Peter Franklin: It’s time to take Green voters seriously
PETER FRANKLIN
Peter Franklin is an Associate Editor of UnHerd.
One of my favourite poems is Waiting for the Barbarians by CP Cavafy. It’s about a decaying civilisation that’s obsessed by an external threat that, in the end, never comes. I’ve sometimes wondered whether my own fixation with the Green Party (for instance, here, here, here and here) falls under the same category.
Well, I needn’t have worried. The barbarians have arrived. Let’s look at some recent polls. The latest from More in Common puts the Greens on 13 per cent, JL Partners on 14 per cent, Opinium 15 per cent, Ipsos 17 per cent, YouGov 18 per cent and Find Out Now 20 per cent. According to Election Maps UK the weighted average comes out at 16 per cent — that’s about three points behind both Labour and the Conservatives, and a similar margin ahead of the Lib Dems. (Reform remains clearly ahead on 26 per cent). Furthermore in the May elections, the Greens are expected gain hundreds of councillors — and to take control of local authorities like Hackney and Hastings.
So never mind the four-party politics we’ve only begun to get used to, we’ve now entered the age of five-party politics (or six in Scotland and Wales).
And yet if you were to view the situation through the lens of Conservative political strategy, you’d never know.
Kemi Badenoch does crack the occasional joke about Zack Polanski’s previous career as a hypnotist, but that’s about it.
If her party’s response to the rise of Reform was too little, too late — its reaction to the Green surge is practically non-existent. In my view, that’s a mistake, but a very understandable one. On the face of it Tory strategists have several reasons to look the other way while the Greens advance — or even to quietly cheer them on.
The most obvious point is that Polanski appears to be Labour’s problem, not ours. If the British Left wants to have a civil war, who are we to interfere? Napoleon’s advice to “never interrupt your enemy while he’s making a mistake” is surely applicable.
Even before Hannah Spencer’s stunning victory in the Gorton and Denton by-election, the Green surge was already destabilising the Labour Party.
It wasn’t just the Mandelson scandal that precipitated the full of Morgan McSweeney, but the visible failure of his political strategy. You’ll remember that this time last year Labour was focused on winning back voters from Reform. But in doing so the governing party left its Leftward flank exposed.
And though Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana blew their own opportunity to take advantage, Zack Polanski — upon winning the leadership of the Green Party of England and Wales — did not.
Labour is now paralysed, unsure which enemy to face first.
Gorton and Denton drove home the Green threat in the inner cities. However, there are many more Cabinet ministers set to lose their seats to Reform than to the Greens. Add to that the indications that Labour’s dominant “Soft Left” faction have decided that only Andy Burnham can credibly replace Starmer and see off Polanski. That may be true, but the Mayor of Greater Manchester has no immediate path back to Westminster, leaving his party in limbo.
Given these facts, why would Kemi Badenoch ride to Labour’s relief by launching a serious assault on the Greens?
Quite apart from anything else, the Tory leader is at her most effective in the House of Commons, where the Greens are a marginal presence and Labour — with its mortally wounded leader — the obvious target. At the current rate, Starmer may soon be gone, but if Burnham (or a Burnham substitute) repositions Labour to compete with the Greens, then that too would play into Badenoch’s hands — by opening up more space in the middle ground of British politics. She needn’t shift to the centre ideologically, just present herself as the adult in the room.
The Green advance is also helping to destabilise Reform UK.
That’s to a lesser extent than Labour, of course, but there is a discernible momentum-sapping effect. Reform had high hopes in Gorton and Denton — and in Matt Goodwin they selected a high profile candidate. But the Greens didn’t just split the anti-Reform vote, they overwhelmed it. They won’t be able to pull that trick off in most constituencies, but Hannah Spencer’s triumph has reinforced a nationwide dynamic in which the key question in every contest is: “who is best placed to stop Reform?” In some parts of the country, that could send tactical votes in our direction.
Farage is also weakened by the fact that he’s no longer the only populist leader on the block. Though Polanski is obviously coming from a very different place, he’s mining the same deep seam of anti-establishment sentiment. There are sections of the electorate who care less about distinctions of Left and Right than disrupting the status quo. At a time when the Greens are calling for wage caps on the rich, Reform are having to answer questions about their deputy leader’s tax affairs. For Farage, it’s an awkward contrast.
The Greens might also prove helpful in regard to the Conservative struggle against the Lib Dems. One reason why the yellows did so much damage at the last election is that they consolidated the Left-of-centre vote where it mattered. Labour’s unpopularity would suggest that this will continue — unless, that is, some Lib Dem voters go Green. After all, why choose Ed Davey’s lemonade-shandy radicalism, when you can get the hard stuff from Zack Polanski? So far, there’s not enough data to suggest how strong an effect that might be, but it’s one to watch.
So there you have it: several reasons why the Conservative leadership might choose to be intensely relaxed about the Green advance. Except that we’re not immune to the effects. The Greens have already snatched two Westminster constituencies from us and scores of council seats. As I’ve argued before on ConHome, Polanski’s shift to Left is an opportunity to regain this lost territory.
More than that, not taking action means that the rot could spread.
If the Left-of-centre vote collapses from Labour to the Greens and the Tory-Reform psychodrama continues to divide the Right, then we be losing more of our heartlands, not winning them back. Any Westminster seat with a concentration of Green councillors — for instance Tonbridge in Kent or the Mid Suffolk area should be regarded as vulnerable.
Even if the immediate losses are limited in scope — there’s the long-term to worry about. If you really want to have nightmares don’t just look at the overall level of Green support in the polls, look at how well they’re doing with younger voters. The problem isn’t only with the student-dominated 18-24 year old category, but all voters aged under 50 — among whom the Greens are now vying for first place. This is the future we’re staring in the face, so where’s the deeper thinking needed to prepare the British Right, indeed Britain itself, for survival?
Forget about finding hidden horrors in Green Party policy — this is not a movement that hides its radicalism. It’s all out there on stage, strutting its stuff for the world to see. Rather, the real intellectual challenge lies in seeking to understand its evident attraction to the voting public.
Thirty years ago, when the populist Right began to make its presence felt in British politics, the ruling establishment failed to take the likes of Nigel Farage seriously. There’s was even less interest shown in the growing numbers of people who backed the Referendum Party, then UKIP, then the Brexit Party and currently Reform UK. The Leave vote in 2016 was something of a wake-up call — but time-and-again the lessons have failed to stick.
Now, there’s every likelihood that Labour, the Conservatives and Reform are going to make the same fundamental error in regard to the rise of the Greens. They might tell us that Zack Polanski is “ridiculous” (thanks, Kemi, we know), but is it enough to say that the millions of voters fuelling his rise are ridiculous too?
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Get ready for the new barbarism
PETER MULLEN
IT was the best of times, but it will soon be the worst of times.
Forgive me for misquoting Charles Dickens’s pregnant opening sentence to A Tale of Two Cities but I wanted to dash your hopes and spoil your expectations straight off. I suspect you might be hoping that, come the next general election, some sensible, right-thinking party – or at least a coalition of the sane and healthy – will replace the ideological idiocy and wokery we have suffered for years: first under the Cameron-May-Johnson-Sunak pretend-Conservative betrayal and latterly under Starmer and his leftie gang. Well, it won’t happen. You – all of us, me too – are going to be disappointed.
In the likely general election of 2029 millions of UK voters will opt for the nominally green, seriously red and entirely bonkers Zack Polanski. They will vote for him because they are stupid enough to believe this smarmy twerp our respectable local ladies, waxing fond, call ‘that principled, refreshing young man’ when he promises heaven on earth. There will be an alliance among Labour, the Greens and the Lib Dems to prevent any possible combination of Reform and a Tory rump from forming a government. This is the sort of thing which has happened already in France where there is a united left electoral front formed by Greens, Socialists, Communists and France Unbowed, cobbled together to block the so-called ‘far right’ – by which is meant any party which operates on common sense. There is a similar left‑wing alliance in Germany which consists of the SPD and Greens as a minority coalition under Olaf Scholz. Politicians who traditionally can’t stand the sight of one another are getting into bed together to keep the forces of sanity and decency out.
There are no longer such entities as the soft left and the hard left: there is only the bad left, the destructive left, the incoherent anarchistic left which hates the nation it seeks to rule.
These are only the symptoms, the outward and visible signs, of an inward and terminal decay. Western civilisation has committed suicide. We have trashed all the institutions which were painfully developed over centuries to protect us against our own worst instincts. The courts refuse to convict obvious terrorists – such as those Palestine Action anti-Semites who targeted Elbit Systems, an Israeli‑linked defence manufacturer. All six were acquitted of aggravated burglary costing £1million in destruction in which they wielded sledgehammers, crowbars, and fireworks.
This could happen only under a judiciary which punishes patriots and pardons our enemies.
Similarly, the police prosecute pseudo-crimes – laughably called ‘hate crimes’, as if there were such things as ‘love crimes’ – and ignore real crime. Burglaries are not even investigated these days.
There were 215,000 abortions of perfectly healthy foetuses last year. This massacre of the innocents is obscenely celebrated as part of ‘women’s health’.
University degrees are not worth the paper they are written on. Consequently most graduates are unemployable, facing a lifetime of debt. The universities, which used to be guarantors of free speech, are now its prohibitors. The NHS is a shambles. Pupils leave school after more than a decade of state education functionally illiterate and innumerate.
Many declare themselves permanently unfit for work and cite spurious ‘mental health issues’ and so become eligible for substantial benefits. Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg recently drew attention to ‘six million noble people who choose to work when they would be financially better off on government handouts’. Labour is no longer the honourable party dedicated to workers. Those whom Sir Keir Starmer calls ‘working people’ are scroungers, skivers and malingerers fraudulently passing themselves off as victims of the nasty rich.
We prefer those who have repeatedly vowed our destruction. So there is Islamophobia but not Christianophobia (my spell-checker recognises the former word but not the latter). The horde of Muslims is welcome to pray loudly in Trafalgar Square but one Christian woman, Isabel Vaughan‑Spruce, praying silently outside an abortion clinic was arrested.
Town centres in Britain, shops closed and boarded up, resemble desolate third world wastelands of lawlessness and drug-addled squalor. Stabbings and shootings, once rare events, are routine. Shoplifting is endemic and goes unchallenged. Indeed, shop staff are instructed not to engage with offenders even when the theft is being perpetrated blatantly and repeatedly. As one local assistant told me: ‘Yes, we know our regulars.’
There is a darkly comical side to our depravity. The theological notion that all the devils are not merely arraigned against God but that each devil is the enemy of every other devil is reflected in the absurd inconsistencies of the anarchic mob. I mean, how about ‘Queers for Palestine’? But they execute homosexuals throughout the Muslim world! There weren’t any rainbow flags at the Trafalgar Square pray-in.
There is inverse racism which in practice means Black Man Good, White Man Bad. If you march for Black Lives Matter, you are given an accolade. But a man wearing a ‘White Lives Matter’ T-shirt was arrested. A spurious guilt for the slavery of centuries long past is inculcated, but its bien pensant originators neglect to mention that it was the British parliament which outlawed the transatlantic slave trade throughout the Empire in 1807 and that it was the Royal Navy which policed the ban.
Careers are curtailed and lives ruined by insane woke policies which censure anyone who dares insist that a woman is not a person with a penis or that a man cannot be pregnant.
Nothing works – from landlines to the Royal Mail.
What was once regarded as noise is now reviewed even in the ‘quality’ newspapers as ‘music’. Real music is ghettoised as ‘classical’ – that is, elitist. Is elitism a bad thing? If so, we must conclude that we are meant to prefer mediocrity and trash.
Popular entertainments are merely pornographic. If you tire of Love Island and such as X On The Beach there are always Married at First Sight and Too Hot to Handle.
We were warned.
Charles Reich wrote in his book The Greening of America: ‘There is a revolution coming. It will not be like revolutions of the past. It will originate with the individual and with culture, and it will change the political structure only as its final act. It will not require violence to succeed, and it cannot be successfully resisted with violence. It is now spreading with amazing rapidity and already our laws, institutions and social structures are changing in consequence.’
The organism that is at once being killed and committing suicide is not just an ill-defined nebulous thing called Society: it is our 2,000 years of Christian history, Christendom itself.
‘Ecrasez l’infâme!’ cried the revolutionaries in the 1793 Reign of Terror when they burned the cross, smashed the stained-glass windows and tore the icons to smithereens. T E Hulme recognised our fatal disease: ‘In the history of every civilisation a time comes when the race loses its confidence in its gods, its values and its mission; and then, in some way not understood, it begins to die out and less civilised races take its place. In Western Europe today, there is a decline in courage, faith and hope that seems exactly like the decline that led to the fall of Athens, Sparta and Rome.’
There remains only one prayer: Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine, et lux perpetua luceat eis.
This article (Get ready for the new barbarism) was created and published by Conservative Woman and is republished here under “Fair Use” with attribution to the author Peter Mullen
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The Green Party is mad, bad and dangerous
Much has been written in recent days about the outlandish proposals and deplorable opinions of the Green Party candidates standing for the forthcoming elections in May. We have read about one candidate in Scotland who wants to abolish prisons, of another in London who called David Lammy a ‘coconut’, and a whole host of grass-roots campaigners who have repugnant views regarding the Jews, the most interesting being one from a Green Party candidate in Camden who avers that the 9/11 attack on the US ‘was done by the Zionists with Dick Cheney as their executing authority’. Andrew Gilligan has also exposed a trio of Green Party candidates who have shared extremist views, including one who promoted a video suggesting that a terror attack on a synagogue was “not anti-semitism” but was “revenge” for Israel “murdering people”.
Economic catastrophe often heralds the arrival of this dystopia, or, alternatively, its descent into chaos
As titillating as it is to dwell on these effusions, it risks becoming a distraction. It’s not so much the rogue candidates and street-level simpletons who should be of primary concern. Rather, it’s the deluded policies that come straight from the top that should worry everyone, not least because of the gains the Greens are set to make next month, notably among the traditionally affluent, middle-class Labour strongholds in the capital.
Never mind, for the moment, the party’s endemic anti-semitism and obsessive, cynical focus on Palestine in order to attract students and voters who don’t speak English. We have been reminded in recent days of the party’s profound economic illiteracy. It emerged this week that the Greens now want to commit 2.5 per cent of national income to overseas development assistance and climate finance by 2030, a figure which exceeds the UK’s current defence budget. As one policy document seen by the Daily Mail explains, these funds would ‘provide for planet repairs (climate debt) and reparations for colonial exploitations, enslavement and trafficking of people over the past few centuries.’
Elsewhere, we read that the party, now polling just short of 20 per cent, also plans to give Universal Basic Income of up to £1,600 a month to migrants without settled or non-visitor visa status, without them needing to become citizens. Seeing that one million non-British nationals are estimated to hold temporary non-settled leave to remain status in this country, this policy would cost the Treasury £19.2 billion per year.
Perhaps the near fifth of the population who now back Zack Polanski’s outfit, with the vast majority of this support coming from the young, aren’t aware of these policies. Perhaps they don’t care. Or perhaps – even worse – they actually endorse them, because they also inhabit the same otherworldly mental space occupied by Polanski, one detached from reality and oblivious to material concerns or real-life consequences.
Sure, Generations Y and Z have had it tough in terms of trying to find a job in a work environment increasingly threatened by AI. They have also found it hard to buy their own homes. Yet this is the generation which also thinks most things in life should be free, because that’s how things work online.
This is also our first post-literate generation who don’t read newspapers, who instead have their prejudices confirmed by algorithms and dubious TikTok videos. This is also a demographic who were taught at school and university that Britain is a racist nation that ought to atone for its historic sins by welcoming to our shores all newcomers of every description and shower them with money.
The Green Party, with its policies on legalising hard drugs and prostitution, appeals to a naïve and internationalist libertarianism that is the eternal hallmark of the callow and the gormless. Their position, that ‘migration is not a criminal offence under any circumstances’, and their desired ‘world without borders’ in which they hope to see ‘the concept of legal nationality abolished’, encapsulates an ethereal utopianism that as an iron-clad rule always results in misery and disaster.
Whether they are rules-free communes established in the wilderness that end up under the grip of a despotic alpha-male, or communist states established in Cuba or North Korea that result in impoverishment and oppression, under the rule of a new dynasty, ill-judged good intentions – driven today by ‘compassion’ – invariably have calamitous consequences. Societies which begin with the Rousseauian premise that human beings are inherently good, and that only nurture, upbringing and society that corrupts them, inevitably create a society that is much worse than the one it replaces.
The Spectator: continue reading
Featured image: Conservative Home
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