the brilliantly leaping gazelle

Remember the good old days when the Green Party was actually the Green Party? Was made up of ex-hippies, cranks and the sort of people who were proudly on the fringes of the political mainstream. Those Greens combined the idealism of Tom and Barbara Good with the relentless optimism of a ‘Blue Peter’ charity appeal.  Wherein the foil from milk bottle tops could turned into guide dogs in Britain or drinking-water wells in Africa 

Probably not, because the Greens have betrayed most of their principles in much the same way that Labour has done. But Carolin Lucas does. ‘Focus on the environment, former Greens leader tells Polanski’, ran a headline in ‘The Daily Telegraph’ last week. It was wonderfully ironic that even when the old Greens are berating the new Greens for not being Green enough, the old Green mantra of ‘reuse and recycle’ was still be used to fight the Good fight. Not only had ‘The Telegraph’ lifted all of Lucas’s quotes from an interview she’d given to ‘Politics Home’. Its that her idea of what ‘environment’ means differs greatly from what Repulsion understands it to mean. He’s not just ‘reused or recycled’ it. He’s totally reimagined it.

His idea of ‘environment’ is a narrowly political one, as opportunistic as it is short-sighted. An environment in which disaffected Corbynista’s, transgender ideologues and anyone else that hates Israel can can call home. An environment in which him being both Jewish and gay are used as political cover.  The fact that numerous Green Councillors and parliamentary candidates have been suspended after social media posts praising the October 7 massacre, calling Jews ‘cockroaches’ were unearthed are nothing more than an internal disciplinary matter. ‘How can the we possibly be anti-Semitic, we’ve got a Jewish leader! This is simply the right-wing press attempting to smear us’ is essentially their defence. 

And the fact that he’s gay is also weaponised. ‘The notion that support for transgender rights could possibly undermine gay rights is offensive. Our leader is gay. Do you really think he’d go for that?’ Then there there is the inherent contradiction of them entering into a loose alliance with British Muslims for electoral advantage.

As Rakib Eshan observed in an article for spiked last year ‘The problem is that the two camps were never remotely aligned on other key issues. These include rights and protections for sexual minorities (such as same-sex marriage), the degree to which queer rights and queer theory should be taught in school, and the sanctity of life – both in terms of abortion and assisted dying. It is no secret that British Muslims are more conservative on these issues compared even with the general population, let alone the progressive left.’

And therein lies the fundamental flaw in the Greens thinking. They imagine themselves to be ‘progressive. It’s everyone else thats divisive. Spreading lies and hate, promoting extremist narratives, and thus stoking resentment and inflaming tensions. Repulsion is worrying oblivious to the fact that charges he levels at Reform might be more accurately used to describe the Greens. 

If he thinks that trans-women are women, or that you can be anti-Zionist without being anti-Semetic, then he’s really putting the mental back into environmental.

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If there remained a shred of doubt in my mind that Farrago is by a wide margin the shrewdest political operator since Milk Snatcher, his decision earlier today not just to resign as the MP for Clacton-On-Sea, but to also stand as a candidate in the by-election it triggers demolishes it. Its a fucking genius move. 

Embroiled by recent scandals as he has been involving donations made to him personally, allegations that he’s profited from products he promoted without disclosing this at the time, and the more long-standing one of him being him, he’s wrong-footed his accusers and changed the narrative. He’s put his  money where his mouth is.

He’s throwing down the gauntlet. He’s standing for election so why doesn’t Andy Capp do the same?  In October 2020, after Lettuce stepped down, he tweeted ‘Election now!’, correctly anticipating that Tory MP’s would simply anoint a new leader and avoid the brouhaha that followed Boris’s Johnson resignation. 

If he hasn’t got a leg to stand on, what about the press? They can hardly impugn Farrago’s integrity and avoid mentioning Capp’s lack of it. Farrago has dared them to their job. 

It’s a bold move by him, certainly. But we all know what fortune favours…