STEVE REED: The vile racists I witnessed in Corbyn’s Labour are now in the Greens. Polanski has to get a grip
Fighting anti-Semitism is more important than party politics.
I demonstrated this when I took on Jeremy Corbyn’s Labor Party, along with other committed colleagues.
We knew we couldn’t allow our party to be taken over by these vile, racist entrants, and I’m so proud we didn’t. Now I see the same people and the same corrosive views in Zack Polanski’s Green Party, and I must say it again.
Yesterday Polanski apologized for his shocking response to the Golders Green attack. After that horror, he turned to X to criticize the police, not the attacker.
I welcome your apology, albeit a slow one, but it’s nowhere near enough. He must now address any examples of antisemitism within his own party and reject anyone guilty of it. In short, he needs to control himself.
In my district, Polanski ran a candidate whose channels suggested Keir Starmer was a ‘Jewish Zionist’, that 9/11 was a ‘false flag attack’ created by Israel, who made offensive statements about the Holocaust, that politics was ‘over-represented by Zionist Jews’ and that the White House was ‘run by Jews’.
Referring to the pogrom that took place in Israel on October 7, this person said, ‘Palestinians are resisting in every way. Last October some did exactly that.’
Remember, he was talking about the callous murder of hundreds of civilian men, women, and children, and he was doing so proudly and publicly on the Internet.
Following the horrific Golders Green attack, Zack Polanski took to X to criticize not the attacker but the brave police officers who responded.
Conservative politician Steve Reed (pictured) says Polanski’s belated apology for his shocking response to the Golders Green attack is welcome, but it is not enough
He has now been arrested but surprisingly remains the Green Party candidate. He is one of many Green candidates who hold such repugnant views.
Last week I wrote a letter to Polanski asking him to ditch these candidates who spew racial hatred. I assumed you didn’t know their views. After all, he admitted that he did almost no checking on his candidates; This in itself was an incredible confession.
I pointed this out so he could fix it. But instead of dealing with this serious problem, he changed the subject.
He said all this was ‘propaganda’. Incredibly, she revealed that she had even apologized to Corbyn for criticizing his handling of antisemitism when he was Labor leader, saying: ‘If I had known what I know now… yes, I would have supported Jeremy Corbyn.’
This is the problem with the hard left. Their arrogant and false moral superiority means that they fail to realize that they too can be racist. And instead of listening and learning from the victims’ pain, they double down and attack.
That’s what Corbyn did, and that’s what Polanski is doing now. But as long as there are people in politics willing to call it out, there is still hope that it can be defeated.
So my message to Polanski, and to any political leader, is: don’t repeat Corbyn’s mistakes and don’t back down.
Instead, put party politics aside, reject these candidates and let’s eradicate anti-Semitism from British politics and society once and for all.
Steve Reed is Secretary of State Housing, Communities and Local Government.
