What is hopeful about Zack Polanski?

The Green Party of England and Wales has an official policy of seeking ‘the effective abolition of private landlordism’. It is worth enquiring, after someone says such a thing, as to how it might work. Would there be a national enforcement agency to make sure that no one was subletting their flat? Forced eviction of lodgers? Air BNB hosts doing time?

The British state, currently unable to build a rail line from London to Leeds without having a meltdown at Birmingham, would now be required to create an enormous security force monitoring against any outbreak of landlordism. This will require a considerable upgrade in state capacity. Oh, and just to let you know, the person in charge of making this happen will be… Green Party leader Zack Polanski.

Not like that, the Green voter says, not like that – but then how? The same with other Green Party policies such as legalising all drugs, removing language requirements for visas, or withdrawing from NATO to ‘fight American imperialism’. I sometimes think that all Green Party policies need to be followed, as a sort of intellectual ‘costing’, with ‘But in a nice way.’ Leave NATO, but in a nice way. Abolish Israel, but in a nice way. Of course, these are not policies in any meaningful sense; they are poses to be struck, not positions to be implemented, any more than a Green councillor can be expected to have any meaningful impact on the war in Gaza.

Poses, and you vote for them if you like the pose and think that endosring it says something about you; the distinct feature of left-wing politics is that it views itself as a revealed truth and not as, as other political tendencies do at their best, a statement of preference. The entirety of this kind of politics functions as such; adopt unworkable proposal, demand candidate asserts unworkable proposal, condemn others who do not. As such, the salient response to the demand that the genocide in Gaza be recognised as such is not to debate the case on the merits but to ask, ‘Why is it so important for you, so many miles away, and with such limited knowledge of the situation, to state this?’

What is risible, tho, is the idea that all this left-populism is supposed to inspire hope. It seems to me to be a straight up category error to present unworkable idealism as something hopeful; in fact, it’s the opposite. Thinking about it for more than ten seconds, it is impossible to outlaw landlords – no other country has managed it, not even the Soviets – and I suppose the idealism is in finding the idea of a world without landlords an inherently uplifting one; for me, it is more inspiring to try, giving the universal human attraction to either renting or renting out a room, to make sure the rental sector functions as well as possible.

‘But we need to teach the government a lesson,’ says the contemporary voter. I have several issues with this iteration of the Labour Party and think their policies on migration have been sadistic to the point of irredeemable. But I do find one thing quite uplifting about them – they’re in government. They’re in power, having made the requisite compromises to get there, and can now do things. Some good, some bad, but all the while things more likely to be in tune with the progressive tradition than parties from elsewhere. For all the rhetoric of the Corbyn left, their sum total of achievements has had less impact than the number of solar farms Ed Miliband approves before lunchtime. Yet of course that kind of far-left politics isn’t designed to get into power, because power would mean accountability; it is designed to fail in a way which can convincingly avoid taking the blame for the failure; it is the anxious avoidant of political styles.

In modern left populism, hope doesn’t mean something wide, realistic, durable, it means ‘the hope of seeing my particular political subculture represented on the main stage.’ The hope of personal validation. It’s not hope for everybody – I don’t think a world where Israel is destroyed or landlords are rounded up or we decimate NATO is hopeful at all. For hope to work, it needs to be something realistic and cognisant of the difficulties of even getting to the stage where you can approve a single wind farm; this is the hope Barack Obama stated well in his 2012 convention speech with ‘Our path is harder, but it leads to a better place. Yes, our road is longer, but we travel it together.’ That's hope, and he sold it well.

Idealism doesn’t have to mean grandiosity. Think of those who helped you in times of trouble. Who helped more, the person who gave you concrete support, a place to stay, but one often presented with clear boundaries and caveats and a need for you to take responsibility to resolve your own situation? Or the person who offered you a load of nebulous, unspecified assertions that everything would get better? The Green Party is the latter friend.

Polanski’s brand of fake ‘hope’ (fope?) is particularly depressing for a specific branch of people – mainstream British Jewry, ironically the community he hails from and frankly is at loggerheads with. In the next few years, the Green Party of England and Wales will inevitably become involved in increasing level of political scandal about antisemitism. Not because of Israel, not because of the media, but because all the ‘antizionist’ obsessives who got Labour into such a spot under Jeremy Corbyn are heading to the party, the people who think that the way to solve the Middle East conflict is to weed ‘Zionists’ out of your local party treasury meeting and bully British Jews for crimes, real or imaginary, elsewhere. And unlike the Labour Party, the Greens are too small to offer any significant institutional pushback.

But, the defence will come, Zack Polanski is himself Jewish! The Greens can’t be antisemitic! Just like the Tories can’t be racist because Kemi Badenoch is Black, right? It genuinely is the entirety of many Green supporters’ answer to charges of antisemitism that Zack Polankski is Jewish, with a selective and rather repulsive outrage at any antisemitism aimed in his direction. Green boosters are up in arms about antisemitism in a Times cartoon of Polanski, but seem rather quieter when their own electoral candidates call Jews ‘cockroaches’.

Of course, daft as Polanski is, he does know what prejudice against Jews looks like. In his old, pre-populist life, he refused to endorse Jeremy Corbyn because of it. And in 2018 he said, as the Greens rejected a motion on making the Party ‘welcoming to Jews’, that he considered that his party’s attitude to Israel ‘felt a bit obsessive at times’. That’s what he really thinks, on Corbyn and Israel, but he’s decided to change his tune. Narcissism is apparently a stronger force than self-preservation.

At some level, though, I think Polanski knows what he’s helping to incubate. I’m less clear that he understands that his new friends will only stay on board if he proves the right kind of Jew for them. One of the ironies of far left attitudes to antisemitism is that the milieu presents the Jew who goes along with their views as the brave outlier, when of course the really brave stance for a Jew on the left to take is to show even the merest affinity for the world’s only Jewish state, let alone self-identify as a Zionist.

Anyway, for these elections there is a raft of dodgy antisemitic candidates running - and the response from the party’s supporters when their words are quoted or objections are raised will be that it’s all the right-wing media trying to stop Polanski becoming Prime Minister or the sinister power of the ‘Zionist’ lobby. That Israel is running false flags in the Kingston Green Party or wherever. Expect to hear the word ‘smears’ a lot and that old favourite left-denialist term ‘weaponised’. Perhaps if left parties don't want antisemitism ‘weaponised’ against them they should try doing less of or making fewer excuses for it.

Polanski is depressing because he’s stupid. He says stupid things, often with a weird gormless smirk when so doing. Asked whether Israel should exist, Polanski said ‘I genuinely don’t think any state has a right to exist.’ Thanks for that, Zack. A really useful contribution to the debate there. It's a first-year student politics answer, and not one of the clever ones, the first-term poseur who just spent a month on a farm in Cuba (or in earlier decades a kibbutzim, ironically enough). It’s the kind of unworkable position which quickly gets disabused by living in the real world of real people.

Why are we supposed to feel hopeful about this? Are we supposed to be happy that the left – which always has the odds stacked against it, through the right-wing media, its own internal division, and its tendency to govern horrendously once in power – has such a low intellectual wattage these days that this kind of unmoored glibness is taken for actual politics?

A Yiddish proverb says that a fool can throw a stone into a pond that a hundred wise men can’t get out. Zack Polanski is a fool; he says silly things for popularity, presents fake solutions to problems real and imagined, and has none of the grit and hinterland that mark a real politician out. And he’s all over the media tossing stones into any pond which will have them.

It is strikingly obvious that this is just a mirror image of all the facile solutions peddled on the populist right; instead of chuck out the migrants, it’s the real villains are the bankers, instead of cut benefits, it’s soak the rich. None of it gets us any further towards anything better in a country with an ageing population and low economic growth rate. It just isn’t true that there’s a massive pot of untaxed money sitting around which the Greens can just skip into power and redistribute and that, incidentally, perfiduous Labour have failed to seize; that’s no more viable a policy than basing your agricultural strategy on obtaining a new species of magic bean. The grim gear-grinding of the current Labour government, for all its shortcomings, is a more thought-out response to a straitened economic climate than Polanski’s promises.

The UK has real, hard problems, and in face of them Polanski is just a Shoreditch-tinged version of the pub bore claiming ‘As far as I’m concerned it’s all very simple...’ Indeed, I’d argue that, given that pub bores are inevitably big fans of nuclear power, Polanski is even less interested in energy issues than they are. He is the second cheek of the simplist arse currently suffocating British public life.

These two populist prongs, the Greens on the left and Reform on the right, feel like the first kind of politics we get into, the politics that appeals when we’re seventeen and think solving the world’s problems is as simple as identifying and denouncing the Bad People.

That this is one of the electorate's currently forward-riding political solutions doesn’t seem to me to be inspiring at all, rather a symptom of the paucity of everything else, including voters’ own level of analysis and their current need for cheap scapegoats. You can’t abolish landlords. You don’t get safer by leaving NATO, and Vladimir Putin is a hundred times worse than Donald Trump. It is all to be honest, pitifully dumb, and there’s never anything uplifting in that.