𝓤𝓷𝓲𝓽𝓮𝓭 𝓝𝓮𝔀𝓼

Say what you like about Zack Polanski, but he knows how to work a crowd. Before a packed-out rally in Brighton, the Green Party leader bounded onto the stage with the exuberance of a pantomime dame, assaulting the ears of attending journalists – his sound engineer having turned him up to 11.

As ever with Polanski, what followed amounted to a masterclass in saying lots but meaning little. Nothing of what he said, I fear, would survive contact with a calculator. Wealth taxes to end “rip-off Britain”, and an “emergency brake” on rents, with oil and gas left firmly beneath terra firma.

Who wouldn’t want a cheaper everything? The only snag? Nobody seems to know who would pay the piper.

Polanski’s faithful seemed rather short of answers themselves. Nobody could tell me how much money – hoarded by the billionaires, don’t you know – was too much. Nobody could agree whether migration was good or bad. Everyone, though, would gladly house illegal migrants in their spare room – they just hadn’t got round to it yet.

The Good Samaritan, I am reminded, paid the innkeeper from his own purse. He did not send the bill to the taxpayers of Jericho.

This is the trouble with the Greens. Their intentions are, by and large, good. Speaking with members attending their Brighton conference, this was quite clear – most of them wanted the world to be a better place. Few would disagree with them. Yet most would agree the good work begins at home, whereas the Green instinct seems ever more to tear it all up and let Whitehall redraw the map.

Polanski’s pitch appears to rest on three questions: how to make life affordable, how to back the “caring majority”, and how to save the planet. Each a fine question. However, now I have interviewed him a number of times, the answer never varies. Tax anyone earning “too much”, have the state do all the good things and none of the bad, and ask the private sector to write the cheques.

One of the newest areas he is keen to extol at every angle, and one which has arguably seen his party catapulted up the polls, is that of Gaza. Few Express readers will not be aware of the news flooding out of the region each and every day. Fewer still, I am sure, would lack concern for the scale of human suffering the ongoing conflict has created.

Yet the position of the Greens ever more appears to veer into the performative, and is increasingly centred around the demands for the Government to lift its intensely impractical ban on Palestine Action. In a sizeable chunk of his speech, Polanski tore into Whitehall for passing the proscription of the group – but neglected to mention the very real ways in which Britons at home can help those suffering.

Perhaps it’s a bit cynical – but I feel that would have been a rather better use of his platform.

Indeed, much of his speech was focused on “calling out” things he and his fans didn’t like. But he found remarkably little time for how Britain pays its way, keeps the lights on, or actually seeks to improve everyone’s lives.

Mr Polanski boasted that Labour delayed drilling at Rosebank and Jackdaw because it was “worried about losing votes to the Greens”. He said it with pride, before extolling the tribulations of those who suffered through heatwaves and wildfires, and struggle every day with poverty.

All in all, his speech was little more than his usual performance. A shopping list of injustices without any plan to actually solve them.