PROFESSOR MATTHEW GOODWIN: They're the darlings of the liberal middle classes, but from trans rights to Gaza the Greens are forging alliances that should trouble us all
Caroline Lucas, the country’s best known Green politician and a Member of Parliament for Brighton — a city which might be described as the beating heart of woke Britain — has just written a book.
According to the publisher’s blurb, Ms Lucas seeks to ‘reclaim’ Englishness from the toxic legacy of the Empire and Brexit.
Her work, entitled Another England, is a hymn to the ‘radical inclusivity’ of its people and ‘their long struggle to win rights for all’.
Mothin Ali, left, celebrated his election to Leeds City Council by declaring: ‘We will not be silent. We will raise the voice of Gaza. We will raise the voice of Palestine. Allahu Akbar!’
Sentimental or not, it has been well received in certain quarters, and not just by the privileged Lefties you might predict.
It’s fair to suppose, in fact, that Ms Lucas’s ‘greener, fairer future’ is just the sort of thing that Green voters thought they were endorsing in Thursday’s local elections when her party did so strikingly well.
But the Gipton and Harehills ward of Leeds presented a very different vision of the Greens when we reached Friday.
That’s when their candidate Mothin Ali, wearing a keffiyeh, a scarf symbolic of Palestinian resistance, celebrated his election to Leeds City Council by lifting his arms over his head and declaring: ‘We will not be silent. We will raise the voice of Gaza. We will raise the voice of Palestine. Allahu Akbar!’
You’ll forgive me asking, but are we in Palestine or Britain? And are local elections concerned with housing, potholes and libraries, or about importing conflicts from abroad?
Mr Ali was not the only successful Green candidate who seemed more bothered about foreign affairs than the environment. Two newly elected councillors in the west have been accused of posting anti-Semitic comments on social media. And a Green candidate in the east is said to have made insultingly anti-Israeli statements.
The party has responded by launching the inevitable inquiry. More significantly, the Government’s independent adviser on anti-Semitism, Lord Mann, is set to investigate, according to The Times.
Middle Eastern politics are some distance from the songbirds and wildflower meadows that many — perhaps most — Green voters thought they were embracing on Thursday. But to me the real surprise is why anyone should be surprised at all.
The Greens have spent years welcoming cranks, luddites and monomaniacs into their big sustainable tent. Now they’re harbouring sectarian extremists — and it’s no accident.
That’s because we’re witnessing the rise of a toxic alliance between a radicalised liberal Left and some British Muslims who, on the issue of Gaza, are taking an increasingly radical stance. And this alliance — strengthened by the furious protests that followed the October 7 atrocities and Israel’s response — is pushing us into a dangerous new sectarianism.
In recent years the Greens have become a natural home for affluent progressives, people obsessed with racial, sexual and gender identities or reparations for historical ‘wrongs’.
Mr Ali stirred up so much hatred towards Rabbi Zecharia Deutsch, pictured left with his wife Nava, that he was advised to go into hiding with his family
And this group’s relentless focus on identity politics and resentment at so-called white oppressors has led to them overlooking the reality of who they are now letting into their midst.
The Greens can’t say they weren’t warned about Mr Ali, a zealous YouTuber who, as the Daily Mail revealed, had already stirred up so much hatred towards a Jewish chaplain at Leeds University that he was advised to go into hiding along with his wife and children.
Rabbi Zecharia Deutsch, an Israeli citizen, had been called up as a reservist with the Israel Defence Forces following Hamas’s atrocity on October 7. Mr Ali’s charming response was to publicly describe the Rabbi as an ‘animal’ and tell the university: ‘If he’s willing to kill people there, how do you know he’s not going to kill your students here?’ It is all the more shocking that such disgraceful things have either been downplayed by the ‘progressive’ Left or ignored entirely. So long as it’s a minority voice, it must be a good voice.
Which is why, bewildering as it might seem, we now have an apparent meeting of minds between the Greens and dangerous agitators of every stripe from Gaza to trans-rights fanatics.
Today there is a terrible danger of sliding ever further into a kind of fragmented politics that reflects the failure of some groups to assimilate into our wider society.
What else are we to make of The Muslim Vote, a group of pro-Gaza activists who have recently threatened Keir Starmer, telling the Labour leader that he must concede to their demands — including cutting military ties with Israel and granting children the right to pray to Allah in school — or face Muslims withdrawing their vote.
I cannot overstate the dangers in this — the result will be a Britain reduced to a society of warring tribes battling it out for resources and recognition.
Thanks to Thursday’s vote, we already have revolutionary ideologues in the mainstream of British politics.
When you hear cries of ‘Allahu Akbar’ on an evening supposedly devoted to electing representatives who will have power over who will collect the bins, you know there is a problem.
And it is the Greens, and those who follow them, who are responsible.
The Green appeal at the ballot box has always been more of a rallying cry than a political agenda. The movement has spent decades persuading well-meaning people that ‘doing the right thing’ is a substitute for making hard political choices.
Even when it’s the wrong thing, such as stalling the development of nuclear power, so leaving the West dependent upon tyrants in Russia and the Middle East for energy.
Or forcing Germany to close down its nuclear plants and replace them with power stations that burn coal — a move which has ineluctably cost German lives as a result of the pollution, and perhaps the lives of those in neighbouring countries.
Or persuading the Scottish National Party to adopt extreme and widely unpopular pro-trans measures in their coalition government —not to mention the criminalisation of free speech and net zero targets so wildly unrealistic that even the Scot Nats finally blinked and backed down.
No wonder that the march of the Greens has been slowing in the rest of Europe, including in Germany, which now finds its energy policy —and industrial base — in crisis.
The Greens have always been something of the watermelon party: green on the outside, Marxist-red on the inside — and with the authoritarian tendencies to suit.
Green politicians have been consistently happy to close down free speech and free expression in the name of their own authoritarian agenda — a classic sign of the woke Left and something they have in common with many of the radicals they now harbour.
To them, after all, politics is not about negotiation, or bargaining, compromise or the other things that make for a working democracy.
Rather, like the elders of a puritan sect, they think that politics is defined by being righteous. Justified with a capital J.
And why wouldn’t they think that way, when so many of our Greens and the progressive liberals who support them lead lives of such comparative privilege.
Except that when it comes to Mothin Ali and the nasty sectarian politics he represents, they are wrong.
Disturbingly so.
- Matt Goodwin is professor of politics at the University of Kent and author of Values, Voice And Virtue: The New British Politics.
