Nick Cohen on how Zack Polanski has destroyed the old Green Party

There are not many left-wingers whose views I find interesting enough to quote. Nick Cohen is one of the exceptions. Here is an extract from his take on the comprehensive defeat of the Green party yesterday in Sir Keir Starmer's old seat, which not long ago Zack Polanski could reasonably have been expected to win.

"Zack Polanski has destroyed the old Green Party

Will the new version be darker?

Labour has just comprehensively defeated the Greens in the Holborn and St Pancras by-election.

The victory was a tribute to Andy Burnham and to the optimism he’s brought to the Labour Party, and to an excellent local candidate, who came to the UK as a refugee from Somalia, fought off the most disgusting racist abuse during the campaign, and is now a Member of Parliament.

However, that’s not the whole story, as you probably already know.

The election was also a catastrophic defeat for Zack Polanski, the leader of the Green Party, who you might have expected a few months ago to have taken this seat at a canter.

The Greens are doing their best to spin the result. They’re saying that they upped their vote by 22 points on the 2024 general election.

Even Peter Mandelson would have been ashamed of this performance. A fair comparison with the 2024 election must add together the Green vote and the vote for the independent socialist Andrew Feinstein, who ran against Keir Starmer.

If you do that, you find Zack Polanski barely increased the radical left vote at all. Until recently, Polanski was meant to be the great left saviour whose populism could destroy the Labour party. Now look at him.

In any case, this wasn’t a general election. This was a by-election, and Labour in government has a terrible record going back 50 years when it comes to holding on to left-leaning seats in by-elections."

"Its opponents can always accuse Labour politicians of being sellouts and traitors and, these days, “Zionists”.

As it turns out, it was the Zionism that did for Polanski.

At their conference last week, he showed abject cowardice. There was a motion saying that Zionism is racism. It did not distinguish between the different types of Zionism – all Zionism was racism, and that was that.

Most people didn’t pick up on it at the time, but the motion called for the abolition of Israel and a unified Palestinian state. That would mean a war to the death. And who on earth do the Greens think would win that war?

Israel has the best army in the Middle East.

It even has nuclear weapons.

There are plenty of politicians in Israel who want a war to the death, so they can drive the Palestinians at gunpoint into the Sinai Desert. And now we have the Green Party playing into their hands.

Then there was a nasty twist. People tried to tell the conference that every Jewish school, every Jewish institution, every synagogue, has some connection to Zionism.

“Are you going to persecute Jews and call them racists and drive them from the Green Party because they attend a synagogue or their kids go to a Jewish school,” they asked. And a majority of Green members in Brighton refused to give that commitment.

You can sometimes accuse voters of not understanding the complexities of politics.

But sometimes the big, simple stories are all you need to know.

And the big, simple story about Zack Polanski is that he’s a coward.

He could have taken the members. He’s Jewish himself, after all. He could have got up on the stage and explained his position

Instead, he ran away.

I think that’s done him irreparable damage. But we shall see.

Certainly, the former Green MP for Brighton Pavilion, Caroline Lucas, is pretty much saying it’s all over for him.

We also know that four of the five Green MPs are upset by what has happened.

However, before writing Polanski off, look around you.

All over the developed world, you see what the French call Islamo-gauchisme – Islamo-leftism.

There’s Die Linke in Germany, which used to be the old East German Communist Party, the party of the Stasi, but now has a huge influx of Muslim and young radical graduate support. There’s Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s La France Insoumise, which is powered by the same coalition. You might have called Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters Islamo-leftists when they ran Labour.

After the old Labour Party reasserted itself and drove them out, Corbynites moved into the Greens.

The old Green members are now like Labour members of the last decade and are saying, “who the hell are these people, and what are they doing to us?”

But they can’t deny that, just as there was passionate support for Corbyn, so now there is passionate support for Polanski, Mélenchon and in New York for Zohran Mamdani.

Everywhere you see the same combination of Muslims furious about Palestine and anti-Muslim discrimination, and young graduates who had been told that, if you go to university and work hard, the good life awaits, and instead found that they have huge debts, can’t afford a home, and that AI is threatening their jobs.

No wonder they’re turning to the radical left. It’s not at all surprising.

So is Islamo-leftism the future for the Greens? Well, it could be.

But here’s the grim choice.

Here’s why the Greens, which were once an amiable party that raised serious issues about climate change, car use, pollution, and the environment, could turn from an amiable party into a vicious party.

Islamo-leftism is not the same project everywhere in the West.

Jean-Luc Mélenchon, in France, essentially goes along with anything Hamas says, and anything Iran says. It works for him, he gets about 17% of the vote, but the price that France is paying for his success is disastrous.

Mélenchon plays into the hands of the radical right. It is possible that the run-off in next year’s French presidential election will be Mélenchon v. Marine Le Pen.

In that event, Le Pen will win by a country mile because most French people regard Mélenchon and as more extreme and more frightening than Le Pen.

By contrast, Mamdani is defying frankly hysterical American right-wingers, who portray him as a terrorist invader. He’s a mayor for all New Yorkers. In fact, the radical left is now criticising him because he protects synagogues from demonstrators. Why on earth people want to demonstrate outside synagogues is beyond me. There is no reason other than race hatred for doing it.

Yesterday, Mamdani’s former allies complained that, as well as showing all due respect for, and outrage at, the mass death of Palestinians in Gaza and increasingly in the West Bank, he also shows respect for the Jews massacred on 7th October.

Which way is the Green Party going to go? You look at Polanski and you think, if he stays in charge, he’s going to go down the Mélenchon route.

The British public sense that.

As I said, French people regard the radical left as more extreme than the radical right.

And now in Britain, if you look at the polls, Polanski has a lower approval rating than Nigel Farage.

You can see how much Farage is feared and hated from the willingness of people to vote for any party that will stop him. Increasingly now, you’re seeing the Greens, the lovely, nice Greens – a bit eccentric, a bit nuts, but good people – being put in the same basket as Farage and treated in the same way.

In yesterday’s by-election, I know Conservatives and Liberal Democrats who voted Labour tactically to stop Polanski.

In the short run, I think this is good for Labour. I think they are becoming the uncontested voice of the centre-left in England, at least.

In the long run, I think we’ve got enough racist and extremist parties already. I don’t want Zack Polanski adding a new one."

Nick Cohen

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