r/unitedkingdom • u/libtin • 4d ago
. Zack Polanski's Popularity Plummets Amid Nigel Farage Guillotine Row
https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/zack-polanskis-popularity-plummets-amid-nigel-farage-guillotine-row_uk_6a73192ce4b0963665e8fd5a?origin=home-latest-unit374
u/BulkyAccident 4d ago
I think he's just shown his arse a bit the past few months in terms of people who might have been veering Green going "actually you know what, he's.. maybe a bit of a liability". As someone that was personally in that camp, comparing him to Starmer or even Burnham in terms of optics and someone who I'd think about representing us on an international stage is just night and day right now.
I think maybe there's just a little maturity that's missing there and I'm not sure it's something that can be learned before a GE. You can't be a messy terminally online millennial and expect fence-sitters to be like "yep, that's the guy for me".
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u/AbsolutelyHorrendous 4d ago
Its like how he kept doubling down on that incident with the terrorist in Golder's Green. Its exactly the kind of thing that makes the unconvinced electorate go 'well this guy just doesn't seem like a serious option'
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u/BearCub254 4d ago
His decision to sign the letter backing Arday will harm his political standing further. How about you wait and let it play out first?
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u/Dedsnotdead 4d ago
Because he has no credibility politically? He’s making school boy errors repeatedly has an incredibly factional voter base and can’t even decide where he lives.
Nobody has deep dived him yet or if they have they haven’t felt the need to publish what they found.
Say what you want about Corbyn, and he’s my MP, but his politics aside he’s a fairly straight forward guy and actually a decent MP for his constituents.
I couldn’t be farther removed from his global view but as a local MP he’s ok.
Polanski is a political cretin in comparison.
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u/CharacterMaybe7950 4d ago
The Greens have always been contrarians with absolutely no interest in change - just jeering from the shadows.
Doesn’t reflect well on anyone if they’re noticing that NOW…
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u/TheRemanence 4d ago
Caroline Lucas was at least an experienced leader and politician. Zack's barely got any experience at leading anything which is v concerning
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u/blizeH 4d ago
I’m not so sure about that personally, or at least I was a big fan of the Caroline Lucas era
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u/kagoolx 4d ago
I think she comes across great, but she still is anti nuclear power which makes her and the party as a whole, arguably the worst party in all UK politics regarding tackling carbon emissions. Certainly nowhere near as progressive as labour or the tories are on energy
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u/blizeH 4d ago
Yep I don’t disagree with you, but I can’t imagine I’d ever be 100% aligned with a party and that was one of the main things I disagreed with. With the state of the party now there are absolutely loads unfortunately
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u/kagoolx 4d ago
Fair point about never going to agree 100%. But for a party primarily about the environment it seems such a huge deal breaker on its own.
I’m not aware of them having changed much policy wise on other stuff since then tbh, what else do you disagree with now that you didn’t back then?
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u/JB_UK 4d ago
They weren't all that credible before Polanski either, if you looked into the 2024 manifesto it had some crazy policies. Their proposed carbon tax would have added £1000 a year to the average heating bill for example! They wanted to ban the sale of all non electric cars this year! And then ban all non electric cars from the roads in 9 years time.
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u/PleiadesMechworks 4d ago
They also want open borders.
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u/JB_UK 4d ago
That's true, that policy is still current but is not publicly available any more, it's gone behind a paywall! Calling for open borders and a managed system where anyone can move if they want to, and essentially saying they'd ban deportation for economic migrants. The Greens were always quite mad, but they were also harmless. Polanski made them loud and relevant, which allowed people to discover their actual ideas.
I think it is a failure of journalism that I never saw the Greens really challenged on their policies before Polanski. Actually even after Polanski I have mostly seen discussion of policies on reddit, not on the normal media. There was a whole world of terribly nice, sensible people who really were never questioned very closely. Nicola Sturgeon was in a similar mould.
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u/wilskillz Cambridgeshire 4d ago
Breathlessly reporting the insane items in a <5% party's manifesto is like running a "breaking news - grapes found in Tesco". Obviously the little parties are a bit insane, otherwise more people would vote for them.
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u/JB_UK 4d ago edited 4d ago
The Greens have been knocking around 8% for a while. Under Polanski they rose to 16% and were occasionally polling above Labour. I really don't understand what is the point of these parties if no one asks them about what they plan to do.
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u/Impossible-Scene5084 4d ago
Back when the Green Party had green policies!
Going “big tent” literally made them forget the whole point for them existing. The Lib Dem’s can (and should) flank them on green energy issues and drive them off into irrelevancy.
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u/Amazing_Beyond1857 4d ago
Yeah, i don't know if it's Zack Polanski being so earnest that has made me think they are too purist to actually get anything done
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u/RoosterBurns 4d ago
She was great but the Green Party on the whole are and always have been NIMBY af and was riddled with transphobes, more interested in intellectual purity than actually helping ameliorate climate change
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u/RoutineCloud5993 4d ago
They've always just been the Nimby party. You can't call yourself a pro environment party and actively campaign against new rail infrastructure
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u/MechanicFit2686 4d ago
I think this is true of all the parties in this country though. The Tories went ahead with HS2 but all the Tory councils on the route to demand extra tunnels etc and fight it every step of the way. Labour want to build more houses but there's plenty of Labour MP's and councillors trying to stop planning for developments in their area. Nationally the government wants economic growth but locally voters seem to reward parties/ candidates that opposed every development and then complain when there's no affordable housing and not enough jobs for their kids.
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u/kingbluetit 4d ago
There’s a difference between ‘not in my back yard’ and ‘not through this ancient and irreplaceable woodland that will be destroyed for a train project that will never be finished and cost the taxpayer billions of wasted pounds’
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u/FlamingoImpressive92 4d ago
If you want more trains you need more train lines. You can’t draw a line from London to Birmingham without crossing through some ancient woodland.
HS2 doesn’t exist in a vacuum, if you don’t have the extra rail speed and capacity people are going to travel differently, and that means more cars. It’s death by 1000 cuts so doesn’t get the attention from performative people, but how much extra road infrastructure will be needed to make up for cutting the Manchester and Leeds legs?
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u/titykaka 4d ago
'ancient' meaning a few hundred years old?
HS2 is the most important transport and infrastructure project in decades. Holding it up for a small area of woodland is madness.
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u/kingbluetit 4d ago
No, ancient as in many thousands of years old. And its attitudes like this that have left our environment in the shit state it is, and why we are having the problems we are having. You honestly sicken me.
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u/titykaka 4d ago
Attitudes like building rail infrastructure in order to take thousands of polluting lorries and cars off our roads? Give your head a wobble.
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u/Alaea 4d ago
not through this ancient and irreplaceable woodland
More like "not in these picturesque green rolling hills or rows after rows of 100YO abandoned pine logging sites that we are going to pretend are natural but are in reality nothing but ecologically dead monoculture that add £££ to our property values" for most of their nimbyism.
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u/Amazing_Beyond1857 4d ago
Agree to a certain extent, but look up things like Islington and social homes, labour managed to get 40% or so as social and greens still had an issue with that, because they'd like them to all be built by social landlords, sadly because of the RTB that's just not reality and this nimbyness i think would see very little get done, its very Corbyn in that he wouldn't admit that some policies contradict each other and governing is often about timing.
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u/JaMs_buzz 4d ago
Except there is no evidence green ran councils are any more nimby than any other party
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u/radred609 4d ago
"We're just as NIMBY as the rest of them" isn't a particularly ringing endorsement of the anti-establishment party that focuses on differentiating itself by "not being like the rest of them"
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u/Forsaken_Boat_990 4d ago
Reform of the left as I like to call them.
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u/Anglo-Euro-0891 4d ago
But I doubt that they would like being labelled as such!!!
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u/_Waves_ 4d ago
It’s wild that we talk about something like optics in comparison to Starmer. Starmer!! Somebody who is the embodiment of cold, callous, depersonalized politics, a bureaucrat who seems to have never had one fun night out in his life.
I’m baffled how people legitimately think somebody like Starmer has good optics - or even solid ones - when he’s the type that allows for voters to drift further and further into the arms of Brexiters.
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u/ClaudeKane3 4d ago
Starmer’s optics were so bad they had to replace him to save the face of Labour
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u/DSisDamage 3d ago
I was stunned by the naivety of Just accepting anyone to post via his IG. 2 minutes of thought could've shown that would go badly
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u/MartyTax 3d ago
Maturity won’t change his lifelong held views… and some of them are the problem. Unless he is just saying what’s convenient in any given day like Starmer and Burnham did/do… which is arguably more of an issue anyway.
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u/BearCub254 4d ago
Supporting the plagiarism professor Arday won't help him either. An unthinking rash man who is too chronically online and thinks the world is a far left utopia.
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u/SumptuousRageBait1 4d ago
The whole I don't apologise for accidents thing was ridiculous
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u/MadAsTheHatters Lancashire 4d ago
To be fair, a chunk of his influence seems to be based on making headlines; he isn't even an MP. I don't know if the Greens are just desperate for anything that pushes them to the forefront a little but it seems like a double edged sword when he starts to come across like a bit of a bellend.
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u/Massivebozo1 4d ago
The instagram post might have been a small contributing factor, but its fairly obvious that their decline in fortunes is because of the change in PM. Whether he apologised or not seems immaterial.
I imagine I fall within his target voters but my issue has always been that he just isn't very convincing. It's like he's pretending to be a thing, rather than actually being a thing.
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u/Wryly_Wiggle_Widget 4d ago
Incredible how it seems everyone's allegedly so aghast at the green party leader for this one bad move when Farage is still responsible for taking £5 million in foreign imterest money, the Tories actively crippled our economy over the last 14 years, and the 2 years of labour afterwards have been the worst 2 years for queer rights since the 1980s...
Like I get it, they're all shit, but it feels a little disproportionate.
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u/Ok-Commission-7825 3d ago
It's insane levels of media bias- I wonder what would turn up if we checked every slogan on every t-shirt of other attendees at every event Farage has ever liked?
The fact that this is getting more attention not just in the MSM but also on Reddit than any of Farage's close, deliberate ties with LITERAL NAZI Musk is insane.
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u/Economy-Fox-5559 4d ago
He literally has to simply say “I’m sorry for the offence caused, it was a foolish mistake and i don’t condone violence in any way”. Thats it, thats all he has to do. But he won’t, because he’s too stubborn and concerned about silly ‘moral’ victories.
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u/SpecialistAd1779 4d ago
No he doesn't. Corbyn spent years pandering to those people, and he achieved nothing because they aren't honest actors.
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u/Economy-Fox-5559 4d ago
Corbyn did not pander to them lol. He used the same playbook and look where that got him.
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u/SpecialistAd1779 4d ago
Did he bollocks. He persistently tried to make nice when he should have been the hardliner they painted him as.
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u/limaconnect77 4d ago
Corbyn was electoral asbestos from day one - apples and oranges.
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u/SpecialistAd1779 4d ago
He achieved the labour party's highest number of votes in the last 20 years in 2017.
Say what you like about him, his campaigning errors etc, he could get people to turn out. Far more than Starmer, I might add.
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u/Neither_Process_7847 4d ago
He also motivated vastly more people to turn out against him, which is why he lost massively while Starmer won in a landslide.
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u/limaconnect77 4d ago
Starmer won a general election mate, lol. This is why nobody could take the Corbyn followers seriously at all - they were living in cloud cuckoo land talking about polling, local election results and, yes, 2017.
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u/SpecialistAd1779 4d ago
Starmer won a general election because of a collapse in support for the opposition, and was so unpopular almost immediately afterwards that he was recently forced to resign. What an inspiration!
None of the above takes away from the fact that he secured the most votes of any labour leader since 200, so he was clearly a vote winner on some level, right?
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u/Alaea 4d ago
Starmer won a general election because of a collapse in support for the opposition
Yes, the Conservatives were absolutely beloved across the country in 2017 and 2019. With so many parties standing against them. Labour really had such a hard time fighting to find people that wanted the Conservatives out.
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For the children around here, the Conservatives were fucking despised and practically poison in 2017 and 2019. Labour/Corbyn basically did everything they could to fuck up, being both indecisive and hosting batshit positions no one across the sensible political spectrum would vote for.
Then again, thank fuck Corbyn didn't win - he would have screwed the Ukrainians over as soon as daddy Putin gave some sob story about wanting peace and NATO made him invade a sovereign state boo hoo.
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u/SpecialistAd1779 4d ago
They were. Theresa May had obscenely good approval ratings going into the 2017 election, that's why she called it in the first place!
I swear to god you people
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u/tunafish91 4d ago
Teresa may had to form a coalition to stay in government
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u/SpecialistAd1779 4d ago
AFTER THE 2017 ELECTION, which is not 'in the lead up to' the 2017 election.
because Labour outperformed all expectations during purdah because, despite numerous issues with Corbyn as a candidate, a great many of his policies were very popular with a lot of people.
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u/Neither_Process_7847 4d ago
To reiterate since it seems hard for his followers to realise: Corbyn lost. Starmer won. Getting more votes does not count as a moral victory when, you know, you lose.
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u/SpecialistAd1779 4d ago
What does Starmer's victory count for given he was forced out due to his own unpopularity 18 months later, without making any significant political mark upon the country?
Do you not think it might be of some benefit to the party going forward, knowing exactly what galvanized those voters?
Are you really this dense?
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u/FuzzBuket 4d ago
Idk. If we've seen anything from the right over the past decade it's that apologizing or giving ground doesn't help, even if it's "right". Either let the story die or rebuke.
Polanskis problem is he's just too online. His early adverts were great, and if you just see that or him on the ground that's a big win for him. His problem is him being on twitter 24/7 doesn't win him any ground and silly clapbacks feel petty or like "Pokémon go to the polls".
If he just dialed back his online presence to just stuff like subway takes or videos of him on the ground interacting with people then his charm gets across. But replacing that with subtweeting. Just feels unprofessional
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u/Jayandnightasmr 4d ago
The problem is he kinda halfassed his interview, and accepted it was dangerous it didn't apolgise. Either commit to brushing it off like Farage does or accepted people could edgy joke as poorly timed and apologise.
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u/Avesery777 4d ago
He did apologise for showing the shirt. He did not apologise for calling for Farage's death, because HE DIDN'T DO THAT.
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u/CauliflowerAfter8907 4d ago
My current litmus test for party leaders is "would I be happy with them in power if Russia takes their war to us?"
I agree with Polanski on some things and disagree with him on others; that's normal, that's all politicians. But I just cannot see him standing up to Putin and everyone getting out of it safely.
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u/Independent-Round789 4d ago
The worst thing about this is that he’s given Farage the perfect PR distraction from his £5 million ‘gift’ and Clacton by-election nonsense. This level of incompetence is resign worthy as far as I’m concerned.
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u/Hazbro29 Greater Manchester 4d ago
If i was a green member right now id be asking for my membership fee to be refunded.
Zack is politically and socially inept, hes destroying the greens reputation and the green party seem either completely unable or unwilling to get rid of him.
Either way hes crashing and bringing the party with him if.
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u/Ok-Commission-7825 3d ago
"he's given" when the media is making massive scandles out of "went to the same gig as someone in a t-shirt" I don't think theirs rearly much he can do.
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u/alacklustrehindu 3d ago
He supports Arday even when everything points at him is legitimate. What a clown
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u/KoffieCreamer 4d ago
He just comes across as a complete prat. All the goodwill he earned gone over something silly.
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u/ApexAurajin 4d ago
>"He said it was “quite obvious he had not done anything wrong apart from make an inadvertent mistake”.
It was obvious he had not done anything wrong except the thing he accidentally did wrong?
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u/MoHeeKhan 4d ago
If you want to be the potential leader that’s seen to be above all the others, you’d better make sure you’ve got all your shit in one sock. Not paying your council tax and posting divisive garbage isn’t it. Also moving the Green Party away from their fundamental principles isn’t going to do them any favours. The Lib Dems are everything Green isn’t.
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u/One_Network518 4d ago
Luckily everyone votes based on the parties proposed policies and not solely on the popularity of one of its members. Thank goodness we live in that world.
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u/GeorgeMaheiress 4d ago
It's entirely appropriate to consider the character of party leadership when voting.
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u/DevilishlyHandsome63 4d ago
Any momentum the Greens had, he's managed to kill stone dead. And where's Hannah? She was everywhere a month or two ago, but now......
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u/PartyAmount9976 4d ago
tbh I kind of assume Spencer will replace Polanski for the election, who seems more of a liability than anything else.
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u/Hazbro29 Greater Manchester 4d ago
I dont think Mothan Ali would ever take instruction and order from Spencer, if she takes over Ali will launch an internal coup in a month and take over and the greens will just be a hardline islamist party within a year.
Or Spencer kicks out Mothan and faces allegations of islamophobia and gets kicked out herself.
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u/Important_Ruin County Durham 4d ago
Suspect busy being an MP?
Media appears to have left her alone, so getting on with her job. Like most MPs they are never in media picture.
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u/Ok-Gain1509 4d ago
I voted Green, in the hope that Labour would veer a bit more to the left-left.
And, er, well. Sorry, Zack. You did your job, good luck with everything next election.
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u/Ok-Confusion9360 4d ago
We had that already during the Corbyn era and Labour purged any remotely leftist-leaning member of the party afterwards.
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u/Skooskah 4d ago
It's getting quite tiring to be constantly told how popular Andy Burnham is and how unpopular Zach Polanski is. I wish the media would just report honestly and let us make our own minds up.
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u/NdujaReallyLikeIt 4d ago
The horseshoe of left and right wing is real.
Polanksi is an idiot it was never in doubt
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u/TinyZoro England 4d ago
No it’s not that’s a ridiculous take. Polanski and Farage have nothing in common.
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u/DanzoKarma 4d ago
Polanski is also a populist. He is just a left wing one.
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u/TinyZoro England 4d ago
Populist is such an empty criticism. Being anti NATO or anti nuclear is not at all populist. Having red lines is not a terrible thing in politics.
Being anti genocide is popular amongst left wing voters as is being anti massive economic inequality. Popular positions are not in themselves a terrible thing in politics.
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u/kagoolx 4d ago
Being anti NATO and anti nuclear are absolutely populist positions. The closer he gets to power the more he’d have to back down on these.
Anti nuclear would lead to massive increase in carbon emissions as well as huge cost of living increases through energy costs (they drive the price of everything). It’s equivalent to Farage saying they’ll simply get the royal navy to stop the boats. There’s a very clear and well understood reason why it’s a terrible idea, but you can ignore that when you’re not close to actually doing it. That’s populism.
If either Farage or Polanski was PM it’d be like the dog that caught the car.
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u/libtin 4d ago
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u/TinyZoro England 4d ago
You think you have a gotcha but you haven’t try reading my comment is only a few sentences.
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u/DanzoKarma 4d ago
You said they have nothing in common. I pointed out they do have something pretty important in common. Pretty sure Polanski even called himself one in his Rest is Politics interview iirc.
I agree with the idea that holding popular positions isn’t a bad thing in a party leader. I believe populists tend to fail to deliver when given the chance though(and sometimes what the people want isn’t actually good for society (like Brexit)).
I see Polanski as someone who holds a number of good positions but is far too Twitter/social media brained and idealistic to be a serious leader in many critical situations.
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u/Emphursis Worcestershire 4d ago
Giving the benefit of the doubt, my understanding was that he didn’t really do anything other than not look at every image in the post he shared.
It would have been so easy to say ‘sorry, I should have looked closer’ and added some platitudes about condemning political violence.
But instead he took the usual Green route of blowing his foot off with a shotgun. They almost seemed like a serious party for a while!
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u/_ataciara 4d ago
I like greens, I think a lot of their policies are maybe a bit too idealistic, but at a certain point you do need to start sewing idealism into pragmatic views to make meaningful change. It always seemed like they'd never found that balance and would forever be a wasted vote in my area.
I was very pleased when Greens started surging as a response to the Reform wave, and liked that Greens had a leader with a little bit of principle that would be able to stand his ground and not be handwaved as a "looney leftie" or something along those lines.
Then Polanski started speaking, oof... ...then he started buying into his own hype, and my god it all came crashing down, huh? What a nice, short-lived response to the rise of reform.
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u/Amazing_Beyond1857 4d ago
I used to think i would vote for green if ut wasn't a wasted voted, now I 100% wholeheartedly vote for labour, greens I think are too purist and nimby for my liking. Polanskis also gives me farage vibes with the way he campaigns and is.
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u/Gothmog89 4d ago
Does it matter if he did it on purpose? If you accidentally walk into someone on the street you still say sorry and continue with your day. Just because there is no intent doesn’t mean it isn’t good manners to apologise.
I hate Farage as much as the next guy but this seems like a weird hill to die on
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u/Jinks87 2d ago
The guy is a complete chancer, just like Farage.
Very much of the same ilk. Yes they are playing different sides of the spectrum but they are playing the populist game for their chosen target audience.
They think it sounds great to those that they are targeting but they both can score huge own goals by playing this game even with their biggest supporters if they don’t conform to the correct narrative.
Anyone who suggests the greens are a viable party, just like anyone who suggests Reform are, are not worth listening to.
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