This article is the first in a series exploring British media’s smear campaign against the Green Party before the May 2026 elections — beginning with the Times.
Britain’s mainstream press is doubling down on a smear campaign against the Green Party in the run up to May’s local elections.
Repeated, targeted attacks against Zack Polanski’s party across legacy media can only be described as coordinated scare-mongering before polling day. Outlets including the Times, Telegraph, MEN and regional news are producing daily anti-Green Party stories pre-election, often mimicking each other’s exact framings.
As Britain’s foremost left-of-Labour party — albeit not exactly a high bar — the Greens are shaking politics up from the progressive left in a way not seen since 2017. Unsurprisingly, given the highly concentrated ownership and well-documented right-leaning biases of British media, they’re not happy about the Greens’ success.
The Greens are set to make record gains across London’s city boroughs, England’s councils, the Welsh Senedd and Scotland’s Holyrood parliament this May. It’s becoming increasingly obvious that the British political and media establishment will do whatever it takes to minimise those gains. (Remember Labour’s polling day misinformation van in Gorton and Denton?)
Given that it’s billed as the UK’s “paper of record,” one of the most ‘serious’ British media organisations, what’s the Rupert Murdoch-owned Times been saying?
Green Party — Sig(h)n of the Times
Well, the Times published this rather dramatic headline, with the snatch-quote attributed to — you guessed it — a Labour MP, party chair Anna Turley:
Greens investigate ‘crackpot’ candidates over social media posts
What were the offending posts? Per the Times:
… posts resurfaced calling non-white ministers “coconuts”, questioning British sovereignty over the Falklands and defending “resistance to occupation” by Hamas.
As a white man, I’m not going to adjudicate on “coconut” — but what I will say is that the Times spinning this word as being “racist” and “divisive” entirely misses the point.
Sensible journalism, in my view, should focus on actual, material racism and division inflicted overwhelmingly on black or brown people first and foremost. This includes ‘hostile environment’ immigration policies of successive right-wing government ministers, from Patel to Braverman to Lammy, and the adjacent rhetoric. Yet rather than take such a meaningful approach, the Times spuriously equates words with actions. Symbolism is foregrounded over material reality.
The word “coconut” is intended to mean this: people of colour who gain positions of political power and authority, but use them to uphold rather than challenge systems of dominance, like racial marginalisation and/or hierarchy.
Again, examples include the racist immigration system or a foreign policy doctrine which enables unchecked war crimes and genocide. (Think: the first black US President Barack “Really Good at Killing People” O-bomber and his knack for unprecedented covert drone strikes on brown people in West Asia.)
Indeed, as is stated in the original (now deleted) post the Times cited, by Lewisham Green councillor Hau-Yu Tam:
It’s reminiscent of Priti Patel admitting her family wouldn’t get in [to the UK] under her own immigration rules, but somehow even more callous. These coconuts.
To criticise this language and paint it as derogatory, rather than critiquing the harmful and degrading policy itself, is both old and misguided.
It’s exactly the same playbook as Zionists shunning people on university campuses for saying “from the river to the sea,” screaming “antisemitism” at them and making unfalsifiable hypotheses about what words could mean — rather than condemning the actual inhumane genocidal crimes committed against Palestinians.
Times and Times again…
Relatedly, the Times also criticised Tam for saying that students at the London School of Economics “were correct to defend the Hamas book.” So much for context!
This followed a coordinated Zionist attempt to shut down a lecture by the author of Understanding Hamas: And Why That Matters, which students physically defended.
This, frankly, is absurd. For one thing, whatever you might think of them, Hamas are a resistance movement against the longest-standing and deadliest illegal military occupation in history, namely the IOF.
Tam included this in the post:
Resistance to occupation is permitted in international law.
Yet the Times frames this without any acknowledgement that it’s actually true! Instead, the Times intends to leave readers with the startling impression that only a Green “crackpot” could believe in such things as resistance to structural violence.
International law?
Furthermore, even if you entirely disagreed with the movement’s legitimacy — which would put you at odds with international law — can anyone really criticise students for wanting to understand the world around them? Should history students be condemned for studying Nazi ideology, too, since most of us disagree with Nazism as a movement?
Clearly not. Even the most Hamas-hating Zionist should surely admit that there’s nothing wrong with anyone — let alone students — wanting to understand political phenomena, especially one of the most significant political movements of our era.
That is, of course, unless learning to understand Hamas exposes students to an independence movement analogous to African National Congress, Algeria’s National Liberation Front, the National Front for the Liberation of Angola, and countless other such movements throughout history.
Lastly, they stuck it to half-Argentinian Green candidate Jo Dowbor — somehow also a “crackpot” — for having a clearly nuanced opinion on the Malvinas (Falkland) Islands.
If that’s the barrel-scraping the Times have to do to score political points, maybe they’re right to be worried after all. Perhaps the Times aims only to mount a resistance to the surging Greens “by any means necessary” — and this is what it takes.
Green Party’s Zack hits back
Reactionary press is nothing new — but the scale and rate of anti-Green sentiment across the British press has become quite pronounced ahead of the local elections on 7 May.
What’s novel, however, is that Zack Polanski has not held off from punching right back at the low-standards journalism spouted by the likes of Murdoch’s Sun and Viscount Rothermere’s Daily Mail (whose wife donated to Reform).
One Green source close to the party leadership told the Canary:
The right-wing press are throwing everything they’ve got at us, but it’s just not working. Our membership is up, poll ratings are up, and we’re on course for a record-breaking set of local election results.
According to Polanski, the scare tactics deployed by Britain’s mainstream media are evidence that they’re scared of what Greens can achieve.
As he wrote in one X post: “The Murdoch empire is terrified.”
Featured image provided via author
By Cameron Baillie
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REF UK 25% (-5)
CON 22% (+3)
LAB 21% (+1)
GREEN 13% (+1)
LIB DEM 12% (nc)
OTH 3% (nc)
SNP 2% (nc)
(@reformexposed) 
POLL | Reform lead by 6pts
Grn: 20% (=)
Con: 17% (=)
Lab: 16% (=)
Lib: 11% (=)
Plaid: 8
(@LeftieStats) 
Res: 4% (=)
YP: 0% (-1)
(@dave43law) 
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