On Thursday, England goes to the polls for the local elections. In theory, this is the most prosaic form of democracy we have. A chance to vote on the administration of bin collections, pothole fixing, planning applications and council taxes.

Councils are not meant to function as a stage for sectarian grievance or foreign-policy cosplay. Yet, across a growing number of English councils, that is what local politics is becoming. Over the past month, I have spent many hours analysing candidates whose political pitch revolves not around their ward, but around Gaza and the politics of the wider Muslim world.

Some of these ‘pro-Palestine’ candidates should be nowhere near public office. Amu Gib, who is standing as an independent in Islington, was allegedly part of the ton last year, in which Palestine Action activists are alleged to have caused £7million damage. Shahid Butt, standing as an independent candidate in Birmingham, was convicted in Yemen in 1999 over a plot to bomb the British consulate, an Anglican church and a hotel. An independent in Bradford, Sharat Hussain, has described Jews as ‘dirty paedo foreskin-eating pigs’.

It is hardly unreasonable to ask what this says about the calibre of people now being drawn into politics by their loathing of Israel. Local-election campaigns are becoming a vehicle for imported rage and council chambers are imagined not as a place to govern a borough, but as a place to perform allegiance to a foreign cause.

My recent report for the Henry Jackson Society sought to measure this phenomenon rather than merely gawp at it. It used ‘Muslim sectarian’ not as a label for Muslim candidates, but as an operational category for candidates whose public political appeal is repeatedly structured around Muslim communal grievance, Muslim representation or transnational Muslim causes.

On that definition, 66 out of 1,902 wards in the 2024 English local elections elected at least one Muslim sectarian candidate. The strongest predictors of a ward electing at least one Muslim sectarian candidate are higher voter turnout, a larger proportion of voters under 30, and a larger proportion of Muslims.

A one-point increase in voter turnout within a ward is associated with a 14 per cent increase in the chance of electing at least one Muslim sectarian candidate. A one-point increase in the under-30 share is associated with an 11 per cent higher chance, and a one-point jump in the ward’s Muslim proportion is associated with a seven per cent higher chance. These are not causal claims. They do not mean Muslim voters or young voters are inherently sectarian. They mean that where the numbers, demographics and mobilisation structures are in place, this sectarian politics can break through.

This is bad for everyone, especially Muslims. It reduces Muslim voters to a grievance constituency. It rewards candidates who inflame rather than govern.

Local democracy depends on shared civic life. A councillor is not elected to represent only those who share his religion, ethnicity, foreign-policy obsessions or communal grievances. He represents the whole ward: the people who voted for him, the people who voted against him and the people who did not vote at all. This basic civic ideal is being corroded by sectarian politics. We need to confront this threat before we lose this ideal entirely.

Emma Schubart is a research fellow at the Henry Jackson Society.

I guess it’s only fitting that Zack Polanski has been accused of telling porkies about his career. The Green Party leader who thinks men can identify as women apparently spent years identifying as a British Red Cross spokesman and a fully licensed hypnotherapist.

Polanski is a figure by turns despicable and risible. The latest revelations fall into the latter bucket. According to The Times, he passed off his efforts hosting fundraisers for the Red Cross as a formal spokesman role with the charity, even bragging on his website in 2020 that he was ‘really proud of the work we do’ (my emphasis).

As for the hypnotherapy thing (Polanski claimed to be a full member of the National Council of Hypnotherapy), this has only served to remind people of the creepiest and most embarrassing chapter of his professional life: when he had a practice on Harley Street and claimed he could enlarge women’s breasts with his skills. I for one am shocked that a bloke who claimed he could do hypno boob jobs might not have been on the up and up.

Natch, Polanski has accused the right-wing media of having a vendetta against him. But he apparently can’t stop giving them ammunition. And I don’t just mean by massaging his CV. Indeed, I hope his colourful past doesn’t steal focus from the shameful things he is saying and doing in the present – particularly on anti-Semitism.

After two Jews were knifed in Golders Green, the heart of Jewish north London, last week, you might have expected the self-appointed leader of the ‘anti-racist’ left to have something strong to say about it. Instead, we got a perfunctory tweet from Polanski, which interestingly omitted the words ‘Jews’ and ‘anti-Semitism’.

If only he had stopped there. Instead, Our Zack proceeded to share posts criticising the police for how they subdued the suspect – they gave the scumbag a few stern kicks to the head, fearing he might be wearing a suicide vest, as they wrestled to get the knife off him.

After a rebuke from Metropolitan Police chief Sir Mark Rowley, Polanski apologised. Kinda. When pressed over the weekend, he conceded only that – while he remained concerned, even ‘traumatised’, by the treatment of the suspect – he should have taken it up with the cops in private, rather than on social media.

Personally, if I was looking for a word to describe how I felt watching that arrest footage, ‘traumatised’ is not the one I’d land on. (That kicking might have been the first time I’ve ever envied a copper.) But trying to turn an attack on Jews into a conversation about police brutality is only the latest, despicable distraction tactic to be used by ‘progressives’ whenever Jew hatred rears its head.

The reflex is always to deflect, to change the subject. Polanski even made a point on Sky News on Sunday of saying that the suspect, Essa Suleiman, also allegedly stabbed a Muslim man (a friend of his) in south-east London before going on his rampage in Golders Green.

What is the point of this comment, if not to dilute the distinctly anti-Jewish nature of the (alleged) attack in Golders Green? Only Polanski can know. But it looks and feels like Zack – like many on the ‘pro-Palestine’ left – struggles to compute the distinct threat to Jewish life and so feels compelled to diminish and generalise it.

You’ll have noticed this tic. After a little throat-clearing about how awful anti-Semitism is, leftists will suddenly pivot to Islamophobia, or racism in general – issues on which they’re much more comfortable. Because staying on topic would provoke awkward questions about their own role in fomenting the Jew hatred in our midst.

On this score, the Green Party is now the prime offender, picking up where Corbyn’s Labour left off. There have been a slew of stories of late about Green local-election candidates and activists spewing pond-scum anti-Semitism. And no, we’re not talking about ‘criticisms of Israel’, as some remain determined to dress it up. We’re talking about calling Jews ‘cockroaches’, dismissing October 7 as a ‘false flag’, and openly praising the rapists and butchers of Hamas. At least 25 Greens have a history of anti-Semitism. Two were arrested last week on suspicion of inciting racial hatred.

And what is the Green Party doing about it? Only a handful of these candidates have been sanctioned. Mark Adderley, standing in Crystal Palace in south London, was suspended after his rants about ‘the chosen people’ were uncovered, but his local party is still urging people to vote for him. Co-deputy leader Mothin Ali has even been encouraging some ousted candidates to take legal action against his own party.

Polanski says these are just a few bad apples, that there are anti-Semites in every party, that the establishment is just trying to take him down, etc. Presumably the media are choosing only to report on the Greens’ Jew haters. Perhaps he thinks Bibi Netanyahu put them up to it.

But this won’t wash. The Greens have succumbed to anti-Israel hysteria, which is the seedbed of the new anti-Semitism. All the ancient anti-Semitic tropes about Jews – as baby killers, puppeteers, sneaky subversives – have just been dolled up as ‘anti-Zionism’. And as the Greens’ candidates list attests, the Jew haters aren’t even bothering to make the distinction anymore.

Polanski, himself a Jewish man, can hardly be accused of being an anti-Semite. But he has become a prisoner of his own low-wattage worldview. The anti-Israel zealot cannot compute the new anti-Semitism, because doing so would require admitting he is part of the problem.

Plus, it would require admitting that much of this Jew hatred is coming from Muslim communities, which the Greens are desperate to court in our more ‘diverse’ cities. Political calculation meets moral cowardice.

So this is the movement that the queen of smug, Sally Rooney, promised to share her fat royalty cheques with. This is the movement that plummy vicars fawned over in Westminster Square with their placards saying ‘I Support Palestine Action’. A movement that counts within its ranks men content to use a 7lb sledgehammer to fracture the back of a woman. A movement so far up the fundament of its own self-righteousness that its members think nothing of raining steel blows on a woman’s spine. I would engage in some serious self-reflection if an organisation I gushed over was found to contain blokes who use weapons to crack women’s bones.

This is the news that four members of Palestine Action were found guilty at Woolwich Crown Court yesterday of causing criminal damage at a UK site of the Israel-based defence firm, Elbit Systems. One of them was also found guilty of inflicting grievous bodily harm. He twice whacked a female police officer, Sgt Kate Evans, with a sledgehammer as she tried to arrest one of the keffiyeh-wearing intruders. He fractured her spine. She was off work for three months. To this day she experiences back pain. As Tom Gent of Avon & Somerset Police said yesterday, battering the spinal column of a female officer is not ‘protest’ – it is ‘thuggery’ and it had ‘devastating consequences’ for Sgt Evans.

It was in August 2024 that the Palestine Action gimps in their dumb red boiler suits crashed a van into the security gates of the Elbit factory near Bristol. They stormed inside, tooled up with weapons to destroy the evil wares of those demonic Israelis. They used crowbars and hammers to smash computers, drones and other equipment. They caused a million quids’ worth of damage. When security guards and cops tried to stop their carnival of hubristic vandalism, they turned on them. Alongside the whack of Sgt Evans’ back, the court also heard that one security guard was whipped by one of the Israelophobic mugs, and another allegedly had a firework thrown at him, causing him to suffer a 4cm cut to his face that had to be stapled at hospital.

Is this what Ms Rooney had in mind when she said she would ‘go on supporting Palestine Action’ even after it was proscribed as a terrorist group by Keir Starmer’s government last year? A group that fucked up a woman’s back and humiliated security guards? One of the intruders, with a keffiyeh around his waist, was heard taunting a security guard with the words, ‘You’re not going to have a job tomorrow’. You will search in vain for a better snapshot of the bilious snobbery of the bourgeois left than this image of four arseholes from the leafy part of town wielding whips and hammers as they mocked basic-wage security guards.

The digital left has been strangely schtum about Palestine Action these past 24 hours. The six bozos were found not guilty of aggravated burglary in February – Rooney and all the other Gazaholics lapped that up. But now four of them have been found guilty of criminal damage, and one of GBH, while the remaining two were acquitted. Perhaps even through the mental fog of their malarial loathing for Israel, the keffiyeh set can see it is not a good look to cheer twats who smash property, smash backs and clash with working-class men, all in order to make a spectacle of their own deluded sense of ethical rectitude.

That’s what this case has really revealed – the lethal narcissism of the keffiyeh classes. This is a class of people so drunk on moral vanity, so convinced of their own saintedness, that they seem to think anything is justified in the name of ‘the cause’. That cause being to advertise to the world their bloated vision of themselves as holy crusaders against the wickedest state in existence. Indeed, one of the activists told the jury, ‘with absolute certainty’, that breaking into the Elbit base ‘is the best thing I have ever done’. You sad bastard. ‘There is a good chance’, they said, that ‘innocent lives were saved’ as a result of ‘our actions that night’. This is a level of self-delusion that borders on the pathological. Lost in a cocoon of sanctimonious fantasy, they really believe that breaking a computer in Bristol will save a life in Gaza.

This is the modus operandi of Palestine Action – it executes dumb stunts not to impact world affairs but to assert the cultural supremacy of the credentialled haters of Israel here at home. It is moral hubris and class arrogance masquerading as ‘anti-war’. Sometimes it crosses the line into something darker, like when Palestine Action smashed up a Jewish-owned business in Stamford Hill in London. This feels ‘very, very scary now’, said local Jews amid the shattered glass of that woke mini-Kristallnacht. Who could have guessed that the bourgeois left’s division of the world into ‘the anointed’ who righteously hate the Jewish State, and ‘the demonic’ who support it, would prove so catastrophic for the liberty and dignity of Britain’s Jews? All of us. That’s who.

It feels like this has been a mask-slipping week for the cult of Palestinianism. More people can surely see the sectarian malice that lurks behind that veil of pacifism. A keffiyeh mob smashing a woman’s back. Rancid anti-Semites who call Jews ‘cockroaches’ stinking up the Green Party of England and Wales. Another gaggle of sanctimonious sea-farers setting off for Gaza, even though there’s no famine there, while in South Sudan nearly eight million face ‘acute hunger’. The stabbing of two Jews in Golders Green glossed over by supposed ‘anti-fascists’, who seem more interested in their own right to chant ‘Globalise the intifada’ than in Jews’ right to live in peace. Just think about that: mere days after violence against Jews, they were demanding the right to agitate for more violence against Jews.

Some of us have known for some time that Palestinianism is bigotry in a keffiyeh, the mask Jew hatred wears in the 21st century. We’ve seen this bourgeois army and its Islamist chums engage in the most vile demonisation of the world’s only Jewish nation, and of all who support it, which includes most of the world’s Jews. Are others now clocking this truth? No, anti-Zionism and the winds of hate it has unleashed are not going away. They are far too entrenched in the cultural establishment. But a reckoning might be brewing. Let us hope so.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His latest book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy.