Zack Polanski’s World

September of last year marked Zack Polanski’s irruption into the highest echelon of British politics. The Green’s new leader, imbued with the gifts of personality, pitch and popularity, bestowed upon the party an attribute they had yet to enjoy – a brand. Polanski has swiftly turned himself into the Greens’ main asset; sharper than his predecessors, more media-savvy, more combative and far less embarrassed by the prospect of harnessing populism for his party’s good. Polanski, armed with his black and white definitions of good and bad, has diagnosed Britain as suffering from a bleak, billionaire-fed fever.

But fear not! For this ailment, the altruistic Dr. Polanski possesses the perfect remedy: a steady dose of ‘hope over hate’, injected intravenously into every inch of British society and politics. Of course, what this injection entails, the good doctor, much like the difference between Britain’s debt and deficit, can’t quite tell you (Polanski has yet to determine what of the Green’s 2024 manifesto is to be retained and what is to be discarded), but he can assure you of its benevolent nature. He calls it hope. His admirers call it authenticity. Less enchanted observers might identify it as something else entirely – a droll fantasy.

In truth, one must adorn a remarkably strong pair of rose-tinted glasses to interpret the same world Polanski does. Disregard his colourful characterisations of the Greens’ political opponents and (albeit accurate) ridicule of ‘rip off Britain’, and instead turn your attention to Polanski’s inconsistent political history, his spotted recollection of events, both past and present, and his colossal oversimplification of the country’s ills and the sticky-tape remedy he sells. Here lies your ticket if you wish to observe, first hand, how a heavy exposure to one’s own supply of slogans and platitudes spells a recipe for delusion.

A glimpse at the man’s past reveals a much more convoluted political philosophy than one with a passing familiarity of Green-Polanski would expect. An enthusiastic Liberal Democrat before his departure to the sunnier side of politics, Polanski secured his mustard-yellow membership card in 2015, before subsequently embarked on an impassioned defence of the party’s coalition record, which, of course, encompassed austerity and intervention in the Middle East. Although he later sought to dispense of support for the former, Polanski nevertheless voiced his demand for a new leader ‘who [was] proud of our government record’ and ‘immensely proud of what Nick [Clegg] and our colleagues achieved in office’, a record which, as Polanski would have known, boasted austerity and all the ills of which it imparted. Naturally, Polanski has since concretely disavowed the fiscal policy, but this disavowal came only after his departure from the yellow camp in 2016.

Murkier still, Polanski claims that this departure followed the Lib Dem’s support for air strikes in Syria. Yet the party supported those in 2013, two years before Polanski joined, and continued their ardent support for the campaign over the two years that Polanski accrued his then-perfect record of losses in running for political office. A cynic might say that Polanski’s publicised motive for leaving the party is therefore an obvious lie, employed as an obscurant once Polanski’s political ambitions as a Lib Dem were rendered moot. But allow me to remind you of the importance of brandishing rose-tinted glasses whenever Polanski is concerned.

For the man’s revisionism extends beyond party politics. Before his venture into the political sphere, Polanski plied his craft as an actor, counsellor and self-styled hypnotherapist; one who possessed the remarkable ability to enlarge women’s breasts through mental power alone. The Sun published an article in 2013 which documented a reporter’s experience in the Polanski clinic. A 90-minute one-on-one with the consummate professional, at the meagre cost of £220, was sought out by Kasie Davies, the reporter in question, following a period of childbirth-imparted body insecurity. Polanski, man of the people, failed to contain his glee when exploiting Davies’s insecurity in advance of his pseudoscientific enterprise.

The episode was tawdry enough; worse was Polanski’s sincerity. Days later, on Radio Humberside, he offered a robust defence of the practice, stating that evidence supporting the theory ‘is growing’ (Polanski used the article to dubiously cite a study in support of his hustle). He later disavowed his actions and apologised for the affair, claiming, recently, that he issued this apology on a BBC interview the day after the article’s publication. The BBC hasn’t been able to source this interview, but it can duly cite the impassioned defence of the science Polanski offered to Radio Humberside, six days after the given date of his alleged apology. Nevertheless, it is hard to place blame on Polanski for awkwardly skipping around the affair, and indeed, the disputed timing of his apology, when a recent poll revealed that voters are half as likely to vote for the Greens after learning of Polanski’s past sleaze.

Historical complications aside, the man has grown into an undoubtedly talented politician, one especially skilled at presenting moral vanity as moral seriousness. He casts himself as the voice of the ‘caring majority’, a man fluent and camera-ready in equal measure and one who has transcended the grubbiness of Westminster politics. One can see the appeal, but this moral clarity overwhelmingly relies on his observers’ lack of due care and attention.

So-called ‘eco-populism’ is central to his identity. That is Polanski’s own phrase, not a hostile invention of the billionaire class at whose feet he rests the blame for nearly all of Britain’s ills. The point is to harness popular anger in the service of noble ends rather than poisonous ones (or something). Reasonable, but Polanski’s attempts to draw a fluorescent moral line between his brand of insurgency and the tactics of Nigel Farage’s Reform often collapse into vanity when a smidgen of scrutiny is applied.

Picture, if you will, the narrative of a corrupt establishment, a betrayed public, a leader who is not afraid to state what others won’t, a nation at a crossroads, and, above all, a movement that alone grasps the scale of the emergency. Reform may come to mind, but Polanski’s Greens certainly employ those central tenets as well. Polanski dislikes the reminder that his and Farage’s cadences share the same key, but his personal tastes do not render such an observation false. The man has built his rise on the precarious scaffolding of insurgent rhetoric, emotional polarisation and anti-establishment theatre; that embodies populism of all kinds – no matter what term it is prefaced with.

His defenders insist that there is a vast difference between left-wing populism and the Farage variant. Morally, this case can of course be made; Farage has long claimed excessive levels of immigration is the cause of Britain’s woes, while Polanski is more inclined to blame tax-dodging billionaires and corporations for such a lamentable state of affairs. Yet one can oppose xenophobia without becoming blind to demagoguery in more presentable clothing. Populism of every ilk is, at its core, a deeply anti-pluralist phenomenon; its pitting of ‘us versus them’ utilises an unstable grammar, one historically vulnerable to the expansion of them to encompass minorities of every ilk. How long might it take a Polanski government to divert the vitriol of the baying masses away from its own failings once the billionaire class was sufficiently rinsed, the Zionists dispensed, and the corrupt corporations dissolved? Might the masses turn towards a more vulnerable foe, whoever they may be?

In truth, Polanski shares Farage’s ferocious appetite for employing emotional simplification while simultaneously deeming himself immune from the populist charge because his causes are kinder. Some might call this self-awareness, but it is far more akin to self-flattery. Instead, Polanski has engaged in the careful curation of a moral universe in which his side is forever virtuous, his critics forever suspect, and his cause perpetually resting on the precipice of triumph; an alluring image to those looking for both a villain to blame, and a route from which victory can be embarked upon.

But the brainrot imparted by populist language is evident in Polanski’s policies, which exhibit an omni-reliance on slogans over substance. There is something especially absurd about the man’s foreign policy, for a start. On one hand, Polanski does not trust Russian Premier, Vladimir Putin, ‘for a second’, nor would he ‘in a negotiation’ either. Yet in the same breath Polanski is quick to add that, ‘you’ve got to build that relationship’ regarding his approach to dealing with Russia in the event of his ascension to Downing Street. If Putin is an expansionist autocrat who almost exclusively negotiates in bad faith, then relationship-building is, of course, a wholly pointless endeavour. Polanski is clearly aware of this, but his commitment to the soundbite, one he knows his voters will never care to dissect, is symptomatic of a general posture that substitutes diplomatic theatre for strategic seriousness. 

This confusion only deepens when Polanski’s flirtation with leaving NATO and constructing alternative alliances with countries such as Brazil and Mexico, is explored. Undermining Britain’s security architecture and replacing it with alliances that are just as geographically incoherent as they are incapable of replacing NATO’s deterrent against hostile states is not simply bad policymaking, it is a fantasists proposition that would endanger British lives. But again, Polanski’s populism provides shelter against such cogent criticism emerging from among his own. By framing his desire to leave NATO through the prism of Trump and American imperialism, Polanski simultaneously provides a reason and justification to depart from the alliance, within a handful of words. Few Greens will care to investigate just how damaging a policy such a departure would be, as that would imply taking sides with a villain of Polanski’s ever-evolving narrative.

Of course, the same oxymoronic strand of both oversimplification and confusion is present in the Green’s economic policy, where slogans are too employed as a surrogate for serious argument. ‘Go after billionaires, go after water companies, go after corporations’ is less an economic programme than it is a chant, yet such a sentiment possesses pride of place in Polanski's most recent economic machinations. Polanski’s assurance that a comprehensive wealth tax would rapidly ‘get that money flowing through the economy and benefitting everyone’ brushes aside every awkward question surrounding capital flight, tax avoidance and investor behaviour, but his chosen audience are unlikely to care; where Farage has curated a faithful who believe that stemming mass immigration will cure Britain of its ills, Polanski’s believe that holding the rich to account will achieve the same. What emerges from both Polanski and Farage’s chosen strategy is the triumph of conviction where coherent policy ought to hold sway.

Yet, policy aside, the moral grandstanding of Polanski’s populism would hold a little more weight did it not encompass the near-complete dismissal of the antisemitism row of which the Greens are embroiled. This row does not encapsulate a few embarrassing headlines, but evidences a deep rot in the party which has seen activist group chats describe Jews as an ‘abomination to this planet’, a candidate spuriously claim that the fire-bombing of Jewish ambulances in London last month was an ‘inside job’, and a Spring conference consumed by an attempt to push a ‘Zionism is Racism’ motion, only for the entire event to collapse into a flurry of no-confidence votes and suspended motions before a vote could even be completed. However one chooses to parse Zionism, and whatever the validity of the claims made, you would be amiss to classify the aforementioned behaviours as indicative of a movement in serene moral health.

Polanski frequently rebuts allegations of antisemitism directed at both party members and policy, not based on their substance, but through the prism of identity. ‘Very obviously, as a Jewish person and deputy leader of the party, I wouldn’t allow antisemitism in the Green party’, Polanski informed the Jewish Socialists. More recently, he declared: ‘I’m the only Jewish person to lead a political party…I’ll take no lectures from [The Daily Mail] on antisemitism’. Fair enough; Yet neither soundbite actually addresses the issue at hand. Being Jewish certainly renders antisemitic abuse levelled at Polanski uniquely sinister, but his identity does not automatically render the party he leads, nor the causes he champions, immune from the bile of prejudice within its ranks. Still less does it cast Polanski as the arbiter of what is and isn’t antisemitic, particularly when Jewish members of his own party have dissented from Polanski’s stance on Zionism citing such grounds. A serious leader would appreciate this nuance, yet for Polanski, utilising his identity as a shield with which to deflect concerns expressed by his Jewish party peers allows for the easy dismissal of allegations which could feasibly poison the Green’s electoral chances. In Polanski’s world, the decision to brandish identity in aid of the greater good, regardless of the flawed ratiocination such a strategy employs, is therefore easily justified.

Lopsided standards become especially apparent when Polanski takes aim at Reform. He is perfectly content with painting Farage’s cadre as institutionally Islamophobic, and there is enough in Reform’s orbit to justify such scrutiny, but identity, one is reliably informed, cannot absolve Reform of racism simply because the previous chief architect of its policy, Zia Yusuf, is a Muslim politician of Sri Lankan descent. Quite right; yet if Yusuf’s background provides insufficient means to exonerate Reform, then Polanski’s Jewish identity similarly fails to cleanse the Greens of allegations of antisemitism in perpetuity.

This train of thought can be followed with relative ease. Do Labour’s proposed immigration reforms lack any trace of Islamophobia because Shabana Mahmood, the Home Secretary who drafted the plans, is Muslim? Similarly, are the Tories guarded from racist and misogynist policies seeping into their next manifesto on account of their leader Kemi Badenoch’s identity as a black woman? The answers to such questions are obvious; what is less obvious is whether they carry a principle to which Zack Polanski is privy.

Of course, there too exists Polanski’s tantrum over the Daily Mail, which cited the apparent existential concern at the prospect of the Green’s electoral triumph among anonymous members of his own family. Such reporting was undoubtedly controversial, yet despite prevailing sentiment, it is actually remarkably easy for one to despise the paper’s methods while deriving concern from Polanski’s subsequent response. He did not merely denounce the story; he peppered the authoring journalist for days on social media, declared the Daily Mail a ‘shit rag’ and promptly folded the sad episode into a clumsy call for media reform. 

Faced with an unflattering story, Polanski swiftly transitioned from rebuttal to denunciation, and from denunciation to calls for ‘media reform’ directed at the press who had dared to run a story which, the journalist in question claims, was a substantiated story brought before her, rather than a smear campaign she pursued independently. Yet for Polanski, the story was not evidence of genuine alarm over the Green’s trajectory among those close to him, but was instead quickly repackaged into a grand drama of Zack versus the machine. 

But then such is the substance of Zack Polanski’s artificial world. When reality presents criticism, it must be muted, and when reality flatters him, he cannot resist flattering himself more. As much is evident in his eager citation of a forecast for the May local elections which estimated a Green gain of over 400 seats. Yet, despite his reposting of the projection as evidence that ‘an entire movement is stepping up’, the Green’s gains, according to the very same forecast, will be overshadowed by Reform’s 2200 seats.

To present the Green’s advance as the decisive story while glancing away from a Farage monsoon is not analysis, it is deliberate blindness, and a sad allegory for why large swathes of the country have been so ignored by the incumbent political establishment that they have felt compelled to turn to Reform for absolution. But such a stance is to be expected. Polanski’s Greens are allergic to seriousness; a group of individuals who subsist on a copious diet of delusion, even when the stakes could not be higher and the consequences of defeat, so serious. 

The man doesn’t ask much from his supporters, only that they opt to view politics through his chosen filter, unquestioningly. His side pure, his enemies damned, his past clean and all evidence to the contrary safely masked by the trusty façade of decade-old apologies, if they are even acknowledged at all. That is not reality, but it is Zack Polanski’s world.

Image: Flickr/Raph_PH

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