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The article is already out of date as Zack Polanski of hypnotic breasts fame has just launched a leadership bid against Deyner and Ramsey.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

All Nigel Farage has to do is point out that these loonies think women have penises, so why should we listen to their mad ideas about zero carbon, which is making electricity bills more expensive?

I am genuinely furious that I cannot vote Green.

You are not wrong as I said in a general election debate Polanski is going to look crazy. It doesn't look good against Ramsey imagine against other parties.

There will be questions about gender stuff so Tories, Labour, Reform will all say women are real. The Lib Dems/SNP currently are middle roading saying women are real but still trying to do gender stuff in some way secretly. Polanski will be the only one pretending there are no problems at all and everything is fine. Unless the Corbyn party turns up. I suspect though because of Muslim vote even they will not be as big on trans stuff as Polanski.

<takes out shares in popcorn factories>

Polanski BiggerTits will sink the party as leader.

He heard you and launched today 😬

My word! I didn't know Jez was reading this thread

Oh. I posted a link to the bookie's odds on the leaders. Maybe not allowed. Polanski seems to be in the lead, anyway.

Interesting. I heard a leadership segment between the two, the differences are there so it will take them in different directions.

It would be idiotic to elect a leader who is not an MP.

It would be idiotic to elect someone who isn't in the GP for the long run. Polanski was a Lib Dem not so very long ago, and he could be in Jezbollah next year if Corbyn succeeds in getting it up and running.

I can't imagine he's representative of the median GP member, but the GP does have a habit of being swayed by motivated minorities winning low-turnout votes.

Jezbollah

Zack Polanski appeals to young, "progressive" activists - the kind who joined Labour under Corbyn and now join the Greens because they see it as the pro-Palestine and pro-Trans party (the environment and climate emergency are not their priorities). He will be far less appealing to the average voter.

As @SionnachRuadh said, he used to be in the Lib Dems. Consensus among the GCs who are still hanging on in the Green Party is that he left because he wasn't chosen as a target MP candidate - more chance of power and being a bigger fish in an even smaller pond in the Green Party.

This is the (2016?) Lib Dem Autumn Conference
s
Zack's speech - which includes many of the cliches and sound bites that he now employs in his Green Party speeches is a 25 minutes.
The infamous singing (which has now disappeared from Twitter) from 37 minutes

His previous career as an actor has been brought up a few times in leadership hustings and interviews. He always tries to give the impression that it was all about worthy community engagement.
But this excruciatingly bad clip from IMDB tells another story.
https://www.imdb.com/video/vi1857601561/?ref_=tt_vids_vi_1

Polanski is definitely the favourite. He has got in a lot of new members. However it really depends on the mass of existing ordinary Greens Chowns/Ramsay are doing their best to undermine him and as this is an election unlike others so we don't know how members may react.

In other news Mothin Ali, the Muslim standing for deputy would not say-l;.hbhg8 a LGBT pledge and then avoided saying TWAW recently and started an online row on X which dragged in one of the online Gaza MPs and then triggered debate about the plans for the new Corbyn/Sultana Your Party.

The hilarious breakdown of the Islamo-left alliance
The progressive left has suddenly noticed that most British Muslims are not exactly woke.

This uneasy marriage got a reality check last week when a Green Party councillor and practising Muslim, Mothin Ali, appeared reluctant to sign a set of ‘pledges’ on behalf of the LGBTQIA+ Greens, Feminist Greens and other similar groups. The MP for Blackburn, ‘Gaza Independent’ Adnan Hussain, then waded into the debate. ‘It’s no secret that Muslims tend to be socially conservative’, Hussain said. ‘Is there a space on the left to create a broad enough church to allow Muslims an authentic space, just as it does other minority groups?’
https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/08/04/the-hilarious-breakdown-of-the-islamo-left-alliance/

Ali had to do a special interview about how much he likes trans/gender stuff, but even that diidn't impress some. If Ali wins after that it will have reverberations.

Shahrar Ali has a great article in Telegraph looking at what happened to the Greens going unbalanced he pinpoints to the Challenor case as a key moment. Famous to Mumsnetters,,but seldom mentioned today outside GC circles good to see it discussed.

Shahrar Ali
How my beloved Green Party lost the plot
Instead of viewpoint diversity and rational persuasion, it is now in thrall to authoritarian identity politics

This is the first leadership bid I’ve been debarred from contesting. It is with sadness that I witness the descent of my party into the entrenched identity politics so typical of the hard Left.
Out of the candidates for leader or deputy, not one is openly gender critical. None unequivocally supports the Supreme Court ruling on the meaning of sex in the Equality Act or commends the Cass review for safeguarding youth from “gender affirming” medical malpractice.
https://archive.ph/vEFzE

More on the election.

UNHERD - The Green Party is more divided than ever
By Peter Franklin

https://archive.ph/9FZeB

I’d not seen the video mentioned in the Unherd piece where Adrian Ramsay is repeatedly asked if he likes Zack Polanski. It’s truly excruciating! 😂

https://x.com/LBC/status/1948134345836806492

Mothin Ali is an interesting character.

When he was elected as a Councillor, he instantly became the darling of the TRA wing in the Green Party because of his reaction when he won - TRAs are also very proPalestine.

But he's been careful not to get drawn in and be a puppet for them.

He's not made any GC statements or statements supporting members who have been unjustly suspended and expelled, but at last year's Green Party Autumn Conference in Manchester, he did chat to some of the Greens in Exile who had a stall outside the venue.

Ali has listened to gender crit women in the party on other occasions. He clearly is genuine in his commitment to listen to many points of view. So in that he is very different to the illiberal position of many senior Greens.

Anyway many TRAs inside the party are now against him, but that puts them in a difficult position in others ways. There are 9 people competing for deputy and he has biggest profile.

It is looking like Gaza vs Trans priority division is going to become a dividing line both in the greens and Corbyn party.

This article hints that Polanski might form a coalition of some kind with Corbyn.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cm2kzrr4375o

I think Polanski would love to form a coalition with Corbyn.

I also think that Corbyn wouldn't be interested. I can see lots of the people who joined the Green Party to vote for Zack, leaving after the leadership election and going over to Corbyn's policy instead.

Let's not forget that Corbyn will be 80 at the time of the next election. He seems quite sprightly, and I don't want to be ghoulish, but with him as your figurehead you're running a big risk of a Joe Biden situation.

So there's going to be a scramble over the next few years to establish who's going to be Corbyn's successor. Sultana is heavily hyped but doesn't strike me as being ready for prime time. I'm getting flashbacks to when Corbyn was Labour leader and some of McCluskey's people were grooming Laura Pidcock (!) to succeed him.

Could be an opportunity for Polanski. He might have to fuck the Green Party to do it, but I don't imagine he'd have a problem with that.

Polanski is Green in name only. Nothing he's written or said suggests he has any interest in sustainability or ecological constraints.

That ought to scupper his leadership bid, but even if the GPEW weren't vulnerable to entryism its ranks have been swelled by a lot of disillusioned Labourites. I know several and they are, to a man, believers in redistributing the proceeds of an extractive economy. They also think that anyone who talks about population control is a crypto-xenophobe.

That BBC article says that Chown and Ramsay got the endorsement of Lucas - that may still count for something.

YouGov did some polling on the priorities of potential Green voters: Green considerers would rather the party was a general left-wing party than an environmentalist party.

Green considerers would rather the party was a general left-wing party than an environmentalist party.

FFS. Why can't we have one party for the environment?! That was the whole bloody point of the Greens. Instead, they want to compete on a weird smorgasboard of unpopular social policies that don't even cohere. They've really finished it off, haven't they?

I know people who have been members of the Greens since it was the Ecology Party and they are thoroughly pissed off with what Zack and his ilk are trying to turn the Green Party into.

Suffice it to say that I am politically homeless several times over. I've stopped paying attention to politics, because it's so frustrating, so heartbreaking.

My experience of generic Omnicause lefties is that they always say they're really concerned about the environment, but really it isn't a dominating factor that shapes their politics. It's a nice to have.

Sometimes I think of a friend, a rather posh lefty, who's a good weathervane for this sort of thing. He occasionally talks about the ecological crisis, but he doesn't have much to say about it. His actual driving issues are Free Gaza, Trump Bad, trans self-ID and the need for schools to wang on more than they already are about the evils of the British Empire.

It's very different from the people who aren't single issue but have a particular frame - environmentalism or feminism or their religious faith or whatever - that informs their approach to more general issues.

I've never got a sense from Polanski of any underlying values or philosophy that drives him. When he's tried to define eco-populism I haven't heard anything more coherent than "all the unpopular stuff Ed Miliband is doing, but more of it, and on TikTok".

I suppose he was an actor before he was a politician. My opinion of actors as activists isn't terribly high.