Tom Slater
Picture the scene. Nigel Farage unwittingly shares an Instagram snap featuring a grinning man wearing a T-shirt with a noose on it, which jokes about Zack Polanski hanging from a lamppost. Imagine this happened only a few weeks after a Green grandee had been murdered brutally in her home, sparking a terror investigation. The response would be more than ‘outrage’. Farage would almost certainly be arrested. There might even be talk of making Reform UK a proscribed organisation.
Let’s be clear. Polanski was not inciting violence here in any meaningful sense
So I certainly understand the mix of horror and righteous indignation with which Reformers are responding to the latest skidmark that Polanski has left on British public life. For it was Polanski who amplified a post over the weekend, chortling about the murder of a political opponent – namely, Farage himself. Because of course it was. Polanski’s Greens now swim in waters full of anti-Semites, Islamists and the sort of neckbearded ‘progressive’ who, when he isn’t banging on about ‘compassion’, can be found laughing about right-wingers meeting a grisly end. When Zack ‘accidentally’ reposted that series of photos of activists, one showing a man in a black tee depicting a guillotine and the words ‘We’re only making plans for Nigel’, no one could really claim to be surprised.
