The news that the Greens are set to take seats from Labour come the general election, not to mention the local elections, coincides quite fortuitously with Paddington 2 sweeping to victory at the Olivier awards. Because according to the actor, Arti Shah, the man behind the bear, Paddington reminds us to be “Welcoming, Inquisitive and above all, Kind…for Kindness isn’t ever complicated”.
And there, in a nutshell, you have the philosophy of the Greens, applicable to any subject from Gaza to immigration to horseracing: Be Kind. Except that in politics, kindness is complicated, and what looks like kindness to the party looks to lots of other people like borderline lunacy.
The Greens have got off lightly to date when it comes to journalistic scrutiny. Media pundits who, quite legitimately, toast Reform spokesmen over hot flames have tended to look at the nice Greens and go aww, bless: see the rather easy rise given to the comely plumber, Hannah Spencer, in the Gorton and Denton by-election.
But now that the party is, according to a poll conducted by More in Common, set to win a dozen London seats in the general election and could certainly claim two, one of them David Lammy’s, the gloves are off. The Greens will be subjected to the kind of scrutiny that potential parties of government can expect. They may wither under that pitiless gaze. Because the Paddington approach to policy – Be Kind – doesn’t cut it when the questions are big and complex.
Immigration? While the Scottish Greens are actually committed to open borders, Zack Polanski’s party carries a Refugees Welcome placard. It proposed, in fact, to “treat all migrants as if they are citizens; give all residents the right to vote; help families to be together; dismantle the Home Office; abolish the No Recourse to Public Funds condition to settlement; abolish the ten-year route to settlement [proposed by Shabana Mahmoud] and stop putting people in prison because of their immigration status”.
The Zackwave could dwarf the Boriswave if it were actually implemented
At one estimate, this breezy approach to borders – more or less treating every migrant as a potential Peruvian bear – would add about four million to the UK population. That may indeed be an underestimate; the Zackwave could dwarf the Boriswave if it were actually implemented.
Then there’s the free and easy approach to prostitution, whereby the trade could be licenced by local authorities and potentially run from homes without a licence. There’s the equally free and easy approach to pornography, which I would say, inevitably comes at a cost to the vulnerable. There’s the approach to drugs which is not so much free and easy as unhinged, viz, to legalise all drugs including class A ones like heroin. Just think through the consequences before you put your mark on a ballot paper.
As for Nato, it’s tricky pinning down Zack P on this; for he was formerly in favour of UK withdrawal from Nato; then in favour of reform from within. Just now he’s working out what the party’s strategy is with the help of lefty think tanks like Common Wealth. Radical uncertainty about the most fundamental security alliance of which the UK is a part is not a credible stance at a time of war at a time when UK defence capability has been cruelly exposed in the Iran conflict.
Interestingly, this is an area which disturbed, Darren Johnson, a former London Assembly Member for the party and its London Mayoral candidate between 2000-2004. He left the Greens in 2024 after being suspended for criticising the party’s response to the Cass Review on transgender issues. He said Polanski’s position on Nato “sends out so many wrong signals at a time like this”.
And obviously there’s the outreach to Muslim communities, which makes sense only if you take on board that Green is not just the colour of nature and Ireland but of Islam, and the Greens courting of some radical elements is profoundly troubling. Andrew Gilligan, writing in The Spectator, has scrutinised the credentials of one Ifhat Shaheen Smith who is likely to become a Green councillor for Hackney after the local elections (in which the Greens may win the mayoralty), despite her worrisome take on Prevent and the organisation Cage (which has supported Isis extremists). It’s hard to see how liberal Green policies can be squared with the support of this constituency, but that’s the all embracing nature of Paddington politics for you.
What’s weird about the Greens is how unpreoccupied they are with the actual environment
For me, what’s weird about the Greens is how unpreoccupied they are with the actual environment. One of the significant challenges to do with biodiversity depletion in England is that so much land is being given over to housing; we are concreting over precious habitat at the expense of native species but the Greens seem set on hugely increasing demands on housing stock by inflating migration. Millions more residents mean millions more houses, Zack. They also mean more demands on water and energy.
And talking of water and electricity, I can’t remember hearing a peep from the Greens about the scariest environmental challenge of the last two years, namely, the proliferation of Data Processing Centres (that’s your AI helper) all over the country, which take phenomenal amounts of water and energy to service. No one appears to have conducted an environmental audit on this, and the companies concerned seem to have a licence to deplete our rivers. How does a party that calls itself Green manage to ignore all this? The tech companies aren’t being held to account for the environmental costs of our data.
There are any other number of issues for a genuinely green party to campaign about, but the Greens seem to have lost touch with their raison d’etre, other than a hump about the “climate emergency” (they’ve got issues with City Airport too because it’s used by rich people).
It may be tempting for younger voters to go Green simply to annoy the middle classes – the Mr Browns of the world - in the way that in happier days they might have voted Communist. But the trouble is, there is a scenario in which the Greens may get within a shout of government, and that is in conjunction with the nationalists and the Lib Dems and a post Starmer Labour rump. And in that coalition scenario, Paddington politics may indeed get its chance. In that case, we will find that Being Kind is indeed rather complicated.
