Worse than Corbyn: The fall of Zack Polanski

0:02The Telegraph

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0:37Zach Polanski is under fire. After a bruising defeat in a by-election, people are asking, are his days numbered as leader of the Green Party? And does his defeat hand victory to Andy Burnham? Shouldn't the Prime Minister now capitalise on the fall of the Greens and call an early general election? The point about Polanski, I think, is that even on the left, I mean, I appreciate you and I think he's a complete idiot on the right. There are some on the left that just think this guy is a joke. And it's not just about I can hypnotise you to have bigger boobs. It's not just about, oh, I am calling for the rich to be taxed at every given opportunity, but I can't seem to get my own council tax in order when I'm living in a houseboat.

1:19It's also the way that he has handled this Ziazim is racism motion. motion.

1:27Tim, it's the only vote that counts. It's important. We were all absolutely hooked by it last night. Yeah. I'm talking, of course, about traitors. Yes, exactly. When you said we need to do a special podcast about the election, that's what I assumed you wanted to discuss. Richard E. Grant's shocking defeat on the traitors after he adopted the unusual tactic of telling everyone that he is a traitor. Now, I would like to see more of this honesty in our politics. Imagine if Andy Burnham said to the voters, I'm an idiot. Yes. We'd all know where we stand. But what's fascinating is that there were still some people who voted to keep Richard E.

2:14Grant on the show, even after he had looked them in the eye and said, I am a traitor, vote me off. They thought it was a glorious vote. As we have learned so often in politics, sometimes political leaders just tell you what they are, and yet people still vote for them. And on that note, the Green Party may well have lost the Holborn and St Pancras by-election, but they still, depending on who you listen to, Zach Polanski says, tripled their vote. They still came second. and let's be honest the circumstances were actually working against them had he been running against Labour and Keir Starmer was still the leader highly unlikely given that this by-election was triggered by Keir Starmer resigning his seat but but let's do a hypothetical here had Zach Polanski been running against a generic Labour candidate with Keir Starmer as leader I suspect he would have won.

3:17I don't know. Let's look at the numbers. Let's crunch the numbers and then debate that. So the Labour candidate Segal Abdiwali won with 12 ,292 votes. That's a 45.1 % vote share. Polanski in second with 8 ,928. That's a 32.8 % vote share. Conservatives in third. Reform in fourth. Lib Dems in fifth. Uh-oh. Restore in sixth. And George Galloway of the Workers' Party managed to poll just 314 votes. Gosh, how his star has fallen. That's worth commenting upon, by the way, because for the last 20 years, George Galloway has been the master at exploiting rifts within Labour and exploiting grassroots disaffection.

4:02And he has won by-elections by doing that, including on the Israel issue. So the fact that Galloway came so far down the ballot, I think is very significant. It shows that is in people's minds, the Greens are now established as the anti Labour left wing party. And although this is a defeat, I think the Greens have got I've got a point when they say this is technically our second best ever by election result. And what Polanski has been saying, don't worry, we'll go on to on to why he's wrong and a fool. But what he's been saying is people told me on the doorstep where we would normally vote for you.

4:44But we're going to vote for Labour this time around because we think Andy Burnham should be given a chance. One other thing to throw in here, it's worth considering that Holborn is quite unusual as Labour London seats go. It doesn't reflect what you think a London Labour seat is like. It's a little bit wealthier. It is young. It's not quite as ethnically mixed. In other words, it's a combination of wealthy white professionals and working class people of colour. It also has a very, very high proportion of people living in rented accommodation. So it doesn't look it's it doesn't look much like the rest of the country.

5:29And when I went to the Green Party conference, it was striking that Polanski and his big speech really wanted to talk about renters rights and the cost of living rather than Israel. And he made a point, he actually wanted to avoid his conference altogether. He had spoken about possibly moving it because he felt it was a distraction from him campaigning in the by-election. But I think he really wanted this by-election to be on bread and butter issues. But because his conference passed a motion saying that Zionism is racism, people are going to say that the people of Holborn have said no to Polanski's variety of left-wing politics.

6:08Yes. I mean, I think it should be pointed out that the person who came second last time around after Keir Starmer in 2024 was a robustly pro-Gaza candidate. And there is no competition from that kind of person. I appreciate the Galloway effect, but Galloway represents a lot of other things. And therefore, I think that because the Greens were the ones who were on the pro-Palestinian ticket, then they're the ones that gobbled up those votes. however we can't say in one breath oh well people vote either against starmer or for burnham and not take to take into account the personality of polanski so the point about polanski i think is that even on the left i mean i appreciate you and i think he's a complete idiot on the right there are some on the left that just think this guy is a joke and it's not just about i can hypnotize you to have bigger boobs it's not just about oh i am calling for uh the rich to be taxed every given opportunity but I can't seem to get my own council tax in order when I'm living in a houseboat it's also the way that he has handled this ziasm is racism motion and I think he lost a lot of respect because he decided to duck out of that vote at a crucial moment and it wasn't representative of the whole of the Green Party if you add up the numbers of those who actually voted it's less than one percent of the Green Party affiliation okay so on one hand it's meaningless but on the other hand his complete and utter spinelessness in not stating a position on that vote and then not even attending it to campaign in a by-election that he's just lost was found wanting and to her credit his predecessor Caroline Lucas the former leader of the Greens said on Newsnight he needs to consider his position because if he isn't vicariously responsible for this motion then who is and can I also say that this attempt this morning with Nick Robinson on the Today programme on Radio 4 to sort of try and not take responsibility for this motion, I found weaselish in extreme.

8:10We covered a hustings that Zach Polanski attended that was host by the British Board of Deputies, a Jewish organisation, during the by-election campaign where he was openly and actively heckled because when he was asked, what is your definition of Zionism? he himself appeared to ignore the dictionary definition or the definition understood by anybody rational in this country or in Israel or beyond and suggested that Zionism was the genocidal persecution of Palestinians and then we're meant to be surprised that a Zionism is racism motion is passed at conference so he can't distance himself from this in the same way that Jeremy Corbyn incubated anti-Semitism in the Labour Party, despite claiming to be a progressive anti-racist.

9:01This has all happened on Polanski's watch, and he has to take responsibility for it. And there is a parallel between these two parties now, because the campaign against anti-Semitism has referred the Green Party, as it did Labour in 2019, to the Commission on the Human Rights, saying that they're breaching the human rights of Jews because they're discriminating against them. And as the CAA has pointed out, actually, at least Labour under Corbyn never passed a racist motion. The Greens have gone even further. And as happened under the Labour Party, the Greens have clearly been subject to entryism, to characters who are stating quite openly, I have joined this party rather than let the Labour Party, because we're not welcome or we've been expelled, or your party because it's inefficient and going nowhere.

9:51we have joined the Green Party because we believe it is a rising force and it is willing to welcome us. So the Greens have been subject to entryism, you're right, the motion passed with very little participation by members and also surprisingly narrowly as well. But entryism is only possible under two circumstances. One is the institution being either so weak that it doesn't wish to police its membership or is willing to take people like that and the other circumstances is a leadership that signals to entrists this is the home for you and that is what polanski has done whether he meant to or not and by running away from that motion well it would almost be i'm not going to say admirable but it would be more consistent if he had just hung around and voted for it.

10:46Rather than allowing the debate to proceed, avoiding it. And then when asked, how would you have voted? Repeatedly said, I would have voted for the motion had it been amended, but it was not, which is a politician's answer. It's a Richard Nixon answer, right? It's not direct. It's not what we're constantly being sold is so good about Zach Polanski. He talks from the heart. No, he's giving you a very loyally answer. And then when finally forced by Nick Robinson to be clear and say, logically, therefore, if you could not vote for this motion, because had it not been amended, that means if you had been present in the hall, you would have voted against it.

11:34He said, yes, that is correct. But then when pushed to explain why, came up with this extraordinary explanation, which is that he could not support the motion that Zionism is racism, because that means that he, a British person in Brighton, would be telling people in the Middle East what kind of state they can have. Good grief. So he's not against the motion because it is at root anti-semitic he is against it for left-wing reasons of anti-colonialism yes i mean talk about the left devouring itself yes they cannot see that this is just wrong because it's wrong yes they think it is wrong or it is inappropriate or bad politics for their own warped left-wing reasons.

12:30That is how far gone they are. And to be fair to Labour, the debate within Labour wasn't over how many angels you can fit on the head of a pin. It was over, are we entertaining anti-Semitism or not? And eventually the party concluded that it was, and it booted all these people out. But Zach Kolanski's objection to this motion is not on the point of it's racist, it's on the point that it is colonialist. Precisely. And also, So we should look at the wording because it not only defines support for a Jewish homeland in any form as racist, but also calls for the end of a Jewish homeland. So consider that for a minute, because that is actually a harsher proposition, a harsher position than the one actually held by the Palestinian Authority.

13:17Point one. Point two. if Zach Polanski can't speak against that and is using the excuse of not supporting the motion or voting on it that he doesn't want to dictate to the Middle East what he can't deny is that the Greens who have supported this motion and vicariously that includes him he's the leader are now one state solutionists so under the entirety of Jeremy Corbyn's time in office to be fair to him, I don't think there was any one-state solution they were advocating. They were suggesting that the Israelis were advocating one-state solutions, which by the way they weren't, but they weren't ever saying that there should be a one Palestinian state with Jews wiped off the map.

14:00The Greens have gone further and that is what they are now saying, which is about as anti-progressive as it comes, because if you can't talk about a two-state solution and peace, without a two-state solution, there's no police in the Middle East, is there? There's just Jews wiped from the map? Well, Caroline Lucas's objection is that you cannot apply one definition to Zionism. There are Zionists who are racist. There are some of those, I would argue, in Benjamin Netanyahu's government. But there is also Zionism as a legitimate civil rights struggle, as a historic, goes back about 100, 150 years, a historic mission to build a Jewish homeland.

14:43and also as an expression of religious desire. I mean, Jews say every year, next year in Jerusalem, right? Jews have been emotionally, historically bound to the homeland for thousands of years. This is why if you say to Jews, Zionism is racism, they take it to mean that defining yourself as Jewish, being Jewish, is immoral. So what Lucas is saying is you cannot define Zionism just by what some members of the Netanyahu government do. But up until now, and this is where you express this so well and it's so important, up until now there has been a consensus to which we've all been giving lip service that we want a two-state solution.

15:32If you are in favour of a two-state solution, by implication, you support Zionism. Yes, of course. You have to. Because one of the states will be Jewish. That's the point of a two state solution. Yes. It's not an Arab Muslim state plus a secular non-ethnic state. It is clear that is a Jewish and a Muslim state. So if you're in the business of saying Zionism is racism, then as you say, you are putting yourself on the side of one state, which in practical terms means it won't be Jewish. But also morally, that means you're saying yes to from the river to the sea. That's what it means. And you are rejecting that project of building Jewish people a homeland.

16:45Thank you.

16:59when you talked about entryism earlier um i was surprised to learn that an old friend of mine emma dent code about whom i wrote a great deal at the sunday express when she was the labor mp for kensington and chelsea now she has appeared on leaflets in this campaign supporting polanski claiming to be somebody who championed the rights of grenfell victims and that may well be true, but people with longer memories might also remember that she was the Labour MP who was suspended from the party for liking a Facebook comment which stated Israel, quotes, disgraces all of us Jews worldwide, and for labelling Tory mayoral candidate Sean Bailey, who is black, as, quotes, a token ghetto boy and a scumbag.

17:46Now, this sort of language is perhaps reminiscent of the Greens deputy party leader, Martin Ali, who was elected despite apparently glorifying October the 7th. He later apologised for that. And for branding a rabbi in Leeds, Tim, a lowlife, a creep and an animal for serving as a reservist in the IDF. Now that rabbi and his family were later forced into hiding. My point being, some of the people that have been admitted to the Greens or to support the Greens or become leader and indeed deputy leader of the Greens, are people that may well have been rejected by Labour under Corbyn. And I think we should consider that very seriously.

18:26Yes, yes. And on top of that, I'm not comfortable policing people's language. I like generally to assume that people have just misspoken. But even if I don't, I'm not calling the police, I'm going to argue against something if I believe it is wrong. I'm going to argue it on the merits. And the point for me is the Green Party has chosen not to be a pro-two-state, pro-peace organization, but rather to encourage forces that pick a side in a conflict. And again, you contrast that with Labour. And I know that people who are both pro and anti-Israel have been frustrated with what has looked like Labour's moral compromise and it dragging its feet.

19:10I genuinely believe that from Keir Starmer and David Lammy to Andy Burnham and Ed Miliband, they've genuinely tried to thread a very difficult needle here of expressing their horror at what's happened in Gaza while supporting the historic commitment to Jews having their own homeland. I don't think the Greens are bothering to do that anymore. No, I think you're being generous. We're going to call that out. I think you're being a bit too generous to Burnham and Miliband, but I take your point that by comparison to the Greens, that they're trying to do something with a great deal more decency. The question, actually, if we link the two is, where does this leave Burnham?

19:50Because Vivian Lichtenstein, who is the leader of the Jewish Greens, has called for Polanski to go. We've had the Lucas, well, she was pushed and she didn't say go, but she said, consider your position. he's now saying oh well I might hold on for a year the question is this one Tim if he stays it benefits Burnham more because of everything we've discussed because of his tanking popularity the fact that people perceive him to be frankly a little bit of a weirdo with all of the kind of boob gate stuff the frank the fact that he seems completely tin-eared on this issue of this motion so if he remains in place and this often happens after a leader loses a by-election if a party loses a by-election generally they they tank a little bit because the sort of previous party faithful loses their faith they could go back up but if I was the prime minister looking at all this I would evaluate the last couple of weeks as follows I've just given a tub-thumping speech which has resulted in opinion putting Labour at 30 % which is its highest poll rating in many many months reform are going backwards and Farage is still being dogged by donation scandals and actually their peak of last summer is completely evaporated the conservatives have had a fairly lacklustre conference with a good leadership speech kemi is doing well but her popularity isn't reflected in brand popularity and therefore they're coasting along on 20 percent now that the greens are appearing to be tanking and we've got dale vince i mean even dale vince eco warrior dale vince pumping money into the labor campaign to stop polanski from winning you might be saying as a prime minister right now, maybe we should have an early general election.

21:32You might do. And if he doesn't, and at some point in the future, he loses, history will judge him as having no judgment, because he couldn't see how everything was lining up for him. I push back against that a bit because he's got a budget to do. Andy Burnham has not yet taken any tough decisions. He's only done stuff that makes the progressive base feel more comfortable with where Labour is going. And that's why it's attracting votes from the Greens, be it on sanctioning Israeli settlers or putting a cap on bus fares of£2. These are relatively cheap, easy wins, the kind of low hanging fruit that everyone was frustrated Keir Starmer wouldn't pluck, but he now has to do a budget and he has to explain and a spending review in the new year and the 10-year plan and welfare reform, which is a synonym for cuts, has got to be in there somewhere.

22:31I would just say don't rule out the Green Party. At the last local elections, they did very well, including some mayoralties or council leaderships in London. The rise and fall of Polanski has been dramatic. And it speaks to how we live in an age, first of all, of podcasting, in which people are judged perhaps too much upon their presentation skills, rather than their experience, character or depth of thinking. But this is a world in which you can put someone in front of a camera and make them a star. They don't have to go through the BBC or ITV anymore, through YouTube, they can become a star overnight.

23:10And that's what happened to Zelanski. Because if you see him speak he's a brilliant speaker he's basically a motivational speaker he could convince me my breasts were growing right he's very good couldn't tim giving him far too much credit honestly i'm getting older it happens to us all but he he so he has written that way but we also live in a period of what rob colville calls the great acceleration everything happens more dramatically and faster and therefore uh there are peaks and troughs in this people go up very fast, and they go down very, very fast. The question for me is, can you separate Polanski, who does seem to be on that trajectory, from the Green Party?

23:52I think you can. Some people I spoke to at the conference said to me, we're not going away, because there's a generation of voters who have grown up post-Brexit, post-Corbyn, who do not regard the Labour Party as their natural home. They don't have that sense of a class or ideological affinity for it. They might prefer Burnham to Keir Starmer, but where they really feel at home is in the kind of politics that the Green Party embodies. So just as in Europe we're continuing to see the fracturing of the established parties, I don't think we should rule the Greens out just yet. And I don't think we should assume that all those votes are going to return to Andy Burnham overnight.

24:35No, no, and I don't think so either. But consider this, the Green Party is now divided. We've had a number of officials having left over the Zionism is racism motion. We've got a row internally and now a potential investigation, right, by the Equality Commission, which is extremely serious and could have some very dangerous outcomes for the Greens. You've also got to say to those other Green MPs and those who really do believe in cleaning up the rivers and the seas, rather than from the river to the sea, what on earth they're playing at and how on earth this party has lost its central mission, which was, last time I checked, to make the world a more environmentally friendly place.

25:18What's happened to all that? And I appreciate what you're saying about the kind of Corbynistas and the hard leftists will always be picking between the Labour Party, the Green Party, some Gaza Independent, and I had actually forgotten your party had even existed until you mentioned it just earlier. That's fine. But the Greens were picking up some kind of like middle-class support among wavering Lib Dems and wavering Tories. That's not happening anymore. There could be some pick-up for maybe the yellows and the blues here, but let's wait and see. But I do think it is absolutely beholden on other Greens to nip this in the bud now.

25:59You know, these so-called progressives, the Adrian Ramseys, the Ellie Chowns of this world, you know, the latter can go in a pine on Newsnight in the face of questioning by Danny Finkelstein, who is Jewish, and sort of say it's all very disappointing and unfortunate. What are you going to do about it? But I don't think that even if the Green Party gets its house in order, the issue of Israel and Gaza is going to go away because it taps into something that's changed within the country. It's become salient in a way that it wasn't in previous decades. As we're recording, it has been reported that the Reform MP Rob Jenrick has been reported to the Metropolitan Police and referred to the counter extremism scheme Prevent over comments in which he described the quote Islamification of Britain as one of the greatest threats to the country's way of life.

26:50Now, this has been a conference season in which race and identity keeps coming up on the left with the debate around Israel, on the right with the debate around Englishness. And I would argue that this is all a consequence of mass migration. It has forced the British, A, to talk about foreign policy affairs that we've always cared about and have always mattered. But now there is a solid voting block that votes on those issues. Right. And it has also forced us to debate issues of identity that in the past we either just didn't care about or we could gloss over because we all had a kind of an understanding of who we were.

27:38Well, that's changed as a consequence of mass migration. so although as we keep saying on this I agree with you the next general election is very much going to be about capitalism versus socialism the role of the state it's clear that issues of ethnicity and identity are more prominent in a multi-racial society than they were before Tim let's end on a great comment that's been posted on the Telegraph website by Anonymous The only Labour victory I will ever celebrate, thank goodness. Polanski had his Corbyn moment. Now kick him out of politics. Well, you and I will obviously be following the career of Zach Polanski after this great defeat next week.

28:23We've got the weekend tea tomorrow. We've got you having a sort of Sunday showdown with the shadow chancellor, Andrew Griffith, over kind of policies that are friendly to the rich. and then I'm going to be back on Monday with Jacob Rees-Mogg while you take a couple of days off, Tim. Thank goodness for that. Well, hang on. Although people listening won't be able to see this, I'll just let Bertie say happy weekend to the people viewing. Bye-bye, Bertie. Bye-bye, Tim. My little dog is waving his paw at the camera. If you want to see this, take a look at the YouTube page.

29:05Thank you.