The Greens are having quite a moment. Since the anointing of Zack Polanski as leader of the party, there’s been a 45 per cent increase in the membership, which is now up to about a hundred thousand believers. The party is also doing very well, comparatively speaking, in opinion polling, reaching about 15 per cent, not very far behind the Tories.
The Polanski surge has come courtesy of a Corbyn-esque policy blitz
But while the Greens are keen to talk up their polling success and growing membership – which is, naturally, good for party coffers – it won’t necessarily correlate to wider electoral success. We’ve been here before: during Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of Labour, the membership peaked at a modern high of about half a million. And we know how that ended.
The Polanski surge has come courtesy of a Corbyn-esque policy blitz, including abolishing landlords, legalising every recreational drug, and opening up the nation’s borders to all and sundry.
Green voters clearly like what they see. Success beckons – or does it? The truth is that the Greens ‘booming’ membership still makes up a tiny group. It’s so hard for us poor humans, with our Neolithic village-sized brains, to grasp big numbers. Comparatively tiny amounts of people can have a disproportionately huge influence in the public sphere, deluding both themselves and us: 105,000 people – the Greens’ reported membership – is 0.16 per cent of the population.
I’m reminded of the story of Michael Foot emerging from a barnstorming public meeting during the 1983 general election campaign to be told that Labour are doing very badly in the polls, and replying that he just absolutely rocked the Hall. Or that feeling you get when you attend a rapturous, crowded gig by a band who haven’t actually had a hit for years. A crowd might reflect something in the air, yes – but a crowd can also be a mirage.
Research from Electoral Calculus tells us, for example, that the people who form the establishment of the country – necessarily a small group – are overwhelmingly progressive left in their opinions; splitting an astonishing 75 per cent in favour of the Left (81 per cent for academics and teachers!).
These are the kinds of people – joiners – who are drawn to such careers. The temperamental difference between left and right is very visible here. Few careers would appeal less to me, a conservative, than sticking my beak in to others’ business, correcting people, boondoggling and shaping society along eccentric lines. On what we are still pleased to call the left, such characters abound. As Yeats so nearly had it, the worst are full of passionate intensity, while the best can’t really be arsed with it all.
And look at where the domination of this small stratum of people in establishment positions has led us: massively in hock to China, awash with legal and illegal immigrants, all of our institutions from Amnesty to Oxford University in reputational rubble. Just think of the trouble we’d be in without their expert guidance! Progressive activists form at best about 15 per cent of the general population, but they control the works.
What are the effects of this? As the Tories discovered, winning elections is a piece of cake. Enacting your manifesto is quite another matter. In government, Reform may well be bogged down by these people in a web of elite spaghetti.
Elite has become a dirty word. It used to mean the best, in the way that we still say, for example, ‘Katarina Johnson-Thompson is an elite sportswoman’. But the data is in; our public elite are, in fact, a load of lefty wrong ‘uns.
All that breezy policy talk at the Tory and Reform conferences – cuts to this, money for that – might as well be weeing in the wind while these people haunt the establishment. It was amusing to hear Kemi Badenoch reveal her plans at the Tory conference, rather like somebody under house arrest making a long list of all the marvellous fun – shopping for shoes, grab a quick Costa then go up the pictures – they’re going to have in town today.
An urgent correction is needed I’m afraid, and there must be no squeamishness. There has to be a screening programme of some kind for these jobs, a modern Test Act. Maybe use an AI to trawl through their works, and see if they’ve ever used, in all seriousness, the word ‘systemic’? A reset is needed. It should be, for example, as unacceptable to bang on about the racist rubbish of ‘reparations’ as it is to use the P or the N word.
For all Polanski’s window dressing of giving hope to the downtrodden and hopeless, I suspect there may be considerable crossover between his new Green members and the progressive elite. There aren’t actually very many of them, but they’re embedded in all the places that matter. Enough! In fact, more than enough.
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