𝓤𝓷𝓲𝓽𝓮𝓭 𝓝𝓮𝔀𝓼

A few years ago, you would be forgiven for thinking of the Green Party as a hobbyist environmental outfit, patronised by well-meaning middle-class retirees with too much time on their hands. Their earnest devotion to the environment made them, if nothing else, quaint and harmless. Not anymore. Now the Greens seem to stand for anything but the environment. The party has morphed into a bizarre coalition of Islamist-friendly voters and progressive nutters – an apparently winning formula dragging the party into serious electoral contention. And that’s not just me saying it.

A recent YouGov poll modelling what the Commons would look like if only women aged 18 to 50 voted gives the Greens a stonking 482 seats, up from just four. Labour collapses to 84 and the Tories barely register at eight. So much for the obsessive narrative about young men being radicalised rightwards by Andrew Tate and his imitators. The far more dramatic political shift has been young women hurtling leftwards – and in many cases to the far left – straight into the arms of Zack Polanski.

Speaking of Polanski, I shared a Jeremy Vine sofa with him during the Green leadership race and even then, he came across as a machine programmed to regurgitate asinine talking points – polished and well-rehearsed yet somehow saying nothing of substance.

His CV is a sprawling thing: actor, nightclub promoter, mental health counsellor, ex-Lib Dem and – my personal favourite – a hypnotherapist who once advertised the ability to enlarge women’s breasts through the power of suggestion.

He was also recently caught out claiming on his website that he served as a spokesman for the British Red Cross – a role the charity says he never actually held. He had merely hosted some of their fundraisers. Pressed on it, Polanski blamed the right-wing press for supposedly being terrified of his wealth tax.

None of this would matter much if the party he leads still resembled the harmless bunch of tree huggers it was a decade ago. Under his stewardship, however, it has become something much more sinister, with the environment itself increasingly an afterthought.

Recent investigations have exposed at least 24 Green candidates in this week’s local elections allegedly expressing extremist views about Jews and Israel, with some counts placing the figure closer to 30.

Among them: a candidate who allegedly described Jews as “cockroaches”; another who allegedly publicly called Britain a “terrorist state” and Israel “Nazis”; a candidate who allegedly said “Iran should hit the Whitehouse” and stands accused of calling Hamas hostages “filthy”; an NHS GP standing who allegedly urged people to “burn Zionism to the ground”.

Two Green candidates were arrested by the Met last week on suspicion of stirring up racial hatred. One had allegedly shared a post insisting that “ramming a synagogue isn’t antisemitism. It’s revenge”.

Polanski’s response has been a masterclass in foot-dragging. Of those 24 candidates, only six have been suspended or disowned – and even those mostly weeks after their statements surfaced.

Caroline Lucas, the party’s first MP and its co-leader for six years, has now publicly called for “immediate action”, which tells you something about how internally rattled even the Greens’ grandees are.

Polanski insists the party doesn’t have “a particular problem compared with wider society” (do read that sentence twice). His preferred line is that this is a “society-wide” issue, which is one way of avoiding the awkward observation that it appears, electorally speaking, to be a Green speciality.

And here we come the real issue – that a major British political party has become so reliant on Islamist-friendly sections of its base that it cannot bring itself to swiftly and unequivocally root out the Jew-hatred allegedly festering within its candidate lists.

Last week, two visibly Jewish men were stabbed in Golders Green, minutes from a Jewish charity centre. Young Jews are now messaging their rabbis asking whether they have a future in this country.

Synagogues require permanent security and children are walked into schools that resemble fortresses. In this climate, a party gleefully hoovering up the supposedly progressive vote cannot manage to expel a candidate who speculated online that the Golders Green stabbing might have been staged by Zionists.

What does it tell us about the state of Britain that a major party can climb in the polls while its candidates publicly fantasise about Israeli soldiers coming home in body bags?

And worse still, what does it tell us about the supposed liberal middle that increasing numbers of British women are happy to lend such an outfit their vote? If a community in your country has to hide who they are just to make it home in one piece, you do not live in a free country. It really is that simple.