On the eve of the British local elections earlier last month, a voter found on their doorstep a leaflet from the local Reform U.K. campaign bearing the slogan, “Vote Green, Get Islamism.” These words were emblazoned across a Janus-faced image of the Green Party leader Zack Polanski: one half showed him as he actually appears, while the other had been crudely altered to give him a long beard and “Middle Eastern-style” headgear, fusing two supposedly conflicting identities into a single image. This was only one of a series of coordinated attacks against Polanski in recent months, as the Green Party has emerged as a significant electoral threat to the Labour Party.
That Polanski’s Greens espouse “Islamism” is certainly a notion so ridiculous that it hardly warrants serious discussion, yet it was precisely this framing that many in British politics and the media have decided to adopt. Closely linked to it has been another line of attack: that, like Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party, the Greens under Polanski have a terrible “antisemitism” problem. In fact, former Conservative cabinet minister Michael Gove went so far as to declare that, in this context, “Zack Polanski is worse than Jeremy Corbyn.” Naturally, Polanski has been subjected to the same smear campaigns that Corbyn faced in the run-up to the 2019 general election.
