2 hours ago
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Since winning the Green party leadership – and as our party has risen in the polls, with our membership surging – I’ve been listening closely to what people say when they stop me in the street. The vast majority have been supportive, while those who haven’t agreed with my politics have still been broadly respectful.
While I was filming in Clacton, for instance, more than one of Nigel Farage’s constituents started off disagreeing with me, but were open to changing their minds after talking through their concerns, and hearing more about the reality of Farage’s policies.
That reception in the street differs dramatically from how my leadership has been met by parts of the media. In a democracy, I should expect a challenge. Indeed, I’m not one to shy away from debate. But the reaction has gone far beyond good-faith questioning of my policy positions, or analysis of what my party is offering.
Instead, I’ve been the target of relentless nastiness – ranging from crass insults about my appearance in mainstream news outlets to the attempted ridicule of my politics by influential commentators. Of course, in being hounded by the media I am by no means unique. These attacks are often made on people with less power and privilege than me. How must it feel for members of the public who find themselves in the public eye and targeted by the tabloid media?
The bombardment takes different forms – but in my case, it can be distilled into three categories: the legitimate examination of my past, the ludicrous attacks on my personal attributes, and the absurd kneejerk reaction to Green party policies.
What’s now clear to me, both from the sheer number of attacks and their increasingly wild nature, is that they are a product of a political and media establishment rattled by a party that’s growing fast and willing to say the unsayable: that our country has been hijacked by those interested only in serving the super-wealthy.
So let’s start with my past, which has come under intense scrutiny. First, there’s the Sun article about breast hypnosis. I knew when I stood for leader of the party that this would come up, and I understand why people would want an explanation.
Long before being involved with the Green party, I agreed to do a piece on hypnosis and body image. The journalist asked for it to be a piece about breast enlargement. I asked for it to be clear that it was their suggestion, not mine, but I should have said no. I went out to clarify that on the radio the very next day. It’s embarrassing, but the desperation with which opponents are clinging to it has been pretty disproportionate. I don’t think there are many TV shows now where I haven’t explained that I was misrepresented in the article.
The other thing that gets a lot of mentions is my previous membership of the Liberal Democrats. Again, this is fair to bring up – it’s about my political journey – and I am more than happy to explain that my politics have changed, and that the Green party became my political home because my strengthening belief in social and environmental justice led me to the only party that truly represents those values.
But then, there are the personal insults. From Harriet Harman weirdly calling me “macho” to Jeremy Clarkson’s rant in the Sunday Times about my teeth, and the Daily Mail’s Quentin Letts suggesting that my looks mean I have “shades of Hannibal Lecter”, the attacks have been fairly consistent, and multiplied by a small army of very loud, very online trolls. Those same trolls are also obsessed with the fact that I changed my name when I was 18 – reclaiming my Jewish ancestry in the process
Most striking, though, have been the wild and increasingly absurd misrepresentations of my politics. Just recently the Tory peer and radio host Daniel Finkelstein claimed I was “against wealth and growth” when I simply said to him that GDP is a terrible way to measure health and wellbeing. Then there was a Times leader saying that Green policies “hold grave dangers”, Piers Morgan’s frankly weird obsession with genitalia and commentator Carole Malone telling the Daily Express that I was a “dangerous man” because I want a public health-based approach to drugs. That doesn’t mean making all drugs freely available over the counter. It means taking out organised crime and the gangs, tightly regulating the market and supporting people who become dependent on drugs with medical interventions, not jail.
It’s obvious to me why these attacks have become so ferocious: it’s because more and more people are backing a party with policies that will dismantle the economic consensus and focus relentlessly on the cost of living. Three-quarters of people support a wealth tax – yet none of the establishment parties will touch it. So parts of the media close ranks the vast wealth of their owners and the policies of their friends in Westminster come under threat.
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In the past weeks, I’ve had many interactions with journalists that have been positive, but it’s striking how often commonsense policies are treated as if they’re extreme. From our plans to bring water into public ownership, to supporting rent controls and an end to the “war on drugs” – I follow the evidence from the UK’s failures, and examples from across the world of how to do things better. All too often, such plans aren’t met with fair scrutiny, which I would welcome, but with a sense that I’m presenting ideas from the radical fringes, and that they therefore don’t merit proper discussion.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in my views on the genocide in Gaza and the actions of Israel. There is an utter disconnect between a journalistic class that nodded along to a boycott of Russian sport after the appalling invasion of Ukraine, while mounting frankly outrageous attacks on those of us who said that Israeli teams should be given the same treatment. This is evidence of a class of people who value independent thought far less than contacts in government. For me, as a Jewish man, to be repeatedly accused of being part of some sort of antisemitic movement is the most galling attack of all. It hasn’t gone unnoticed that across the Atlantic there’s another politician who has faced a whirlwind of abuse and attempted distraction but has maintained his relentless focus on raising people’s living standards. Zohran Mamdani’s victory has demonstrated the potential for a city – it’s time for us to do it for our entire country.
When I was elected, I said I wanted the Green party to replace Labour as the progressive choice for people. I mean it. One poll in late October put the us ahead of Labour for the first time and suggested the Greens could take the seat of Holborn and St Pancras from Keir Starmer. That’s what smashing the stale, old two-party politics and replacing Labour looks like.
The bad news for those who attack me is that we simply won’t back down. They can sound off about my teeth all they want. But the more I see them panic about the replacement of the politics of hate with a politics of hope, the more we know our movement is on the right track.
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Zack Polanski is the leader of the Green party
