Maxi@AllForProgress_
The Green Party of England and Wales has dropped 6% in the published polling over the last several weeks, an absolutely dire swing-low in such a short period of time.
No kind of accident, either. It has accompanied the most concentrated run of party-level scandal that any insurgent party in modern British politics has carried into a national set of elections.
Two of Mr Zack Polanski's local council candidates were arrested under the Public Order Act, on suspicion of stirring up racial hatred. One had described a recent ramming attack on a north London synagogue as "revenge, not antisemitism," while the other had compared modern Israel to Nazi Germany.
The arrests sit on top of multiple Green candidates earlier exposed by the Jewish News for sharing antisemitic conspiracy material, including content originating on neo-Nazi websites; on top of a leaked internal WhatsApp group full of party members that amuses itself by describing the Jews as "an abomination to this planet".
And all of this is on top of Mr Polanski's increasingly visible attempts, over the last fortnight in particular, to walk the party back from its more electorally toxic positions while the cameras are watching. The soft-pedalling on Universal Basic Income for migrants. The studied silence on drug legalisation since the polling started moving.
But the fact is that we have no more to fear from the Greens now than we did when Polanski's world was all ludicrous pantomime, wall-to-wall fluffery in the mainstream media, and talks of revolution.
Why? Because the Green Party of England and Wales were never going to get anywhere near power. You who thought differently underestimate the British public's powers of discernment.
The contemporary Green philosophy is to take everything the modern British public has ever told a pollster it hates about modern Britain, think:
- Open borders
- Pro-criminality and soft sentencing
- A state that taxes the working class to fund welfare for non-citizens and non-contributors
- An energy regime that punishes the household for boiling a kettle
- A foreign-policy obsession with conflicts thousands of miles from any constituency in this country
...the Greens want to take all these things that presently make Britain shit, and to amplify each of them by an order of magnitude.
The British swing voter finds that offer offensive at almost every point of contact. They refract from it in their bones, just in the way that late 19th century Britain, with its largest proportional working class in the world, decisively rejected Communism.
The electorate was always going to look upon the Green Party of 2026 as fundamentally crackers and unelectable. The fact that it ever appeared otherwise is the consequence of three things acting in concert.
1. Green activist mania
2. An unusually obliging treatment of the Greens by certain quarters of the British political press
3. The well-documented difficulties British polling firms have in capturing populations whose stated intentions evaporate on contact with an actual booth on an actual Thursday.
None of those three survives a real ballot. The Greens will make gains on May 7th, that much I do not doubt. But they will hit their head very quickly on a ceiling they will not be able to push up without bringing the house down on themselves.
The second thing is more important. While the leadership of the Green Party - the activist core, the candidate roster, the people quietly running the policy committees - is, on the available evidence, very largely of the end of the pier, the Britons currently telling a polling firm they might consider voting Green are, in the main, not.
They are people who have looked at the present state of the country and decided, correctly, that the legacy parties are not going to fix it, and that legacy operators trying to play-act as new kids on the block (Reform) aren't going to either.
This lot wants a fairer shake for working people. They want an environment kept reasonably in trust for their children. Whether they know it or not, they want Britain to build, because Britain building is the way Britain gets wealthier again. They want an economy in which young families can buy a home and old families do not have to choose between food and heating.
I agree with them. My proposal to them is that we deliver these things via means that work.
The floor under wages is raised by reducing the supply of cheap labour and rebuilding the productive economy that produces good wages in the first place.
The environment is greened by deregulating nuclear power and giving Britain the cheapest electricity in the developed world, not by impoverishing the household sector through fuel rationing.
A fairer society is built by a state that protects its citizens, secures its borders, and educates the next generation.
None of which requires open-borders, sectarian communism, the legalisation of heroin, the decriminalisation of shoplifting, or a Universal Basic Income paid for by people not yet born.
The Greens have been good value for the panto, if you like panto. That's as far as it goes.
