The revenge of the entitled

To see how thin Zack Polanski’s ‘Up the workers’ schtick is, just ask him this: ‘What about Sandie Peggie?’ She’s the Scottish nurse and working-class heroine who is fighting for that most elemental worker’s right – the right to dignity in the workplace. The right not to be treated like trash by the boss class. Specifically she’s agitating for the right of women like her to have access to changing areas in which no men are present, even men who hallucinate that they are women. Would Polanski support her brave stand for workers’ rights against a boorish, heartless management class drunk on post-truth ideology? I doubt it.

Polanski – the new leader of the UK Green Party who’s getting middle-class millennials hot under the collar – is one of few party leaders still giving voice to the lunatic idea that women can have cocks. Asked recently if a woman can have a penis, he said a stark ‘Yes’. So presumably he believes that that 6’2” ex-rugby player turned doctor who entered the female changing area in Ms Peggie’s hospital is indeed a woman, and Ms Peggie should stop being such a transphobic bellend. Presumably he sides with Ms Peggie’s bosses who likewise think women can have penises and that actual women should shut up and put up with these bepenised people in their private areas.

Let’s call it ‘the Peggie test’. And it isn’t only Polanski who would likely fail it. So, I suspect, would the vast majority of the young of the credentialed classes who are lining up behind his supposed ‘socialist’ insurgency. So, I wager, would that politician Polanski is often compared to – Zohran Mamdani – and the Ivy League blue-hairs who propelled him into power in New York City. Because for all the Marxian posturing of this new class of moral influencer, these people actually feel a far greater affinity with wokeness than with workers. In fact, while they might plunder the old language of working-class radicalism, they push an eccentric agenda that is so innately hostile to working people it would even force a nurse to disrobe among men.

It’s time to tell the truth about the Polanski surge. This is no radical uprising – it’s the revenge of the entitled. Polanski, who became leader of the Greens in September, calls himself an eco-populist. In truth, his ‘movement’, like Mamdani’s across the pond, is an entirely counter-populist one. It is sworn to unwinding virtually all the gains made by working-class people these past few years, from Brexit to the taming of the anti-women, anti-worker lunacy of trans to the slowing of the Net Zero ideology that poses such an existential threat to working-class jobs and living standards. The Polanski push is the retribution of the educated, an attempt to restore the woke order in defiance of those working people who have the temerity to oppose it.

There isn’t one genuinely populist breakthrough that would survive contact with Polanski’s barmy army. He says it is a ‘Green Party aim’ to take Britain back into the EU. He promises to start a ‘conversation about rejoining’. In defiance of the millions of men and women who made up that brilliant ballot-box revolt against the EU oligarchy, he dreams of once more making our nation a plaything of that most neoliberal of institutions. As the late, great Tony Benn said of the EU, it is essentially a capitalist gang – it has ‘the only constitution in the world committed to capitalism’, thus ‘destroy[ing] the prospect of socialism anywhere in Europe’. And yet here comes this supposed socialist, the great white hope of the am-dram radicals of Dalston, fantasising about our future bending of the knee to this flesh-and-steel embodiment of the rule of capital.

There’s his aforementioned devotion to the grotesque untruth of women with penises. If trans ideologues like Polanski and his overeducated cheerleaders were ever to darken the doors of power, it would be calamitous for the women of Britain. TERF Island’s women in revolt have won some stunning victories these past few years, from workplace protection for gender-critical beliefs to the Supreme Court’s clarification that equality for women means equality for women — not fellas in dresses who are fooling no one except Zack Polanski and his acolytes. Women under Polanski would once more find themselves at the mercy of a boss class that cares more for the accruement of virtue than for the rights of workers.

He genuflects at the altar of Net Zero, too. He opposes oil-drilling and the building of coal power stations, with seemingly not a second thought for the tens of thousands of well-paid jobs such things would bring. Just as more and more working people agitate against the Anti-Industrial Revolution of Net Zero, from British voters eyeing up Reform UK to European farmers in open revolt against stringent emissions cuts, here come the faux-radical greens elevating their own right to fresh air on Primrose Hill over the right of the oiks to have good jobs and low energy bills. Polanski would go even harder than Thatcher and close all coalmines.

Then there’s the borders question. Working-class Britain is simmering with dissent over the elites’ criminal trashing of our sovereign integrity and their failure – refusal, in fact – to institute a more rational, more democratic immigration policy. The Polanski ‘movement’ takes the opposite view – they basically think it’s racist oppression for Britain to control its borders and forbid entry to illegal arrivals. Greens display far more fire and passion over the ‘rights’ of illegal immigrants than they ever do over the concerns of working-class Britons, confirming my suspicion that the ‘pro-migrant’ stance of the middle classes is directly proportionate to their moral distance from ordinary Brits. Wary of their uneducated fellow citizens, they seek their moral kicks from noisily pitying the wretched of the migrant crisis instead.

There is no party in Britain whose leader and burgeoning membership are as out of touch with ‘ordinary people’ as Polanski and the Greens are. Surveys find that the Green Party membership is ‘overwhelmingly middle class’. The party scores far more highly among ABC1 (upper class) voters than among CD2E (working class) voters. The Green Party has always been a thoroughly middle-class outfit, of course, being made up largely of well-to-do voters keen to protect nature from the toxins of industry and its black-handed workers. Under Polanski, incredibly, an even more irritating section of the middle class has joined – those zealous woke youths determined to defend not only nature but ideology too from the grubby antics and beliefs of mass society.

It’s the dishonesty that gets me. I believe in political freedom – I fully support the right of the clerisy and its sons and daughters to organise in defence of their narrow class interests and harmful ideologies. But to dress it up as ‘socialism’, to hide behind jabber about standing up for ‘working people’ against ‘the rich’ – come on, we’re not as dumb as we look. From gentrified London’s love for Polanski to the Bushwick push for Mamdani, we all know what’s happening here – a counter-revolution against the spirit of populism is gathering steam.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His latest book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy.