Greens Face a Venue Ban and Open an Inquiry on Polling Eve
Brighton and Hove’s council leader is considering refusing to let the Greens hire the Brighton Centre again after Sunday’s motion defining Zionism as racism, the party has opened an investigation into the member who proposed it, and its former deputy leader in Wales has resigned. Zack Polanski is on the ballot in Holborn and St Pancras tomorrow.
The motion passed 1,022 to 813 and becomes party policy, though not automatically a manifesto commitment; four of the party’s five MPs opposed it. Bella Sankey, the Labour leader of the council that owns the Brighton Centre, said she was “deeply concerned at the prospect of the Green Party returning to Brighton for future conferences”, called the motion “divisive, discriminatory and wrong” and said it risked “the safety of Jewish members and Jewish people more broadly”. Green sources reject her characterisation. The party is investigating Lubna Speitan, the British-Palestinian artist who proposed it, after she was named in 2015 United States court documents as a “close friend” of a man convicted in the United States and jailed for forty years for supporting al-Qaeda; the documents carry no suggestion she knew of his criminal activity. She says: “I reject all defamatory and nonsense claims made about me... This is a classic distraction. I am not the conversation.” Phil Davies, the Greens’ former deputy leader in Wales, has quit, calling the motion “pointless”, “imperialistic” and “idiotic” because “it doesn’t do anything to materially improve people’s lives in Palestine”, and wants Welsh members to vote next month on splitting away. Mr Polanski, who is himself Jewish and is barred from entering Israel, repeated that “antisemitism and criticism of the Israeli state are, and must always be, completely distinct”. Voters in Holborn and St Pancras deliver the only verdict that counts tomorrow.