It is impossible to imagine a political party built around loathing for black people attracting any meaningful support in Britain. Today, however, as the results of the local elections come in, it is clear that the same is not true for the Jews.
I speak, of course, of the Green Party, that deplorable alliance of hard-left fanatics and Islamists that has seduced up to 20 per cent of the vote, or nine million people, according to recent polls.
Reform’s stonking success may be stealing the headlines, but the Greens are performing strongly, and on current trends, this is only the beginning.
Clearly, the evil genius that is Zack Polanski has found a winning formula. It is a plan based not on policy but prejudice. He is a master of social media, the king of the soft exterior, which he uses to seduce a public with little attention to detail.
Polanski knows the game because he understands the shallowness of his audience. It is this mass dullness, this susceptibility to propaganda, this narcissistic tribalism, this lamentable lack of curiosity that lies behind the rise of the most racist party in British political history.
Because running through all this is the animal spirit of antisemitism. I’d hazard a guess that Green voters aren’t attracted by policies such as legalising heroin or creating a “world without borders”.
Give them a way to express their loathing of Israel at the ballot box, however, and they’re right behind you.
Think I’m exaggerating? All you need to do is look at the Green campaigns across the country. They are all about “Gaza”, even though the war ended months ago.
Antisemitism, meanwhile, infests the party like dry rot, with candidates churning out conspiracy theories and bigotry, and some even being arrested.
“Help make hope normal again,” posted Zack Polanski, the Green leader, just before the vote closed last night. But hope for what?
The evil genius has found his winning formula, and we are asleep at the wheel - Jake Wallis Simmons
|Getty Images
Presumably, for a world in which the Middle East’s only democracy is ostracised, Britain’s Jews have been replaced by migrants, Islamists hold the balance of power in parliament, Trident has been decommissioned, and punitive taxes have bankrupted the Treasury.
It has become a cliché to point out that Jews are only taking the early hit in the assault that faces us all, but that is only because complacency forces us to repeat it.
Imagine for a moment that Polanski’s “hopes” are fulfilled and Britain becomes a Green and unpleasant land. Once the Jews are gone, do you really think the campaign against the West would be satiated? How long would our fundamental freedoms survive?
Given that the Gaza mob regularly defaces the statue of Winston Churchill outside parliament, the odds are not looking good.
In Britain, this newest chapter in the world’s oldest hatred went mainstream when Jeremy Corbyn led Labour. Then came October 7, which should have led to a groundswell of support for Israel, but instead gave birth to the opposite. As antisemitism scandals became a regular part of public life, people simply got used to it.
Which brings us to the Britain of today. Society is sleepwalking to disaster, and it seems impossible to wake it up. Imagine if two black men had been stabbed by a Ku Klux Klan fanatic in London, and two more murdered by a white supremacist in Manchester.
Imagine black communities living behind fortress walls, whether that’s at school, at church or at their social centres. Imagine Lenny Henry suffering a campaign of racial intimidation when acting in a show in Aberdeen, as has been Maureen Lipman’s experience at the hands of antisemitic mobs in recent days.
Imagine black people being targeted by NHS medics, hounded out of theatres, excluded from careers in the media and the arts, abused in the streets, suffering vandalism against their homes and being bullied at universities. Then imagine the party that has come to represent this racism soaring in the polls.
It makes you furious just to think of it. Happily, it is inconceivable that Britain would debase itself in this way. But this is exactly the reality for Jews.
In a recent Sunday Times column, the journalist Josh Glancy strangely claimed that Britain had never had “inquisitions or pogroms” against the Jews. “Hostility, sure, alienation and prejudice,” he wrote, “but rarely anything worse.”
Really? I’m not sure where he gets his history, but he weirdly neglected the spate of persecution that culminated in the expulsion of the Jews in 1290, after which Britain was Judenrein until 1656.
Granted, that was a long time ago. But the influx of migrants from countries where antisemitism is the norm is rousing those old muscle memories.
So let this be a warning. Time after time, we are presented with outrages of racism that we never would have dreamed of seeing in our country. These are all symptoms of a culture in decay.
At this late hour, there may still be time to turn it around. We need to recover our sense of national pride and realise that yes, we do have things of value, and yes, it is worth fighting for them.
But that will require us to unite against efforts to subvert our freedoms. The longer we remain asleep, the harder the wake-up call will be.
Until then, those awake to the threat can only persist in our attempts to rouse people from their slumber. “I know of nothing like it in all the history books,” lamented Zionist leader Ze’ev Jabotinsky on the eve of the Holocaust in 1938.
“Millions of educated, well-mannered people are being driven towards the edge of a cliff. What do they do? One cries, one smokes a cigarette, one sings, but no one can be found to jump to his feet, grab the reins and change the wagon’s direction.”