It is the lot of smaller parties that grow rapidly that they tend to endure something of a trial by the media in the UK. The attention from some of the newspapers and broadcasters to the Green party before this week’s elections has occasionally borne an unlikely resemblance to the height of Clegg-mania in the spring of 2010, when the Liberal Democrat leader, Nick Clegg, was rewarded for his positive polling with the unlikely Daily Mail headline “Clegg in Nazi slur on Britain”.
All manner of colourful tales have emerged about Green policies and personnel as the party has risen up the national opinion polls, making them something of a target for news editors and reporters. That attention has ranged from legitimate questions over the views of members to more eccentric warnings of a dire future for everyone in Britain from exotic animals to members of the clergy.
“Woke Greens slammed as ‘barking mad’ over plans to license dog owners and ban zoos”, read one recent headline in the Sun. Rupert Murdoch’s daily tabloid also warned both the pious and the punters among their readership that the “loony” Greens would “drop Church of England as UK’s established church if it wins election” and that they had every intention of banning horse racing.
There has, meanwhile, been the inevitable exposure of controversial or offensive views allegedly held by Green candidates. The Mail on Sunday ran a spread that revealed one had described the justice secretary, David Lammy, and the former home secretary Priti Patel as “coconuts”, a racial slur against a person who is said to be “black on the outside and white on the inside”. The paper also revealed that a Green candidate believed Britain should hand back the Falklands to Argentina. “Still thinking of voting Green?” the newspaper asked.
Perhaps most damaging, in the context of the recent attacks on Jewish people in the UK, has been a spate of allegations of antisemitism. On Thursday, two Green candidates standing for Lambeth council were arrested over allegedly antisemitic posts. Another candidate, in Walsall, was revealed to have referred to “Jewish cockroaches” in a 2023 post on social media.
The party’s outspoken leader, Zack Polanski, has drawn fire himself. Polanski, who is Jewish, has asked whether there is an “actual threat” to the Jewish community in the UK rather than merely a “perception of unsafety” and this week, after the stabbing of two Jewish men in Golders Green, he shared a social media post criticising police officers responding to the incident for allegedly “repeatedly and violently kicking a mentally ill man in the head” when he was already on the floor.
That prompted anger at what many perceived to be a crass response to how officers dealt with an unpredictable and potentially dangerous situation – and a letter from the Met commissioner, Mark Rowley, criticising the Green leader’s “inaccurate and misinformed commentary”, with Polanski later apologising “for sharing a tweet in haste”. Not that there is any sign that this episode has deterred him from standing up to those who he believes have slurred him in that particular row. On Saturday, the Greens said they had “engaged lawyers” over a cartoon in The Times that they said was antisemitic in the way it portrayed their leader.
A party spokesperson said: “It is astonishing that amongst a rising climate of antisemitism in the UK, a national newspaper has chosen to publish a cartoon of the only Jewish political leader in the country using tropes so clearly associated with antisemitic depictions of Jewish people.
“The words used by both politicians and the media this week, directing further attacks towards Zack in the wake of a violent attack on his community, are deeply irresponsible.”
Few frontline politicians in British politics have taken quite such a combative approach to certain outlets and journalists.
Before Saturday’s furore, there was a testy confrontation with Ed Balls on Good Morning Britain, where the presenter’s questions about the Green’s policy on borders prompted Polanski to suggest that the former Labour cabinet minister was far from being an impartial observer. Polanski later reshared a post that claimed Balls in his response to that observation came across like a “classroom bully”.
Then there was the less publicised but perhaps telling scrap with the Daily Mail over Polanski’s family. The Daily Mail has been running a series of stories under the banner “Beware of the Green Menace”, of which one, written by the freelance reporter Nicole Lampert, suggested Polanski, leader of the Greens since last September, was facing a “rebellion from his own family as they fear being forced to leave UK if Green party leader becomes prime minister”.
The Daily Mail had gone on to explain that three unnamed relatives had spoken of their concerns about the Greens’ policy on Gaza. “He’s currently the leader of the future Islamic party of Britain,” one of them is said to have told Lampert.
Polanski went on the attack. In a social media post he pointed to national polling showing the Greens in second place behind Reform. “This is why Daily Mail journalists are going after my family now,” he wrote. “The rightwing propaganda machine will not work on the Green party.”
Lampert responded in kind. “Daily Mail journalists aren’t going after your family (as you are aware, there is more we could write if we were),” she wrote. “I’m a freelance journalist who spoke to your family members who are frightened by the Jew hate in your party … Shame on you.”
He hit back: “Daily Mail and journalist? Those words don’t belong together with your parasitic behaviour. You try your daily nonsense – with a paper that literally backed the fascists – and the Green party continue to rise. Together – we will win.”
For Lampert, also Jewish, Polanski’s punchy approach represented evidence of his “thin skin” and unfitness to govern, she suggested in a piece in the Jewish News.
Others, sympathetic to the Greens, might lament that this story and the splurge of others illustrate the difficulties for a progressive party in a rightwing media environment – although Nigel Farage’s various political parties have received similarly rough treatment in the past.
Even among those who do find it all rather unfair, there will be those who might be tempted to quote Enoch Powell, who is said to have opined that “politicians complaining about the press is like a ship’s captain complaining about the sea”.
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