Sexism/other issues in the Green party England & Wales - Discussion Thread 2

[fromorbit]

Zack Polanski is making things bigger again.

We need a new thread to discuss all his antics and the ongoing situation in the Green party which is getting more ever more bizarre. While it is getting ever strident in denying biology it also has Mothin Ali as deputy Leader who clearly doesn't believe in trans thinking, but cleverly sidesteps round talking about it.

The fight back from Green Women's Declaration,(https://www.greenwomensdeclaration.uk/ ) continues and the court cases against GPEW from Emma Bateman and Shahrar Ali are developing.

In Bristol the Women of Wessex are causing panic amongst the ruling Green council just by turning up and asking questions. This may result in another court case.
https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5455053-bristol-council-is-about-to-be-sued

With local elections in May and elections in Wales incoming lots more to discuss and call out.

First thread - where you can follow the rise of Hypno Boobs:
https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5328986-greens-internal-drama-warms-up

Note the Scottish Greens which are a separate party to the Green Party England/Wales have their own thread for all their drama. They split off because GPEW didn't hate biology enough at the time.
https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5313420-scottish-greens-being-sexist-again?page=1

I suppose one thing to bear in mind is that the two insurgent parties got 70% between them in G&D, while the establishment parties got less than 30%. That's an index of how pissed off the median voter is. (And, ideologues may find this hard to believe, polling is picking up swing voters who are wavering between GPEW and Reform - because lots of voters go more on vibes than formal policy)

But this is really interesting, because only a few years ago the Lib Dems were the obvious recepient of protest votes at by-elections. But not any more. Which is odd, because you'd expect them to do well when there's a deeply unpopular government and an opposition that lacks credibility.

I think part of this is that voters are so alienated they'll go for a radical alternative, and it doesn't really matter which one, ahead of a vanilla alternative.

But I also think the Lib Dems have snookered themselves by believing in the broad progressive alliance. Listen to Ed Davey at PMQs. Nine times out of ten, he's agreeing with Starmer when ever Starmer's own MPs don't agree with him. And in return, Starmer is remarkably polite when you consider how techy he is with Badenoch or Farage or Liz Saville Roberts.

At a time when voters want an alternative to a broken political class, the Lib Dems have become the equivalent of one of those fake opposition parties you sometimes find in one-party states, like the Left Kuomintang in China or the Chondoist Chongu Party in North Korea or the Scottish Greens.

I don't think Ed Davey went into politics to be General Secretary of the Left Kuomintang, but life throws you some curveballs.

Yes, I can't really picture quite what they are really proposing. There are a lot of questions, not least what happens to the Israelis that live there? I'm not sure that the founding of modern Israel was ever a good idea, but the fact is they are there now, generations of people for whom it is their only home. A few were eve there before the modern state and they have descendants too, and things were not great for them back then.

It's all a little vague.

Indeed.

I copied and pasted a screenshot of some of the clauses in the Palestinian motion but it's not showing for some reason.

The great Lib Dem curse is that they were an unusually effective junior partner to the Tories - low drama, coherent agenda, highly managed expectations. So, in the age of diminished trust in consensus elites, they are the seen as the ultimate party of consensus elites.

That points to your broader thesis - the public wants someone chaotic to shake things up. That was certainly the case with Johnson and continues to be the case with Farage and Polanski is perhaps an even purer example than Farage.

The cynical take is that a lot of would-be voters know that they wouldn't be happy with a Farage or Polanski government any more that they were happy with a Johnson government. But they feel it would make a lot of elites even more miserable (grievance & resentment), which seems to point to a prolonged future era of bad governance.

But there's also a constructive take, which is that institutions and their policies have outrun public permission and mandate - that nothing answers to public opinion and that bringing in Farage or Polanski would restore that accountability. Trump in the US has shown there's an element to truth to the basic MAGA/Reform allegation that much institutional function, governmental and NGO, is ideological patronage and clientelism - it rewards one side - the omnicause industrial complex - and punishes the other. So, they do have a point there. But there's also a high degree of fantasy: Trump is neo-liberalism, global elitism on steroids - muscular, aggressive, impulsive, and somewhat stripped of its high-minded rhetoric, but not much different in its aims and means than Nixon, Reagan or Bush (or even carter, clinton and obama)

This is where much of Reform and all of the Green agenda crashes onto the rocks: neoliberalism is the only game in town - world financial markets, global trade, digital media, global cultural, global energy flows. There simply is no other plausible configuration that's being presented. For all of Trump's efforts on tariffs (in a country that could plausibly introduce autarky) the effect is that not even one net, new factory has been built in the US, i.e. increased input costs for manufacturing have entirely offset tariffs applied to finished goods. He has reduced legal immigration by 50%, a titanic change, but that's hardly bringing it to zero - and with enormous industry efforts to carve out ever more exceptions to fill research universities and high tech startups, and to pick agricultural crops - pressure that will only grow as these are strategic concerns - again the inexorable pressure of the neoliberal order.

My own views is that it's imperative to reevaluate civic institutions to make them fit for purpose, its unfortunate that Reform is the only one serious about it. There's also a great need for deeper thinking about the neoliberal order that we live in and realistic ways that its harms can be mitigated, and also imagination about what alternatives might exist. But instead all the left produces is age old fantasies that have already been shown not to work while the right engages in slights of hand to pretend they're not implementing neoliberalism when that's exactly what they're doing.

So the Greens have invented “queerphobia” as a smokescreen for them to justify discriminating against women with GC views and avoid the consequences of Forstater? It’s not very subtle or clever, is it?

I don’t think the LDs had much of a presence in G&D traditionally so protest votes were more probably likely to go to the left/right extremes than the middle, especially given the composition of the electorate.

The Libdems have actually set on fire any credibility they had. Davey had some reasonable ideas about care, iirc, so its a shame he's only known as the twit who keeps falling in the water.

Queerphobia is the new transphobia? Let me guess - lesbians who only are attracted to women are especially guilty of it?

Exactly. And the willingness of so many to wave away serious allegations of electoral fraud (in G & D) not realising that it disenfranchises the very Muslim voters they are purporting to support.

I have seen interviews with Muslims who were lied to about policies by the Green campaign and would never have voted Green and also the so called ‘family voting’ (a misnomer as it doesn’t have to be a family member that supervises the vote of the coerced and people taking photographs of their voting slips (so they can provide evidence of how they voted to the person coercing them)

Or maybe they do realise and don’t care as long as it means their side wins?

I joined the Liberal party all those decades ago because it was the only one with any real policies on the environment, apart from the single-issue Ecology party (I didn’t think single-issue parties are long term viable, and I was right, seeing as the Greens have morphed into something entirely different). The three things I was interested in were electoral reform, Europe and the environment and the Libs fitted the bill. I eventually got put off by some dreadful behaviour at local level and ceased all involvement once the genderists hijacked the LDs. Even the backbiting, dishonesty and deceit of the erstwhile locals seems relatively benign in comparison.

Thank you for clarifying 🙏

Two conferences every year?

Remember the Greens will lose this.

Plaid and the Lib Dems have already discovered that evicting people from conference for saying women are real is in fact illegal. They had to give up and apologise.

This is going to happen again and again.

However the Greens as so committed to this stuff it might tear the party apart and certainly waste money.

Remember it goes alongside being fine with Muslim Greens and women in hijabs.

The Green Party will need the subs from all of the new members to fund their court cases.

They may not be collecting all that much in subs from new members when full membership is only £60/annum but full membership is also available at the reduced price of £13/annum or £6/annum.

join.greenparty.org.uk/#membership

GPEW not raking in big donations, based on the Electoral Commission's Q4 figures Reform Rakes in £5.4 Million as Crypto Boost Leaves Tories Trailing – Guido Fawkes

Green Party members are now submitting late motions for Spring Conference. This is so bonkers that I'm wondering if it's a spoof or a satirical attempt to show what the Green Party has become.

🤣

What if all the toddlers vote Reform, eh?

I can imagine Farage unveiling Baby Grumpling as his latest defector...

I think this is one of the problems with bits of the left, and not just the Greens. You tell normie voters what they're advocating and the sheer looniness makes them think you're making it up. I think it trips some kind of switch in the voter's brain where they adjust the policy to something that seems vaguely rational.

So if you say "Zack Polanski wants to abolish borders and legalise all drugs", they adjust that to "he probably just means let's be kind to refugees and not arrest teenagers for smoking a spliff".

It's remarkably similar to how, when we tell people what TRAs are advocating, they just don't believe it, even if you show them the quotes, and it's hard not to sound like a conspiracy theorist.

The problem is it's 2026, and over a decade strong into radical ID politics and populism in the mainstream, stuff like this will either be ignored or supported by young voters especially.
There's no shame in politics anymore, whether that's promoting men in women's spaces and ramping up the medicalisation of youth (the Greens) OR sending vulnerable women back to the Taliban (Reform)
Whether rolling back on equalities legislation (Reform) OR full decriminalization of prostitution (the Greens).
Farage can say he'll toe the boats back to Calais, Polanski can say Zionism is racism, the base is satisfied, these comments broaden the base, and the centre ground gets crowded by the rest of us "politically homeless".

When the Irish Greens were emerging as a force, people used to spoof them as having wacky but harmless policies like reforming the Senate to have reserved seats for badgers.

Then they got into government and turned out to be even wackier and not quite as harmless.

Like The Gumbys from Monty Python, just less commonsense.

Interesting. All of sudden you might have 2 or 3 or more votes available to you as, let’s face it, the parents would tell the kids who to vote for up until they’re early/late teens.

“Family voting” on steroids.

Well, they know it can work for them.

Those figures for Green's income do look bleak. With three court cases ongoing plus election costs they have a lot to deal with.

Economist
Nigel Farage and Zack Polanski: best of frenemies
Their voters have more in common than they think. Compared with supporters of mainstream parties, they earn less and are more likely to rent. Their politics reflect a loss of status. Many prospective Green voters have paid a lot for university degrees that turned out not to be the ticket to the middle-class jobs they imagined; many Reform supporters have lost the well-paying industrial work of their youth.
Both sets of voters are susceptible to zero-sum thinking. After two decades of stagnation, many doubt that the pie will grow much and are open to being told that someone else has taken too big a slice. Reform blames scrounging migrants. The Greens blame the rich. Both parties vow to raise living standards by squeezing their respective bogeymen. But their policies would make Britain poorer. Both are sceptical of multinationals, trade and building anything anywhere near anyone

https://archive.is/2azuD

That is so wrong!!!! The whole principle of democracy and the aim of parenting is to raise a child to make their own choices.