You think the Greens are well-meaning? Wrong-headed, perhaps, unrealistic, yes, and maybe a tad juvenile, but fundamentally motivated by wishing good to others?
Think again.
We are dealing with a very different Green Party now, one which has lost almost all interest in the environment, becoming instead a party of radical Marxism, leavened by a dislike of the West in general, and of Israel in particular.
Like all fanatics, the Green leader, Zack Polanski, dreams of Utopia: a perfect society in which the complexities and conflicts of the past are sponged away.
After Year Zero, he believes, everything will be different. The trade-offs of democratic politics, the jostling between different ideologies and interests, the reality that pleasing some means offending others, and that you can’t have winners without losers – all these things will be swept aside.
Utopia, however, cannot be created overnight. It requires a different kind of human being. And, like all Utopians, from the Bolsheviks to the Islamists, Polanski is clear that not everyone will make the cut.
‘Before we go into complete Utopia, which I’m totally there for, there are people, though, who would identify as Right-wing, or indeed even far-Right,’ he said on his podcast last week.
‘And no matter what humanity or community we put them in, they are set on destroying or pushing this toxicity. Do we think we can change their minds? Or is it a case of building a society that doesn’t include them?’
Like all fanatics, the Green leader, Zack Polanski, dreams of Utopia: a perfect society in which the complexities and conflicts of the past are sponged away, writes Daniel Hannan
We have heard similar talk before, and it never ends well. Here, for example, is Friedrich Engels writing in 1849: ‘The next world war will result in the disappearance from the face of the earth not only of reactionary classes and dynasties, but also of entire reactionary peoples. And that, too, is a step forward.’
Engels himself, as far as anyone is aware, never murdered anybody. Neither did Karl Marx, though his shameful neglect of his family was so extreme that four of his seven children died in infancy and of his three surviving daughters, two later committed suicide.
Still, the creed hammered out by Engels, Marx and their fellow dreamers ended up being the most lethal devised by human intelligence.
The Atlantic slave trade killed perhaps 10million people; the Nazis killed some 17million. But Communism, led by men who were convinced, Polanski-like, that they were building Utopia, slaughtered 100million who were deemed to be, so to speak, ‘pushing toxicity’. Polanski would no doubt be horrified at the suggestion there is any connection between his policies and human suffering. He means well, he would protest.
Yet the connection is intrinsic in any ideology that holds that the ends justify the means. When Lenin wrote, in an academic spirit, that ‘the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat is rule won and maintained by the use of violence’, he was setting in motion a chain of events that led to gulags, torture chambers and firing squads. You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs.
Can we truly say the same of the Green Party, whose council hopefuls have first names such as Bliss, Cinnamon, Aurora and Rainbow (all genuine candidate names)? These, surely, are the names of children’s dolls, not of revolutionary cadres in some future Polanski autocracy. If you asked them, they’d eschew the eggs, let alone the gulags.
And if you still think the Green Party is mainly interested in things like promoting veganism and stopping pollution, I have news for you: that Green Party is dead and gone.
The party’s name is a relic from a different age. Green activists today are interested in bashing Israel, redistributing wealth, bashing Israel, trans rights, anti-racism and bashing Israel. The environment barely gets a look in.
One recent example illustrates this. When Keir Starmer was forcing through his Bill to hand the Chagos Islands to Mauritius, there was hostility from almost all sides.
The Conservatives and Reform naturally lined up to oppose the proposal, but so did the Lib Dems and more than a few Labour MPs. They did not go into politics to betray a poor, dispossessed, black population; and they were horrified at the idea of placing the world’s most pristine marine conservation zone in the hands of a country with a terrible biodiversity record.
The party that was nowhere to be seen was the Green Party. Captured by the imperatives of wokery and decolonisation, they didn’t give two hoots about hawksbill turtles or coral reefs. If defending the conservation area required them to line up with Tories, too bad for the turtles.
Indeed, the only thing that today’s Green Party has in common with the party of Save The Whales and Ban The Bomb, is a certain misanthropy. Even in the 1990s one could hear in Green rhetoric how having a single baby would wipe out all the carbon savings you made, a disquiet about human flourishing. Some of the party activists seemed to dream of a world (to quote an old missionary hymn) ‘where every prospect pleases, and only man is vile’.
That impulse, the desire shared by religious millenarians, communist revolutionaries and Bond villains, for a purification of mankind, lives on in the new Polanski party.
I have observed before that Polanski is the perfect politician for our post-literate age. He speaks in disconnected soundbites, like a series of posts on X randomly cobbled together. When you hear him in a debate, it’s painful. He struggles to answer questions, feels no need to be consistent and deflects criticism with a jibe to the effect that he’s got the billionaires rattled.
To anyone brought up in a pre-smartphone age – and the fact you have managed to read this far tells me you’re likely to be in that category – it seems extraordinary that anyone might be persuaded by such inchoate gibberish.
Universal basic income, a higher minimum wage, more benefits, free housing for illegal immigrants, slavery reparations – all somehow to be paid for by replacing capitalism. A traditional voter, faced with such a litany, is sceptical. Why not promise an England-Scotland final in the football world cup while you’re at it?
That, though, is not how Polanski’s core supporters, typically women under 25, approach politics. As far as they’re concerned, the only reason not to give these freebies to people is meanness. No, not just meanness – sadism.
What are they to call people who don’t want to do these kind, generous, fluffy things? Such people are plainly anti-social, nasty, poisonous – evil. ‘No matter what humanity or community we put them in, they are set on destroying or pushing this toxicity,’ as Polanski would say.
Hence the ease with which that generation pass from pictures of cute kittens to hysterical pile-ons, from #BeKind to #HatesTories.
In Polanski, they have their prophet, the man who accurately reflects their unreflective self-righteousness. Grant that, and they overlook everything else. God help us.
Lord Hannan of Kingsclere is president of the Institute for Free Trade
