DANIEL HANNAN: In a wholesome nation, the Greens can be laughed out of rivalry. The reality they’re surging within the polls says a lot about sad, divided Britain

The Green Party has put out a video aimed at voters in Denton and Gorton, who go to the polls today in a by-election.

Nothing unusual there. Except that this video is wholly in Urdu, the language spoken by most local Pakistanis.

Its contents neatly demonstrate how identity politics can pull a democracy apart. Its images flashed from Reform politicians to Trump and his ICE deportations. 

It accused opponents of racism and xenophobia. It showed footage from Gaza. It flashed up a picture of Keir Starmer shaking hands with his Indian counterpart, the Hindu Narendra Modi – a blatantly sectarian pitch.

For 20 years, it has been taboo to talk about the growth of parallel cultures in our northern towns. 

Any Right-winger who complained about segregated societies was pilloried as a racist and lucky not to be hounded out of public life. Yet the people who did the hounding are now happy to encourage such segregation for partisan gain.

The Greens are not the first. Five years ago, at the Batley and Spen by-election, Labour circulated images of Boris Johnson with Modi.

Voters of Pakistani heritage – including many who are Pakistani nationals, and who vote as Commonwealth citizens – make up between a fifth and a quarter of the electorate in Denton and Gorton.

It is depressing, but not surprising, to see the parties appealing to them not as Britons, but as the nationals of other countries.

Perhaps the most telling aspect of the episode was the way the Greens responded to their critics. 

On Tuesday night, Zack Polanski, the 43-year-old who was elected their leader last summer, took to X with a new version of the clip. ‘The right wing trolls hated seeing our campaign video in Urdu. So here it is in Bangla [spoken in and around Bangladesh] instead. I love our party!’ 

In that glib, babyish post, we glimpse the appeal of the Green leader to young voters. Polanski is happy to increase racial tensions and encourage ethnic voting for the sake of online trolling. Never mind the impact on the social fabric of Manchester: what counts is the likes and the lolz.

This, indeed, is the best way to understand Polanski: as an online phenomenon, perfectly adapted to our screen-addled age. 

On the surface, he is an unlikely leader. He has an odd, shuffling gait and a smile like an archaeological dig. The only time he crossed anyone’s radar before becoming leader was when he tried to enlarge a woman’s breasts through hypnosis.

That was about as realistic as any other Green policy. The party airily promises to give money to everyone, quite literally in the sense that it wants a universal basic income. 

It also wants hikes in benefits spending, rises in the minimum wage, free houses and healthcare for illegal immigrants, slavery reparations, the works.

How is it planning to pay for any of these things? Meh. The party has a few proposals to tax rich people, businesses and so on. But there is nowhere near enough to fund all the things it wants to do. Then again, neither Polanski nor his voters are much interested.

Appearing on the Left-wing Rest Is Politics podcast a couple of months ago, Polanski was unable to answer the most basic questions about the British economy. How much does the state spend? How much does it borrow? What is its tax take?

Instead, he fell back, as he always does, on slogans. Capitalism has failed, we need a new paradigm, time for a wealth tax, blah blah fishcakes. 

The horrifying thing is that it works. For a chunk of younger voters, his slogans are enough. Polanski talks like posts on X, delivering one soundbite after another.

Incredibly, that approach has allowed his party to rise to second place in at least one poll by Find Out Now, while building an immense lead among young people, rising to 44 per cent support among women under 24.

Why? Is it simply Leftist disillusion after the sky-high expectations raised by Labour in Opposition? Does it have to do with bloated house prices, which make it hard for young people to leave home and grow up?

Are the kids still stuck in the demented BLM summer of 2020, convinced that the nation-state itself is an evil thing and white people must be punished for some imagined ancestral wrong?

Maybe. But the neatest explanation was offered by writer James Marriott in a post last year called ‘The dawn of the post-literate society’. 

 Marriott noted that the rise of smartphones from 2012 had led to a crash in literacy levels across the developed world. As people’s concentration-spans shrank, even English Literature students could no longer understand the first paragraph of Charles Dickens’s Bleak House, let alone finish the novel.

Unable to read other than in short and simplified spurts, younger voters are not equipped to recognise that politics is about trade-offs. 

The idea that, say, ­ giving everyone a pay rise might damage growth and thus make people worse off is beyond them. The only ­reason they can see not to give everyone a pay-rise is greed and neoliberalism and mimblewimble.

Polanski is the politician most adapted to the post-literate age. He speaks in soundbites because he thinks in soundbites. 

When he is confronted by some obvious contradiction in his statements, he falls back on: ‘I’ve got the billionaires ­rattled!’ And, tragically, for a growing chunk of the ­electorate, that seems to be enough.

Think, though, of what price we are paying. Most immediately, we risk a descent into sectarianism that will make 1970s Ulster look mild. 

Most Brits of South Asian origin came from the provinces most affected by the violence that accompanied the partition of India in 1947: Bengal, Kashmir, Gujarat and Punjab.

They settled in the same towns, Sikhs, Muslims and Hindus, mostly leaving their grievances at the door. 

The children of the perpetrators and the children of the victims largely set past atrocities aside. This is unlike what happened on the subcontinent, where India and Pakistan struggled to overcome the trauma, fought four further wars against each other and, to this day, maintain the most militarised frontier in the world.

Now, for electoral advantage, the Greens are stirring the grievances up again.

Their very name is a misnomer: they barely mention the environment these days. Instead, they campaign (alongside trans rights and more or less Marxist economics) on Gaza and ‘anti-racism’, presenting themselves as a party for Muslims who reject British identity.

They are a party that, in a healthy country, would be laughed out of contention. The idea that what Britain needs, when its taxes are higher than they have been since the 1940s, and when it is borrowing £150 billion a year and spending two-thirds of that on servicing older debts, is a yet more interventionist state and a more Left-wing government is, objectively, nuts.

Then again, the fact that you have been able to read this article puts you in the declining portion of the country capable of thinking through cause and effect. We are the minority now.

Lord Hannan of Kingsclere is President of the Institute for Free Trade