23.04.2026

Not so bold politics

Tony Greenstein’s suspension from the Green Party exposes its current left posturing as a total sham. It also shows that investing hopes in the Green Party is completely misplaced. The Green Party is petty-bourgeois through and through, says Carla Roberts

He might not have set out to expose the Greens, but Tony Greenstein’s very short membership has certainly laid bare the rotten underbelly of Zack Polanski’s shiny new Greens. Tony joined on March 1 2026, but, less than two weeks later, on March 13, a “request” was made by persons unknown in “the local party” to the “Green Party regional council” to suspend him, which the leadership council, meeting on April 15, duly supported.

The comrade has sent us the relevant documentation, though it does not come to very much. The “basis of the decision” runs to a full 11 words: “Documented history of anti-Semitism, including court decisions and recent terrorism charges.”

He has been suspended under point 4.8 of the Greens’ constitution, which states that the council has the “power to expel or suspend any person from membership and/or refuse membership to any person for a specified period if in its opinion it is in the party’s interest to do so.” A lovely catch-all phrase that does not even require those accused to do any ‘harm’ or suchlike.¹

No evidence is featured in the pre-printed, three-page template document, although there is plenty of space allocated for appendixes, etc - but it is all empty. There is not even an attempt to do what the witch-hunters in the Labour Party used to do, such as taking quotes out of context, featuring screenshots from private conversations, ‘liking’ a Facebook post, etc.

And it would be quite hard to find evidence. Yes, there are “recent terrorism charges” against Greenstein. In December 2023, he was arrested for this single tweet: “I support the Palestinians, that is enough, and I support Hamas against the Israeli army.”² As Hamas has been designated a terrorist organisation, he has been charged under the Terrorism Act 2000 and will stand trial on August 18 2026. Greenstein also received a nine-month suspended prison sentence in September 2023 for his involvement in a planned protest by Palestine Action against an Elbit Systems factory (which never took place). His terror charge is on the same kind of bogus level as the charges doled out against over 3,000 people for the crime of holding up signs declaring “I support Palestine Action”. It is beyond laughable to use these types of political charges as an excuse for disciplinary action.

Greenstein is certainly known for his fruity language and often explosive conduct and has clashed with many organisations that he has been involved with over the decades. But he is a long-standing and well-educated anti-Zionist Jew (whose father was a rabbi), who has written plenty on the subject. We might criticise his book Zionism during the holocaust for the lack of editing, but one would be hard-pressed to find in it anything that could be construed as racist.

Of course, we disagree with his unwavering support for the so-called ‘one-state solution’, which, as Moshé Machover has explained, is no solution at all, because it boils down to denying the “very existence of a Hebrew nation - a settler nation formed by Zionist colonisation”. Greenstein views them as a single monolithic bloc, in which no significant body can ever be won over to a progressive or socialist viewpoint - so the working class in the Hebrew nation is written off! As such, Tony can only tell them that, in his vision for the future for the region, the poles of oppression will simply be reversed: Israeli Jews will have no right of self-determination. This is clearly not a programme for socialism of any kind, although it is certainly a very widespread position. But he is no anti-Semite.

Accountability

Contrary to the suspension letter, there are also no alleged “court decisions”, which supposedly prove his “documented history of anti-Semitism”. In fact, not even the Labour Party could manage to dig up anything along those lines - and they certainly tried. In the end, they expelled him for “harassment” and “abusive language” towards a number of pro-Zionist politicians.

As a rather troubling aside, the “Green Party Regional Council” that suspended Greenstein was actually abolished at the Greens’ autumn conference in October 2025. It was replaced with the Green Party Council (GPC), which “has responsibilities over areas such as the culture and wellbeing of the party, its governance, party policy, our political direction, and political strategy”. Rather than being made up of regionally elected members (as was the old regional council), the new body is supposed to be made up of “members [who] will be elected at the annual ballot from 2026”.

These annual ballots take place during the two conferences the Greens hold every year. And, while there was such an annual ballot during the party’s spring conference on March 18, this did not extend to electing the members of the council!³ The list of 30 “council members” on the GP website was last updated on January 8 2025 and still features the regionally elected reps of the former regional council - and the ‘leadership team’ of Zack Polanski, Mothin Ali and Rachel Millward.⁴

So who knows who actually sits on the body that suspended Greenstein or how they could be held accountable? We can see from the documentation sent to Greenstein that 12 people voted during the said meeting on April 15 - 11 voted in favour of Tony’s suspension, with only one against. Was Polanski there? How did he vote? Shouldn’t Green Party members know this kind of thing? Such a lack of transparency always favours the incumbent regime.

Tony’s suspension letter states that he “may make representations (for example, if you believe this decision was made in error) or to offer any mitigations for the council’s consideration”, by 5pm on Wednesday May 13. But there is no evidence! How can Greenstein defend himself against 11 short words? He also does not know if there will be a hearing, where he could present his side of things, or if this suspension would then be followed by his expulsion. We very much suspect it will. His numerous requests for more information have remained unanswered. This is, rather incredibly, much worse than the sorry excuse for a disciplinary process we witnessed during the height of the witch-hunt in the Labour Party.

Racism?

In his blog on the issue, comrade Greenstein says that “this whole process, known as a ‘no fault suspension’, proves that racism is alive and well in the Green Party”.⁵ Among his evidence is that the Greens “continue to allow Zionists to accuse Palestinian supporters of ‘anti-Semitism’ without fearing any comeback”, that the Green Party “has never been involved in Palestine solidarity work” and “its policy on BDS has always been a dead letter”, that “there have been numerous articles targeting mainly Muslim [Green] council candidates” and that “anti-Arab and anti-Muslim racism is extremely high amongst Jewish Zionists, many of whom, like Sussex Friends of Israel, are in bed with Tommy Robinson’s racists”.

Perhaps comrade Greenstein is stretching things here. Nonetheless, the Green Party is definitely soft on Zionism. Under Caroline Lucas it adopted the IHRA’s so-called definition of anti-Semitism, presumably to show that it was a reliable potential junior partner in a capitalist government.

Of course, what we are seeing from the Green leadership is not another attempt to play the ‘anti-Semitism’ card, which worked so well to get rid of Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader. Tony Greestein is not Jeremy Corbyn. What the Greens want to avoid is themselves becoming the target of such a witch-hunt already being whipped up by the Telegraph. That is why Greenstein is being pushed out, not because of racism, but because he makes an easy target.

Comrade Greenstein is also a potential pain in the arse for the local Green council in Brighton and Hove - he clearly has no fear of speaking out and has, for example, quite rightly publicly lambasted the council for wasting over £50 million on i360 - a pointless elevated lift on the seafront.

The Greens might have over 220,000 members - but most of them are happy to remain entirely passive, with only 700 voting during the spring conference (although it took place on Zoom and was open to all members). Greenstein, however, is the kind of active member who rather inconveniently disturbs Zack Polanski’s very delicate balancing act: the Green leader is posing left, all the while touting the idea of a European (capitalist) defence pact, as an ‘alternative’ to Nato. He is touring trade union conferences, while assuring medium and big business that he is no anti-capitalist of any sort - for example, with the amendment agreed at spring conference, which removed a previous commitment to nationalise “the five largest energy supply companies”.⁶ He is speaking out in solidarity with the Palestinians, while conniving with those in the Green Party apparatus who did everything in their power to stop conference from voting for the ‘Zionism is racism’ motion.⁷

Polanski himself missed his party’s highest decision-making body, instead spending the whole day at the Together demonstration, ending with him raving on the stage in Trafalgar Square. He judged that viral dancing clips of him and Hannah Spencer would do a lot more for the Greens’ electoral chances than an ‘internal’ discussion about Zionism. Polanski has certainly made no attempt to overturn the Greens’ adoption of the IHRA misdefinition of anti-Semitism, which, of course, is not about anti-Semitism at all, but serves as a shield to stop criticism of Israel.

In other words, the arch-careerist, Polanski, is getting ready for government. Not only is he hoping for a Green takeover of a whole slew of councils after May 7: he is very much looking for the big time of national government, albeit as a junior coalition partner. Zack Polanski has talked of entering a coalition with Labour (as long as it is not led by Sir Keir - not because of his commitment to British imperialism, but in reality because, for the moment, he is unpopular in the polls).

The Greens are and remain a petty-bourgeois formation (ie, they fight to reform capitalism in the interest of the petty bourgeoisie). They might soon enough become a thoroughly bourgeois party, especially if they get called into a potential anti-Reform coalition after the next general election - not an impossible prospect.

Corbyn lessons

While he has certainly learned lessons from the defeat of the Corbyn movement and is less of a pushover, when it comes to the smear campaign, Polanski certainly does not want ‘trouble-makers’ like Tony Greenstein in the party ruining his electoral chances. It is the kind of witch-hunt against the left that unfortunately Greenstein supported in Your Party before he jumped ship: “The history of the left is a history of failure. We have groups who have built that failure - I refer to the SWP. We can’t have parties within parties, otherwise we’ll have the old fractious debates.”⁸

Indeed comrade Greenstein seems to have given up entirely on the working class:

In the current climate forming a revolutionary socialist party is impossible for the simple reason: that we are not in revolutionary or pre-revolutionary times. We will have to ally with forces to our right who agree on such minor things like the right to protest, freedom of speech and association, and opposition to the deployment of terrorism laws to outlaw protest groups like Palestine Action.⁹

He is being facetious, obviously, but there can be no denying that this is opportunism pure and simple. It explains why he had no qualms about joining an organisation, which, by his own admission, is “a petty-bourgeois party with no socialist politics. It does not even recognise the connection between capitalism and the destruction of the environment. That is why Green Parties in Germany and Ireland have moved to the right and far-right. The Green Party has nothing to say about who controls the levers of production in society. It is filled with people who want to green capitalism, not change it.”

Of course, there is no revolutionary situation today. But one thing is guaranteed: if socialists today simply wait for this to arrive, while giving up on building the kind of political alternative we actually need and instead help to prop up organisations that have no interest in building socialism, we can be absolutely sure that we will never ever get there.