The Greens’ Win Is England’s Loss

The parliamentary by-election victory by the United Kingdom’s Green Party in an area that has for years been represented by Labor is a stunning setback for Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer — and an ill omen for the country he leads. NBC news calls the outcome “a sucker punch from the progressive left” delivered from the Northern England heartlands. The Greens won going away, with Reform in second and Labor bringing up the rear.The result is a feather in the cap of the leader of the Greens, Zack Polanski, and his candidate, a plumber named Hannah Spencer, who will represent Gorton and Denton. Mr. Polanski won the leadership in a landslide last year and has rebranded the party as what he calls “eco-populist.” The real zest, though, appears to come from his rabidly anti-Israel politics. Just this week he signaled support for a “Zionism is Racism” resolution in his party.Israel’s deputy foreign minister, Sharren Haskel, calls the resolution “one of the most hateful and racist documents I’ve ever read.” It echoes United Nations Resolution 3379, passed in 1975, which labeled Jewish self-determination a “form of racism and racial discrimination.” This gambit of the Greens, though, goes even further and asserts “the right of the Palestinian people to resistance,” meaning the murder of Jews. The Telegraph reports that the support that the resolution is already garnering “has led Jewish Green members to fear expulsion from the party.” The irony is apparently lost on Mr. Polanski, a former leader of the Jewish Greens whose ancestors fled to England from the pogroms of Eastern Europe. Now, though, he asserts that Israel’s self-defense makes him “feel less safe as a Jewish person.” Meanwhile, the Greens promise amnesty for illegal immigrants.The district newly won by Ms. Spencer covers greater Manchester, where Mr. Polanski grew up and where, last year, a terrorist attack on a synagogue on Yom Kippur left two dead that was driven, according by police, by “extreme Islamist ideology.” Allister Heath in the Telegraph attributes the Green victory to “the lie that the Jewish state has committed a genocide in Gaza and that Labour is complicit, a modern blood libel” that encourages antisemitism.Mr. Starmer blames Labor’s loss on the endorsement of the Greens by George Galloway’s Workers Party, which won 10 percent in the last election in the same district but stood aside this time. Mr. Galloway, who makes Jeremy Corbyn look like a Zionist, has said of Israel: “No recognition, no normalisation. Just boycott, divestment and sanctions, until the apartheid state is defeated.” Mr. Starmer has lost control of the left flank. The win by the Greens came on the same day that the statue of Winston Churchill at Parliament Square was defaced with graffiti that read “Zionist war criminal” and “Globalise the Intifada,” among other imprecations. Also scrawled was an inverted red triangle, a symbol used by Hamas’s al-Qassam Brigades to denote Israeli targets. Metropolitan Police apprehended a subject who appears to be affiliated with Palestine Action. Mr. Starmer rose to the leadership of Labor promising to banish the baleful antisemitic influence of his predecessor, Mr. Corbyn. ow Mr. Starmer is in free fall, and Corbynism appears well on its way to becoming the charter of the resurgent Greens. So acute is anti-Jewish animus in England that the Trump administration is reportedly mulling offering asylum to English Jews fleeing the land of Benjamin Disraeli, Arthur Balfour, and Jonathan Sacks.The prime minister is correct when he calls the Greens “extreme” and a far cry from being “harmless environmentalists.” That such a party could snag a seat, though, puts in sharp relief the failures of His Majesty’s government. Sir Keir’s recognition of a state for the Palestinian Arabs, a craven capitulation, has done him no favors with those who are ginning up votes over Gaza. Mr. Polanski, at the head of a red-green alliance, has the wind at his back.

The Greens’ Win Is England’s Loss

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