Thursday’s local elections have exploded one myth. The Green Party of England and Wales is definitely not riding a wave of popular support to power. It turns out that an obsessive loathing of Israel, combined with a vicious identitarianism and sixth-form ‘tax the rich’ slogans, is not quite the electoral elixir the Greens’ media cheerleaders would have had us believe.

Not that you would have known this in the lead-up to the ballot. For weeks and weeks, there had been breathless talk of a Green wave about to break across the nation. This had been accompanied by heady seat projections, with the Greens expected to pick up over 700 councillors in a one-on-one battle with Reform UK.

Amid the Green fluffing, the leader of the Green Party of England and Wales, the Walter Mitty-ish Zack Polanski, was everywhere, garnering ear-bleeding amounts of airtime and eye-watering puff profiles in The Times, the New Statesman and even, across the Atlantic, in the New York Times. The Greens, we were told, were always ‘rising’, ‘surging’, the right-thinking populist counterweight to Reform UK.

After the hype, the reality. The Greens have done relatively well in these elections, but achieved nowhere near what had been expected. They have recorded the second-most gains behind Reform, leaving them with 587 councillors. But that has still consigned them to fourth place overall, behind Reform (1,453), Labour (1,068), Lib Dems (844) and the Conservatives (801). Extrapolating from Thursday’s vote, Sky News gave the Greens a General Election vote share of just 13 per cent. Under the first-past-the-post system, this would translate into a meagre 13 seats out of 650 in the House of Commons. That’s not a wave, that’s a leaky soil pipe.

Even in London, which many had anticipated turning Green, Polanski’s crew underperformed. The Greens did win mayoral races in Hackney and Lewisham, but they have struggled in large swathes of London, from Ealing to Westminster. In both Hammersmith and Richmond upon Thames, the Greens actually lost all their councillors.

Their cheerleaders are no doubt blaming the Greens’ failure to live up to the pre-election hype on every leftist’s favourite bogeyman, the right-wing meeja – and, by association, their supposedly duped audience. They see all the negative coverage as little more than an orchestrated smear campaign. In their paranoid style, they cast the reports of the rampant anti-Semitism among election candidates, the criticism of Polanski’s police-bashing response to the Golders Green attack, and the revelations about Polanski’s CV embellishments (he was never, as he once claimed, a Red Cross spokesman), as all part of one big billionaires’ plot to discredit the self-styled radical left.

It’s true the Greens have received a rough ride in the media recently (and not just in the Telegraph or the Daily Mail). But journalists haven’t been victimising Polanski; they’ve been scrutinising him. They haven’t been smearing the Greens with accusations of anti-Semitism; they’ve simply been reporting evidence of anti-Semitism. That’s not a conspiracy – it’s called accountability.

The Greens’ problems – Polanski’s personal popularity ratings have plummeted in the past week – are of their own making. Over the past few years and especially since Polanski took the helm, they have turned themselves into a vehicle for identitarianism and ‘anti-Zionist’ Islamic sectarianism, leavened with Occupy-era slop about taking on the ‘one per cent’ and the ‘billionaires’.

As the local elections show, this paradoxical admixture has gone down well among certain constituencies – from the middle-class left, comprising students, under-employed graduates and affluent ‘progressives’, to large, concentrated Muslim communities. Hence the Greens have broken through in areas where those constituencies predominate. They’ve picked up councillors in the wealthy, university-dominated urban areas of Exeter, Reading, Manchester, Oxford and parts of London. And, thanks to their sectarian, anti-Israel posturing, they’ve done well in areas with large Muslim populations, such as Waltham Forest in North East London. In one telling moment in Burngreave, Sheffield, the victorious Green councillor, Mustafa Ahmed, interrupted the count to raise the Palestine flag and chant ‘free Palestine’. Quite how he will use his mandate in Sheffield City Council to affect Middle Eastern politics is unclear.

As Tony Travers, professor of political science at the London School of Economics, told the Financial Times on Friday, the Greens’ success is ‘very concentrated in a small number of cities and city centres’. But beyond those areas, beyond those constituencies, it seems Polanski’s Palestine and progressivism platform is about as appealing as a couple of hours in one of his nipple-focused hypnotherapy sessions. Especially since the mask-off moments of the past few weeks, with more than 30 candidates being investigated over anti-Semitism in an internal party probe, two London candidates arrested for ‘stirring up racial hatred online’, and Polanski himself seeming more concerned with the police’s treatment of the alleged Golders Green attacker than with his Jewish victims.

Indeed, the Green Party’s mutation into a tribune for decadent identity politics and Islamic sectarianism is even worrying some long-standing, senior Greens. Siân Berry, the Green MP for Brighton Pavilion, admitted on Friday morning that there had been ‘questions on the doorstep’ about the party’s response to anti-Semitism. And Caroline Lucas, the former leader and doyenne of the pre-Polanski Greens, called last week for ‘immediate action’ to be taken against the Greens’ anti-Semitic candidates.

This will be easier said than done – and not just because current deputy leader Mothin Ali has been threatening his own party with legal action if it tries to kick out those accused of anti-Semitism. The Green Party also owes its relative success over the past couple of years precisely to its embrace of ‘anti-Zionism’ and identity politics. This has pulled in hardline Muslims and middle-class Corbynistas, and with them, an inevitable undertow of anti-Semitism. Polanski can no more root out the Jew hatred in his party than he can turn away the party’s new support base. The source of their rise in the polls is also the source of their animus towards Jewish people.

Polanski and his party have made their bed, complete no doubt with a keffiyeh-pattern duvet and pillow set, and will have to lie in it for the foreseeable future. They will no doubt enjoy a significant measure of support from sectarian bigots and their middle-class, ‘progressive’ enablers for a fair while yet. The local elections have shown it works in some specific urban areas. But the Greens are alienating a great many Brits in the process – especially the working-class majority currently lending their vote to Reform.

If the elections have revealed one thing about the Greens, it’s that this now very nasty party is neither populist nor popular.

Tim Black is associate editor of spiked.

In the words of Quint aboard the Orca: ‘He’s got lifeless eyes, black eyes, like a doll’s eyes. When he comes at ya, he doesn’t seem to be livin’. Until he bites ya…’

When a similarly soulless creature lurched onstage at this year’s BAFTAs, the reaction of the audience was not to run screaming. Instead there were a few whoops, and then a slide into what felt and looked like… embarrassment. Paddington Bear gave his speech, and his jokes got barely a laugh. Not even his earnest quotes from his opinionated mother figure, ‘Mrs Brown’, got a cheer. Prince William, the future king no less, looked as if he regretted not bringing his hunting rifle. It all made the breathless media headlines – ‘Adorable!’ ‘Paddington stole the spotlight and hearts!’ ‘Stunning debut!’ – look somewhat out of step. Maybe they were quoting the pre-show press release.

I was a fan of Paddington growing up. Quite a big fan. I loved the books. But here’s the thing: I was seven. Don’t get me wrong, I would probably still enjoy them today (I mean, I recently spent a few happy hours reading old Calvin and Hobbes compendiums). I loved the 2014 Paddington movie. It’s just that I don’t remember the Paddington of my day giving quite so many moral lectures – and I think that even at the age of seven I’d have resented his newfound priggishness. Nobody likes a lecture, least of all children. It’s a big part of why the modern publishing industry can’t get kids to read.

But with the bear from computer-generated hell, it’s not the kids I’m worried about – it’s the grown-ups. Paddington Syndrome is rife these days. It hit what I can only hope was its nadir last year, when district judge Sam Goozee, an actual member of the judiciary at an actual magistrates’ court, told two sheepish defendants, ‘Your actions were the antithesis of everything Paddington stands for’.

The defendants in question had vandalised a Paddington statue in the home town of his author, Michael Bond. Vandalism is bad, even when it’s (whisper it) quite funny. The two young men deserved their punishment and they deserved the financial penalty of restoring the statue. What they didn’t deserve, because none of us does, is a vicarious moral lecture from a fictional bear. As the defence counsel said, likely while trying to stop his eyeballs from rolling back in their sockets:

‘I accept there are a lot of people who know who Paddington Bear is, but there are a number of people who would not say it is a national treasure. It is a literary character. I am not too sure it has that level of status.’

Sometimes pronouns do matter. I am full of admiration for that lawyer for his use of ‘it’.

The bear is not to blame for this phenomenon. Paddington is a cutesy, dead-eyed symptom of mass infantilisation – a process that has long infected public-information leaflets, advertising and our television screens in the UK. You know the style: two-dimensional figures who look as if they were dressed by Hannah Spencer, long-legged and occasionally eyeless, big white semicircles on their faces in lieu of human smiles. They’re supposed to make information accessible. Relatable. Though what kind of grown-up human being ‘relates’ to these artless monstrosities is anyone’s guess.

The BBC is at it, too; everyone’s a kids’ TV presenter these days. Watching a BBC News TikTok video about violence towards Trading Standards officials, I had to ignore the presenter’s earnest CBeebies enunciation. Here was a truly dark story voiced like a Newsround item. The One Show comes across as a reiteration of Blue Peter. Programmes on gardening, properties and makeovers feature the stars speaking to their guests as if they’re nine years old. Even on Question Time, host Fiona Bruce acts like an overwrought Year 12 teacher fielding rude interjections from the class. You can almost imagine the scene in the staffroom – sorry, the green room – afterwards. ‘I’m so sorry about Connor. I’ll be writing to his parents. I do hope you’ll be kind enough to visit again?’

Perhaps the most curious thing about this infantilisation of adults is the concurrent determination to treat actual children as if they’re undersized grown-ups. Children sometimes need guidance from actual adults. However, as is particularly stark in the gender debate, adults are increasingly prone to taking political dictation from their kids. Alastair Campbell, who learned everything he knows about women and woman-impersonators from his infantile daughter, Grace, is one such example of this. Back in the day, it was understood that children rebel against their parents from time to time. That it’s all part of the process. But the poor offspring now have nothing to rebel against. Their parents merely roll over at the first threat of a breakfast-table tantrum. Kids, we are encouraged to believe, are omniscient little gods.

This age-inversion has real-world safeguarding consequences. There are way too many videos of mothers applauding their children as they dance ‘provocatively’ at events, all the while being leered at by grown men throwing money. The idea that ‘young people know who they are and what they want’ has quickly devolved into ‘Thomas is a girl and wants puberty blockers’. Of course, Thomas has no concept of what it means to lose future fertility and sexual function and to put a screeching chemical brake on his brain development.

Adulthood and childhood have been transposed, and it’s not just insulting – it’s dangerous. Let children be children, not political gurus, hyper-sexualised drag queens or medical experiments. And for the love of all that’s holy, cut the cartoons and the stuffed bears, treat adults like adults, and expect a bit more of them.

Gillian Philip is a writer and a driver in the haulage industry.

A defence barrister is facing contempt-of-court proceedings after allegedly inviting a jury to act according to their consciences. Rajiv Menon KC was acting for Palestine Action activists, who had been charged with aggravated burglary for damaging the property of Elbit Systems, an Israeli arms manufacturer, near Bristol in August 2024. During their first trial at Woolwich Crown Court in January, at which they were acquitted (although, in a re-trial this week, four people were convicted on lesser charges of criminal damage), the trial judge had ruled that the barristers could not invite the jury to disregard his legal rulings. He also directed them not to invite the jury to acquit ‘on the basis of their conscience’.

In his closing address in January, Menon allegedly told the jurors that they could acquit according to their conscience, relying on Bushell’s Case from 1670, which is ordinarily recognised as having established the independence of the jury. He quoted a plaque at the Old Bailey stating that Bushell’s Case ‘established the right of juries to give their verdict according to their convictions’.

There is, of course, nothing in our constitution that expressly protects the right of a jury to completely abandon the evidence. But juries can, and sometimes do, return verdicts that appear to cut against the evidence or the strict application of the law. This is possible because of a combination of legal rules and constitutional traditions that protect juries’ independence.

Bushell’s Case arose after a judge imprisoned a jury for refusing to return the verdict he wanted. There is plenty of argument about the applicability of that case to modern trials, but it at least established that jurors cannot be punished for their verdicts. It is also unlawful, because of separate rules, to enquire into the reasons for a jury’s decision. This means that even if we suspect that a jury has acted contrary to the evidence, there is no proper way to prove it. That combination of rules and traditions shows how hallowed the jury’s verdict is in our system.

That is a good thing. The whole point of a jury is to allow the wider community to participate in the justice system, free from the pressure of the institutions conducting the proceedings.

That is why these contempt proceedings are chilling. Without commenting on the individual case, lawyers should be able to draw a jury’s attention to its independence, the importance of its judgment and the fact that its verdict is ultimately its own. A jury should never be reduced to a rubber-stamping exercise. We should not be afraid of juries bringing the morals of wider society into the courtroom, including by refusing to convict where they cannot, in conscience, do so.

Juries have always brought morality into proceedings. In the United States, jurors famously refused to convict people accused of helping enslaved people escape – a practice widely thought to have contributed to the end of slavery. In England, during the 18th and 19th centuries, the criminal law made many offences punishable by death, including minor property crimes. This became known as the ‘Bloody Code’. Jurors frequently refused to convict defendants, thereby sparing them from the gallows.

More recently, juries have returned what look like perverse verdicts in cases involving political protest, free speech and the limits of criminal liability. These cases allow the black-letter law to be tested against public morality. That is not a defect in the jury system. It is one of its essential democratic functions.

So, solidarity with Rajiv Menon KC. The proceedings against him should concern anyone who believes that the justice system should remain democratically accountable through our juries.

Luke Gittos is a spiked columnist and author. His most recent book is Human Rights – Illusory Freedom: Why We Should Repeal the Human Rights Act, which is published by Zero Books. Order it here.