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Rachel Millward is the co-deputy leader of the Green Party, a party polling ahead of both Labour and the Conservatives and forecast to make significant gains in Thursday's local elections. On Monday she shared a post claiming that Ishmael Hussein, the third victim of the Golders Green attack on April 29th, had been erased from headlines to suit a weaponised, desperate narrative. She added her own commentary. How can this be? Three attempted murders and only two reported?
The answer is that all three were reported. Extensively. By the outlets she was accusing of erasure. The Telegraph reported Mr Hussein's attack in Southwark on the morning of April 29th on the day it happened. So did the BBC. So did multiple other outlets. Essa Suleiman was charged with the attempted murder of Mr Hussein alongside the two Jewish victims. That is public record. It has been public record since the day of the attack. A thirty second search of any news website would have confirmed it.
This leaves two possibilities. She did not check before amplifying a conspiracy theory to her followers days before the local elections. Or she checked, knew it was false and shared it anyway because it served a political purpose. The first is negligence that disqualifies her from senior political office. The second is deliberate misinformation. Neither is defensible and the Green Party has offered no explanation for which it was.
This is not an isolated error. It is the third act of a documented pattern. Polanski retweeted a post falsely accusing police officers of repeatedly and violently kicking a mentally ill man in the head while two Jewish victims were still in hospital. The Metropolitan Police Commissioner wrote to him personally to correct the factual record. Polanski apologised and then four days later accused the Commissioner of election meddling. Now Millward has shared a conspiracy theory about the same attack from a platform set up specifically to challenge Western media coverage of Israel, without checking whether the claim was true.
The WhatsApp group is the most revealing element. The Muslim Greens, a party activist group whose private chat included Mothin Ali, the other co-deputy leader, were coordinating a campaign around this false premise over the weekend before Millward shared it. The party whose leader had just apologised for spreading misinformation about the Golders Green attack was simultaneously planning a misinformation campaign about the same attack in a private messaging group. The briefing document produced after the Greens for Palestine WhatsApp scandal told members not to post antisemitic comments publicly and to think about how it would look on the front page of a newspaper. The lesson the leadership appears to have taken is not to stop producing misinformation but to coordinate it more carefully before publication.
Then there is Sabine Mairey. Arrested on suspicion of stirring up racial hatred for allegedly sharing a post stating that ramming a synagogue is not antisemitism, it is revenge. Suspended by the party. And three days after her arrest, seen campaigning alongside Green activists in Clapham while the party distributed newly printed leaflets featuring her name and face to residents. The party that claims to have suspended her was actively promoting her candidacy on the doorstep of voters who did not know she had been arrested.
The Green Party's response to the worst week in its recent history has been to spread misinformation, coordinate campaigns around false premises, campaign for arrested candidates while claiming to have suspended them and accuse the Metropolitan Police Commissioner of election meddling. Polanski's approval rating has collapsed from ahead of Farage to nine points behind him. The party going into Thursday's elections is not the party being damaged by antisemitism. It is the party demonstrating, in real time, exactly what its critics have been documenting for months.
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