How the smear campaign targeting the Green Party and Muslim voters failed
How the smear campaign targeting the Green Party and Muslim voters failed Submitted by Peter Oborne on Sat, 05/09/2026 - 20:08 The Greens, which made enormous gains in the local elections, were repeatedly accused by their rivals and sections of the media of engaging in 'Muslim sectarianism' For the last six weeks, the UK's Green Party has been the victim of a sustained smear campaign. Leader Zack Polanski has been accused of being an antisemite, a liar, a fabricator and a hypocrite. His supporters have been painted as crazed Islamists obsessed by foreign policy at the expense of day-to-day issues. The smears have come from Labour, the Conservatives and Reform. But it has also been led by sections of the British media, which went to the lengths of hunting down Polanski's distant relatives in order to discredit the Green Party champion as an antisemite. Four national newspapers published cartoons of Britain's only Jewish leader, which have been widely criticised as antisemitic. As the final votes were counted yesterday, it became obvious that the attempt to destroy Polanski and the Greens had failed. Reform was the winner of the elections. Nigel Farage's party turned its long-running dominance in the polls into actual results, winning more than 1,400 council seats and fourteen councils. But the Greens won a series of remarkable victories, including four councils. Particularly striking was the party's near triumph in the north London borough of Haringey. Last March, cabinet minister and local MP David Lammy boasted: "I can 100 percent tell you, knowing my seat as I do, that there is no prospect of the Greens taking my constituency". This week, the Greens surged to 28 council seats, comfortably overtaking Labour and coming very close to achieving overall control. In east London, the newly elected Green mayor of Lewisham Lewis said on Saturday that he "would like to explore twinning with a Palestinian town". So far, the BBC's projection of national vote share shows the Greens in second place. This is a major achievement for a party that, for many years, was consigned to near irrelevance in the polls. The famous pollster Sir John Curtis noted that the Greens had inflicted far more damage on the Labour vote than Reform. Prime Minister Keir Starmer's political strategy, guided by his now-departed chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, proved disastrous in driving away millions of traditional Labour voters. Greens compare Reform UK's detention centre pledge to racist 1960s Tory campaign slogan Read More » Hence, the special importance of this week's local election results. The collapse of Starmer's authority has created a vacuum. The party is now paying a terrible price for the prime minister's decision to block Andy Burnham, the mayor of Greater Manchester, from running in the Gorton and Denton by-election, which the Greens won in February. Burnham, who remains highly popular in the party, is seen as a leading contender to replace Starmer as prime minister if he resigns or is deposed. Starmer's attempt at self-preservation now looks like the political equivalent of a dying man refusing to call an ambulance. Which way for Labour? Labour has reached a turning point. It can stick with the old strategy of chasing the Reform vote even further to the right. Expect this approach to be championed by the cabinet remnants of the Labour Together clique that propelled Starmer to power, in particular by Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood and Communities Secretary Steve Reed. Or Labour can respond to the Green insurgency by moving back to its traditional roots on the left. Given the collapse of Starmer’s authority, along with his general lack of direction, we can probably expect both policies to be tried at once. Labour will most likely continue to implement tougher immigration policies to try to dent Reform’s popularity. But we anticipate a simultaneous attempt to appease Labour’s lost left-wing constituency. This will include a stronger response to Israeli war crimes. Some moves, long put off by Starmer for fear of offending US President Donald Trump, are obvious. Labour is likely to ramp up criticism of Israel, with which Britain still cooperates militarily. We expect Labour, for example, to finally take the step of sanctioning goods from the illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank. Supposing a leadership election takes place, the whole subject of Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon will open up. Starmer has refused to accuse Israel of apartheid or even to state that Israel has committed war crimes in Gaza. All candidates for the leadership will be obliged to declare their hand on Starmer’s handling of Gaza. Is Gaza just a Muslim issue? A series of lies and misconceptions were exposed by the local elections. Firstly, that only Muslims care about Gaza and that the Greens have ignored domestic and local issues. Consider Areeq Chowdhury, 33, who stood as the Green candidate for mayor of Newham and came third with 18,999 votes. Dressed in a slick black suit with a blue tie and green rosetta, Chowdhury told Middle East Eye last month that, as well as caring about local issues, people were also "disillusioned" with the national government. "They didn't stand up strongly enough against the genocide in Gaza. But they've also U-turned on many of their policies. They've cut welfare benefits for disabled people. People are ready for change." Rather than being a religious issue disconnected from politics proper, Chowdhury presented British cooperation with Israel as a political issue intertwined with others. He argued that for many voters in Newham, Labour’s perceived weakness on Gaza was a "trigger for people to look elsewhere". Meanwhile, Eva Tabbasam, 35, was elected as a Green councillor for the ward of Cann Hall in Waltham Forest, another borough in east London where the Greens made major gains. 'It's Green all the way, darling': The coming political earthquake in East London Read More » While campaigning, she told MEE that voters were raising local and national issues. "They go hand in hand," she said. It was often non-Muslims who brought up Gaza, Tabbasam added. "We get a mixture of big things, like the illegal war on Iran. We also get told about what's happened in Palestine and the government's complicity in that." Chowdhury, the Newham mayoral candidate, described accusations that the Greens have engaged in "sectarian" politics in campaigning on Gaza as "completely racist". "The Green Party is at the same time an Islamist party and a super LGBT party? Right. The reality is that we're a coalition of progressive voices [that] wants to build a better society." Meanwhile, Faaiz Hasan, a national elections coordinator for the Green Party, framed the political debate in terms of class. He told MEE last month that "this is the moment that we can actually start putting forward an alternative vision for the country that is not based on blaming migrants, is not based on blaming people of colour or others, but identifies that the real issue is not race, it's class, and the concentration of wealth and power in a very tiny group of people". Muslim politicians like Chowdhury have opposed Israeli actions in Gaza on the same basis - support for international law and human rights - as non-Muslim Green politicians have. This has also been the case for most independent candidates, including those associated with the Jeremy Corbyn-led Your Party. They have been standing up for the rules-based order promoted by British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt when they agreed to the Atlantic Charter in 1941. Foreign policy - a local elections issue? Another false narrative that has been shattered is that foreign policy cannot be discussed in local elections and that doing so is sectarian. Wes Streeting, the health secretary and a potential contender to replace Starmer, repeatedly raised the alarm on what he called "sectarian politics" in the east London borough of Redbridge during the campaign. Streeting's seat is in Redbridge, the Labour stronghold where the Redbridge Independents - backed by Your Party - have won nine seats. Redbridge has 22 wards and around 300,000 residents. It is highly ethnically diverse, with more than 47 percent of the population identifying as Asian or Asian British, and a large Muslim population of over 30 percent. MEE reported in March that Streeting sent a letter to residents of his seat accusing the Redbridge Independents, a local party backed by Your Party, of being "a divisive political party that aims to only represent some of us, more focused on foreign conflicts than on fixing potholes". Then, in April, Streeting told The Times: “We’re voting for Redbridge council, not the UN Security Council. Who you choose to run your local council matters and the Redbridge Independents represent a divisive brand of sectarian politics.” 'Redbridge Council is not going to solve the problem in the Middle East' - Vaseem Ahmed, Redbridge Independents leader Launching Labour's local election campaign, Starmer himself turned foreign policy into an issue when he spoke about the Iran war, attacking his opponents, Reform leader Nigel Farage and Tory leader Kemi Badenoch. "Nigel Farage and Kemi Badenoch would have jumped into this war with both feet without thinking through the consequences," Starmer said. He argued that Britain would have been “in a war without a plan” had they been in power, adding that he “won’t be dragged in” to the US-Israeli war. On the day the war began, Badenoch said Starmer was “too scared to make foreign interventions for fear of upsetting a tiny section of the electorate”, implying that he was appeasing Muslim voters. This was false. Polling would soon show most of the British public opposed involvement in the war. Both Labour and the Tories, then, have used foreign policy to score political points against their opponents, with Labour doing so even during the local election campaign. Streeting's characterisation of the Redbridge Independents was also entirely inaccurate. A scan of the party’s campaign literature and social media output suggests it is focused on local issues and representing the local community. This is fused with a general discontent with the political establishment and the Labour government, as well as opposition to Labour's foreign policy. During the campaign, MEE spoke to the leader of the Redbridge Independents, Vaseem Ahmed, who runs a recruitment firm and has been involved in local community politics for years. "The biggest challenge in Redbridge right now is the cost of living," Ahmed told MEE. "Our manifesto is about that, and about managing priorities for the council budget. "Thirdly, it's about engagement with local residents who don’t seem to have a voice." Ahmed said "95 percent" of the party's platform was focused on local issues. A glance at the 20-page manifesto on its website confirms that. "When it comes to Gaza", Ahmed explained, "we're realistic and Redbridge Council is not going to solve the problem in the Middle East". However, he said Israel's war on Gaza and British cooperation with Israel are relevant to the council on issues such as divesting its pension fund from companies complicit in Israel's violations of international law. Far from promoting religious identitarianism or conflict, Ahmed said that the party was making a concerted effort to reach out to all sections of the local community and that its candidates were ethnically diverse. "Ordinary people like ourselves are rooted in the community," he told MEE. "We live here, we work here, we raise our families here, and we just want our voices to be represented. Right now, we just don't feel we have that." Ahmed also rejected suggestions that Muslim politicians only represent Muslim interests. "[It's] an Islamophobic trope that somehow, if you have Muslims who are in politics, that they're only going to be worried about fellow Muslims and nobody else," he said. "Whereas we live in a diverse community and we represent everybody. You know, if you get elected, you're not going to focus on one section of the community." Ahmed said that he previously served on the panel of local mosque committees but stepped down after entering politics because he doesn't "want there ever to be a conflict of interest". "I've got so many contacts there," he added. "I could walk into those mosques and just stand there with a mic and say, vote independent. "But I won't do that because they're charities and I don't want to put them at risk. I'll never do that, because they do so much other good work outside of politics." Last week, The Times apologised to the Redbridge Independents for falsely reporting that the party included a “recently suspended councillor who attributed a string of antisemitic social media posts to his struggles with back pain”. In reality, the councillor had never been part of the party. Rise of the independents Elsewhere, in east London's Newham borough, MEE spoke to Councillor Mehmood Mirza, who was standing to be the council mayor for the Your Party-backed Newham Independents. Mirza came second to the Labour candidate on Friday. As in Redbridge, Mirza's campaign was heavily focused on local issues, but combined these with a general opposition to the political establishment and pro-Palestinian sentiment. "Labour has failed Newham residents," he told MEE. "When I got elected [as a councillor], the Muslim community came out to vote, but all different communities voted for me because people were fed up with the council’s performance. Streets were filthy. Things were not getting done. Council tax was on the rise." He campaigned on pension fund divestment, like the Redbridge Independents. "We stand with international human rights. And it's not just that we stand with Gaza, we stand with anybody oppressed across the world," he said. "We are not in favour of any war." Mirza was keen to stress that "we go to churches, we go to gurdwaras, we go to temples and we go to different people from the community. And we are reaching out and I think people agree with our policies". Not all independents are cut from the same mould. In Birmingham, the maverick criminal lawyer Akhmed Yakoob's Independent Candidates Alliance supported around 70 councillor candidates. Thirteen won seats on Friday. UK law professors set out why they signed open letter in support of Palestine Action Read More » Yakoob is facing trial on money laundering charges that he strenuously denies. His campaign rhetoric explicitly eschewed friendship with left-wing progressives on socially conservative grounds. He repeatedly attacked the Green Party throughout the campaign, saying Polanski was "not a good person" and "someone who, in the middle of London, is dancing on stage with a couple of naked men in broad daylight in front of children", referencing an event in Trafalgar Square in March. According to Yakoob, the Greens "want to lead our children into the path of drugs, sex and degeneracy". A Green source called these remarks "beneath contempt". He was filmed this week demeaningly shouting at journalist Lewis Goodall and trying to have him banned from the cafe where he was interviewing them. During the interview, Yakoob referred to himself in the third person, insisted he was a "great man" and compared himself to Nelson Mandela. Two Muslim MPs told MEE during the campaign that they were concerned some independent candidates, not facing any party selection process, would end up being "harmful" and would cause chaos. But 212 independent councillors were elected in these local elections. Blanket smears of Muslim sectarianism bear little resemblance to reality in many places. Increasing attacks on the Greens In the coming weeks and months, it is expected that attacks on the Greens and Muslims will continue. A useful indicator of how these attacks will likely play out is the fake "family voting" scandal, which Reform and Labour both used to attack the Greens after the party's candidate, Hannah Spencer, won the Gorton and Denton by-election in February. "Family voting" refers to the illegal practice of voters conferring, colluding or directing one another on how to vote at the polling station. Starmer, whose Labour candidate came third, said his left-wing rivals had engaged in "divisive, sectarian politics", while Reform's losing candidate, Matt Goodwin, declared that "the progressives were told how to vote", insisting that "Islamists and woke progressives came together to dominate the constituency". Reform politicians repeated claims that there were high rates of "family voting" in the multicultural Gorton and Denton seat, in which one in four voters is Muslim. Farage swiftly linked these claims to Muslims, saying: "This is deeply concerning and raises serious questions about the integrity of the democratic process in predominantly Muslim areas." He announced that Reform had "reported the many cases of 'family voting' to the Electoral Commission and Greater Manchester Police". Labour politicians issued statements of concern. Robert Jenrick, a former Conservative minister who defected to Reform earlier this year, decried "South Asian men instructing women how to vote at polling stations in modern Britain" and condemned what he called an "appalling level of sectarianism". Even Badenoch waded in, saying that "Labour created the monster of harvesting Muslim community bloc votes and… that monster came back to bite them". These claims were later proved false and a police investigation found no evidence of family voting or voter coercion. But by that point, Muslim voters had been smeared, and question marks placed over the Green win in Gorton and Denton. The Greens, it seems, will continue to be attacked and branded a divisive party whose success is driven by Muslim sectarianism. Yet, what these election results really demonstrate is not Muslim sectarianism but the final blow in the gradual death of the two-party system, as momentum goes to insurgent parties on the right and the left. UK Politics Imran Mulla The Big Story Post Date Override 0 Update Date Mon, 05/04/2020 - 21:28 Update Date Override 0