Hold the front page: Green party leader Zack Polanski has requested an investigation. After a blissfully quiet few weeks in which he struggled to score even a “British News” paragraph, and the television studios largely stopped calling, Mr. Polanski is once again in the news.
The age-old rhythms of nature are asserting themselves again. Damsons ripen, the Gulf Stream returns to normal, and Zack the Yack is on the air. The upcoming onset of autumn restores the old routines.
A party leader who demands an investigation can always be sure of an inch or two. And who doesn’t like an investigation? Lawyers make a fortune from it.
But it might be wise for us to investigate further what Mr Polanski is asking for – and why.
He, enraged by Fleet Street’s coverage of the Jason Arday affair and, even more eccentricly, by a commentary article in The Mail on Sunday about the wonderful summer we’ve had, wants a public inquiry into the culture and behavior of the press. “It’s time to get the press in order,” Mr. Polanski raged. Not one of life’s Mister Sunshines, him.
Some of us happened to enjoy the warm weather despite the fires and the difficulties it brought to the farmers, just as we think University of Cambridge had to be exposed due to the promotion of the hapless, underqualified Professor Arday.
So yes, let’s investigate, but let’s make it about the culture, behavior and consequences of the Green Party. Wouldn’t that be much more revealing and urgently necessary?
I don’t know if you’ve ever been to a public inquiry, but these are detailed matters.
Green party leader Zack Polanski has called for an investigation into the British press
They delve into historical emails and company calendars. They subpoena witnesses from an organization’s gubbins and force them to explain controversial decisions. The slightest misjudgment can cause a snowball effect. Low cunning can lead to disaster.
Surveys examine the attitudes of major institutions toward annoying journalists.
That happened in the 2003 Hutton inquiry, which exposed the confrontational approach of Tony Blair’s press secretary, Alastair Campbell, and bungling at the BBC.
Lord Hutton investigated the ‘sexed-up dossier’ on which the BBC, in Lord Hutton’s opinion, falsely claimed that we were involved in the Iraq war. The process ended with the resignation of both the chairman and director general of the BBC. Mr Campbell had also moved on to pastures new.
Similar research has recently been seen in investigations into the Covid pandemic and the Post Office Horizon scandal. Huge volumes of evidence were collected and digitized at great expense. Witnesses were questioned under oath about their work. Questions about transparency – another way of saying honesty – were central.
The Covid inquiry may have been slow tennis, but it has exposed the vulgarity of former Downing Street strategist Dominic Cummings and Whitehall’s suppression of information. The Post Office investigation revealed a similar paranoia about uncomfortable truths reaching the public.
These investigations do not always lead to sweeping conclusions, and some reporters believed that the Hutton investigation in particular was a fabrication.
More instructive are the attitudes that gradually come to light. How did civil servants or politicians behave? How reckless were they? Why were they so jealous of secrets and angry with the fourth estate?
An investigation into the culture and behavior of the Green Party could be intriguing. Friendly senior advisors leaned back on their hind legs, stuck their thumbs into their pant tops and surveyed the partygoers.
Did Green activists agree with their leader that it was ‘time we got the press in order’? They might deny, or perhaps even confirm, that complaining about journalists is the time-honored tactic of politicians with something to hide.
The Green Party has become an unfunny joke. An outfit once associated with hemp-shirted herbivores and middle-class Good Lifers has been hijacked by urban Marxists and anti-Semites. Lentils and wind energy (one follows the other in that particular combination) have been replaced by police bashing and calls for the destruction of Israel.
The party’s now deputy leader, Mothin Ali, gave a speech in 2024 in which he shouted “Allahu Akbar” in front of a Palestinian flag – and called his election as a councilor in Leeds a “victory for the people of Gaza”.
The Greens are no longer genius hippies. They are authoritarian leftists who want to tax meat, ban new gasoline cars and freeze defense spending. Nuclear weapons would disappear, but 30 km/h speed limits would spring up like mushrooms.
They would raise the minimum wage, making it even harder for small businesses to hire young people. Higher tax rates would rise higher than one of Elon Musk’s rockets.
Mr Polanski criticizes tax evaders in his flying way, but has not always been punctual in paying his council tax. He once worked as a breast whisperer, a hypnotherapist who told women he could make their breasts bigger just by looking at them. How very Benny Hill of him.
He sells policies with a similarly light-hearted intimacy.
His party’s drug policy is aimed at heroin being sold on prescription and cannabis being available in liquor stores. The Greens are convinced that women can have penises. Once the entire country has gone to the office for a bag of weed, who wouldn’t?
And then there is their attitude towards the police. In May, Polanski hungrily jumped to the wrong conclusions after police in north London arrested a man suspected of stabbing two Jewish people.
Polanski shared a tweet saying the officers behaved “violently” toward the knifeman. The head of the Metropolitan Police, Sir Mark Rowley, called Polanski’s intervention “inaccurate and ill-informed.” Others wondered if it told us something sinister about a party so heavily adopted by Islamists.
On top of the Golders Green episode came the strange fact of a Green Party conference motion proposing to defund ‘police, prisons and surveillance’ to reduce our ‘dependency on the police’.
The motion emerged from the Greens’ ‘crime and justice working group’. It was also proposed to prevent police from using pepper spray and Tasers when confronting violent offenders.
It is welcome that the motion has now been withdrawn. That it was ever drafted may tell us who the Greens really are. And all this in the week we saw two fine police officers killed in the line of duty in Middlesbrough trying to arrest a car full of joyriders.
Come, come, you might say, the vague old Greens are just a protest vote, a passing phase, an interim dip. Yet this is a party that consistently gets about 10 to 15 percent of the national vote.
It seems to be mainly a prey to the immaturity of student voters. It was partly concern about the Greens that prompted Labor MPs to oust Sir Keir Starmer, who was only elected our Prime Minister two summers ago.
Some idiotic middle-class types might think this couple is Tom and Barbara Good, all woolly jumpers and free-range pigs. The evidence suggests something darker. Let’s unleash Sir Brian Leveson on them. Let’s have the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth about Zack the Yack.
