Absurd Greens must steal from the manifestos of other parties

Why do Green political parties still exist? Nobody in Europe angrily demands the overdue introduction of the universal franchise, or insists that every home should have its own toilet, or campaigns against burning witches at the stake. European civilisation has achieved a consensus on these issues, as it has on protecting the environment. So why still the Greens?

Because they are largely a front for otherwise unacceptable ideas. There is hardly a more absurd exemplar of this than the leader of the British Greens, “Zack Polanski”. From his phoney name to his creepy politics, he is like a hermit crab, a confection of unprincipled opportunism and deranged egotism. Notionally, he is “Jewish”, except that he is not really. His family certainly was, escaping from East Europe to Britain just before the Second World War.  He was born David Poulden in 1982 in Manchester, and is largely typical of his generation’s rootless, ruthless blandness, which he sensed, which is why the little crab has crawled into a shell named “Zack Polanski”, the name he gave himself when he began his acting career.  

Did Poulden choose the surname after his Jewish grandfather, as he now alleges, or more probably, after the most exotic, most tragic and most perverse creature in film, Roman Polanski?  The latter is not merely perhaps the most brilliant living film director, but also a Holocaust-survivor, the widowed husband of Sharon Tate (yes, she who was murdered by Charles Manson) and later a sexual-violator of a thirteen-year-old girl. “Polanski” is certainly an attention-finding name for an aspiring actor like Poulden, but once he’d become a therapist, it made more sense to say that his new name came from his grandfather. So what about that “Zach”? Was that an echo of Zak Goldsmith,  the MP who first found personal fame as an environmentalist? And isn’t the requisitioning of discarded items exactly what hermit crabs do?

But before that, Poulden had a brief career as a hypnotherapist whose induced trances – or so he said – could enhance women’s breasts. (Sigh). Now he says he’s sorry for these boasts, and instead he leads often raucously anti-Israel marches through London. He maintains their chants are merely “anti-Zionist” and not anti-Semitic, though in the fevered atmosphere of modern London where attacks on Jews had become increasingly commonplace, that was a dangerous and disingenuous distinction. That distinction became meaningless last week, when two Jews were knifed by an ethnic Somali, an attack that virtually no Muslim leaders have condemned. However, the opportunistic hermit-crab Poulden/Polanski went even further, retweeting a tweet denouncing the police for “repeatedly and violently kicking a mentally ill man in the head when he was already incapacitated by Taser”.  For which the hermit-crab then had to apologise, after even that abject creature, prime minister Starmer, denounced  him….

As the Jewish expression goes: Enough already. 

Poulden is simply a desperately insecure politician trying to breathe life into the environment that, as a stand-alone political issue, is now quite valueless, since all European political parties have carefully-created policies on it. So nowadays, whenever Europe’s Greens – the loathsome capital G is to distinguish the cause from the colour – seek votes, they can only do so by stealing from the manifestos of other political parties. The human hermit-crab does not have a monopoly on this strategy. It is central to all green campaigning.

Why else has Greta Thunberg been repeatedly drawn into the conflict in Gaza on the side of the Palestinians? What prominent Green has ever campaigned against Iran or Saudi Arabia, which have used proxies to fight the murderous civil war in Yemen? Why is almost all eco-activism against the gas and oil industries in the USA, even though Mexico produces 1.6 million barrels of oil a day, making it the fourth largest supplier in the Americas? Its state monopoly, Pemex, enjoys (and enjoys really is the right word) an exemption from Mexican laws governing sulphur content, making Pemex the 7th most polluting company in the world.  So how many convoys has Thunberg led against the Mexico oil industry? Or Brazil, India, or Russia? 

The Cold War continues, as eco-warriors direct their ire against Caucasian Christian fossil fuel operations, even when they directly sabotage national interests. Thus the British politician Ed Miliband has given himself the title of “Minister for Energy Security and Net Zero”, when Net Zero can only mean Massive Energy Insecurity. Miliband’s suicidal policies favour windfarms over British oil, a sort of metaphorical enactment of how communism worked in the old Soviet Union. Yesterday’s Marxists are today’s environmentalists, both seeking ideological solutions to complex problems that are immune to the witchcraft of hope – as, no doubt, were the breasts of Poulden/Polanski’s clients to his hypnosis. 

In other words, fraud fraud fraud, and all the way back to Petra Kelly and the birth of the Green movement in Germany. Unlike Poulden, Kelly was a genuine environmentalist and pioneer, but like him changed her surname, in her case, from Lehmann. From the outset, her Green movement was infiltrated by communists and their fellow leftists.  An early colleague was the left-wing lawyer Otto Schily, who in court defended the fanatical terrorist-leader Gudrun Ensslin, who later was murdered or killed herself in prison. In 1982, Schily met the Libyan dictator Gaddafi to assist him in his attempts to close US bases in Europe. Kelly’s later “partner”, the former Bundeswehr officer Gert Bastian, was probably an agent of Stasi, the East German communist intelligence agency. He was also a member of “Generals for Peace”,  a front-organisation of former army officers opposed to NATO, that root and branch was a creation of the Stasi. In 1992, Bastian, probably fearing exposure as a Stasi agent, shot poor, innocent Kelly dead as she slept, and then shot himself.  

To be sure, it is often beguilingly easy to see a conspiracy by joining unrelated dots. But the history  of the Green movement clearly suggests that one factor (amongst many) in its successful penetration of western democracies is an agenda inherited from the Soviet Union. Yes, Poulden/Polanski is a clown: But like many of his ilk, clearly a useful one. Why would the Greens be so angry about Gaza and silent about Russia, Iran, Sudan, the Uyghur Muslims of China and about Mexico’s dirty fossils fuels? Once it’s coincidence, wrote Ian Fleming, twice its happenstance, three times, it’s enemy action, but repeatedly? That can only mean one thing: war….

Kevin Myers is an Irish journalist, author and broadcaster. He has reported on the wars in Northern Ireland, where he worked throughout the 1970s, Beirut and Bosnia.