And The New World Struggles To Be Born

Paul Knaggs writes:

The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.

Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks

Antonio Gramsci wrote those words in a Fascist prison cell, somewhere between despair and defiance. He was describing a structural moment in history, not a passing inconvenience. He meant that when the dominant order loses its authority but has not yet collapsed, and when the forces that might replace it have not yet found their form, the space between is filled with something dangerous, something distorted, something that feeds on the hunger for change without satisfying it. He was writing about Italy in the 1930s. He might as well have been writing about Britain today.

The political commentator John McTernan, hardly a revolutionary, put it plainly enough in a recent broadcast. Look at the voters, he said. For a decade they have been voting for change: Brexit, then Corbyn, then Johnson, then Starmer, then Farage and Polanski. They are not stupid. They are not fickle. They are hungry, and they have not been fed.

They are not stupid. They are not fickle. They are hungry, and they have not been fed.

That hunger is what walks into the polling station today. It is what shapes the pencil mark on the ballot. And the question that will define British politics for a generation is not which party wins the most council seats, but whether what emerges from this moment is genuinely new, or merely a new label on the same old bottle.

THE RECKONING FOR LABOUR 

Let us be direct about Keir Starmer’s position. The evidence, across every credible poll and every reliable projection, points toward a set of losses so severe that the question after tonight will not be whether Labour can recover, but whether it can survive in its present form. YouGov’s final Westminster voting intention, conducted on the 4th and 5th of May, placed Labour on 18 percent, trailing Reform UK by seven points and barely a percentage point ahead of the Conservatives. One projection has the party losing close to two thousand of the roughly two thousand five hundred council seats it is currently defending across England.

Forecasters point to councils such as Sunderland, Barnsley, and Wakefield as virtually certain to fall to Reform. The eastern counties, Essex and Norfolk especially, are projected to shift from Conservative to Reform control, completing a realignment that began with Brexit and has been accelerating ever since. In London, where Labour once enjoyed near-total dominance, the Greens are mounting credible challenges in inner boroughs such as Hackney, while Reform is expected to outperform the Conservatives in swathes of outer London.

Former frontbencher Richard Burgon has said plainly what many in the parliamentary party dare only whisper: if tonight goes as the polls predict, Starmer will be gone. Labour MP Helen Hayes has added that serious questions about the leadership will become unavoidable. Prediction markets have placed the probability of Starmer departing before the year is out at over sixty-five percent. These are not the sounds of a governing party with confidence in its course. They are the sounds of a party waiting to see how bad the damage is before deciding whether to act.

The deeper problem for Labour is not merely the scale of the loss but its geometry. The party is losing simultaneously to its left and to its right. Reform is taking the post-industrial working class. The Greens are taking progressive urban and younger voters. The Liberal Democrats are picking off the professional suburban vote. There is no single counter-move to that kind of dispersal. It represents a coalition that was never really held together by ideological conviction, only by the absence of credible alternatives, and the alternatives have arrived.

Reform is taking the post-industrial working class. The Greens are taking progressive urban and younger voters. The coalition is dispersing in every direction at once.

WALES: A CENTURY ENDS TONIGHT

If there is a single result tonight that ought to stop the entire political class in its tracks, it will come from Wales. For over a century, Welsh politics has functioned on a simple if depressing axiom: Labour governs in Cardiff Bay as surely as rain falls on the Beacons. The final YouGov MRP poll for ITV Cymru Wales placed Plaid Cymru on 33 percent and Reform UK on 29 percent, with Welsh Labour collapsed to 12 percent, its worst performance in any major Welsh election since 1906. Under the new proportional Senedd system, that translates into a chamber where Labour may hold as few as twelve seats.

The structural change here is crucial and too often missed in the commentary. Wales is using a closed-list proportional system for the first time, expanding the Senedd to 96 members. The old constituency-based mechanics that allowed Labour to entrench itself even when its vote was hollowing out have been stripped away. What remains is something closer to an honest arithmetic of Welsh opinion, and that arithmetic is brutal for the party that built the NHS, won the Attlee landslide, and has treated the Welsh valleys as a rotten borough for the best part of thirty years.

Our prediction: Plaid Cymru will emerge as the largest party, almost certainly led by Rhun ap Iorwerth toward some form of coalition or confidence arrangement, most likely with a depleted Welsh Labour as a junior partner. The arrangement would be uncomfortable and fragile, but it would hold a left-to-centre-left majority in the chamber against Reform’s challenge. Reform itself, we predict, will finish as a strong second force with somewhere between 28 and 34 seats, a dramatic entry into Welsh devolved politics but not enough to govern, and, crucially, with every other party on record as unwilling to enable them.

This is not primarily a story about Plaid Cymru’s strength. It is a story about Labour’s failure to remain the vehicle for Welsh working-class aspiration. That failure belongs to the party’s machine in Cardiff Bay and in Westminster equally.

SCOTLAND: MAJORITY DENIED, QUESTIONS MULTIPLIED

In Scotland, the story is different in character but similar in structure. The SNP will almost certainly remain the largest party in Holyrood, but both Survation’s final MRP, placing them at 59 seats, and YouGov’s comparable modelling suggest they will fall short of the 65 required for a majority. That shortfall matters enormously. It transforms the independence question from a clean parliamentary mandate into a piece of political arithmetic requiring negotiation, compromise, and coalition.

The rise of Reform in Scotland is the most arresting subplot of the evening north of the border. A party that held no seats and polled a fraction of one percent in 2021 is now projected to win upwards of 17 seats, competing for second place with Scottish Labour on the regional list. The party’s appeal in Scotland is not purely about immigration or culture war positioning. It is drawing on a deep current of disillusionment with devolution itself among a section of the unionist working class who feel the Scottish Parliament has delivered them nothing except progressive social policies they never asked for and a prolonged argument about independence they have not wanted to have.

Our prediction for Scotland: SNP largest party, short of majority, most likely continuing as a minority administration or in loose arrangement with the Scottish Greens on confidence and supply. Reform will finish a credible third or second on the list vote, representing a genuine parliamentary presence where none existed before. Scottish Labour will continue its long managed decline, unable to escape the shadow of the Westminster government it is nominally part of. 

ENGLAND: THE MOSAIC AND THE MESSAGE 

Across England, over five thousand council seats in 136 local authorities are up for election. The projections here are more volatile, because Reform is contesting wards at scale for the first time, and first-past-the-post in multi-candidate contests is notoriously resistant to clean modelling. What we can say with reasonable confidence is this: Reform will make historic gains in post-industrial northern towns and in rural county councils across the east. Labour’s defending position, built on the extraordinary circumstances of Partygate in 2022 when it polled 35 percent, simply cannot hold against a party now polling around 20 percent.

The Greens, under Zack Polanski’s leadership, are the progressive wildcard. The party is polling at levels it has never reached before, and the inner London contests, Hackney most prominently, represent a genuine test of whether that polling momentum translates into organised local wins. We expect the Greens to take Hackney and to make significant inroads in Haringey, Lewisham, and parts of Sheffield and Norwich. Whether they can do so at sufficient scale to reshape the narrative of the night remains to be seen. 

A note of caution on Reform’s ground operation: translating 27 percent national polling into council seats under first-past-the-post requires disciplined candidate selection, ward-level organisation, and the ability to concentrate votes efficiently. These are things that established parties have built over decades. Reform has built them, if at all, in months. The gap between their polling ceiling and their actual seat yield may be larger than their supporters expect. We still expect them to top the National Equivalent Vote Share when it is calculated from tonight’s results, but the headline seat total may feel anticlimactic by comparison.

Translating 27 percent into council seats requires organisation built over decades. Reform has built it, if at all, in months.

MONSTERS, AND WHAT THEY FEED ON 

Gramsci’s monsters emerge in an interregnum. They fill the space that legitimate, confident power has vacated. The question worth asking today, as polls open across Britain, is not simply which monsters are winning but what they are feeding on, and whether any force exists that can offer something better than what the old world provided.

Reform UK is feeding on genuine, material grievance: stagnant wages, deteriorating public services, housing that a generation cannot afford, an NHS that cannot function. It channels that grievance through the politics of spectacle, scapegoat, and personality. Farage has never governed anything at scale, and the councils and Senedd blocs he is about to inherit will require him to do precisely that. The contradiction between populist promise and administrative reality tends to express itself, in time, as disappointment of a particularly bitter kind.

The Greens represent a different possibility. They are drawing, particularly among younger voters, on the same underlying frustration but offering a structural analysis rather than a scapegoat. Their weaknesses are real: limited geographic reach, dependence on the political weather, and a media environment that is not yet sure whether to take them seriously as a governing force or dismiss them as a protest phenomenon. But they are growing, and they are growing in the right direction for a left that has spent thirty years searching for its post-Thatcherite form.

For Labour Heartlands, the honest assessment is this: the working class that built the Labour movement did not abandon it out of spite or confusion. It abandoned it because the party that claimed to represent them made a series of choices, over many years, that prioritised the management of capitalism over the challenge to it. Tonight’s results are the compounding interest on that debt. The question now is whether anyone in what remains of the Labour Party understands that, or whether the response to tonight will be another round of repositioning, rebranding, and managed retreat.

We do not know who wins tonight. Nobody does. British voters have a long and honourable history of making fools of the forecasters. But the structural reality beneath tonight’s numbers is not in doubt: the old world is dying, and it deserves to. The only question that matters is what is born to replace it.

“The old parties are not losing to new ideas. They are losing to old hunger. And hunger, unaddressed long enough, does not ask questions about the menu.”

PREDICTION SUMMARY

Scotland: SNP largest party, short of majority (57-62 seats projected). Reform UK breaks through as a significant list presence. SNP minority government or confidence arrangement with Greens most likely outcome.

Wales: Plaid Cymru largest party on approximately 33 percent. Reform UK second on approximately 29 percent. Welsh Labour historic collapse to around 12 percent. Most likely outcome: Plaid-led administration, requiring coalition or supply arrangement.

England: Reform UK tops NEVS, projected historic gains in northern councils and eastern counties. Labour loses the bulk of its 2022 Partygate-era seat gains. Greens take Hackney, strong urban showings elsewhere. Conservative squeeze from both flanks continues.

National Equivalent Vote Share prediction: Reform 25-27 percent, Labour 18-20 percent, Conservatives 17-19 percent, Greens 13-16 percent, Liberal Democrats 12-14 percent.

All predictions carry the standard caveat: British voters have consistently surprised everyone, and first-past-the-post in multi-candidate contests is structurally resistant to precision forecasting. These are directional assessments grounded in the best available pre-election intelligence.

Eve of Poll Cards

That phone is not plugged in. This picture certainly gives me Pride in Britain. How about you? All that, and although it was mostly procedural matters today, Roman Lavrynovych told the court that he had never heard of Keir Starmer. As well as what I had told you, that since El Money spoke both Russian and Ukrainian, then he was almost certainly a Ukrainian, since hardly any Russians spoke Ukrainian.

Now, there will have been no tax on Christopher Harborne's undeclared personal gift to Nigel Farage. Of five million pounds. Five million pounds. Five million pounds. And what if Reform UK did indeed come second both in Scotland and in Wales? In particular, have you ever heard its English Nationalist base that on the subject of the Welsh? Moreover, a Scotland in which Reform could be the Official Opposition, while no surprise to many of us, would cut to shreds everything that the SNP had always told both itself and everyone else.

Zack Polanski, Toolmaker’s Apprentice

Paul Knaggs writes:

Modern British politics runs on backstory. Not policy. Not record. Not the hard, testable evidence of what a person has done with power or sought to do with the power they were denied. Backstory. The distilled personal mythology that a political operation constructs, tests in focus groups, and then releases into the world as though it were the spontaneous expression of an authentic life.

Sir Keir Starmer’s handlers understood this with considerable precision. As Labour Heartlands documented in our 2024 investigation into the prime minister’s manufactured working-class credentials, Starmer mentioned his father’s occupation as a toolmaker so many times across so many interviews, speeches, and campaign events that the repetition itself became a form of revelation. Not revelation of working-class roots, but revelation of a communications strategy. Genuine working-class politicians do not catalogue their backgrounds with that kind of metronomic discipline. They mention it once, because it is simply who they are, and then they move on to what they think. The repeated invocation of the toolmaker was the tell: here was a man, or the team around him, who had identified working-class origin as the credential most needed for the electoral task at hand, and had decided to deploy it, again and again, until it was indistinguishable from instinct.

The toolmaker’s son became prime minister. The toolmaker himself, Rodney Starmer, ran a small factory that made specialist components. He was, by any reasonable account, a skilled small businessman rather than a factory floor worker. The distinction matters not because it diminishes Rodney Starmer in any way, but because the word toolmaker was chosen precisely for the associations it carries: the overalls, the lathe, the calloused hands, the honest manual labour that the professional class has always found it useful to claim proximity to when seeking the votes of people who actually do it. The truth of the father’s life was quietly promoted into a more useful version of itself.

The trade in manufactured origin stories is not confined to Labour. It is the operating system of managed politics across the spectrum. What changes is only the specific credential being inflated, and the specific audience it is calibrated to reach. Starmer needed working-class authenticity, so his father’s factory became a badge. Nick Clegg needed principled insurgency, so his tuition fee pledge was scripted as the statement of a man who meant every word, right up until the moment he voted the other way. The origin story and the policy promise perform the same function: they construct the impression of a self that the actual record does not fully support.

Starmer had the toolmaker’s son. Polanski has the reluctant activist. Both are confections. Both were manufactured in the same political workshop, and both serve the same purpose: to give the audience a story it wants to believe, for long enough to win whatever is currently being sought.

Zack Polanski’s contribution to this tradition is the reluctant politician. A man who never planned to enter public life, who was dragged in by conscience rather than pulled in by ambition, who would rather have been anywhere else but found himself unable to look away from injustice. Politics Was Never Part of the Plan, as he titled the 2019 Medium essay in which he constructed this persona with some care. It is, as origin stories go, rather well made. It has the right texture: the drama school in Atlanta, the gig economy jobs, the hypnotherapy clinic, the accidental convergence of a life lived away from Westminster with the moment when the world demands something of you. It reads like the opening pages of a political memoir that has not yet been written. It is also, when set against the documented record, largely a fiction.

What follows is not merely the chronicle of a man who told some lies. It is the chronicle of a system that rewards the lie, selects for it, and then expresses surprise when the lies keep coming. Starmer was that system’s product. Polanski is its latest apprentice.

THE RED CROSS: SPOKESMAN FOR AN ORGANISATION THAT SAYS HE NEVER WAS

The breaking story today is the most straightforward of Polanski’s documented fabrications, and for that reason the most damaging. In a CrowdFunder appeal published in 2022, as he campaigned to become the Green Party’s deputy leader, Polanski described himself in the following terms: as a spokesperson for the British Red Cross, I care deeply about ending racialised policing and have been calling for an end to the phoney war on drugs.

The British Red Cross has confirmed, without qualification, that Polanski has never been an official spokesperson. He was a host at several fundraising events. The charity is scrupulously non-partisan. It does not lend its name to politicians for use in political fundraising appeals. It raised the issue with Polanski’s team. The claim had also appeared on his personal website in 2020, where he wrote that he worked as a spokesman for the British Red Cross and added that he was really proud of the work we do. A man who was really proud of the work we do was, on the charity’s own account, someone who hosted a few events. He was not someone who did it.

Confronted on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, Polanski said he had hosted various fundraisers for the British Red Cross, that he would go on stage and speak for them about the amazing work they do, and that he had used the wrong word. The word he used was not spokesman at an event, however. It was spokesperson for an organisation, deployed on a political fundraising page specifically designed to establish his credentials before party members deciding whether to elect him. You do not reach for the wrong word in that context by accident. You reach for it because it carries more authority than the true one.

He told a political fundraising audience he was a Red Cross spokesman. The Red Cross says he never was. That is not imprecise language. That is a fabrication deployed to acquire authority he had not earned.

The Green Party’s initial response was not to address the substance but to attack The Times for having published a cartoon of Polanski that the party considered antisemitic. That is not a defence. It is misdirection. The response to one alleged wrong does not extinguish the other. Observing that both things can be true simultaneously is not difficult. It simply requires honesty, which appears to be the quality currently in shortest supply at the top of the Green Party. 

The same investigation raised a second allegation: that Polanski was not a full member of the National Council of Hypnotherapy while practising professionally and charging clients approximately two hundred and twenty pounds per ninety-minute session, despite representing himself to those clients as if he were. The Green Party has not rebutted this. Polanski has not directly addressed it. A silence of that quality tends to speak for itself. 

THE MAKE VOTES MATTER OVERCLAIM: SMALLER LIE, IDENTICAL HABIT

In the same 2022 CrowdFunder page that falsely named him a Red Cross spokesman, Polanski also described himself as a spokesman for Make Votes Matter, the proportional representation campaign. Make Votes Matter clarified that while Polanski had spoken in support of a cause it championed, he was not a spokesman for the wider organisation. The Green Party, when pressed, said he had served as a representative rather than a spokesman.

Representative. Spokesman. Spokesperson. Host. These words are not interchangeable, and political candidates understand that perfectly well. Spokesman implies institutional standing: that an organisation has chosen you, authorised your voice, and stands behind your public statements. Host means you stood on a stage at someone else’s event and spoke warmly about the work. The upgrade from host to spokesman is the kind of inflation that constructs an impression of seriousness and consequence without the underlying substance that would justify it. Applied once, it might be imprecision. Applied across multiple organisations over multiple years, it is a system.

THE HYPNOTHERAPY LIE: AND THE LIE ABOUT THE LIE

In 2013, Polanski offered a session to a Sun journalist at his Harley Street hypnotherapy clinic. The journalist claimed her measurements subsequently increased. He charged the clinic rate. He failed to disclose the resulting article in his Green Party candidate declaration when standing for office in 2019. When it resurfaced during his 2025 leadership campaign, he told LBC and then Good Morning Britain that he had never believed breast enlargement through hypnotherapy was possible, that he had been misrepresented, and that he had gone on the BBC the following day to apologise and correct the record.

The BBC investigated and found no record of any such interview. What they found was a BBC Radio Humberside recording made six days after the Sun piece, in which Polanski described the session as a successful project, cited anecdotal evidence at least of a growth in breast size, and, when asked directly whether he believed hypnotherapy could achieve this, replied: I believe that it can happen in theory. Those are not the words of a man who had rushed to apologise for a misrepresentation the previous day. They are the words of a man defending and extending the original claim.

Against this background, the allegation that he was not a full member of the National Council of Hypnotherapy while charging clients for his professional services assumes a particular weight. It suggests the misrepresentation of his standing was not confined to a tabloid article or an election platform, but extended to the private relationship between a practitioner and the people paying him, who had every right to accurate information about his qualifications. That is more serious than embarrassment. It is a professional claim made to paying clients that may not have been true.

THE POLITICAL BIOGRAPHY: THE YEARS THAT VANISHED

His foundational 2019 Medium essay, Politics Was Never Part of the Plan, presents a man pulled into public life by conscience rather than design. The paper trail tells a different story. By 2014, the reluctant politician had joined the Liberal Democrats.

In 2015, the year Jeremy Corbyn was rebuilding the socialist left and drawing hundreds of thousands of new members into Labour, Polanski was standing as a Lib Dem council candidate in Camden, singing songs on stage at the Liberal Democrat conference, and writing for Lib Dem Voice in praise of Nick Clegg’s coalition record.

A man who wrote that he wanted a leader who remains immensely proud of what Nick and our colleagues achieved in office was not stumbling into politics by accident. He was a disciplined partisan of the party that had provided parliamentary cover for an austerity programme from which this country’s public services have never recovered. 

Polanski Campaigning Against Climate Change — January 2019

In 2016, he stood as the Liberal Democrat candidate for Barnet and Camden at the London Assembly elections. He put his name forward for the Richmond Park by-election candidate selection. When he was not shortlisted, he wrote a public blog post objecting bitterly. According to Private Eye, a senior Green later told reporters he had quit the Lib Dems in a strop. The sequence, a failed selection fight followed by a public grievance campaign and rapid departure, fits that description rather well.

His stated reason for leaving, delivered in 2019, was deep unhappiness with the Lib Dems’ support for airstrikes in Syria. The party had backed military action in Syria in 2013 and again in 2015. Polanski joined after those votes, stood for office under the banner, praised the leadership, and agitated for a winnable seat. The Syria explanation does not survive contact with the chronology. What does survive contact with the chronology is the Richmond Park rejection and the grievance blog that followed it.

In June 2016, as an active Lib Dem operative, he heckled Jeremy Corbyn at a Momentum rally over Europe. In 2025, he auditioned to inherit Corbyn’s voters using Corbyn’s own vocabulary.

And then there is the heckling. BuzzFeed News identified the lone heckler who interrupted Jeremy Corbyn at a Momentum rally in June 2016 as Liberal Democrat activist Zack Polanski, who had gone specifically to denounce what he called Corbyn’s passivity and ambivalence for Europe. Corbyn told the crowd to let his friend stay. Fast forward to 2025, and the same man presents himself as the natural heir to the Corbynite left, delivering speeches that borrow the rhythms, the language, and the thematic architecture of 2017-era socialism with considerable fidelity.

THE CORBYN RECANTATION: CALIBRATED TO THE AVAILABLE AUDIENCE 

In 2018, Polanski wrote publicly that Corbyn’s complicity was an existential threat to the Jewish community, and that being a pro-European Jew gave him two reasons he could not vote for Labour under Corbyn. These were public positions taken at the precise moment when the antisemitism smear campaign was being used most aggressively to destroy Corbyn’s leadership. Polanski was lending his voice to that campaign.

By June 2025, with the Corbynite constituency available and the Green leadership race underway, he told Novara Media it had not been helpful for him to assume Labour was rife with antisemitism, when we now know that blatantly was not true. He added that Corbyn had not dealt with it perfectly. The timing of the recantation tracks the available electoral constituency with suspicious precision. In 2018, the incentive was to align with the anti-Corbyn consensus. In 2025, the incentive was to attract the Corbynite left. The position changed when the calculation changed. That is not moral evolution. It is audience management.

The left, which suffered genuinely from the antisemitism smear campaign and knows precisely how it was manufactured, should be slow to forgive the man who helped give it credibility, and slower still to trust the recantation of a man who has demonstrated, repeatedly, that his positions are audience-dependent.

FROM ECOLOGY TO IDENTITY POLITICS: THE PARTY THEY USED TO BE 

There is a broader and more lasting damage that this chronicle illuminates, and it deserves honest statement: the damage done to the Green Party itself.

The Green Party was built over decades as the political home of ecologists, scientists, conservationists, and those who understood that the health of the natural world is not one item on a list of political concerns but the condition on which all other political concerns depend. That seriousness was real and it was earned. The Greens spoke about climate, about soil, about water, about the systemic consequences of industrial capitalism for the living world with a depth of knowledge that the established parties have never matched. They commanded a cross-spectrum respect that no other party in British politics could claim, precisely because they were not a faction of any existing political tradition. They were ecologists, and in a political culture saturated with opportunism, that independence had genuine value.

That party is now largely unrecognisable. Under Polanski’s tenure, the Green Party has undergone what its own internal critics describe as a fundamental mutation. The environment remains on the letterhead. It is no longer the animating principle. In its place has come an omnicause radicalism in which gender ideology, identitarian politics, and the cultural preoccupations of the urban professional class have been elevated above the material concerns of ecology, and well above the material concerns of the working class whose cause is rhetorically performed at every opportunity.

The Greens once held credibility because they placed the planet above the parliamentary game. That seriousness has been traded for a bouquet of identitarian causes that the party’s founding generation neither recognises nor voted for. The ecologists have been replaced by the culture warriors.

The exclusion of groups like the Green Women’s Declaration from party conference marked this transformation. Women who have spent years defending the material reality of biological sex found themselves unwelcome in the party of ecological materialism. The Darren Johnson case made the cost of principled internal dissent explicit. Johnson served the Green Party for twenty-four years, was a London Assembly Member and the party’s London Mayoral candidate, and was suspended after criticising the party’s response to the Cass Review. He eventually left and joined Labour. The biological had become negotiable. The ideological had become mandatory.

The Green surge in membership since Polanski’s election has been remarkable. The question nobody in the party leadership wants to sit with is who those new members are and what they have joined. A party whose membership has trebled in under a year, that cannot prevent candidates who call for the killing of Zionists from appearing on ballot papers, that has a deputy leader who privately advises candidates accused of antisemitism to seek legal advice, is not a party whose vetting procedures have kept pace with its ambitions.

The working-class communities whose names appear in every Polanski speech about wealth and power are not joining the Greens in any significant numbers. The ecological movement at its most serious was always capable of speaking to those communities, because the people most exposed to environmental degradation, to industrial pollution, to the poisoning of air and water, are not the urban professional class. They are the people at the bottom of every economic hierarchy. A serious Green politics would have built from there. The Polanski Greens have built instead from the student union and the identity politics seminar.

GOLDERS GREEN: WHERE POLANSKI WAS RIGHT, AND THEN WAS NOT 

Labour Heartlands examined the Golders Green attack in detail in our piece Fitting the Narrative: Ishmail Hussein, the Inconvenient Victim, published 3 May 2026. The full account, including the first victim the official narrative erased, is there. Readers owed the complete picture should read it.

When Polanski shared a social media post questioning police conduct during the arrest of Essa Suleiman, the man charged with the Golders Green stabbings, the question he raised was not, on its merits, an unreasonable one. Footage appeared to show officers kicking a man who had already been tasered and was on the ground. The post condemned the attack itself as horrendous. It did not defend the attacker.

Labour Heartlands went further than Polanski dared. We reported what the official narrative systematically omitted: that the first victim of Essa Suleiman that morning was Ishmail Hussein, a Muslim man, a friend of the attacker’s for two decades, stabbed in his Southwark flat hours before the Golders Green incident and erased from the story because his existence complicated the clean ideological account the government needed to tell. We reported that Suleiman had been recently discharged from psychiatric care, that his Prevent referral had been closed with no terrorist ideology identified, and that the speed with which the government raised the terror threat level and threatened to ban pro-Palestine marches owed more to political opportunity than proportionate response. Those observations remain on the record.

The question Polanski raised about police conduct was legitimate. The problem was what came next. When Starmer turned on him, calling him disgraceful and not fit to lead any political party, Polanski apologised. He said he had shared the post in haste. He retreated from a defensible position under political pressure because the electoral cost of standing his ground felt too high. A leader who abandons a correct position the moment it becomes costly is not offering the left reliable ground. The courage of conviction holds when the pressure comes. The performance of radicalism dissolves. Polanski demonstrated, in the most public possible way, which of the two he has available.

THE CANDIDATE VETTING CATASTROPHE 

The Green Party’s candidate failures in the week before the May 2026 local elections are a direct consequence of a leadership choice: to grow a party from sixty-five thousand to over two hundred thousand members in under a year, apparently without the institutional machinery to determine who was joining or standing.

Among the candidates whose social media posts were exposed: a Lambeth candidate who had shared a post reading Ramming a synagogue isn’t antisemitism. It’s revenge; a Camden candidate who shared content attributing the September 11 attacks to Zionists; a Newcastle candidate who wrote that it takes serious effort not to be a tiny bit antisemitic; and a candidate operating an account under the name thereal.anne.frank who called for every single Zionist to be killed. Polanski said those messages are all unacceptable and expressed confidence in ninety-nine per cent of his candidates. He had himself acknowledged, during the campaign period, that vetting was a real challenge for the Greens. It was a challenge he had not met before those candidates were placed on ballots that cannot now be legally altered.

THE PATTERN THAT CONNECTS EVERYTHING 

It is worth mapping the territory plainly, because the cumulative picture is considerably more damaging than any individual element.

In his professional life, Polanski apparently told paying clients he held a professional membership he may not have possessed, then lied to national broadcasters about his response to a story about that professional work, a lie contradicted by audio evidence that remains on the public record. In his voluntary and advocacy roles, he described himself as a spokesman for the British Red Cross, a claim the organisation denies, and overclaimed a parallel status with Make Votes Matter, which also corrected the record. In his political biography, he erased a two-year period of active Liberal Democrat partisanship, obscured the personal disappointment that drove his departure, aligned himself with the antisemitism smear campaign against Corbyn before reversing when the Corbynite constituency became electorally valuable, and has presented a series of career reverses and opportunistic pivots as a narrative of continuous principled evolution.

Under his leadership, a party that once commanded genuine cross-spectrum respect for its ecological seriousness has become the vehicle of an identitarian politics that its founding generation does not recognise, whose candidate roster has required suspension after suspension in the days before a major election, and whose deputy leader responds to antisemitism allegations by advising accused candidates to seek legal counsel.

The Toolmaker’s Apprentice has performed his role with considerable skill. The reluctant politician who never planned to enter public life has, by the documented record, been planning to enter public life since at least 2014. The man who borrowed Corbyn’s language once called Corbyn an existential threat. The Red Cross spokesman never held the role. The hypnotherapy apology was never made. The professional membership may never have existed. And the green party beneath all of this is no longer, in any meaningful sense, a green party.

Starmer was the system’s product. Polanski is its latest model. The system does not produce these figures by accident. It produces them because it rewards the biography that moves the target audience, the credential that fills the authority gap, the recantation that unlocks the next constituency. It produces them because the alternative, honest politics prosecuted at personal cost, does not reliably win. Until the left builds structures that reward substance over performance, it will keep receiving performances.

The working class of this country has been offered the performance before. It recognises it now, even when the stage lighting is better than usual. 

Manufacturing Backories and CVs 

In late 2007 Reeves moved to become Head of Business Planning in the Customer Relations department, which handled complaints. Rachel Reeves claimed a decade at the Bank of England; she actually spent roughly four and a half years in employment there, with nearly a year of that spent studying. She left the Bank nine months earlier than her LinkedIn stated, and left HBOS more than six months earlier than she claimed. Her LinkedIn had her listed as an “economist” at the Bank of Scotland; she was in fact running a small complaints team managing administration, IT matters, and small projects and planning. The explanation for all of this was, in every case, administrative error.

Farage’s Mass Deportation Fantasy 

Farage, the self-styled anti-establishment man of the people, attended Dulwich College, one of Britain’s most elite private schools, and the FT reported that his City career was considerably more modest than the image suggested, with colleagues saying his suggestion of wealth was “probably a bit of a misnomer.” One of his metals broking companies went insolvent.

Jonathan Reynolds described himself as a solicitor who worked in the Manchester branch of Addleshaw Goddard on his website and told the Commons in 2014 that he had worked as a solicitor in Manchester city centre. He was never qualified, having quit his training contract to run for Parliament in 2010. His LinkedIn simultaneously listed him as both “solicitor” and “trainee solicitor.” His explanation: inadvertent error.

Credibility, once cracked, spreads like a fracture through glass. Pull one thread and the whole garment comes apart. Zack Polanski has been pulling his own threads all week, and the garment is now showing the Liberal Democrat lining beneath the socialist weave.

Organically Self-Regulating

Miriam Cates writes:

Boris Johnson is a clever and educated man. As a King’s scholar at Eton, classics scholar at Oxford, President of the Oxford Union, and author of numerous books, no one can doubt the former Prime Minister’s literary talents. Yet I am sure that even Johnson himself would admit that maths was never his strong point. The previous government’s woeful response to the Covid pandemic may have been significantly less destructive had our former Prime Minister’s grasp of statistics been half as a good has his knowledge of Greek mythology.

Last week, Johnson’s innumeracy struck again, this time leaving him struggling to grasp the implications of falling global birth rates.

Writing in the Daily Mail last week, Mr Johnson claimed that rapidly declining global birth rates are not a “crisis, but a sign that the human population is organically self-regulating” and that “after years of demographic strain we are in sight of a demographic dividend”.

Online, Johnson has been roundly derided as a hypocrite. For a man who has fathered at least nine offspring to publicly celebrate a global fall in the number of children demonstrates a lack of self-awareness to say the least. And it is somewhat galling for a former PM who oversaw record levels of immigration and population growth to welcome a decline in national births. Yet Johnson’s views on falling fertility rates are not just hypocritical; they are plain wrong.

In his article, Johnson recognises that, across the world, ageing populations are transforming societies. He writes that in Italy there are now more funerals than weddings, in Tokyo children’s playgrounds are deserted, in India schools are empty and in China thousands of family apartments lie empty. Yet the former occupant of 10 Downing Street mocks leaders who are raising the alarm about this worrying trend – such as Italy’s Georgia Meloni and Emmanuel Macron of France – accusing them of having ‘spasms’ and saying ‘Crisis? What crisis?’

But the global ‘baby bust’ is no joke. Here in the UK, our total fertility rate (TFR) now stands at just 1.4 children per woman. This means that the number of yearly births is around a third lower than what is necessary to maintain a stable population. Who will care for the elderly when there are not enough young people to go around? Who will pay the taxes that fund pensions and healthcare when each year, more people leave the workplace than enter it? How will our business and technology sectors grow without the young minds that drive innovation? How will our economy be revived when the most important driver for growth – the labour force – is shrinking not growing? How will we survive the ravages of inflation and shortages as the productive workforce declines?

Below-replacement birthrates will not result in a one-off population reduction like after a war or pandemic. Rather each generation will be a third – or in some countries a half – smaller than the one before, in a tailspin of decline where the old always outnumber the young.

As a classicist Boris Johnson must be familiar with the fall of the Roman Empire, which was brought about in part by collapsing fertility rates. Yet he fails to recognise a parallel impending catastrophe of our own times. In fact, Johnson says that falling populations are a “blessing” and a “ray of hope”, because of the “crippling burden” human beings place on nature.

But are people not part of the natural world? Are not the desires to grow, reproduce, harness nature and build civilisations a core part of what it means to be human? Of course it is true that human beings have had an impact – in some cases negative – on the environment and other species, but is Johnson seriously suggesting that the world would be a better place without us in it?

Johnson admits that the dire prophecies of Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 book The Population Bomb have not come to pass. As the global population has grown, we have not, as Ehrlich predicted, run out of food and natural resources. In fact the opposite is true; as the demographer Paul Morland writes in the Telegraph: 

“At eight billion, humans as a whole live immensely longer, healthier and richer lives than when we were four billion, at four billion living standards were higher than when we were two billion and at two billion, people were living much better than when, at the start of the 19th century, there were just one billion of us.”

Global food production has already increased by over fifty per cent in the first quarter of this century. Meanwhile, the proportion of the world living in absolute poverty has fallen from around half in 1970 to under ten per cent today. It turns out that population growth catalyses rather than curbs human flourishing. We should certainly be concerned – and try to mitigate – the impact of global warming, yet over the last century, the risk of dying from natural disasters has decreased by an astonishing 98 per cent, as technological capabilities (driven by population growth) have enabled us to save countless lives from the ravages of earthquakes, floods and famines. Cold-temperature related deaths – which account for nine times as many deaths as heat-related mortality – are also falling.

It is true that the global population is still rising; we are in a lag phase where falling birth rates are still masked by rising life expectancy. But even if we were to arrest the fertility decline tomorrow, the earth’s population will peak some time in the 2080s, followed by rapid collapse.

Yet despite these undeniable facts, Boris Johnson is far from alone in his misguided belief that falling birth rates should be welcomed. The message of The Population Bomb and generations of relentless environmental campaigning have been so pervasive that it now seems counterintuitive to worry about population shrinkage.

In Britain, high levels of immigration in recent years have also disguised the problem of low birth rates. Since 2010, the UK population has increased by seven million people, almost entirely as a result of new arrivals. As is now abundantly clear, this kind of ‘transfer’ growth (as opposed to natural growth driven by births) has had a negative and deeply unpopular impact on our economic and social conditions. Adult immigrants compete for housing and infrastructure. Language, cultural and educational differences create friction and reduce social trust. Mass migration has transformed our cities, and not for the better; it’s unsurprising that many British people might be relieved to hear that we may be moving towards population decline.

But natural population growth – the birth of new babies – carries none of the downsides of mass immigration. Babies are born into existing families, without requiring any additional housing, and making negligible contributions to consumption or infrastructure demand for at least eighteen years, by which time natural deaths will have freed up housing stock and other resources. Children born in Britain are educated in the British education system, learning our language, culture and the skills they require to positively contribute to our society and economy. While net migration of 300 000 or more foreign adults each year has placed huge strain on society, an additional 300 000 babies born each year – the gap between current annual birth numbers and population sustainability – would have little impact in the short term but store up a bountiful demographic dividend for twenty years time.

It is sadly ironic that Johnson’s gravest political error – the “Boriswave” – has become the greatest political barrier to understanding the consequences of falling national birth rates. But it is a barrier we must try to overcome; the fact that the ratio of working age people to retirees has continued to decline despite such an enormous influx of young migrants should be an indicator of just how serious Britain’s birth dearth really is.

As a former Prime Minister and prolific columnist, Boris Johnson is still an influential figure. Yet it is noticeable how far the debate has moved in the last three years. Back in 2023, discussions about falling birth rates were derided as ‘far fight’ moral panics by much of the mainstream media, yet all of our national news outlets now regularly profile this issue. Just last week The Guardian published a comprehensive report on the economic impact of declining fertility.

Johnson is now an outlier in his demographic denialism as more and more of his peers are becoming worried about the baby bust. But worrying isn’t enough – we must act. Most young people still want to become parents, and the average desired family size is a healthy 2.2 children. The task of government and society is to break down the barriers that stop these dreams from becoming reality. If we could devote half as much time and energy into saving humanity as Johnson has devoted to saving the polar bears, perhaps we might have a fighting chance.

That Guardian report, by Linda Geddes, is here:

In Japan, there are now companies that specialise in cleaning the apartments of elderly people who have died alone and gone undiscovered for weeks or months, while adult incontinence pads have outstripped nappy sales for more than a decade. In Italy, depopulating villages are selling homes for €1 to attract new residents and keep services running. In the UK, falling pupil numbers are already closing schools and classrooms in parts of London.

These are not isolated curiosities, but signs of a broader shift taking place across much of the developed world. “In the EU in 2024, 21 of 27 countries had more deaths than births,” said Prof Sarah Harper, the director of the Oxford Institute of Population Ageing. Across Asia and the Americas, too – from Japan and South Korea, to Cuba and Uruguay – many countries are seeing the same pattern.

It reflects two long-running demographic changes: people are living longer, and the average number of children they are having – something demographers refer to as fertility – is falling.

In the UK, the latest projections from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) suggest that deaths will outnumber births every year from 2026 onwards, driven by falling fertility and the large, postwar “baby boom” generation living longer than previous generations, but now reaching later life. The population is still expected to grow, but more slowly than previously forecast, peaking at about 72.5 million in 2054 before beginning to gradually decline. Earlier projections had suggested growth would continue until 2096. 

“Although the point where there are more deaths than births is emotionally significant, it’s part of a long process,” said Dr Paul Morland, a demographer and author of No One Left: Why the World Needs More Children. Life expectancy has been rising since the late 18th century, while fertility has been declining since the late 19th century, aside from a brief mid-20th century rebound.

“There comes a point when these two lines cross,” he said.

The reasons people are having fewer children are complex. A fertility rate of 2.1 children per woman is typically needed for a population to replace itself over time. The UK rate is 1.44.

“Recent fertility declines in the UK have been especially marked in those under 30, indicating some postponement,” said Prof Melanie Channon, of the University of Bath. “However, even accounting for the trend towards later parenthood, fertility is still declining.”

These changes are already being felt. “In the short run, those in sectors that serve children – maternity care, schools, childminders – and new parents are feeling the falling number of births,” said Dr Bernice Kuang, of the University of Southampton. Falling enrolment is forcing some schools to close, while businesses such as soft play centres and childminders are struggling. Even midwifery training is affected, as students must attend a minimum number of births.

The effects of such struggles extend beyond children themselves. “Working parents – disproportionately mothers – may have to leave the labour force or reduce their hours,” Kuang said, with implications for the economy and gender equality. 

Meanwhile, longer lifespans are contributing to a gradual “greying” of the population, with consequences of its own. As populations age, Morland says, they tend to become more risk-averse, with investment flowing into safer assets rather than innovation, while a smaller, older workforce may be less entrepreneurial and able to sustain economic growth.

The pressures on public finances are also stark, with fewer workers supporting rising spending on pensions, health and social care. Older people require far higher levels of support, placing a growing burden on younger workers.

At the same time, consumption patterns are shifting. Younger people tend to spend more on goods and appliances, whereas older people spend more on care and other services that cannot easily be automated or offshored. “Just as your labour force is drying up, you have more demands for local hands-on labour,” Morland said.

Many developed nations face similar pressures. What is striking, however, is how these trends have spread beyond the richest economies. In many middle- and lower-income countries, fertility is falling despite more limited economic development. Parts of Latin America, as well as countries such as Jamaica and Thailand, and states in India including Tamil Nadu and Kerala, have fertility rates comparable with – or lower than – those in Britain. 

“There are countries that will grow old before they grow rich,” said Morland.

All this marks a shift in how demographic change unfolds. Historically, falling birthrates followed rising incomes, urbanisation and education – the so-called demographic transition. But now fertility is declining more rapidly than economic development, driven in part by changing aspirations and social norms.

Even so, the pattern is not uniform. Israel remains unusual in maintaining much higher birth rates – about 3 children per woman – suggesting that culture may play a role. The UK, too, may be more resilient than some of its neighbours. “There is a very strong and persistent two-child norm in the UK, which means our fertility rate is slightly more buoyant than some other European countries where single children are more accepted,” said Channon.

In parts of sub-Saharan Africa, fertility remains high and populations are growing rapidly, even as mortality declines. In parts of central Asia, meanwhile, economies have grown without the same decline in births.

Migration also plays a crucial role. While deaths may outnumber births, the UK’s population is still expected to grow for now, largely because of net inward migration, albeit at lower levels than previously assumed.

Demographic projections are not destiny. They do not account for unexpected shocks or policy shifts, and migration is particularly difficult to predict. As the ONS puts it: “Projections are not forecasts.”

If the direction of travel is clear, the question becomes not so much whether demographic change can be reversed, but how societies respond to it.

Some changes are already “baked in”, reflecting what demographers call population momentum – the way large generations moving through populations continue to shape their size and age structure. “Population growth will slow down, but it will be a long time before it reverses,” said Kuang, pointing to China, where decades of low fertility have only recently translated into population decline.

This means there is time to act. Morland argues that countries with low fertility rates face difficult trade-offs between economic growth, migration and birthrates – though others suggest the picture is more complex.

Rather than trying to “fix” falling birthrates, policymakers should prepare for an older population – from rethinking how old age support is funded, to enabling people to remain in work for longer. “Simply telling people to have more babies is unlikely to work,” said Kuang.

These changes may need to be far-reaching. As Harper, the author of the forthcoming book Ageing Societies: Risk and Resilience, puts it: “The main challenge is that 20th-century labour markets, pension systems, family norms, healthcare institutions and long-term care arrangements were built under demographic conditions that no longer prevail.”

Adapting to longer lives will therefore require rethinking how people work, retire and are supported in later life. “The traditional linear life course – education, continuous employment, abrupt retirement – is increasingly obsolete,” said Harper. Instead, longer lives may involve more flexible patterns of work, retraining and phased retirement, alongside efforts to tackle ageism and support lifelong learning, as well as redesigning homes, transport and public spaces to support independence and connection in later life.

And even if telling people to have more children is unlikely to work, there may be ways of supporting them to have the children they want. “Everyone should have the right to decide how many children they have, and when,” said Channon. Yet, many are unable to do so: in three-quarters of surveyed countries, more than 40% of women end their reproductive lives with fewer children than they would like, reflecting economic insecurity, work-family conflict and wider social constraints.

Policies that support families, particularly affordable childcare and parental leave, can make a difference, said Channon, but are more effective at helping people realise their intentions than dramatically raising birthrates.

She and others also call for more comprehensive reproductive health education in schools, noting that “curricula often don’t include important topics such as fertility, preconception health, pregnancy and miscarriage”, which might impact young people’s ability to make informed choices, Channon said.

Migration can help ease labour shortages in the short term, as those who move for work are typically young and economically active, but it is not a magic bullet. Migrants also age, meaning a fixed level of migration would not be enough to keep pace with reduced fertility and an ageing population.

“And I am also wary of the ethics of encouraging migrants to come to the UK solely to fill labour gaps while making a path to settlement, or any kind of viable long-term future here, extremely difficult,” said Kuang.

Others point to wider ethical questions, including the impact on countries that lose skilled workers to richer economies.

The good news is that demographic change rarely arrives with a jolt. It unfolds gradually until its effects are visible everywhere – in classrooms, in health and social care, and in the shifting relationships between generations.

The question now is whether those changes continue to accumulate quietly, or whether governments and societies begin to confront them more openly, and work on ways to adapt.

Celebrate the full compatibility between the highest view of human demographic, economic, intellectual and cultural expansion and development, and the most active concern for the conservation of the natural world and of the treasures bequeathed by such expansion and development in the past. That means growth, industry, what someone once nearly called “the white heat of technology”, and the equitable distribution of their fruits among and within the nations of the world, for everyone to enjoy at least the standard of living that we ourselves already enjoyed.

Let Us Begin Again

There is rightly plenty of attention to Islamic and Chinese oppression and persecution of Christians, but there is still far too little to such oppression and persecution by the Israelis, and even less to their perpetration in the name of the Dharma. Anto Akkara writes:

The results of staggered elections in four key Indian states held in April have drawn diverse reactions from the Christian community following the May 4 counting of the votes.

While the poll outcomes from the two southern states of Kerala and Tamil Nadu have been soothing for Christians, the results from West Bengal and Assam in eastern and northeastern India have come as frustrating for Christian communities.

Kerala: A ‘clear verdict’ against propaganda

In the southern Christian heartland of Kerala, the ruling communist alliance was decimated to 35 seats while the opposition Congress-led alliance won 102 seats in the 140-member assembly of Kerala, a state of 35 million people, 18% of whom are Christian.

“The result has shown that the people cannot be misled by propaganda and they have given a clear verdict against it,” Father Thomas Tharayil, deputy secretary of the Kerala Catholic Bishops' Council, told EWTN News on May 6.

The remark came against the backdrop of anti-Christian propaganda by the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), with prominent Christians in the BJP even attacking Church leaders for the Churchʼs protest against the draconian amendment to the Foreign Contribution Regulation Act.

Christians in Kerala were relieved after four prominent Christians who had allied with the BJP lost the polls despite making much noise against church leadership: P.C. George, a seven-time Kerala legislator; his son Shone George; federal Minister of State for Minority Affairs George Kurian; and Anoop Antony, son of veteran Congress party leader and former Kerala chief minister A.K. Antony.

Half a dozen other Christian candidates the BJP fielded in Christian pockets under its lotus symbol also lost, while the party won just three seats with its Hindu candidates.

Tamil Nadu: A ‘genuinely historic’ TVK upset

In neighboring Tamil Nadu, with a population of 77 million, the new political party TVK (Tamilaga Vettri Kazhagam — Victory Party of Tamil Nadu), founded by Catholic actor Joseph Vijay, stunned the Dravidian parties that had held power for nearly six decades between them.

Under Vijayʼs leadership, the TVK he founded in 2024 won 108 of the 234 seats in the state legislature, with the ruling DMK reduced to 73 and the opposition AIADMK left with 53 seats.

Describing the TVK victory that stunned even poll forecasts as “genuinely historic,” Father Charles Antony, editor of the Catholic fortnightly New Leader based in Chennai, told EWTN News: “Vijayʼs victory is real, consequential, and disruptive [of the] bipolar politics” in the state, which has more than 5 million Christians.

“He visited churches, temples, and mosques alike during the campaign, successfully projecting himself as a leader for all communities. This secular messaging helped his party distance itself from identity-based polarization,” he added.

While Vijay is “Catholic,” Antony emphasized that “his Christian identity is incidental to his politics. Attacks from the BJP [on his Christian identity] with ‘minority’ tag against him, paradoxically, may have helped consolidate minority votes.”

West Bengal: ‘A terrible result many had feared’

The likely outcome in West Bengal — the state bordering Bangladesh — had been the subject of much conjecture even before voting, due to the controversial, hurried action of the Election Commission of India that disenfranchised more than 9 million, or 12%, of its 76 million voters under a Special Intensive Revision of the voter list.

The Trinamool Congress, which had ruled the state since 2011 across three consecutive terms, lost the election badly — as many had feared — winning a mere 80 seats while the BJP captured power in the state for the first time, with 205 seats in the 294-seat state assembly.

“This is a terrible result many had feared,” Sunil Lucas, former president of Signis India, told EWTN News, while prominent Church leaders declined to comment on the results that bring the Hindu nationalist BJP to power in West Bengal — with Kolkata as its capital — for the first time.

“Decoding BJPʼs Bengal sweep: 77 seats won in 2021 retained, 129 wrested from TMC,” Indian Express summed up the results, which were flayed by the ruling party and the opposition parties other than the BJP.

On May 5, the national news channel NDTV carried a similar report with graphic details on how the ruling Trinamool Congress party “performed in seats with high voter deletions.” In constituencies where more than 25,000 voters had been disenfranchised, the BJP had won 95 of 147 seats, the report pointed out.

Assam: ‘Democracy becomes a failure’

In Assam state in the northeast, the BJP improved its tally with allies to 102 of the stateʼs 126 seats, securing a third consecutive term.

“When the ruling party with over two-thirds majority has no member of the minorities in the legislature, democracy becomes a failure,” Allen Brooks, a Catholic and spokesperson for the ecumenical Assam Christian Forum, told EWTN News.

While none of the 82 BJP winners are from the Muslim community, which accounts for 34% of Assamʼs population, Brooks also lamented that “there is not a single Christian in the Assam Assembly now, though Christians account for 3.7%” of the stateʼs 31 million people.

Nirmala Carvalho writes:

Police in the Indian state of Rajasthan have arrested four Catholic men and charged them under multiple sections of the penal code, including attempted murder, after a group of right-wing Hindu activists disrupted a Mass gathering and accused worshippers of engaging in religious conversions. 

According to local Church leaders, the incident occurred in Kalinjara village, Rajasthan’s Banswara district, within the Diocese of Udaipur, during an evening Mass held as part of a Novena leading up to a Marian feast on May 7. The prayer service was being held at a private grotto because there is no church building in the area.

Father Arvind Amliyar of Trinity Parish in Kalinjara told Crux Now that approximately a dozen men entered the gathering during the distribution of the Eucharist and began accusing the Catholics present of conducting “forced conversions.” A confrontation followed, and police later detained four Catholic men who remain in jail facing charges under anti-conversion laws and other criminal statutes.

India has a population of over 1.4 billion people, and the vast majority – around 80 percent – are Hindu. Christians make up just 2.3 percent of the population, a number that has remained unchanged for decades despite accusations of “forced conversion” by Hindu nationalists.

The state of Rajasthan has an even higher average number of Hindus – nearly 90 percent – and its Christian population is just 0.14 percent.

“There is no formal church building in that area, so the faithful gather at a grotto on private property,” Amliyar told Crux Now. “Catholic families and people from nearby areas are invited to join in prayer.”

Father Parsing Damor, a newly ordained priest from the village and a member of the Phil Tribe, presided at the Mass when the group stormed in.

“They started making allegations like ‘conversions taking place’,” Amliyar said. “Our people tried to calm the situation and suggested calling the police to clarify matters.”

The situation escalated when, according to the priest, one of the intruders was seen carrying a knife.

“Our people noticed that one of them had a knife. That’s when tensions rose, and some members of the congregation reacted angrily. A scuffle ensued,” he said.

Police arrived quickly. However, instead of initiating an inquiry into the allegations, officers detained four Catholic men at the gathering.

“They immediately took four individuals into custody—a retired government school principal, a young man, and two middle-aged men,” Amliyar said. “All of them are Catholics. There was no question of conversion.”

Efforts by the local community to file a criminal report were reportedly unsuccessful.

“Our complaint was not registered despite repeated attempts, even when a large group approached the police station,” the priest told Crux Now.

The four Catholics are in jail and have since been charged under multiple sections of the penal code, including attempted murder and violations of anti-conversion laws.

Additional arrests have also been reported.

“The next day, more individuals were taken into custody. There are claims that others were involved or abetted the incident,” Amliyar added.

Meanwhile, fear has spread among the village’s residents, many of whom are Bhil tribal community members. The Bhil people have a larger percentage of Christians than the rest of the state.

“People are frightened. Those whose names have been mentioned are in hiding, especially the men,” Amliyar said.

Despite the confrontation, no serious injuries or property damage were reported. The priest who had celebrated the Mass left the area shortly after the incident.

As legal proceedings begin, the community awaits bail hearings and further developments. The case highlights ongoing sensitivities around religious practices in rural regions and raises questions about law enforcement response and the protection of minority communities.

“This is not about conversion,” Amliyar said. “It was a peaceful prayer gathering that was disrupted.”

Bishop Devprasad Ganawa of Udaipur condemned the incident, saying it disrupts the life of the village and the wider community.

“A peaceful celebration was underway, attended solely by Catholic faithful. Today, being a Christian presents significant challenges, and it often feels as though we are under constant surveillance,” he told Crux Now.

The Bharatiya Janata Party, which has ruled India since 2014, is linked with the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, a Hindu nationalist group.

Hindu nationalists often accuse Christians of using force and surreptitious tactics in pursuing conversions, and such “illegal conversions” can be punished with fines and jail time.

And Nirmala Carvalho also writes:

Four Catholics have been arrested in Kalinjara, a village in Rajasthan’s Banswara district within the Diocese of Udaipur, on allegations that included “forced conversion,” according to local Church officials.

The arrests come amid continuing tensions in India over anti-conversion laws and accusations by Hindu nationalist groups that Christians use coercive or deceptive methods to convert people — allegations Church leaders have repeatedly denied.

India has been governed since 2014 by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which is closely associated with Hindu nationalist organizations, including the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS).

Several Hindu nationalist groups have campaigned aggressively against alleged religious conversions, and in several Indian states, including Rajasthan, so-called illegal conversions can carry penalties including fines and prison sentences.

Christians make up about 2.3 percent of India’s population of more than 1.4 billion people, according to government data. In Rajasthan, where Hindus account for nearly 90 percent of the population, Christians represent roughly 0.14 percent.

Crux Now spoke with Bishop Devprasad Ganawa of Udaipur and Archbishop Thomas Menamparampil, the retired archbishop of Guwahati, about the recent arrests and the broader climate facing Christians in India.

Crux Now: What is your reaction to this latest incident?

Ganawa: The incident is strongly condemnable, as it disrupts the life of the village and the wider community. A peaceful celebration was underway, attended solely by Catholic faithful. Today, being a Christian presents significant challenges, and it often feels as though we are under constant surveillance.

Nevertheless, our apostolate in education, healthcare, and welfare services continues unabated. Our personnel serve tirelessly, reaching out to people of all castes and creeds without discrimination. We remain committed to our mission of contributing to nation-building.” 

Crux Now: Archbishop Thomas Menamparampil, the incident in Udaipur diocese comes amid a broader pattern of increasing hostility. According to the Evangelical Fellowship of India (EFI) and its Religious Liberty Commission, there was an increase in reported persecution in 2025. The EFI documented 747 verified incidents of hostility against Christians in India in 2025, higher than 640 incidents in 2024. Does this rising intolerance against Christians reflect a worrying trend?

Menamparampil: We have reports from Udaipur diocese of a group of 12-13 Hindutva activists disturbing a gathering of 70 Catholics gathered for prayer in Kalinjara village, Banswara District. They were accused of conversion activities and cow slaughter. The scuffle that followed turned violent. The police refused to register a complaint. Our national leaders connive at these instances of violence.

Over 640 such incidents were reported in 2024. Every year there has been a steady increase.

The other day, Dattatreya Hosable, the General Secretary of the RSS, claimed that his organization was not an Indian version of the Ku Klux Klan. In the mouth of some of our leaders today, a denial is the assertion of a fact. It has become a standard mode and widely acceptable. 

It is true, the RSS does not take to direct violence like the Ku Klux Klan, but it plants division among communities that leads to communal clashes and victimisation of the minorities. It motivates and trains Hindutva youth volunteers, places before them goals and strategies, and outsources violence to these risk-takers. Those of them who are ready to be beaten up or arrested are honored as heroes. They know they will be released soon. That explains the recklessness in our streets today.

Crux Now: The BJP has won the 2026 Legislative Assembly elections in West Bengal and Assam. What are your concerns with this victory?

Menamparampil: The victory of the BJP in the recent elections in West Bengal and Assam sends a red signal round the nation. Cow-protection forces will increase. There will be fresh volunteers to enforce the meat ban near temples; new scholars to distort history in revised textbooks; ready accusers of forced conversion.

Healing services are already forbidden by law in Assam. We are waiting to see what the first decision of the new Assam Government will be, giddy with their victory.

What we suggest in response is not collision, but collaboration; not ongoing tussle, but joining hands together for shared social service; not empty boasts of past achievements, but enthusiastic appreciation of each other’s contribution. Let us begin again.

Help? Safeguard?

There is so much more to come out about that five million pounds from Christopher Harborne. Nigel Farage has had security for years, and it seems to have been effective, since he has not been murdered, unlike the far less well-known or divisive Jo Cox and Sir David Amess. No one would call George Galloway obscure or uncontroversial, but it is notable that there has been an attempt on his life, yet not on Farage's. Harborne's money, payable to Farage personally, was for something else, and the failure to register it was not an oversight. Stay tuned.

Since the protection of Farage has thankfully been so successful, then it must be from that duty that the Metropolitan Police was reassigning an extra 100 Officers "to help safeguard the Jewish community". Or what else have they been doing, and who will be doing it now? They have certainly not been defending Ishmail Hussein (we are in "say his name" territory), or a Muslim woman from a deliberate hit and run, or a Sikh woman from being raped by a white man who had thought that she was a Muslim, or 50 mosques from being attacked between June and October 2025, or a building that was being turned into a mosque but which has become only "a former synagogue" when someone has set fire to it. They will, however, have been eight times more likely to stripsearch black children, the same ones repeatedly in 30 per cent of cases, and they will be the people by whom black children were also disproportionately likely to be handcuffed, Tasered, or shot. Shot.

Anti-racist campaigners go where these is most need, and that is not where a COBRA meeting can be called, and a national emergency declared, in response to two nonfatal stabbings out of the 150 to 212 knife attacks committed per day in the United Kingdom, leading to the deployment of an extra 100 Police Officers who had apparently had nothing else to do, as well as the imposition of further obligations on universities and on cultural institutions, obligations of the kind that otherwise inspired derision from the quarters that were lauding them in this case. When a university reported that there had been no incident of antisemitism, then would that be celebrated? Not by those whose comfortable livelihoods depended on there being any amount of it. In any other circumstance, that point would be made forcefully by Kemi Badenoch, and if she finds that "It's becoming fashionable to be antisemitic at London dinner parties", then she needs to find a better social circle, or at the very least explain why she kept such company.