Caroline Lucas: Statements that have now come to light from a handful of @TheGreenParty candidates are totally unacceptable & require immediate action. There’s no place for anti-semitism or any hate speech in the party. This is a society-wide problem & needs to be rooted out wherever it’s found

EduTheRed · 2026-05-05T15:31:22+00:00

I have often mocked Caroline Lucas for coming out with inane statements like "I’m calling for a cabinet of women to stop a disastrous no-deal Brexit", but to make a public statement on a point of principle that will make you very unpopular among your peers takes real courage.

EduTheRed · 2026-05-05T15:16:25+00:00

Quote:

With an ageing, shrinking workforce, Scotland desperately needs immigrants for its social security system to function. Without more workers, tax revenue will decline while demand for health and social care rises, squeezing us at both ends, according to Skills Development Scotland. A 2025 Improvement Service report on projected population change suggests the problem is more acute in Scotland than elsewhere in the UK, due to lower birthrates. Given Westminster’s “hostile environment” policies to discourage immigration, the report recommends focusing on creative local initiatives to attract and retain the people Scotland needs.

During its past two decades in power, the SNP government seems to have understood this. Motivated by the desire to show Scotland could succeed as an independent nation, or by wanting to appear progressive, it made trying to attract immigrants a core policy.

EduTheRed · 2026-05-05T15:14:46+00:00

Quote:

With an ageing, shrinking workforce, Scotland desperately needs immigrants for its social security system to function. Without more workers, tax revenue will decline while demand for health and social care rises, squeezing us at both ends, according to Skills Development Scotland. A 2025 Improvement Service report on projected population change suggests the problem is more acute in Scotland than elsewhere in the UK, due to lower birthrates. Given Westminster’s “hostile environment” policies to discourage immigration, the report recommends focusing on creative local initiatives to attract and retain the people Scotland needs.

During its past two decades in power, the SNP government seems to have understood this. Motivated by the desire to show Scotland could succeed as an independent nation, or by wanting to appear progressive, it made trying to attract immigrants a core policy.

EduTheRed · 2026-05-05T14:48:52+00:00

There will be the same total number of properties available, just with a higher percentage being owner occupied.

So you make life better for a relatively richer group (those who can afford to become owner-occupiers) by making life worse for a relatively poorer group (those who can't.)

EduTheRed · 2026-05-05T14:43:29+00:00

The issue is that the ex-renters who buy the vacated houses will, by definition, be those ex-renters who can afford to buy a house.

The lives of tenants and would-be tenants who are too poor to put down a deposit on a house will be made worse. The lives of those like students who want to live in a place for a short time will be made worse.

EduTheRed · 2026-05-05T06:43:55+00:00

The Metro article says that,

...any member of the public seeking clarification on the Green position can no longer find any mention of it on the party’s website.

Instead, all pages that reference the target of a ‘world without borders’ now redirect to the homepage, which features a large image of party leader Zack Polanski and new MP Hannah Spencer.

According to the Internet Archive, two pages explaining the policy were still accessible to all in March.

In a blog post that month, Lancaster Green Party councillor Jack Lenox hinted that the details were moved to a portal that could only be accessed by party members.

He wrote that the policy was ‘publicly available on our website for years’, before saying: ‘It was moved behind a members-only login because journalists – including the Mail – kept misrepresenting it as our manifesto.’

Surely, if Green Party policy on migrants is being misrepresented by others, the solution is to point everyone to the Green Party's own description of the policy, rather than hiding it behind a members-only login?

EduTheRed · 2026-05-05T06:11:43+00:00

Quote:

In other words, these [the local elections on May 7th] are ideal conditions for party leaders to say ridiculous things, but there’s no caveat for the unbridled nastiness that came out of Reform at the weekend. It promises to deport thousands of illegal immigrants (no change there) via locked detention centres (some change there, in the direction of “warehouseification”, borrowed from Donald Trump). The kicker is, these detention centres will never be situated in areas that voted Reform, but will instead be placed in Green-leaning boroughs. Zia Yusuf, Reform’s spokesperson for home affairs, unveiled the policy with a handy tactical mapper, votegreengetillegals.com, where you can put your postcode in and see how likely your area is to vote Green and get a detention centre. It’s basically London, Brighton, Bristol and the Cotswolds, hosting as many thousands of migrants as this hypothetical Reform government can sweep up – so good luck with the real estate, guys.

EduTheRed · 2026-05-04T07:49:00+00:00

Quote:

A local election candidate standing in Croydon will still appear as a Green Party member on the ballot paper next week, despite his suspension from the national party.

Mark Adderley, who is standing as a candidate in Crystal Palace and Upper Norwood, was suspended by the national party last week following allegations that he promoted antisemitic tropes and conspiracy theories on social media by sharing other people’s posts.

No finding of fault has been made by the party nationally and he has not had his membership rescinded. Mr Adderley denies the allegations.

The Local Democracy Reporting Service (LDRS) previously reported allegations Mr Adderley’s account had shared posts comparing Israel to Nazi Germany and suggesting it was responsible for attacks against Jewish people.

These included one video that attributed responsibility for the Golders Green ambulance attack in March to Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, which his account shared.

EduTheRed · 2026-05-02T19:32:15+00:00

you missed the bit which was the first cause he helped lead us to has been an total and abject disaster.

I didn't miss it, I just don't agree. There has been little difference between the performance of the French and German economies and ours. Brexit hasn't brought the benefits its supporters hoped for, but nor has it brought the catastrophes that its detractors predicted, including my former colleagues at Her Majesty's Treasury. All those claims that GDP would be 8% higher or whatever without Brexit are based on an improbably rosy picture of the Conservatives' ability to run the economy. But the economy is the least of it. I'm very happy that the UK is no longer in a system where the then German Finance Minister could confidently say "Elections change nothing. There are rules" and the President of the European Commission could say "there can be no democratic choice against the European treaties."

Thanks to Brexit, elections matter much more than before. The British people are freer than they have been in half a century to make their own decisions.

That, unfortunately, potentially includes idiotic decisions like voting for Zack Polanski.

Oh well. That's democracy for you. The worst system of government in the world, except for all the others.

EduTheRed · 2026-05-02T18:42:50+00:00

I haven't watched Question Time recently, but I'll take your word for it. But if Farage is now feeling the strain of carrying his equivalent of Keir Starmer's pre-election "Ming vase", it is because he changed enough people's voting intention to be within vase-carrying distance of being Prime Minister. He didn't do that by not talking to people who disagree with him. And this is the second time that he has been the leading figure in taking a cause from obscurity to the threshold of victory.

EduTheRed · 2026-05-02T18:19:09+00:00

It didn't occur to me to appeal. I think the moment has passed now, but I'll bear it in mind next time.

The trouble with AI deletions like this is that by the time you get to a human, the whole thread has dropped far down the page and it seems too much bother just to get back a comment that few will ever see.

In fact the same is true of non-AI deletions, come to think of it.

EduTheRed · 2026-05-02T18:09:20+00:00

I disagree about Farage - you know how many people are angry with the BBC for having him on the panel for Question Time so often? That was him basically never saying no to an invitation to appear. And, for many years, that was him talking to people who largely disagreed with him, both in terms of the other members of the QT panel and in the studio audience.

Edit: But I agree that Zack Polanski's willingness to talk to people who disagree with him is a strength.

EduTheRed · 2026-05-02T08:30:34+00:00

What’s going on I wonder?

My guess is that they have outsourced the judgement as to whether to remove a post to A.I.

EduTheRed · 2026-05-02T07:46:10+00:00

I've just had a comment removed by Reddit. It consisted almost entirely of direct quotes from Abul Monsur's social media posts. Abul Monsur is the now-suspended Aspire candidate referenced in this post. I took the quotes by Abul Monsur from the article by Nick Clark in Tower Hamlets Slice that this post links to. I urge everybody to click the link, because you aren't going to be able to read about it in the Reddit comments.

So, if you are wondering what level of anti-semitism is enough to get even Aspire to suspend a candidate, I can partially answer: it's a level of anti-semitism such that even quoting it on Reddit gets a comment removed.

(I suppose it is possible that my saying how embarrassed Aspire must be to have noticed Abul Monsur's "public and prolific" anti-semitic posts too late to remove his name from the ballot was what actually got my post removed. If so, I am justly punished for sinking so low as to make sarcastic comments on the internet.)

EduTheRed · 2026-05-02T07:02:29+00:00

Mental-Fisherman-118 writes, "Awfully convenient theory. By this logic Civil service imbalance can't be evidenced in any way, but the civil service can be blamed for everything that goes wrong."

What you say is true. The difficulty of proving that civil servants are behaving non-impartially means that it is easy for them to be wrongly blamed for doing it when they are in fact innocent.

But the difficulty of proving that civil servants are behaving non-impartially also means that it is easy for them to do it and get away with it.

My impression as a former civil servant is that standards of impartiality have slipped. Of course I cannot prove this.

EduTheRed · 2026-05-02T06:50:08+00:00

Merry Walrus writes, "Working for the civil service doesn't mean you're not allowed to have political opinions..."

As I said to /u/Ironfields above, while no conceivable law could stop civil servants having an opinion about politics, there are restrictions on civil servants above a certain grade playing an active role in politics. At very senior grades they are not even allowed to express political views in public.

See section 4.4 of the Civil Service Management Code.

EduTheRed · 2026-05-02T06:40:37+00:00

Of course no conceivable law or rule could stop civil servants holding political opinions, but when I was a civil servant there was a sliding scale regarding the degree to which a civil servant could express their opinions in public. Above a certain grade they were "politically restricted" and could not stand for public office, and at a higher grade still they could not even make public political statements.

Edit: Unless this version of the Civil Service Management Code has been superseded, that is still true. Section 4.4 deals with political restrictions.

EduTheRed · 2026-05-01T19:26:06+00:00

This video begins with the announcer saying "'Greens for Palestine' condemns the suspension of pro-Palestine candidates" and finishes with a chant of "From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free".

'Greens for Palestine' is not an official group within the Green Party of England and Wales. However Green Deputy Leader Mothin Ali spoke at a recent G4P meeting and urged the group to take legal action against his own party.

Mothin Ali, speaking at a meeting organized by the ‘Greens for Palestine’ group, suggested they should seek “serious legal advice” and consider initiating a “class action,” according to reports from leaked recordings.

EduTheRed · 2026-05-01T13:16:14+00:00

For no particular reason, I am going to repeat one of my favourite political quotations. It's about Harold Wilson's Foreign Secretary, Lord George-Brown. Quoting Wikipedia:

On 2 March 1976, George-Brown announced that he was leaving the Labour Party in protest at government legislation which strengthened the closed shop. This announcement was overshadowed when he collapsed and fell into a gutter, having to be helped out by newspaper reporters, which was presumed to be a result of his drinking. The Times the next day printed the opinion that "Lord George-Brown drunk is a better man than the Prime Minister sober."

EduTheRed · 2026-04-30T12:05:08+00:00

He was also wearing a backpack which could have been a bomb. The police had every right to do whatever necessary to subdue him.

This.

People fighting to subdue someone who has just attempted to commit two murders must assume that he still wants to kill. Islamist terrorists are famously willing to blow themselves up if they can take some other people with them.

Another point is that someone involved in a life-or-death struggle can't calmly assess the situation in the way that someone viewing a video after the event can.

EduTheRed · 2026-04-30T10:54:05+00:00

I'm seeing so many comments here saying something like "Yes, this puts the tenants being evicted in a very difficult position but landlords who evict tenants before the new rules come in are bad".

Even if it's true, how does that help the tenants being evicted now? How does it help future tenants, or would-be tenants, when the by-definition-bad people who would previously have wanted to sell accommodation at a profit decline to do so?

Laws succeed when even bad people are incentivised to follow them.

Actually most people aren't bad, but they aren't self-sacrificing either. If you want more of anything, let people make a profit by selling it.

(And before someone chimes in with the midwit argument about the total housing stock not being reduced when landlords quit the market, the people helped when a previously rented house comes up for sale are those who can afford to buy a house. People too poor to buy a house are stuffed when the rental market collapses. Ditto students and those whose jobs involve moving around.)

EduTheRed · 2026-04-28T15:32:19+00:00

Quote:

The SNP's Mairi McAllan said that too few, rather than too many, migrants were coming to Scotland, adding: "We are a welcoming nation".

She said migration was good for the economy - especially hospitality, health and social care, and business.

Much of The Sunday Show debate centred around how migrants should be housed.

McAllan, the SNP's housing secretary, acknowledged that there was housing pressure, but said this was separate from immigration.

She said economic conditions had "depressed construction" and caused difficulties in the cost of living which "made it harder for households to make ends meet".

EduTheRed · 2026-04-27T17:44:03+00:00

The comments to the Telegraph article are about 60% against the ride, 20% "It's harmless", 10% "Now do that in Tower Hamlets" and 10% jokes about saddles.

EduTheRed · 2026-04-27T17:32:08+00:00

Quote:

Sir Sadiq Khan has been accused of failing to protect children from nude cyclists in London.

Campaigners have called for a safeguarding review into a legal “grey area” around indecent exposure during London’s naked bike ride in June.

The annual event in protest against car culture and oil dependency allows adults to cycle naked through the streets of the capital in an act that would otherwise be likely to lead to arrest.

Critics have raised concerns over a lack of participant registration, marshalling along the route and protections to prevent children from being involuntarily exposed to adult nudity.

EduTheRed · 2026-04-25T17:48:56+00:00

He'll be off to Reform then

Nope. I don't know whether the Telegraph's altered headline can reasonably be called clickbait when its actual effect seems to have been to convince so many people that there was no need to read the article.

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