Why is Zack Polanski campaigning in Urdu?

They say you campaign in poetry and govern in prose. On current form, the Green Party of England and Wales seems intent on campaigning in Urdu and governing in Lahore.

What else could explain Green leader Zack Polanski’s decision to make a video in Pakistan’s official language? He’s barely been his party’s candidate for Holborn and St Pancras five minutes and already he’s decided to dust off Google Translate and take to social media.

Truly, Zack is a man of many talents. In his latest viral video, the all-singing, all-dancing, bap-boosting eco-bore makes his pitch to the voters of this Central London seat, left vacant by the resignation of Keir Starmer, in some very (and I’m no expert) ropey Urdu.

What’s he saying? I’ve no idea. But nor will almost all of his would-be constituents. The most commonly spoken ‘main languages’ – other than English – in hyper-diverse Camden are French, Bengali and Spanish. According to the council, ‘Other South Asian’ languages are the main language of 575 people in the entire borough. In other words, only a tiny handful of them would be incapable of understanding Zack if he had simply spoken in English.

The Greens have rightly been hauled over the coals for their willingness to campaign along sectarian lines, to ride Britain’s crisis of integration to inner-city electoral success. At the Gorton and Denton by-election, Hannah Spencer tried her hand at Urdu, too. Whole videos in Urdu were released painting Reform as ‘Islamophobes’ and Labour as in the pocket of India’s Narendra Modi.

It made for a dispiriting spectacle, all but making a virtue out of the fact that some of Spencer’s now constituents are so poorly integrated they can’t speak solid English, all while ruthlessly exploiting ethno-religious divides.

But at least that made a rank kind of sense. Gorton and Denton, unlike Holborn and St Pancras, has a sizeable Pakistani-origin population (both, incidentally, have significant numbers of Bangladeshis). It’s hard to work out whether Zack is merely ignorant of those he seeks to represent or trying to rage-bait us into talking about him.

Whatever the reasoning here, the Greens’ Urdu electioneering reminds us of the Balkanisation of British politics wrought by mass migration, multiculturalism and outdated, lax election rules that allow Commonwealth citizens to vote so long as they are legally resident in the UK. They needn’t be British citizens nor speak the language nor have been here for any particular length of time. And yet they have the same vote as anyone else.

This has only incentivised political parties to engage in pork-barrel identity politics whenever an election rolls around: campaigning in foreign languages, leaning into tribal grievances, and even – in some cases – exploiting ‘kinship’ networks to ‘harvest’ votes. What should be an exercise in universalism, in appealing to voters as voters, has been reduced to an ethnic headcount.

The Greens are just more shameless and online about it all. Where before Labour would push leaflets through letterboxes claiming the Conservatives don’t care about Kashmir, or Tory London mayoral hopefuls would fear-monger about Sadiq Khan betraying Sikhs, now Polanski et al are funnelling purposefully divisive content into the TikTok-Instagram-WhatsApp-group pipeline.

Like so much the Greens do, these Urdu election videos are as sinister as they are cringe. Beneath the ‘Live, Laugh, Love’ exterior lurks a grim new sectarianism.