According to the UK pollster Stats for Lefties, the Greens have pipped Reform to be the UK’s most popular party. The announcement was made on the 5th of April. Well, that’s that then. Goodnight nurse.
So watch something else now instead of Prime Minister’s Questions on Wednesdays: only a fight between two strong black women: Kemi Badenoch representing Nigeria and Dawn Butler representing the island nation of Jamaica, with a reasonable prospect of braids being ripped out of scalps, or else perhaps the ceremonial mace being smashed on the bald head of a sneering octogenarian who has just voted to elevate the age of retirement to 79, can make the place relevant or worthy of your time again. Those guys, in both parties: they’re over.
I don’t have a classic relationship with Stats for Lefties. I once told the Irish woman who runs it that she should be put in a cage. While she took exception, to her credit she didn’t report me to the filth (that was over free speech). In terms of her research and methodology, she cannot be accused of misleading the public. Her stuff, when presented without a blood libel, is sound.
What makes this news even harder to frisk is that the poll isn’t actually hers, rather, it belongs to a man called Lord Ashcroft, and he’s a conservative peer. He’s gone and asked what voters’ intentions are, and the majority of respondents have returned with: Green. Already uniparty types are trying to blow holes in the sample. Of course, they are mostly the same people who told everyone not to believe what their own eyes were seeing during lockdowns, so good luck with that one.
Multiple other pollsters now mark the Greens at 47% of voters between the ages of 18 and 24, making them the largest youth and student constituency of any political party. Over 20% of the party consists of “young people”, including the leadership. In next month’s Welsh elections, the Greens are expected to take no less than 10 seats, and then act as kingmakers elsewhere in a place where Labour is set to lose 31 notional seats.
There’s an urgent temptation to ridicule the Greens, insult their leader Zack Polanski (whose smugness gags for insults), produce data that humiliates their policies and betrays their cynical pivot from environmentalism to social justice or argue that multiculturalism is a demonstrably impossible concept. This will inevitably happen, and when it does, much of it will miss vital logic: (as Stats for Lefties would say: “lived experience”.)
Mischievous lies
London is seeing youth unemployment between the ages of 16 and 24 edging toward 25%. The West Midlands isn’t far behind. Employers say the government has priced them out of hiring: claims seconded by recruiters, whereupon the Treasury intervenes by denying it’s doing anything but stimulating growth. With the country pretzeled into popularity contests, unaffordable pensions and conflicting opinions if not mischievous lies, the Greens have swooped, out-flanking even Jeremy Corbyn on the left.
Central to the smashed fortunes of both major UK parties is an obsessive grasp of outdated political theories, the idea that elections are won from the centre being the prime culprit. What has emerged from this ill-tempered, puce intransigence is the kind of vacuum that aloof traditional political classes deserve. Forces outside help too.
Aiding the Greens generously are the shrieks of conceited elders (from an age when homelessness was twenty, possibly thirty very bad decisions away) demanding that today’s young pull their socks up or stop eating avocados. The more this happens, the more the Greens advance.
I’d be careful, mouthing off at the young like that. The Greens are not the sort of people you want controlling councils, let alone laboratories researching radiological attacks or trying to land planes. They make lists. They remember vividly. If you think my generation is a little bit mean to England’s extravagantly cosseted, boat-cruise enjoyers and their extensions across the Anglosphere, just wait until the Greens start auctioning them off at farmers’ markets.
So the point is to start listening, as the few remaining sensible politicians in the country are urging. Polanski is but one performatively demented avatar of a deeper crisis that won’t be solved by spitting at young people whose real fear, concealed behind layers of racial or religious or identity pandering, is of being too penniless to maintain a relationship or make rent come the end of the month (we’re considerably past the stage of housing ladders). Nothing crushes the young spirit more than the idea of surrendering as a ward to the modern transactional state.
More vindictive
I suspect they won’t be listened to, but I also suspect the young Greens have already acknowledged this, so they will plan on being that much more vindictive.
What could that look like? I’m not sure but…maybe a Molotov cocktail attack on Downing Street while their Prime Minister Zack Polanski is inside? Unharmed, he escapes via the back door only to join them on the front line, not in disguise, and starts bricking his residence and swearing at it himself.
When everyone’s bushed, he says goodbye to his comrades and returns to sleep among smoldering ruins, only to wake up the next day and carry on: business as usual, we’re on the up and up, etc.
[Image: David Dibert on Unsplash]
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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