The Greens are neither populist nor popular

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.