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

"Never kissed a Tory" t-shirts.

And the " Still Hate Thatcher" T-shirts that continue to sell on the activist circuit.

People like Suella Braverman, Priti Patel and Boris Johnson were continually demonised in more recent years. They were not permited any humanity at all.

Well, tbf, disillusioned conservatives like meare displaying quite the acid tongue towards the likes of Patel and Johnson. Their names are mud right now. Braverman has a chance of political renewal, but not those two.

Matt Goodwin announced as the Reform candidate. He's already known as a strong media performer and he's not a recycled Tory, so not a bad choice.

A lot of lefties in academia will be throwing their toys out of the pram if he gets in. He's also hated by the Very Online Right, which counts as a character reference for me.

Maybe, though my point relates more to the intensity of personal invective and vitriol involved in hating on political figures.

If I'd read your post yesterday I wouldn't have had an earthly but I saw this earlier today

https://thecritic.co.uk/the-self-defeating-earnestness-of-anti-extremism/

The format was a bit wonky in places but that could have been my tablet.

I'm unsurprised that taxpayer's money being spaffed something so counterproductive and frankly a bit Stasi-like.

Who knew that Hull had a propaganda department? It's like 1984 in sitcom form.

And the problem with this is that if you are even vaguely centrist or even left of Centre or Soft Left, as most of the country is, and was where both parties largely were before the probably 2010's, you are apparently fascist Reform supporters. People who think biological women should have rights are evil right wing bigots. All that happens if you go into this type of purity spiral is that people think 'Maybe I am Right wing then?' Because the 'Right' is now so enormous it covers the views of most of the country. It minimises what the Fascists and Nazis were and what they did and still do if people think the Tory party (a party that has been in power in this country for most of the last 200 years) is a fascist party.

In the American example, the first example I can find of Democrats calling the Republican candidate a Nazi is the Harry Truman campaign against Tom Dewey (!) in 1948. They skipped that for Eisenhower, who literally defeated the real Nazis, but resurrected it in the 1960s and have rolled it out every four years since.

I imagine that normie Democrats a generation or so back knew this was just stage invective and not to be taken too seriously, and Ronald Reagan wasn't Hitler, but they seem to have trained up several million people who really do take this invective seriously.

Now look at the way the Guardian has covered every new Tory leader in the past few decades. Were Polly Toynbee and Owen Jones serious when they said that David Cameron (!!) was a radical right winger? Probably not, but if you take them at their word and assume that Cameron (someone who ideologically would be very much at home in the Lib Dems) is waaay out on the right, then obviously any candidate who's more than a millimetre or so to the right of Cameron must be as close to fascism as makes no difference.

Do they want a Charlie Kirk situation here? Bearing in mind we've had two MPs murdered in recent years? Sometimes I wonder.

I mean you've got to laugh when you have some of Zahra Sultanas supporters calling Jeremy Corbyn a right wing agent of Israel!

That's the piece. Like so much atm which is frankly surreal (eg Starmer's response to the Southport slayings was...ban the sale of pointy ended knives), this story rewards on so many levels. It's having the exact opposite effect to what was intended.

Double whammy.

LBC Lewis Goodall interviews Green deputy Rachel Millward on whether the increased global threat to security means defence spending needs to increase.
"Id need to think about that"

https://nitter.net/LBC/status/2015397649696841795#m

Immediately sub tweeted (is that the term?) by your party Zarah Sultana stating every penny spent on WAR is money not spent on education. Who'd have thought she'd be as invested in defending NATO as Trump.

https://nitter.net/zarahsultana/status/2015498160395723195#m

And THAT is the problem. Wilfully blind and thick.

Sorry typo

I meant De funding not defending

Fully agree.

LOL.

Since 2005, Britain has run a counter-extremism strategy focused on deradicalising people before they become supporters or participants in terrorist acts. Like many government policies, this once narrowly defined idea quickly exploded to encompass the idea that “any ideology can be harmful, and therefore anyone can be at risk of being radicalised”.
A scheme once aimed at stopping young Pakistani men blowing themselves up during the morning commute has morphed into what most government policies now end up as — a box-ticking, lanyard-wearing, finger-wagging series of workshops run by delusional grifters, but with the added joys of a sinister surveillance-state infrastructure whereby teachers, social workers and healthcare professionals are instructed to report law-abiding individuals for wrongthink.

perfect description - a lot of people on MN and elsewhere don’t even seem to be aware that Prevent was set up specifically to combat the Islamist terrorist threat, still the number one terrorist threat to people in the UK. Proportionally, that’s where the focus should be. But it isn’t any more.

I have to do this as part of my job. Its turned into a box ticking exercise. Its a ' lets waste loads of other people time to show we are doing something rather than putting resources into counter terrorism'. And yes, whenever you talk about it mentioning Islamist terrorism there are always people who say 'What about far Right terrorism?' even though about 90% of terrorism investigations are Islamist. It completely voids the pointvof prevent ( which is pointless anyway. Talking about people being vulnerable to undue influence is part of Safeguarding.

They have been blaming NATO for the Russian invasion of Ukraine since the start. They are even more anti NATO than Trump. Luxury beliefs writ large.

Yep.

Same with the SNP. Anyone asking questions or failing to perform the catechism has been cast out as bigots, facsists, and 'probably racist'.

So having spent years jeering at women and slandering anyone who does not uncritically swallow the Party whole, they have lost and alienated most centrists, created and reinforced their mad purity spiralling bubble, and cleared the field for Reform, and other opportunists.

Geezo.

Interesting tensions between 'establishment' and big state politics.

'More and more progressive politics has merged with managerial and bureaucratic authoritarianism'.

Yep.

I wonder if the creators of Pathways are fans of Slow Horses.

I love Mick Herron's books - he's a clever and funny writer - but sometimes it seems like they've been scripted by Prevent. At the start of each story his MI5 agents will be doing some work vaguely connected to Islamist terror plots, but it's heavily implied that this is all a waste of time and possibly a bit racist, and then the real terror plot turns out to involve some combination of shady Tory MPs (there's a recurring villain who's obviously Boris Johnson), the "far right" and probably the Russians pulling the strings.

It's a bit like a Carole Cadwalladr fever dream. I can believe lots of things about Boris Johnson, but it takes me out of the story a bit to imagine that he's in the habit of conspiring with white van men from Romford to have his enemies bumped off.

At this point the surprising twist would be if there were actually an Islamist terror plot, and it was played straight. The writers of Spooks fell into the same trap on a regular basis.

Anyway, in terms of the by-election, I think Zack made a major unforced error not standing in Gorton and Denton. He's from Salford, he's an energetic campaigner, in the absence of Burnham he could have presented himself as the guy to unite the left. Seats like that don't come up very often.

It looks like Reform's campaign is saying this is a referendum on Keir Starmer, and the Green campaign will be trying to make it a referendum on Matt Goodwin and the various spicy things Goodwin has said about terrorism and grooming gangs and cousin marriage. Also they'll be talking a lot about Gaza, which they probably would have done anyway, but I noticed Salma Yaqoob was speaking at the Zack event.

So it seems they'll be running a Galloway-lite campaign. It might even work, but it doesn't bear much resemblance to green politics.

😂

I dont know what Slow Horses is but I suspect this precis may be more entertaining.

Galloway's party are running a local Muslim councilor

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c9dv3x5yep4o

So going to be very interesting if Greens run a white woman who thinks biology is complicated.

Reform with Matt Goodwin.

Really want an angry feminist to cause drama at the hustings by asking some pointed questions.
Why not ask how the new MP will free women in Iran, as relevant as Gaza to local politics? Women who are oppressed because of their biology.