The Independent's journalism is supported by our readers. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn commission. Comment: Zack Polanski's 'nice' party has come unstuck on contact with reality. The Greens are struggling to deal with antisemitism in their ranks, their leader has been rebuked by the Met police commissioner, and a rise in the opinion polls has stalled. It will only get harder from here, says John Rentoul.
Friday 01 May 2026 13:46 BST. Polanski condemned by his own party over Golders Green after police chief accuses Green Party leader of inflaming tensions.
The green shine is coming off the Zack Polanski bandwagon. I wrote the other day that the Greens would run into many of the same problems as Nigel Farage's Reform after both parties made stunning advances ahead of next week's English local and Scottish and Welsh elections. But Polanski is coming off worse from his first contact with reality long before the polls have opened.
His most serious mistake, I think, was to repost a comment on X that said the police were heavy-handed in the way they arrested a man with a knife in Golders Green. The post said that Met officers were "repeatedly and violently kicking a mentally ill man in the head when he was already incapacitated by taser". I saw that video at the time, and thought the police were exceptionally brave to tackle a man who was far from incapacitated, holding the knife under his body and refusing to give it up. They used the minimum force necessary to disarm him.
Polanski's response prompted an unusual counterblast from Mark Rowley, the Met police commissioner: "Apprehending violent and dangerous criminals is a full contact and messy task which may appear shocking to observers with little experience of policing in the real world." Rowley was equally robust today, after he was accused of interfering in politics. "I'm not getting involved in politics. I'm dealing with operations. I need my officers to have confidence to tackle the most difficult and dangerous individuals." He said Polanski had "stepped into operational policing with his criticism and inaccuracies, and I need to put that straight".
On its own, an isolated mistake might be forgivable. Too many tweets risk making a politician look foolish, as David Cameron once said, and Polanski needs to rein in his social media activity. (The Economist charted his "likes" on Bluesky, and he is at it all day from about 7am until gone midnight.) But this was about the police response to the stabbing of two Jews in the street in Golders Green. As Rowley said, Jews "have experienced a series of targeted attacks on the community, and they expect our officers to act, protect them". (He seems to have been so angry that he missed out some words.) He went on: "That is exactly what our officers did yesterday. Your decision to criticise those officers, using your public profile and reach, will have a chilling effect."
It is one thing to have a reflex leftist reaction to "police brutality", but quite another when two Jews have been stabbed and your party is in the middle of a storm over antisemitism. Polanski has tried to thread the same needle that Jeremy Corbyn did, distinguishing between his and his party's strong criticism of the actions of the Israeli state in Gaza, and prejudice against Jews. But often, just as Corbyn did, he manages to strike a wrong note, appearing to minimise or excuse antisemitism. He did it in a New Statesman interview in which he defended Corbyn and said that antisemitism had been "weaponised" against him. He did it in an interview last week with Hagar Shezaf of Haaretz, in which he acknowledged that "Jewish communities are feeling unsafe", but said: "There's a conversation to be had about whether it's a perception of unsafety or whether it's actual unsafety, but neither are acceptable."
The "perception of unsafety" phrase will haunt him, but his reaction to criticism of missteps such as this is as defensive, prickly and righteous as Corbyn's ever was. And just as Corbyn's hostility to Israel attracted a lot of people with more explicitly unsavoury views, so too the Greens – two of whose candidates were arrested this week over antisemitism. As it happens, I do not think the police should be arresting people for expressing horrible opinions on social media, but I do think that a party that has a candidate saying "ramming a synagogue isn't antisemitism, it's revenge" is in trouble.
Weeks after the Greens won a historic by-election by posing as the nice party that cares about how hard life is, the boost to its opinion-poll standing is over. Average support for the Greens in the first half of April was 16 per cent; it was unchanged in the second half. They are still the cooler protest option for Labour voters than the Lib Dems, who went into coalition with the Tories and broke their promise on tuition fees, but they have collided with reality surprisingly early in Polanski's quest to lead the main party of the left in Britain. It will get much, much harder from now on.
