https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/07/02/the-green-partys-bigotry-problem-is-far-worse-than-reforms/
There’s a political party in the UK that is fielding candidates who seem to have ‘praised’ the slaughter of hundreds of members of an ethnic group. This party has put forward candidates for the 4 July General Election who appear to have favourably compared racist murderers to the French Resistance. It’s a party with candidates who allegedly accused victims of racist violence of bringing the violence on themselves in a bid to win some pity. What awful party is this? What dreadful organisation might have such bigotry coursing through its ranks? It must be Reform, right? No. It’s the Greens.
We need to talk about the Green Party’s anti-Semitism problem. All the comments mentioned above – the praising of bigoted violence, the likening of such violence to resistance – were made by Green Party candidates in the wake of Hamas’s 7 October pogrom. The world witnessed the worst act of anti-Jewish violence since the Holocaust and these people were crowing about Hamas’s ‘freedom to resist’. More importantly – far more importantly – we need to talk about why the Greens’ seeming Jew problem has caused far less concern in chattering-class circles than Reform’s handful of mad candidates who’ve said vile things about black and Asian people. It’s the most glaring double standard of this election, and it demands interrogation.
Election followers will be keenly aware of the racist invective that has been spouted on the fringes of Reform. For the simple reason that it is never out of the headlines. Everywhere you look there is media fury over ‘Reform’s racism’. Every time party leader Nigel Farage appears on TV he is grilled about the bigoted tweets and hateful blather of some of his candidates.
And, to be clear, dreadful utterances have been made. A Reform campaigner in Clacton, where Farage hopes to be elected to parliament, was filmed by an undercover journalist referring to Rishi Sunak as a ‘Paki’. The Reform candidate for Barnsley North reportedly said black people should ‘get off [their] lazy arses’ and stop acting ‘like savages’. Another allegedly referred to the people arriving on small boats as ‘scum’. Another seemed to make sneering comments about the IQ of sub-Saharan Africans. The Clacton campaigner and these three candidates have now all been unceremoniously dumped by Reform, and quite right too. Language like this has no place in 21st-century Britain.
But here’s what I want to know: why is the racism of a small number of Reform-linked people hogging the headlines while the horrific post-pogrom commentary of certain Green candidates is being treated as a small, troubling affair, at best? Or to put it another way: why has there been more cappuccino-spilling in right-think circles over that Reform candidate’s gross likening of black people to ‘savages’ than there has been over some Greens’ seeming sympathy for the real-world savagery visited on Israelis by Hamas? Is saying the word ‘savage’ worse in these people’s minds than praising the savagery of fascistic violence? If so, I’d hate to see the state of their moral compasses.
