Hannah Spencer: the cuddly face of a monstrous party

When people talk about ‘useful idiots’, it is hard not to think of Hannah Spencer, the Green MP for Gorton and Denton.

Spencer has the disposition of a children’s TV presenter: relentlessly cheerful and consciously unthreatening. When she first campaigned for her seat, we heard plenty about her fashion sense and her rescue dogs. We heard far less about how she might grapple with any difficult political choices.

Last weekend, Spencer and her Green Party colleagues were confronted with exactly the sort of controversy that cannot be softened with a smiley emoji. On Sunday 4 October, Green members voted to endorse a motion declaring that ‘Zionism is racism’.

As the 90th anniversary of the Battle of Cable Street, the date carried a bitter historical charge. On 4 October 1936, Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists attempted to march through London’s East End, home to a large Jewish community. Local residents, Jewish groups, trade unionists, communists, socialists and anarchists blocked their route. Cable Street became a lasting symbol of collective resistance to fascism and anti-Semitism: a public refusal to let the Blackshirts pass.

Ninety years later, the Green Party of England and Wales passed a motion, by 1,022 votes to 813, that treats most Jews as morally suspect. The party now defines Zionism as an ethnonationalist political project, rejects the equation of anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism, and backs a single democratic Palestinian state across historic Palestine – the end of the state of Israel, in other words. Supporters of the motion insist that Judaism and Zionism are not the same thing. Yet critics point out that Zionism is merely a belief in Jewish self-determination and that the majority of observant Jews attend synagogues that the motion’s proposers would characterise as ‘Zionist’.

So what has Hannah Spencer had to say about this grim turn in her party? A party that calls itself anti-racist must be able to say, plainly and without evasive slogans, where opposition to the Israeli government ends and hostility towards Jewish people begins. It must also confront the possibility that anti-Semitism can shelter behind anti-Zionist language.

When the motion passed, Spencer shared a joint statement issued by her fellow Green MPs and other senior figures. It claimed that, in spite of the anti-Zionism motion, the Greens will always ‘uphold universal human rights’ and would not tolerate ‘discrimination’. On her own Instagram post, Spencer added that she was ‘proud’ of how the debate unfolded and to be part of ‘a party committed to Jewish rights, and Palestinian rights’ – and then signed off with a Palestinian flag and a pink love-heart emoji.

This is extraordinary, no? Once conspiratorial prejudice is given room to breathe, it does not respond to teddy bears, emojis or appeals for everyone to be nice. Anti-Semitism cannot simply be wished away by vacuous slogans.

As Jewish members desert her party, Hannah the Plumber’s cuddles and candyfloss schtick has never looked so contemptible.