𝓤𝓷𝓲𝓽𝓮𝓭 𝓝𝓮𝔀𝓼

Right-wing critics of Zack Polanski reckon his Green Party is plotting to overthrow civilisation as we know it. I think they need a lie down. Some of the bloviations about Polanski I’ve seen in recent days read like they were written halfway through panic attacks about compost bins and rent controls. The theory goes that the Greens have ditched the environment completely and turned into a hard-left doomsday cult determined to ban private landlords, capitalism, and, somehow, fun. You can almost hear the panicked mutterings as columnists bang their keyboards.

Let’s start with that “abolition of private landlords” line. It’s not some soviet-esque manifesto commitment, it’s an overdue conversation. Britain’s rental market is broken, and not in a quirky, “we’ll fix it in post” kind of way. We’re talking mould on the walls, families one rent hike away from homelessness, and landlords making more from misery than most people earn in a year. Reforming that isn’t communism, more so just common sense.

And the fact that this line has rattled the media class so much proves its worth. The Greens knew exactly what they were doing: dragging a stale debate back into the daylight with something fresh.

Outrage is always easier to write than nuance though, so we right-wing fever-dream of watermelons, Islamists, and solar panels, the sort of thing you’d expect from a late-night subreddit rabbithole.

It’s ridiculous, but dangerously so, because it pulls focus from what actually matters: that young people can’t afford homes, public trust is shot, and the planet’s on fire.

I’m a Labour Party member. I don’t vote Green. But I respect the hell out of Zack Polanski for still believing politics can be something different. We have different approaches on how we’d improve our country: he’d look to scrap the whole engine and get a new one, I’d look to fine-tune it; but fundamentally we both just want the thing to actually run.

The outrage over the Greens’ stance on clean energy is just as cooked. Arguing that wind turbines and solar panels are nails in the coffin of Britain’s economy is like saying every doctor’s appointment is a threat to the NHS.

Clean energy isn’t an apocalypse, it’s just investment. Real money, real jobs, in the parts of Britain that globalisation left behind. Ask the crews installing wind farms off Grimsby, or the builders retrofitting homes in North Nottinghamshire. Those jobs don’t kill economies, they’re the only thing looking to them breathing.

And then there’s the weird mashup of culture-war paranoia: Muslims, trans activists, Greens, all supposedly uniting in a plot against an open, tolerant society.

That’s not analysis, it’s projection. The people actually making this country intolerant aren’t the ones planting trees or marching for ceasefires – they’re the ones who are alienating migrant workers, and asking stupid questions like “Can a woman have a penis?” instead of talking about the real issues in our nation.

So when the Greens throw something like rent reform into the mix, it’s not the end of civilisation as we know it, it’s actually a refreshing change in the topic of discourse.

When people stop shouting for change, we get austerity. We get deregulation. We get food banks with nurses in the queues, and an entire generation locked out of home ownership while billionaires blast themselves into orbit.

The idea that anybody normal should fear a party calling for something better, fairer rents, cleaner air, safer streets, says more about the insecurity of the establishment than it does about the Greens.

So no, Zack Polanski wasn’t holed up in a Bournemouth Airbnb plotting a Marxist coup. He was doing what every good politician should be doing, asking awkward questions about the kind of country we want to live in, and whether our kids will even have a planet left to argue about.

You can sneer at that all you want, but at least he’s in the ring, taking hits and throwing a few that land. Let’s stop treating idealism like it’s a crime.

The world’s shifting beneath our feet, whether we like it or not. The question isn’t whether we rebuild this country, it’s whether we do it with empathy, and ambition. I don’t think that the Green Party are the answer – but I think that they’ll certainly push political discourse to something close to what is.