Provocations and ‘Picking Quarrels’ – Green Party Leaders Must Wise Up
Brighton’s Green MP Siân Berry posted a strange message on X during the massive feminist gathering at the Brighton Centre on the sea front on 10 October:
She was referring to the FiLiA Women’s Liberation Conference marking the 10th anniversary of a feminist conference in the city that, she had decided, was a ‘clearly provocative’ event, and that she had tried (and failed) to persuade the council to ‘prevent this’.
This was her response to the attack on the centre on the eve of Europe’s biggest feminist conference: it was to blame, the women were the provocateurs who, she suggested, had inflamed the masked-up faux militia, the trans cult Bash Back, to smash windows and spray-paint the conference centre’s walls.
Despite her best efforts, the council had refused to cancel. But it was, in a way, complicit – it had refused to pre-empt the attack and rejected FiLiA’s request for a Public Space Protection Order.
FiLiA had anticipated an assault. In August, Bash Back vandalised the constituency office of Health Secretary Wes Streeting allegedly for ‘intending to erase trans people from public life.’
Berry’s complaint is an eerie echo of Article 293 of China’s Criminal Code prohibiting ‘picking quarrels and provoking trouble.’ Among the many celebrated victims are the Feminist Five, known for their witty and sad public performances against violence against women and the lack of public toilet provision for women (they occupied a men’s toilet). Their fate went global after they were rounded up, arrested and imprisoned in 2015 for planning to post stickers against sexual harassment on public transport.
A hostile environment smoulders in the Green Party; a large members’ group, Green Party Women, was disaffiliated, feminist events are sabotaged and activists have been suspended or expelled.
Berry’s ill-judged intervention is unsurprising – she is an implacable warrior against Green feminists, against any debate about trans-gender politics and against those who endorse the meaning of ‘woman’ in the UK’s equalities law (that is, woman = adult female sex), recently re-affirmed by the Supreme Court. She also takes a hard line on prostitution – sexual exploitation is merely sex work (the two themes are often paired in Green and trans-cult politics).
The party leaders’ animus has almost bankrupted the party: around £1 million has been spent defending itself – and losing – in anti-discrimination legal cases. The party is paying a high price for their bullying and deployment of what in Stalinist Russia was deemed the use of ‘administrative methods’ against critics (in the Soviet case, to dispatch dissidents to prisons, labour camps and asylums).
Millions of activist hours will have been squandered on disciplinary procedures and expulsions.
For the avoidance of doubt, the Green Women’s Declaration is not trans-phobic, or hostile to men or women who choose to live as if they were the opposite sex, and its advocates have never resorted to violence or threats.
Its 1600 signatories resist ‘the chilling atmosphere of censure within the green Party’. They insist on freedom to speak up for biological reality and the core values of science-based policy-making on climate and the environment.
They also want a more democratic and accountable party structure. At the moment anyone can turn up to the party conference – a seemingly open structure but, in practice, one that can be captured.
Berry is one of the censors. So, too, it seems, is new leader Zack Polanski who has defended the party decision to ban Green Women’s Declaration from holding a stall at the party’s October conference on the grounds of their ‘bad behaviour’.
What behaviour? He didn’t disclose. My guess is that he couldn’t because the Green feminists are typically scrupulous: they haven’t stalked or suspended members, smashed up venues or events.
They are not transphobic – they never say that trans people should not exist. And they oppose the cultish mantra ‘no debate’. My guess is that it is the feminists’ very presence that is offensive to the trans cult.
That is certainly what motivated the masked Bash Backers when they vandalised the Brighton Centre. Berry and Polasnski should have a word with themselves – they need to take responsibility for the fine mess in which they and the party finds themselves.
It is urgent – the party is the beneficiary of an unprecedent rush of support – membership up from 40,000 to over 100,000. This surge reveals a longing for a new configuration of progressive politics. It follows mass disappointment with Sir Keir Starmer’s hapless, authoritarian Labour leadership, and equally mass disappointment with the chaotic launch of Your Party .
The surge is attracted by the optimism of Green policies and, no doubt, Zack Polanski’s audacious performance as the party’s new leader.
What these new members want and deserve is the Green esprit translated into progressive political practice. What they won’t want is bullying leadership, expulsions, and misogyny, and they certainly won’t want Bash Back.
Further Reading
My sorry stories about trans-cults, censorship and misogyny:
2010: Censoring Julie Bindel
2015: We cannot allow silencing and censorship of individuals
2016: TRANS/formations
2017: Letter to the Working Class Movement Library
2020: Bad Dreams …Greens and Gender
Sadly, there appears no evidence of the leaders wising up- or even any discernment among local branch members.
Sadly, yes. Problem may be that local branch members haven’t connected with this issue, keep their focus on local green issues. Perhaps it will be worth thinking about the ne context, a huge swell of new members for whom there will new an expectation of a more democratic and accountable structure, and a proper debate.
Thank you
You are welcome