Green Light?

If Zia Yusuf was wrong, then Alastair Campbell should sue him. Having been Groom of the Stool both to Robert Maxwell and to Tony Blair, at 69 Campbell still has absolutely no self-awareness. But then, where would he have acquired any? None of the Iraq mob has ever suffered professionally. Quite the reverse, in fact. 90 per cent of the British population saw through the Iraq War from the start, but none of the 60 million of us has ever been deemed capable of assuming any of those wholly discredited individuals’ positions in public life. Campbell should be given Allison Pearson’s column in the Daily Telegraph, not because I bear him any good will, but just for the fun of it in so many directions.

Campbell has never rejoined the Labour Party, which, like the Liberal Democrats, is now taking in disgruntled Green councillors. Until the point of defection, each of those had at least pretended to believe that Zack Polanski ought to become Prime Minister. Polanski has never been a spokesman for the British Red Cross, he has never been a spokesman for Make Votes Matter, he has never been a full member of the National Council for Hypnotherapy, and he has never worked for the nonexistent “justice assessment committee” of the Ministry of Justice. But he did fail to pay Council Tax on his narrowboat despite having been registered to vote there, he did fail to register to vote anywhere in the local elections this year, and he did take payment to hypnotise women so that their breasts would grow bigger.

The Greens are the British party for which Noam Chomsky would vote, so taking in their refugees formally admits to the Epstein Class the Lib Dems who were the more pro-austerity and pro-war party to the Coalition when Polanski stood as a Lib Dem for the Camden Borough Council seat of St Pancras and Somers Town, in the Holborn and St Pancras constituency that he recently failed to win as a Green. Polanski had joined the Lib Dems during the Coalition, but they now provide a happy home to Greens for whom even he was too left-wing.

Meanwhile, with deep reactionary roots, the Greens are a party of anti-industrial Malthusianism and misanthropy, and therefore of NATO and the EU, of their war in Ukraine, of the conscription to which that was leading inexorably, of Scottish and Welsh separatism, of gender self-identification, of drug legalisation, of licensed prostitution, and of Peter Tatchell. So yes, interchangeable with Labour, then.

The Green Party was all of those things on the day before its recent conference, yet just as the Old Greens are not making a fuss about its hugely significant abandonment of its opposition to nuclear power, so there was no talk of a firewall until it passed a resolution stating the view of most of the relatively few people in Britain who had much of an opinion on Zionism. Polanski was defeated at Holborn and St Pancras because he was as described above, not because of that resolution.

But how does that resolution look now, anyway? Israel was not an apartheid state because the Arabs were “allowed” vote, but they barely did, so that once they did in such numbers at to end up with the potential balance of power, then that must have been because of the kind of foreign interference that the implacable opponents of Brexit or of Donald Trump were wont to allege? And Zionism required no inclusion of the Arab-led parties in government no matter how well they had done, even if that required further elections, quite possibly on a more restricted franchise, or with a higher threshold, or with the Arab-led parties banned, or with all of those measures? If that is not racism, then what is it? And if that is not racism, then what is?