Greens internal drama warms up

[fromorbit]

New long article looking at the drama inside the Greens over biology suddenly existing again despite their best efforts.

How the Green Party forgot the environment and was torn apart by trans rows
It was a party united by a single mission – to save the planet. But now the gender identity debate has left it divided and in chaos

https://archive.is/TOlNx

The article is already out of date as Zack Polanski of hypnotic breasts fame has just launched a leadership bid against Deyner and Ramsey.

Emma Bateman
It's no secret that big boobs Polanski wants the top job. He is a student politics slogan churner, a self server who distains women and wants misgendering misdemeanours to be grounds for expulsion from the Greens.
He is "LGB with the T"
Still NO DEBATE!

Pro-women Greens article on his background:;
https://concernedgreens.uk/watchlist/zack-polanski/

The existence of biology is likely to be a significant part of the leadership contest for sure so interesting to watch .

Ali Shahrar has launched another legal challenge against the Greens. Gardening needed.

May 27th is the date for Emma Bateman's legal hearing against the Greens.

On May 27th I am in court against Green Party in a case which will expose the contorted lengths the Greens go to in order to shut women up.

It isn't going to go well for the Greens given the Supreme Court ruling. This could be key moment in seeing the ruling's effect on politics and directly impact the leadership contest. It will also be probably be infuriating and hilarious in equal measure.

They're the right and left side of the same coin.

Yes I see NF & ZP as adopting extremely similar approaches albeit from different political starting points

I think ZP will clean up in the wards with large youth/student populations and middle class areas where voters can afford to indulge luxury beliefs - looking at you Bristol & Brighton. Ironically both places have areas of serious deprivation but it's that boring every day deprivation and inequality as opposed to glittery stuff so grts ignored

when Polanski gets questioned on his attitudes towards puberty blockers, child transition and men in women's sports ( which he'll try to avoid and waive away as 'transphobia') he'll show himself up for what he is....someone who is also riding on an out of date ticket. Things have moved on from women having a penis now.......everyone knows they don't, and many are now far better educated on the excesses of the trans rights movement.....the one he is still riding.

Polling data on which issues voters consider important is almost complete tripe (and very sensitive to the wording of the question and options), but women's rights isn't - and has never been - a vote-determining issue for more than a tiny percentage of voters. Even if the rise of Hypnoboobs causes women's sex-based rights to rise up the media agenda (I'm sceptical) this will not change unless/until a party of the left commits strongly to supporting sex-based rights.

Yes. Women's rights vs genderwoo as such only motivates a small sliver of the electorate. US polling from last year backs that up.

Which isn't to say that it can't be a lightning rod for broader perceptions of party candidates. Republican pollsters say the success of Trumps "Kamala is for they/them; Trump is for you" ads wasn't the salience of trans in itself, it was confirming a perception that Harris was too fixated on niche ideological/identity issues and didn't care about bread and butter issues.

Fixation on niche issues is a Green vice that ZP shows little sign of wanting to break from.

Grifters and conmen are good with words. They know what subjects to avoid and how to deflect.

Hypnotits will always go on the attack if you start to talk about men in women's sport or safeguarding children from vouyerism and grooming.

Once you see someone do this, you can't unsee it.

Its fascinating to watch.

The curious thing about current politics is this is one of the big dynamic driving disillusionment with mainstream politicians. If Polanski thinks that he can break that, he's wrong. He'll gain echo chamber votes and 'least worst option' votes but the problem for him on that is he's literally enabling cheats and paedos which doesn't tend to wash too well with the general public when the chips are down.

I agree that women's rights as an issue in itself doesn't motivate voters but that it's about the wider narrative of (I think it was paxman quote) "why is this lying bastard lying to me?"

everyone knows men are not women so if ZP continues with the lie that they are he will just be tarred with the same brush as all other politicians ie he's a liar and can't be trusted

Most sensible voters know that they aren’t as well informed as they might be about big issues such as economics, immigration, crime and how to best run an education or a health service. What they want us capable, knowledgeable politicians to make decisions on these things on their behalf. Which politicians they choose depends on what they say and how convincingly they say it, as well as other more personal factors.

However, most sensible voters have a pretty clear understanding of basic biology and the sometimes conflicting interests of men and women. They will be sceptical about politicians who confidently spout nonsense they know for a fact not to be true. So though gender related issues are generally low on people’s priority list, they can be instrumental in eroding confidence in those who espouse them. I believe this happened to the Democrats in the USA.

It's NOT like the shift to Reform either. It's much more superficial and transient. And has limited appeal ultimately. It can grow but only to a certain size.

I think the Greens could get bigger as that is reflected in U.S. politics with a shift from centerist Left politics to the more Left wing A.O.C /Bernie Sanders / Mamdani wing of the party.
Our politcs tend to copy theirs and so I think the Left /Far Left might get bigger.

It seems like young people who are not able to afford a house, are generally not getting married or having children (which in the past has shifted politics more centerist)-they find Green party policies appealing - Zac promises massive housebuilding projects and 'tax the rich'.

Farage and his team are clearly better at convincing large sections of the electorate that they understand their interests.......whether or not they can deliver is another question.

If Polanski simply defines himself in opposition to Farage ( which he seems intent on) he's got no chance of attracting any of their support; all he will do is further polarise the vote.

He can promise all he likes...but he wouldn't be able to deliver on those promises. He'll probably do well in student sections of our big cities

Farage and his team are clearly better at convincing large sections of the electorate that they understand their interests.......

NF has the MSM cheering his cause and the BBC seem to platform him/Reform at any opportunity - he's even got his own news channel propagandizing for him 24/7 and yet seems to have topped out at 30%.

They're both populists, ZP has only just been elected leader and is starting to gain traction - it will be interesting to observe how it pans out over the next few years.

If we think about this in terms of personalities - and ZP seems determined to have a personality-driven presidential style - you need to have a bit of authenticity to lean into.

Farage's persona as Pub Banter Man isn't the whole man - people who know him well say he's more thoughtful and intellectually curious than you would imagine - but he really is Pub Banter Man, he just takes that side of his genuine personality and exaggerates it a bit.

Or the way David Lammy always talks about himself as the boy from Tottenham, where he's telling you about himself but weaving in a story of upward mobility to tell you how he sees the country. Or how the stories about Corbyn pottering around his allotment and buying vests from a market stall work because everyone knows he does those things. Voters can smell fakeness.

ZP's best moment so far has been his response to the Manchester synagogue attack, because he comes from that community and he was obviously affected by it. I'd like to see more of him in that style. So far I've mostly seen him do the slick snake oil salesman thing, and voters right now aren't in the mood for slick. To carry off slick you would have to be a Tony Blair level genius, and ZP isn't.

People tend to vote on the basis of just three things:

They are driven by Personality, Policy and Tribalism (traditionlism).

In a media driven world we've moved particularly hard from policy. Few people are able to name many actual policies in a manifesto. They might know soundbites of one or two, but won't know the actual policy. When we get to the next election, test this out in your own bubbles - the responses you get are fascinating. Keep in mind you should really be able to name policies for all significant parties if you are giving proper thought to who you vote for other wise you are voting on one of the other two drivers. Policy is now the least important of the three.

For a long time Tribalism has perhaps been the most important of the three. But Tribalism has broken down. The traditional voting blocks disappeared with the Brexit Vote and we are now in a period of significant flux. This means we see significant large voting swings which are often somewhat more unpredictable.

In a period of flux and media driven world we've seen a rise across the world in the idea of the 'celebrity' politician who performs rather than leads. The depth of their understanding of complex subjects tends to be spectactularly poor. It is your populists leaders who do well in this. However this can collapse very quickly with the loss of that leader. These leaders are charismatic. (Starmer notably is polling particularly badly precisely because of his lack of it - on top of difficult economics and unpopular policy. Note this is the key difference between him and Johnson). If a populist leader manages to alienate his own devotees they can turn - he (and it almost always is a he for various political reasons) has to keep his core happy by always giving them red meat they desire. This is why Johnson failed (and Trump is continuing to succeed).

Ironically the public want policy fixing, but don't actually vote primarily on policy.

This leaves us with a scenario of wondering when we will turn back to policy and a desire for less swings in politics which ultimately the public will eventually get to a point with - and how this manifests.

Just need to say.

how much of an absolute twat ZP is.

Policy seems meaningless, given how parties seem.to abandon them once in power. I guess if everyone is operating on the assumption that all politicians are lying bastards, one then has to seek out what seems genuine and believable, and that becomes a critical means to assess politicians. More startling views may seem more honest than plodded out prevarication, even if the latter is more accurate. So that pushes people to come out with weird extremist blurts.

Politics must be subject to audience capture as much as media is.

I like a boring politician, personally.

I've been thinking for a while now that "boring but competent" is the best thing you can say about a politician.

Ironically, one of the few things Starmer has in his favour. At a certain point one wonders whether the boringness is even real or cultivated, though.

On question time last night ZPs main schtick was Tax The Billionaires and Wealth Tax Now but this is Not About A Tax on Ambition So Plumbers and Hairdressers will Be Alright.

Fair enough for what it was. It was actually Zia Yusuf from Reform that was landing the blows on the conservatives and Labour, and as much about the deficit as immigration. He said it very quietly at the end, and reform are cuckoo with their costings, but he did say if you want lower crime and more people getting prison sentences say for violence, you actually need to invest in more prisons being built, or more hospitals to cope with a larger population

Thing is the greens, with their message that you can't run up a deficit against planet earth, were actually once the environmentally prudent ones. ZP is promising free transport the legalization of narcotics and All The Things that will get him a round of applause on question time (like George Monbiot on any questions last Friday) , but what if Taxing The Rich doesn't cover it? It's like anti capitalist parties saying that they'll pay for stuff from borrowing. What, from the international capital markets that are LITERALLY THE EMBODIMENT OF INTERNATIONAL CAPITALISM? The green party used to recognise trade offs

I like a boring politician, personally.

Boring politicans have to actually do their fucking job.

I'm definitely in this camp.

"Boring but competent" is appealing, but doesn't always work. Olaf Scholz looked like a good successor to Merkel because he's literally the most boring man in Germany, but the competence was lacking.

There's a broader story - and it's not just the Anglosphere - of a political class that can't govern. This is relevant to Starmer because he knows he's not good at retail politics and he's staked everything on "deliverism".

Case study 1: The difference between Trump 1.0 and Trump 2.0. In his first term Trump had a bunch of establishment GOP types who mostly hated him and hated the populist agenda and sabotaged him when they could, and to the extent he got things done he had to work outside the system (e.g. the Abraham Accords, sending his son in law to do Middle East diplomacy). Trump 2.0, even if you don't like what he's doing, he's much more effective in getting things done. In retrospect, 2020 was a good election to lose.

Case study 2: Scholars of UK politics might find there's an interesting study to be made about why Boris Johnson was a pretty good Mayor of London and yet such a terrible Prime Minister. My instinct is that, as Mayor, he had a good team around him doing the boring work, freeing him up to do the salesmanship. As PM there isn't as much scope for that - the PM constitutionally has to spend much of his time doing really boring bureaucratic stuff - but also he got rid of his winning team. And then Johnson was succeeded by people who weren't much better at the boring stuff but also lacked his salesman skills.

But even if you've got a PM who's good at the boring stuff - Sunak was assiduous about doing his boxes, which Boris definitely wasn't - that doesn't deal with the delivery stuff.

I have reservations about Dom Cummings, but I pay attention to him because he often asks useful questions, like why in the UK does it take 30 years to expand a dual carriageway. (There are bigger questions about moving away from car dependency, but leave those to the side right now.)

I'm not an expert in the North East, but one thing that seems to absolutely enrage people up there is the traffic gridlock in the Newcastle metro area that flows from the never-ending repair work on the Tyne bridges and associated infrastructure. It shows practically how the Victorians could build amazing infrastructure and we can't even keep Victorian infrastructure in good nick. It's an emblem of a country where nothing works.

If I were advising Reform I'd say, if a Reform government can get the traffic flowing in Newcastle, they will be putting up statues to Nigel and voting Reform for the next 100 years. If I were advising Labour I'd say, sort out the Newcastle gridlock or the whole region will go Reform. If I were advising Polanski... I'm not sure what I'd say, and he'd probably rather go to Newcastle Uni and bang on about Gaza.

This swing to Reform cannot be put down simply to media manipulation and coverage.

I live in a large, Left leaning city and I'm more than aware that there is a growing groundswell of former Labour voters who are seriously considering, and many have already declared that they will be, voting for Reform. Zac Polanski will have absolutely no appeal for them at all. These people have no truck with the politics of identity, nor with some of his wilder ideas around no borders, no growth economics, women with penises. A lot of people have become very disillusioned with radical Left/Progressive politics.

Look at Corbyn's new party; already split between the 'economic redestribution' stalwarts and the 'identity/trans' lot that is represented by Sultanah. Polanski is trying to be both things to all those who identify as progressive or Left, plus tryingto keep the Islamic vote on board.

Posting without comment.

To be fair a leadership trio of Hypnoboobs, a Muslim Third Worldist and a sort of ur-Lib Dem is probably representative of the coalition the GPEW is trying to build

Mothin Ali actually refused to sign the LGBTQ pledge, but did have a trans campaign manager

surely that one is by Moley?