Suspension Row Engulfs the Greens; Now They Face The Corbyn Test

Tony Greenstein’s suspension is not just a Green Party row, but a warning that the pressure politics used against Corbyn is now being turned on them. Right, so the Green Party has suspended Tony Greenstein, a Brighton-based Jewish anti-Zionist activist who had only just joined the party, and the wording reportedly used against him was “documented history of antisemitism, including court decisions and recent terrorism charges.” Put that next to the fact that the party is already in a live row over Palestine and over a conference motion treating Zionism as racism – which it is - and the optics of an anti-Zionist Jew being suspended frankly lands like a ton of bricks. It starts looking rushed. It also starts looking somewhat familiar. It starts looking like certain people, certain bodies who have decided that if they cannot beat a rising Green party politically, they’ll resort to what they know worked before, the same filth that was used on Labour under Jeremy Corbyn, the weaponisation of antisemitism that we saw during his tenure. The important thing is not simply that Greenstein has been suspended. The important thing is that the people trying to make him the problem have exposed themselves for pulling this same stunt again. Zack Polanski, the Green Party leader, has not inherited a sleepy little environmental outfit minding its own compost heap. Under his leadership, still under a year old, Green membership has gone from around 60,000 to over 225,000 in seven months. That is the reason the atmosphere has changed. Small parties are tolerated. Growing parties get trawled. That’s a threat to the status quo, unless you are Nigel Farage’s outfit and then you are tolerated, because that’s an establishment party too. Parties that start to matter to ordinary people and don’t serve the establishment get inspected, denounced, briefed against and held up as public hygiene problems by people who suddenly discover a deep concern for standards when somebody awkward starts getting somewhere. Polanski has made himself very awkward in a very good way for all of us.