Mailwatch(ed) Forum

Clifton already has a Green MP, I notice. One of my Mum’s neighbours in North Herefordshire is an enthusiastic Green voter for the environment, as she told me. I’m not sure Corbynite socialism was the main attraction, though I may be wrong. My guess is that some of these people are Lib Dems. The Lib Dems got 2.6% in the election.

Zack Polanski has made quite the start as leader.

His communication style is being proven to be warm, open, and almost effortless. Granted, he is not bearing the weight of government on his shoulders as he eases from smile to smile and from hope to hope.

It's all a bit Cleggy (2010) but far too early for cartwheeling. Steady as she goes, through the local elections which are on the nearer horizon.

Hopefully Zack can shave the Reform vote as he's 'authentic' and 'says it like it is.'

Unfortunately, Greens don't really say it like it is on what should be their pet subject. Renewable energy is a necessity for obvious reasons, and a good policy for energy independence. What it isn't, as yet, is cheap, when you add in back up and costs of transporting it from windy places where nobody lives. Ed Miliband does this stuff too, and John Swinney plays cleverly on it, but there's a danger that Farage looks more like the straight talker at the next election. He'll ask Zack where these cheap energy prices are. Zack's answer that we should nationalize Octopus Energy may not cut it.

I'd nationalize Octopus just to shut their CEO up, with his one-sided proselytizing for regional pricing. And I'm a satisfied Octopus customer.

I don’t Greg Octopus's focus on zonal pricing, either. What's stopping a heavy electricity user moving next to a wind farm in West Scotland, having a feed that by-passes the grid and negotiate a private pricing deal?
And Octopus already has a Ryanair type pricing system, on a good breezy day the leccy is free.

One of the other problems as I understand it is that currently green investment is funded by bill payers across the UK. Much harder for Scotland to fund it itself, which is why the SNP didn't back regional pricing properly, instead doing vaguer stuff about how much renewable energy Scotland has.

Greg Jackson's got a job on the advisory council for industrial strategy and the board of the Cabinet Office, which sounds like a reasonable level.

Zack's getting a bit of stick for this. It sounds very plausible if your knowledge is basically "Rise of Hitler" and "The dockers marched for Enoch". Poland was booming when it chucked in its lot with Law and Justice. Le Pen (pere) built his political base in the South with fairly well off farmers and Algeria vets. Are Liverpool and Birmingham, more racist than Epping Forest? They're certainly poorer. Nor is it necessarily the poorest who are the most racist in areas with lots of racists.

"If you don't have scarcity in your life why would you hate another person? That noise you hear is sociologists packing up. "Zack's put us all out of a job", they say. "Though one last question- what about the super rich you've just said are whipping the hatred up?"

It's utterly tragic that for most on the left the analysis begins and ends at 'the rich do it, the poor follow it'.

I'm not exactly free of this myself, and it's rooted in a lot of sensible analysis - them Marx and Engels were onto something, certainly - but it becomes so fucking easy and so fucking thin.

He's not very bright, but very confident. I thought he'd be a major threat to Labour, but I'm not so sure now. It's "shoot from the hip straight talker" stuff, and that's much harder to pull off when you haven't got the media on your side.

Go into any pub in middle England with expensive cars parked outside to hear some weapons grade stupid bollocks about immigration.
Its becoming likely that there won't even be enough immigrants to fill labour shortages in the West in the coming decades so the anti-immigrant mob will be getting what they want anyway.
As a consequence you can have a civilised chat about how we manage an economy with a shrinking workforce. Just kidding, most nativists have no ideas or even thought about the consequences as they're full of shite.

He was sounding off about GDP in another in another interview, like it was some sort of silly concept only Sir Keir bothered with. We need other measure, like pay gaps, mental health etc. We already measures these gaps, and the gender pay gap is reducing steadily, as it has since the nineties. Few people think those things don't matter, but the idea that growth isn't important probably works better if you already have a lot. Anyway, I thought we were relieving poverty because it caused racism? In fairness, that was in a different interview, so can't expect Zack to be consistent.

The Greens had a lot of the same policies before Zack, so the contradictions aren't new. They do though become more obvious when you're "ranging across the media shooting from the hip".

In fairness to the Greens, it seems like social homes are still being built there, just not as council homes.

Migration is Britain’s superpower. Our future depends on embracing that truth, not denying it
Zack Polanski

But you can't build those houses, not there.

Tubby Isaacs wrote: ↑Fri Oct 03, 2025 1:09 pm

Migration is Britain’s superpower. Our future depends on embracing that truth, not denying it
Zack Polanski

But you can't build those houses, not there.

And don't you dare connect them to electricity.

Nor build or widen any roads anywhere, because we already built exactly the right number of roads to cope with a much larger population.

Or put a mast up to improve the mobile signal in the area.

I see Zack's on to "the political class", in true Farage fashion. Does this stuff work from a left point of view? From a Farage point of view, there are lots of voters it does work for, the idea that these "politicians" are arsing about with what they see as fancy dan issues. I'm skeptical if a left politician can makes eg much more immigration, much looser fiscal policy, nuclear disarmament into "robust common sense".

Labour made a pledge for £28bn on Green investment before the election. They ditched it before they even got a sniff of power.

Alternate reading- Labour realized before the election that the country was potless, leveled with the electorate, and won a big majority.

What does Zack think of the outputs on green investment? Or is it, like anything with the left, largely a matter of spending more money?