'The Green Menace': The Daily Mail's newest scary stories for Middle England
Ahead of the Gorton and Denton by-election, the paper's working hard to cast the Green Party as mad, bad, and dangerous to know.
Today’s Daily Mail front page (headlined Greens plan to hand illegal migrants free house, a wage, and NHS care and including a graphic that screams Beware the Green Menace) is built on the premise that the newspaper has uncovered secret plans by Zack Polanski and co. The key paragraph introducing the ‘revelations’ says:
Unearthed policy proposals seen by the Daily Mail show the Greens plan to 'abolish' immigration detention and grant a full amnesty to illegal migrants to stay in Britain, even if their asylum claims are rejected.
How, I wondered, did Sam Merriman, the Mail’s political reporter, “unearth” the documents in question? What kind of sleuthing did he have to engage in? How many darkened parking garages did he have to lurk in to secure the secret dossiers? Well, they’re all on the Green Party website, so it’s less “unearthed” and more googled.
The Green Party’s migration policy was voted on and passed by members in March 2023 and has been publicly available on its website ever since. So when The Daily Telegraph, gobbling up the Mail’s story, writes of “internal documents seen by the Daily Mail”, it reveals itself to be particularly lazy. Anyone can see these internal documents. They are a very badly kept secret.
The point of pretending that the Mail has uncovered the Green proposals rather than simply having read them on the party’s website is to heighten the sense of fear. The idea is to give the impression that the Greens are hiding their ideas and trying to sneak them past the electorate.
The Green Party’s utopian rhetoric at the beginning of the policy paper — “The Green Party wants to see a world without borders…” — allows the right-wing press to ignore the next part of the sentence: “… until this happens the Green Party will implement a fair and humane system of managed immigration where people can move if they wish to do so.” Now you can argue fairly against that proposition, but using the phrase “open borders” lets newspapers frame the Greens’ actual policy as demanding open borders right now.
It’s also a gift to the Greens’ political opponents. That’s why Reform’s Zia Yusuf can pop up in the Mail article frothing that…
Under the Greens' open-borders plans, not only is every hoodlum and criminal welcome to our shores but entitled to free housing, healthcare and anything else they might fancy.
… and a Labour source can loudly tut:
The public expect immigration controls that are properly enforced – not the open-borders plan the Greens are proposing.
Of course, a calm quote from a Green Party spokesperson is buried right at the end of the article:
We're proud of this policy, voted on and decided by our members... We know it's popular as well – Green policy regularly comes out as the most popular in polls.
The way the Mail frames the Green Party position is the most bad-faith reading. That is entirely predictable and, if the party is going to continue to grow as a mainstream proposition, they’re going to have to be much more prepared for this kind of attack.
While we’re on the topic of bad-faith attacks, let’s look at the second part of the Mail’s pincer movement on Polanski today — an opinion piece from that well-known bastion of balance and reason, Sarah Vine. Under the headline, Green Party leader Zack Polanski is the biggest creep in British politics. He’s a wolf in sheep’s clothing... and here’s why, she writes:
As Keir Starmer limps from one U-turn to another and his financially illiterate Chancellor plunges us all into a growth-stifling tax-and-spend abyss, I often find myself thinking: how can things possibly get any worse?
The answer, of course, is Zack Polanski, whose emergence on the political stage is the equivalent of discovering a rather nasty wasps’ nest in your roof, or realising that a rat has died under your floorboards.
Zack presents himself as a nice, harmless guy who’s just trying to make the world a better place. He’s gay, Jewish (albeit avowedly pro-Palestine), vegan. He buys his clothes secondhand from Vinted and is charmingly self-deprecating about his very English teeth. He doesn’t drive, he doesn’t fly. He talks about ‘hope not hate’.
That all sounds great — well, apart from the bit where Vine compares a Jewish man to a rat — but I suspect we’re in for a turn. Ah, yes, here it comes…
… the truth is, far from being a nice guy, Polanski is the biggest creep in British politics.
His carefully curated persona is in stark contrast to his stated policies and beliefs. He is, bluntly, a wolf in sheep’s clothing.
And just like Starmer, he will say and do anything to pander to his base and get himself elected.
A woman who used to be married to Michael Gove and spent years hanging around with members of the Tory cabinet thinks Polanski is “the biggest creep in British politics”. I’d suggest her barometer for beastliness is entirely broken at this point.
So let’s get into what passes as the substance of Vine’s critique. She begins with a rant about a video featuring the Green candidate in the Gorton and Denton by-election that featured a voiceover in Urdu, aimed at British Pakistani residents in the constituency. Vine says this is “simply sectarianism, every bit as one-dimensional and toxic as the kind of populist nonsense promoted by those on the far Right”. Or, it’s just the kind of voter targeting that has been common for a very long time, but framed as sinister because it’s not about voters who look like Sarah Vine.
As Polanski is pro-Palestine, Vine — who already dismissed his Jewishness earlier in the piece — sneers that he only holds the view because it’s “highly fashionable among young people”. Where she would act utterly disgusted if someone on her side of the political divide had their identity diminished to make a political point, she’s happy to claim that Polanski “uses his Jewish religion as a defence when attacking Israel”. There’s an underlying antisemitism here that implies that being Jewish means you must support Israel.
Having misrepresented Polanski’s identity, Vine turns to twisting his policy positions. The topic of drugs — a great one to terrify Daily Mail readers — is first up:
If elected, Polanski wants to legalise all drugs, including Class-As such as crack cocaine, heroin and the date-rape drug GHB – and build ‘direct partnerships’ between the UK and South American drug cartels.
He wants soft drinks that are laced with cocaine to be available at your local corner shop, and he wants psychoactive substances such as ecstasy and psychedelics to be on sale in nightclubs and music festivals.
Polanski says he’s never drunk alcohol or taken drugs. But in the picture painted by Vine, he’s planning to become pusher in chief, making sure Coca-Cola finally lives up to its name again. It’s obviously a cartoonish misrepresentation of the Green Party leader’s position. He told the BBC earlier this month:
… the war on drugs is not working. In fact, it’s making drugs more dangerous, and actually what we need is a grown-up conversation based on evidence, taking a public health approach that looks at prevention, intervention and makes sure that afterwards people can get the support they need.
We could have an honest and intellectually rigorous debate about drug laws, but Vine has no interest in that. Instead, she pretends that Polanski is the dealers’ biggest friend. The fundamental unseriousness of Vine’s pretend outrage is summed up by the line: “Why doesn’t Polanski throw in legalising rape and murder while he’s at it?”
She then, of course, goes on to argue that Polanski personally wants to legalise sex work and make pornography more accessible. Again, this is a ‘revelation’ of secret Green Party policy documents that… have been around since 2017.
All of Polanski’s views and the policy positions of his party can and should be put under scrutiny. But look at the way Vine summarises him:
Zack Polanski is pro prostitution, porn and hard drugs. Meanwhile, he’s against homeowners, savers, businesses and job creators, and he also hates it if you mention the fact that in 2013 he attempted to increase the size of a woman’s breasts through hypnotherapy.
Red flags? Don’t say you haven’t been warned.
It’s well known at this point that the hypnotherapy story was a Sun feature where the journalist prodded Polanski into a silly experiment. It was stupid, and he’s apologised. But providing that context wouldn’t fit with Vine and the Mail’s mission to present the Green Party leader as a monster, the unhinged intelligence behind the Green Menace.
What the Mail is engaged in is not journalism, analysis, or criticism but writing new fairytales to terrify Middle England. And like Jeremy Corbyn before him, Polanski is simply being set up as the new big bad wolf getting ready to huff and puff and blow all their buy-to-let investments down.
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"he’s against homeowners, savers, businesses and job creators"
Well that's 4 different ways of saying 'landlord', depending on your view of the world.
I laughed out loud at 'The Green Menace' - these people need medical attention.
There’s an argument that Mail readers would be better off as illiterates.