ROD LIDDLEThe Greens used to be about bees and hedgehogs, but now it’s all bile and venom
The party has drifted to the very far left of British politics, and swallowed all the necessary delusions
Ispent most of last week trying to order giant posters of myself to place in the gardens and windows of the constituency in which I’m standing, in order to frighten the local children. It is the ultimate in narcissistic activity and thus hugely enjoyable. It is also futile, since nobody has asked me for one, not even my close friends.
The problem, I tell myself, is that placards and the like have become the means by which people signal their standing in society. A Labour poster says: “Look, plebs, I am compassionate, decent and a fully paid-up member of the liberal elite. In short, I am considerably more affluent than yow.” A pro-Tory placard says: “I am an avid supporter of cruelty and arrogance.” A poster of me in your front garden, meanwhile, suggests despair and self-abnegation. I’m not even sure my wife would let me put one up. Brings down the tone of the neighbourhood.
There will be plenty of Green placards to be seen across the country. You can out-virtue-signal your Labour-supporting neighbours with one of those, even though the Greens are rapidly becoming the country’s least virtuous party. Apparently almost 20 Green candidates were being investigated by their party for posting foul antisemitic statements on social media, and a further four have already stood down or been removed. The party has rather been dragging its feet over the issue, given that the deadline for nominations was Friday.
It is a bit strange that hating Jewish people now seems to be good for the environment, which is what I thought the Greens were meant to believe in. The Campaign Against Antisemitism said of the party: “There appears to be an obsession with Israel and Gaza, comparing the Jewish state to Nazis, justifying the barbaric October 7 attacks carried out by Hamas, an antisemitic terror organisation, labelling Zionism as ‘cancer’ and antisemitism-denial. How is this fostering good communal relations?”
I don’t think the Greens give a monkey’s about good communal relations. They have profited from Sir Keir Starmer’s laudable stance on antisemitism and opened their organic, nuclear-free doors to any and every Hamas groupie they can get their hands on. A colleague suggested that they have ceased to be a political party and have instead “become a bin”.
For those who, like me, have voted Green in the past, it is all a little perplexing. In the late 1980s they were a very attractive proposition, campaigning on what they now regard, a little derisively, as “soft Green” issues such as being nice to animals, not paving over the entire country to build millions of Barratt homes and keeping the rivers clean. However, as I have mentioned many times before, it is a golden rule that all organisations end up campaigning against the very things they once believed in.
This is certainly true of Labour, and it seems to be the same with the Greenies. The environment has been ditched and the party is now the chief receptacle for every laughable manifestation of corrosive post-rational identity politics, with a concomitant loathing for the heteronormative, the nation state, the nuclear family and so on.
Quite how this — alongside hating Jewish people — fits into a coherent ideology may puzzle normal people, but not the Greens. It is all about intersectionality. The Greens take the view that all those people “oppressed” by the patriarchal, colonialist, white-supremacist nation state have common cause. The trouble with that is there is no such thing as intersectionality, as the campaigning group Queers for Palestine will quickly discover if it holds one of its colourful parades in Hebron (or Bradford West). Islamists are not hugely keen on homosexuality, gender-critical lesbians not noticeably at one with the trans lobby and so on ad infinitum. This stuff does not intersect; instead it jars. Times.
