The Green Party has become a monster

Two years ago, the Green Party of England and Wales became the first political party in British history to lose a claim for unlawful discrimination under the Equality Act 2010.

My ordeal escalated in 2021, when I was reappointed as a frontbench spokesperson for policing and justice. My gender-critical views precipitated the passive-aggressive resignation of Siân Berry as co-leader of the party and the escalation of an unrelenting, concerted campaign by gender-identity ideologues to have me removed as spokesperson.

Despite the fact I had gone through a competitive selection and appointments process, my detractors sought to reverse engineer a process by which they could justify my removal. They drew up a revised spokespeople’s code of conduct and created a special monitoring panel for which I was the first subject of business. It was truly Kafkaesque stuff.

It took the groupthink authoritarians almost another year to have me removed, in 2022. They said I had ‘championed a highly controversial position on trans rights’ that was allegedly incompatible with acting as a spokesperson. I countered that my sensible positions on keeping rapists out of the female prison estate and prohibiting rogue online clinics from dispensing puberty blockers to kids were not just compatible with party policy but required by it, too. As a spokesperson for justice, I was also duty-bound to articulate these positions.

I took the party to court for unlawful gender-critical discrimination and won in 2024. Going to court was extraordinarily stressful and required my absolute resolve in the justice of the cause and the support of countless concerned campaigners and donors. I was horrified at the idea that a political association could remove a spokesperson from post for expressing not just a legally protected belief but also a sex-realist one at that. I was prepared to risk all in the pursuit of justice, including bankruptcy and destitution.

Several crucial lessons are still to be learned by the fanatical ideologues in the party. Above all, the party failed to understand that to remove somebody from post, without being able to say why, is fundamentally unjust. In the words of Judge Hellman: ‘Dr Ali’s removal was, in summary, procedurally unfair in that he was dismissed for breaches of the SCOC [spokespeople code of conduct] although GPEx [the executive committee] failed to identify, consider, or make findings in relation to any such breaches.’

After around 18 months of litigation and six days of trial, the failure of the Green Party to provide chapter and verse of what part of the speakers’ code I was supposed to have breached, and how, demonstrated that the evidence did not exist to begin with. Nor did it show that I had made statements contrary to party policy. The party’s procedural failure showed that they had nothing on me and never did.

The Green Party aggressively fought the cost hearing later that year and lost again. It was ordered to pay £100,000 in damages and costs. Of course, the Greens hated my guts for having lost to me, but something worse was happening here. My detractors in the party still enjoyed the power to set the tone and tactics of litigation, in defiance of all good sense. They were squandering members’ subscriptions, without having to expose themselves to financial risk. Their main contention, that I hadn’t really won, was flatly contradicted by the judge a second time in the following terms, in which it was plainly stated my ‘claim succeeds.’

To this day, you will find Green Party leader Zack Polanski and MP Ellie Chowns spreading disinformation about my court victory. They absurdly claim that the judgement showed that political parties have a right to remove spokespeople. The right of a political association to select or deselect its spokespeople was never in dispute, nor was it part of the claim. What was at stake, crucially, was whether a political party can discriminate against the legally protected belief of a spokesperson at the same time. The judge could not have been more clear: ‘Dr Ali also seeks a declaration that he has been subjected to unlawful discrimination. I grant the declaration sought, although it does not obviate the need for damages.’

The case demonstrated that gender-critical beliefs are worthy of respect not just in a democratic society, but also within a political party. The Green Party cannot act as a law unto itself. It cannot remove representatives unlawfully. By doing so, it betrayed its true motivation – to discriminate against people with gender-critical views.

In any sane organisation, which had just lost a landmark court case, the next step would not be to do the same thing again. Following my victory, the rational thing to have done would have been to reinstate my spokesperson role. Instead, the party sought to find renewed pretexts for removing me entirely.

In 2024, following my legal win, it subjected me to two additional disciplinary processes. In the first, the party suspended me for ‘misgendering’ boxer Imane Khelif. I had simply correctly sexed him, while criticising the obscene risk of harm he and the International Olympic Committee were subjecting women to in the Paris Olympics boxing ring. In the second, the Greens fast-tracked a disciplinary hearing without an investigation into a motion I put to the Green Party conference in 2021 to prohibit GenderGP from prescribing puberty blockers to kids. The timing of all this seemed rigged both to prevent me from presenting a motion on the Cass Review into gender-identity services I had already tabled for a party conference – and from standing as a leadership candidate on a sex-realist ticket.

I’m not through with the unhinged Green Party yet, but that’s because I care about politics. It is now facing a second court case from me, later this year, on substantially the same grounds of unlawful discrimination, including victimisation. The safeguarding of women and girls’ single-sex services, protections and opportunities, alongside the protection of children from the unconscionable harms of rogue ‘gender-affirming’ medical malpractice, are hills worth dying on.

I also regard it as my duty to expose the monster that the party has become. The almost daily revelations about the anti-Semitic bile, whether historic or recent, perpetrated by a slew of its local-election candidates are testament to how far the Greens have fallen. The hypocrisy of the leadership in seeking to stop a ‘Zionism is racism’ motion from being voted on at conference, when they have fed and facilitated hardline Islamic entryism, is evidence of its further hard-left totalitarian rot.

The Green Party has always talked about doing politics differently. That once was the case, in a good way – but now it has become so in a bad way. A political party that acts as an authoritarian law unto itself, and that is seeking to govern the UK, is a menace to society.

Shahrar Ali was deputy leader of the Green Party of England and Wales between 2014 and 2016 and won the first gender-critical case for unlawful discrimination against a political party in 2024. You can support his current case here.