Just a few years ago this question would have been silly. Everyone knew the Greens were fanatics of the environment, with everything such zeal entailed.
Scientifically, green is the colour of chlorophyll, the pigment in leaves and grass. But poetically, green symbolises pristine, unspoilt nature, the way it used to be before humans befouled it. Hence the expression ‘God’s green earth’, freely bandied about even by those Greens who don’t believe in God, which is to say most of them.
The Greens translated that nature worship into a whole raft of policies that, if put into practice, would be guaranteed to drop the first world below the standards of the third. Even net zero was too, well, capitalist for them. They’d settle for nothing less than absolute zero: no hydrocarbons, full stop.
Essentially that meant reversing the Industrial Revolution, powered as it was by coal and later oil. As far as the Greens were concerned, we should produce energy the way our forebears produced it: by wind, sun, water and supposedly two pieces of flint rubbed together.
Advocacy of extreme Left policies followed naturally. Since greedy capitalists insist on raping nature for profit, both capitalism and profits had to be condemned. In the absence of bourgeois avarice, what remained was equality for all, as extreme a form of socialism as was possible to achieve before the cold, starving human race died out.
All things considered, that made the task of political taxonomists easy. Everyone knew what the Greens stood for. Most people saw them as oddballs, an extremist, half-mad minority permanently resident in the lunatic fringe.
But then the Greens came up on the political rail by winning the Gorton and Denton by-election, leaving Labour languishing in third place, also behind Reform. The victorious campaign struck most observers as incongruous: environment was hardly mentioned.
It was as if the Greens forgot they were supposed to be green. Instead their strategy was to appeal directly to the Muslims who make up 18 per cent of that constituency. A minority, you might think, but one that can swing elections if voting as a bloc.
The Greens were astute enough to realise this, which is why much of their campaign literature was in Urdu, the language spoken in Pakistan and by the predominantly Pakistani Muslim minority in Britain.
(As an aside, I’d be in favour of a law making English the only allowed language of political and official communications. NHS patient literature, for example, is currently translated into 200 to 450 languages, at a cost that could probably make nurses well-paid.
And my political point is that those who can’t understand the language of a country shouldn’t take part in deciding its politics. As the Texas governor Miriam ‘Ma’ Ferguson put it in the 1920s, “If English was good enough for Jesus, it’s good enough for me.” Unfortunately, she didn’t mean it as a joke.)
The well-trodden path to the Muslim heart lies through visceral hatred of Israel (of Jews in general, if truth be told); championship of all anti-Israel, which is to say pro-terrorist regimes and causes; and removal of all restraints on immigration, specifically Muslim. The Greens shaped their campaign accordingly and won.
Nor was it just a peculiar part of Manchester that could be swayed that way. National polls put the Greens way above Labour and only a whisker below Reform. If the general election were held today the Greens would gain around 100 seats, not enough to be kings but enough to be king makers.
Following the US-Israeli offensive on Iran, pro-Iran demonstrations have broken out all over the country, with the Greens leading from the front. Incidentally, calling these demonstrations pro-Iran is a misnomer. The mob supports not Iranian people but specifically the Revolutionary Guard terrorism fronted by the mullahs.
What exactly is the attraction? After all, Islam frowns on some Green policies, such as legalising all drugs including crack and heroin, decriminalising prostitution, removing all restraints on pornography.
Above all, the Greens are fanatically feminist, whereas Islam is, well, not quite. Specifically in Iran, women must cover their heads and bodies in public on pain of corporal punishment. They can’t get a passport without written permission from their husbands or guardians. They aren’t protected by any laws from domestic violence. Laws governing marriage, divorce and child custody heavily favour men.
One can just see British feminists, Green or other, marching in support of women’s rights in Iran and chanting “Down with misogyny!”. Instead, the polls show that the Greens draw much of their support from women, mostly feminist ones.
This is what I call a conflict of pieties. The cause of Islam is closer to the Green heart than the cause of feminism, and the Greens are prepared to forgo the latter for the sake of the former.
Thus, the party must re-orient itself, but – and I’m happy to make this helpful suggestion – no re-branding is necessary. For green isn’t only the colour of nature; it’s also the colour of Islam.
It was Mohammed’s favourite colour. He felt green symbolised paradise and the garments worn by the righteous admitted there. That’s why many national flags of Muslim countries, including Iran, feature green among their colours.
Incidentally, virgins get a free pass to paradise even if they commit capital offences. To prevent such incongruity, the Iranian regime demands that prison guards rape condemned women before execution, to make sure a virgin doesn’t slip through. One would think Green women would find it hard to reconcile such practices with their rooting for Iran’s regime, but any clash between two pieties is an elimination contest. And it’s Islam that has made it to the finals.
All this is good knock-about fun that one likes to have at the expense of assorted lefties. But that’s all it is, for the essence of the matter is different. The Greens aren’t inspired by their love of anything, be it nature, Islam, Iran or Palestinians.
The more extreme a Left-wing movement, the more evident it becomes that its true inspiration isn’t love but hatred. And the Greens are as extreme as they come. That’s why they aren’t bothered by espousing what seems to be mutually exclusive causes. Such causes are only mutually exclusive in what they advocate – not in what they hate.
The list of the Greens’ bogeymen is long: capitalism and Jews as its embodiment (according to Marx); Israel as a first-world country stubbornly resisting extermination at the hands of her third-world neighbours; the West as the hatchery of capitalism; NATO as the West’s cutting edge; US as an ally of Israel and hence complicit in the latter’s criminal efforts to protect herself; the West in general, as the oppressor of lesser, especially racially diverse nations.
The leader of the Greens, Zack Polanski, is living proof of only the illusory nature of any inner conflicts in his party’s ideology. He himself is both Jewish and homosexual, which doesn’t prevent him from touting a regime that happily murders both groups.
As long as a regime hates what Zack hates, which is Britain with her history and ethos, along with everything the West stands for, he’ll do his best to champion it. Hatred trumps any personal considerations, which is known to be the case with fanatics.
Opinion polls are fickle, and one hopes that the Greens’ current showing is merely a statistical blip. Such things have happened before: a marginal party jumps out of the water, only then to sink without a trace (Nigel Farage should also beware).
Even so, the situation is frightening. It’s just possible that the rise of the Greens adumbrates the downfall of Britain qua Britain, a malignancy eating away at the country’s body politic. If so, run for the hills (but not, on present evidence, for Dubai).
It is indeed a bit scary. There are sections of Texas, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota that are Muslim controlled. Modern immigration is poison to a nation. It’s like a doctor injecting a patient with live viruses, claiming that all organisms deserve an equal chance in the body.
The Muslim world (at least the art with which I am familiar) is right in step with the Green party (assuming all necessary science is explained in the Koran). While in Saudi Arabia, we saw how the locals lived, and the influence of sudden wealth from oil. But it appeared to be superficial. It was common among us to comment that the people will enjoy the money as long as it lasts, but when it runs out, they will just leave their cars by the side of the road and disappear back into the desert. In fact, single car accidents were common, and backroads were littered with rusted hulks left to the sands of time. The fact the telephone lines were laid next to the road, on top of the sand, was a definite sign that the technology was transient. Muhammad had no phone, so it is not important. What is important is what height above the ankle he wore his thobe.
Islam, I think, is an awful religion but one that’s followed with great piety. Christianity is exactly the opposite, on both counts. I’ve never been to that part of the world, but my friends who have all talk about the contrast between Israel and her neighbours when overflying both. One is a flowering, living oasis of luxuriant nature; the other, a dead desert.
Politically, and aesthetically, he resembles Max Schreck’s character in ‘Nosferatu’.