Zack Polanski’s Friday apology for sharing a post criticizing the police after the Golders Green attack was less a retraction than a reframing of it. His mistake, he told Laura Kuenssberg, was not one of substance but of forum. “I was very concerned by what I saw, and I remain concerned,” he said, before adding that he would discuss with Rowley whether the officers’ response had been “proportionate”.

But by once again questioning the police’s actions in response to the Golders Green attack, Polanski has added more fuel to the story. What might otherwise have passed as a fleeting controversy has instead become a marker of political judgment.

It is highly unlikely the average voter would have viewed the incident in the same light. Indeed, instinctive sympathy for the attacker rather the police protecting the public during a terror attack is not a natural reaction. It is a position derived from ideology rather than reality.

Like the Faragist Right, the Greens are a terminally online political movement. Their instincts are molded by American discourse, where racial tensions are sharper and policing is far more violent. British events are then interpreted through an imported lens, regardless of how well it fits reality here. The result is a flattening of context, where a domestic incident is treated as though it belongs to a different political and social order. Is that really the argument the Greens want to foreground ahead of local elections?

The episode also highlights something unusual about the party’s ideological character. The Greens, and many of their leading voices, display a distinct, if inconsistently applied, Left-libertarian streak. Polanski has, for example, voiced support for legalizing drugs while the Green Party has advocated treating all migrants as “citizens in waiting”. A review aimed at jettisoning unpopular policy positions is said to be underway, but it will be hard to overcome the party’s own rulebook. Its policymaking process deliberately empowers activists, including a surge of new members aligned with the Polanski leadership.

To the Green faithful and its new members, the state is a necessary force when confronting economic power, but something to be restrained — even distrusted — in matters of defense, policing and public order. It is a worldview that sits comfortably within activist circles, but less so within the broader electorate.

It might not matter: the Green Party is not trying to match the mass appeal of the Labour Party. Its ambition right now is to cleave the Left away from Labour and unite it under the Green banner. As an insurgent party, it doesn’t even need to resolve its contradictions to attain a significant vote share for now. The Greens are still, in many voters’ eyes, a vehicle for protest rather than power, and are granted a degree of latitude as a result.

But as Reform UK has found, success brings scrutiny. As the Green Party expands beyond its activist base, positions that once signaled moral clarity can begin to look like liabilities. British voters remain broadly supportive of law and order, and show little appetite for moral ambiguity when violence is at issue. A politics that reflexively questions the use of force may energize a movement; it is far less clear that it reassures an electorate when the country’s terror threat level has just been raised to “severe”.

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James Sean Dickson is an analyst and journalist who Substacks at Himbonomics.

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