With the votes finally tallied from last week’s local elections, most of the attention is rightly on the success of Reform UK. Close to the dream figure of 1,500 council seats, control of 14 councils and 26% of the national vote, Farage couldn’t have asked for more. There is another side to the centrist collapse however – the rise of the Greens. Under Zack Polanski, the party has delivered a record performance: overall control of Hackney, Lewisham, Waltham Forest, Norwich and Hastings, a gain of 441 council seats, and a projected 18% national vote share.
This is unlikely to be a mere flash in the pan. Polanski’s outfit has tripled its membership since he took the helm, and is now the party of choice for voters under 50. I had to read that again after I typed it, and I suggest you do too. We therefore need to have an honest discussion about the extreme policies this growing cross-section of the electorate appears perfectly comfortable with. Specifically, that’s young, urban dwellers, particularly those from areas with a high Muslim population.
Let us start with some of the more eye-watering items on the menu. The party wants to legalise all drugs, including heroin and crack cocaine, with a “public-health” model of regulated sales and prescriptions. It is in favour of full self-identification for ‘Trans’ people, puberty blockers for minors, and considers “misgendering” a serious offence. It demands an immediate ban on blood sports, factory farming, and badger culls (don’t worry about the inevitable rise of tuberculosis, the NHS will get a healthy cash injection too). It seeks to impose “rights of nature” laws that would grant legal ‘personhood’ to rivers and ecosystems – no, I’m not making this up. Just for fun, throw in the dismantling of Trident, free university for all, a four-day week, Net Zero by 2040, and a halt to new fossil-fuel projects overnight.
All very 21st-century progressive, you might say. Or, if you were feeling slightly less charitable, a Utopian shopping list that ignores basic economics, human nature, and the occasional inconvenient fact from the real world. Even Jeremy Corbyn would have balked at this lot.
But it is the core platform, the key policy detail under Polanski that should give every sensible Brit pause for thought. Strip away the kale smoothies and the quinoa, and several of the party’s flagship policies could have been lifted straight from an ISIS manifesto. The long-term aim of a “world without borders”, with generous Universal Basic Income-style support for migrants in the meantime? That’s the Caliphate, rebranded as a “fair and humane system of managed migration” – the ummah without the need for passports.
Full decriminalisation and regulation of prostitution, complete with brothels on high streets and designated safe zones? That’s little more than sex slavery, dressed up as empowerment; the sort of thing Dabiq magazine might have hailed as a blow against Western prudery.
How about scrapping the Prevent programme and treating “Islamophobia” as a hate crime, with further incursions into free speech? That’s straight out of the sharia playbook: criticism of Islam becomes a criminal offence, while the faithful get a free pass.
Then there’s the massive hike in foreign aid and “climate reparations” for colonialism – Jizya by another name. Wealth taxes, inheritance raids, and punitive corporation tax? Same principle: the kuffar foot the bill.
And let’s not forget, the Greens also desire the abolition of the Monarchy. Well, there can be only one sovereign, and it certainly isn’t King Charles – no matter how sympathetic he is to the cause.
While this no doubt sounds like conspiracy theory territory, the dichotomy is plain to see. The Greens claim to be secular, feminist, and vegan – the very antithesis of Islamic extremists. And yet, their policies create the perfect petri dish for the very extremism they claim to abhor: open borders that import parallel societies, speech codes that shield grooming gangs and hate preachers, a kid gloves approach to crime that emboldens the nefarious, and the relentless transfer of British wealth abroad. As the Telegraph noted after the Gorton and Denton result, the party’s pro-Gaza message concealed a radical social agenda utterly at odds with the socially conservative Muslim voters who delivered the win.
Historically, the Green Party was a quirk of the electoral system, popular in eco-friendly Brighton but virtually unknown elsewhere. This new, less environmentally-focussed version is disturbing, because the Green vote is now young, growing, and heavily Islamised. In seats with large Muslim populations (Gorton and Denton being the prime exhibit), the shift from Labour has been dramatic. A recent Henry Jackson Society report on the 2024 local elections confirms this pattern, identifying “Muslim sectarian voting” as a structural phenomenon strongly predicted by higher Muslim population share, younger demographics, and elevated turnout. Thanks to mass immigration and high birth rates, Britain’s Muslim population is expanding rapidly. The right-wing vote, by contrast, skews older and is shrinking demographically. In other words, the Green-Islamist overlap is not a blip; it is a structural trend here to stay.
What does it say about modern Britain that a non-trivial and expanding proportion of the public is comfortable with this extremist agenda? That it actively seeks to impose it on the rest of us? That it presumably believes such policies are not only viable, but morally righteous?
Reform UK may have had the best of the 2026 local elections in terms of momentum and seats gained, but we are potentially three years away from the next general election. In that time, how much ground could these views foment and spread – especially among a cohort that dominates the public square? The idea that this parasitic existence of the Muslim vote (first Labour, now the Greens) ends in a lasting alliance with a gay Jewish vegan like Zack Polanski is for the birds. The Muslim vote is gathering its strength, and by 2029 should be ready to go it alone.
The Greens, of course, are not about to form a government. They should not be serious contenders in 2029 either. But their surge is a warning. When a party’s manifesto starts to read like the Islamic State, we are beyond the realm of “compassionate” politics. And that’s my real beef. If you genuinely seek extremism, feel free to go join ISIS – at least they’re honest about what they want. Granted, the Koran doesn’t come with pronouns and a carbon tax, but at least it’s got the basics covered: sex slavery, freedom to maim, and end of life care as standard.
Meanwhile, on this side of the Gaza Strip (right here in Britain) we need to wake up before the joke stops being funny. Polanksi himself, could do with a long hard look in the mirror as well.
Frank Haviland is the author of Banalysis: The Lie Destroying the West and The Frank Report Substack.
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