The Greens: a party of thickos, cranks and cultists

Carla Denyer, co-leader of the Green Party of England and Wales, has decided she doesn’t want to be co-leader any longer. She has dropped a statement, telling us: ‘I’ve decided that for the next few years, the best way I can serve the party and the country is to pour all of my skills, passion and energy into being the best MP I can be, in parliament and in Bristol Central.’

Uneasy lies the head that wears a co-crown. But don’t worry – the Green leadership race is already hotting up, like a greenhouse full of nasty emissions. The process takes four months – quite long, really, for people who think the end of the world is next week, and who’ve been screaming that there’s no time to lose for about 60 years now.

My eyes have always glazed over when climate change / global warming / ice ages and burn-ups are mentioned. It’s one of those things where the people who bang on about it all the time really put you off the whole enterprise, like Monty Python and Star Wars obsessives.

I was highly suspicious of the speed at which green issues resurfaced in the late Eighties, the very moment that Soviet Communism started to dissolve and nuclear-war fretting subsided. The earlier ‘ecology’ movement was an artsy-crafty craze of the early Seventies that had been written off, along with tie-dyeing and macramé. But suddenly, out of nowhere, it roared back. This was dizzying, as if ‘Theme from S-Express’ had been knocked off the top of the charts by a resurgent ‘Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep’.

There was, and is, something painfully middle class about greenism. It’s a kind of update of medieval millenarianism, with the same holier-than-thou expressions being pulled, but with the self-flagellating and sackcloth replaced by tutting and nice kitchens.

It would be a mistake to write off a political cause purely because of the vibes of its adherents. After all, the Stop The War Coalition of the 2000s – where Denyer apparently cut her teeth as an activist – turned out to be right about Iraq, even if for almost completely the wrong reasons.

Still, the Greens – and the wider movement – are undoubtedly stuffed with the silly and the off-putting, and Denyer is very much one of them. In parliament, she has to share the corner occupied by the other small parties and the ‘Gaza independents’, jammed up with the awkward squad. Her Commons seat lets her pull performative faces on television, of the ‘I’ve never heard such dangerous rhetoric in all my puff’ variety, whenever Nigel Farage goes on a riff about immigration using naughty words.

But nothing sums up the Denyer daftness better than her reaction to the UK Supreme Court ruling on the meaning of sex in the Equality Act. She objected especially to the interim guidance issued by the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) in its aftermath. For context, this was written in Ladybird-book, Year 8 language, so that nobody – surely – could possibly misunderstand it, or pretend not to understand it. Yet when asked about it by the BBC, poor Carla was caught like a green rabbit in the headlights. She told Laura Kuenssberg:

‘We’re really worried that the guidance from the EHRC has been rushed, clearly it’s been ill-thought-out in my opinion… I have already been, and will continue to be, liaising closely with human-rights and LGBT organisations to get their expert advice. But I won’t hesitate to push for changes in legislation if it becomes apparent that that’s necessary… It seems to fly in the face of the strong tradition of tolerance we have in Britain.’

Once again for the slow table, the Supreme Court ruling and the EHRC guidance are crystal clear – in shock news, there are two sexes. But now for the humdinger, where Denyer really got to show her ‘skills, passion and energy’:

‘The EHRC guidance seems to be saying that if a lesbian association or venue wants to be inclusive, wants to include transwomen [ie, men] – and let’s bear in mind that lesbian, er, women, non-trans lesbians, are among the most supportive of trans people in the whole of society, so quite a lot of lesbian LGBT organisations are going to want to include trans people – the guidance seems to say that they won’t be allowed to.’

The delicious twists and tangles people get themselves into when they start using the nonsense terms of gender ideology! ‘A non-trans lesbian’ is what we used to know as a lesbian (ie, a woman who fancies other women), rather than a ‘trans lesbian’ (ie, a heterosexual man in a frock). And of course the guidance only states that if lesbians want to meet without such men around, they can. And if they want to meet with these enterprising fellas over a gin and bitter lemon, they also can.

What on the melting Earth are the Greens doing, fussing about this gender rubbish anyway, if they genuinely believe humanity is on the edge of extinction? If I thought we were facing imminent ecological catastrophe, the hurt feelings of big fellas gatecrashing lesbian discos wouldn’t be top of my list of concerns.

As we speak, the chief contender in the Green Party leadership race to replace dismal Denyer is one Zack Polanski, whose big claim to fame seems to have been offering a hypnotherapy service that claimed to increase the size of women’s breasts. Really?

The Greens have become a party of thickos and cranks.

Gareth Roberts is a screenwriter, author and novelist, best known for his work on Doctor Who.