bitter, moralising general election campaign. It is bad news for public discourse, bad news for any engagement or generosity of spirit.
None is saved outside the Church of St Zack, but Polanski must be careful. Those who police dogma see heretics everywhere, even at the top. All it takes is a careless tweet or a clumsy choice of words, and they might come for their leader next.
Eliot Wilson is a writer and historian. He is a senior fellow for national security at the Coalition for Global Prosperity and a contributing editor at Defence on the Brink