Once upon a time, believe it or not, the Green Party stood for saving the planet and protecting the environment.

For a brief moment at the end of the 1980s, when global warming and the hole in the ozone layer first came to public attention, it even threatened to become a serious electoral force. In the 1989 European Parliament elections, for example, it gained more than 14 per cent of the vote in this country.

But that brief flowering was followed by a return to the electoral wilderness as Britain’s three main parties co-opted environmental policies as their own.

Now, however, it’s back with a vengeance thanks to a surge in popularity following Zack Polanski’s elevation to its leadership in September last year, a resurgence vividly illustrated by its unprecedented triumph in the Gorton and Denton by-election two months ago.

These days, the Greens consistently attract just shy of 20 per cent of the vote, while an Ipsos survey published two weeks ago suggests around half of Londoners are considering a vote for them in tomorrow’s local elections.

With Labour predicted to lose up to 2,000 council seats nationwide, the Green Party looks set to become this country’s first ever genuinely popular, unabashedly hard-Left party with a realistic prospect of ultimately seizing power.

And this should worry everyone who loves this country.

Its ascendency has been achieved not by flaunting its environmental credentials but by sidelining them altogether.

As the by-election result in Manchester highlighted, its support now mostly stems from idealistic youngsters drawn to its anti-capitalist, no-borders rhetoric and the promise of a raft of financial bonanzas in the form of a universal basic income, a higher minimum wage and increased benefits.

Meanwhile, its obsession with Gaza and its increasingly hostile language regarding ‘Zionists’ has attracted a growing Muslim voter bloc.

Polanski himself has repeatedly shunned opportunities to call out anti-Semitism.

Asked in a Sky TV interview with Trevor Phillips on Sunday if he agreed with Fiyaz Mughal, founder of Tell MAMA (a government- backed group monitoring hate against Muslims) that ‘whilst the vast majority of Muslims are an asset to our country, unless we have a root-and-branch rejection of Muslim anti-Semitism, calls for commiserations with British Jews are futile’, Polanski misinterpreted the quote and evaded the question.

The Greens’ leader said, disingenuously, that he thought ‘blaming an entire community’ was the ‘opposite of what we should be doing’.

And the man who shared a social media post that accused police officers who arrested the suspect in the Golders Green attacks last week of ‘repeatedly and violently kicking a mentally ill man in the head’ was in trouble again yesterday.

A survey of his posts on Bluesky, a Left-wing network, revealed that Polanski had liked several messages which accused Sir Keir Starmer of being on the payroll of ‘Zionist philanthropists’. 

In sum, the Green Party has become an unlikely coalition of far-Left ultra-progressives – many of them infatuated by fashionable woke causes such as LGBTQ+ rights – and those affiliated to radical Islam, a movement whose adherents hold some deeply unsavoury views on people who aren’t heterosexual and very nasty opinions about Jews.

It’s been tempting to pour scorn on this unholy alliance. Many predict that it cannot possibly last: sooner or later there will have to be a reckoning between the homophobes and self-styled ‘queers’ that constitute its membership and support.

But they are by no means the only people who have been gulled by the Greens’ ostensibly cuddly rhetoric.

Many of the party’s detractors have observed in wonderment the sight of ‘Vote Green’ signs in the windows of multi-million-pound houses in prosperous market towns and cathedral cities in areas such as the Home Counties and even the Cotswolds.

This penetration of sections of the affluent middle class is reflected in the composition of the Greens’ candidates list, which is peppered with nice-but-dim contenders with fanciful names such as Rainbow, Aurora and Cinnamon espousing outlandish policies, such as cutting the motorway speed limit to 55mph, slashing the Armed Forces and abolishing the monarchy.

Aware that such proposals don’t go down very well on the doorstep, Polanski has recently announced a review of some of these policies. But, as Daniel Hannan reminded Daily Mail readers last month, it would be complacent to dismiss today’s Green Party as an assembly of harmless eccentrics and entitled airheads.

To judge by the support they muster in refined and respectable circles, many people still suffer from the delusion that it simply stands for ‘being nice’. This perception ignores today’s reality that some of its Islamist supporters are not remotely this way inclined.

As a steady drip of reports this year has reminded us, many are consumed by an antipathy towards Jews and scorn for this country. And this poison goes right to the top.

On October 8, 2023, the day after Hamas terrorists killed 1,200 Israelis in the worst day of Jewish slaughter since the Holocaust, Mothin Ali, now the Greens’ deputy leader, wrote on social media that Palestinians had a right to ‘fight back’ and that ‘white supremacist European settler colonialism must end’.

And Polanski himself recently told the New Statesman that he had privately apologised to Jeremy Corbyn for criticising his leadership of Labour over anti-Semitism.

So forget any preconceptions you might have about a movement composed of callow, well-meaning types. This party has metamorphosed into a thoroughly dangerous collective, one which, should it get its way, would inflict untold damage on an already fractured country teetering on the edge of bankruptcy.

What makes the Greens such a menace is their combination of economic illiteracy and utopian idealism.

As the party of wokery made flesh, it has gained much headway among the under-30s – particularly women – because many of them feel, with some justification, that the system is stacked against them. Denied the sort of employment opportunities and job security that their parents enjoyed, they fear that they will never be able to afford a house, for example.

Yet the Greens appeal to this demographic because it also constitutes our first post-literate generation. This is one with a greatly reduced attention span, which doesn’t read newspapers, instead picking up its political affiliations from videos on social media, where its prejudices are confirmed and deepened by algorithms that feed them more of the same.

Given this echo-chamber effect, it’s no wonder this generation believes that the future lies with a party that not only promises generous financial benefits but free housing for immigrants and reparations for slavery.

With its sugary displays of concern and promises of bottomless munificence, the Green Party appeals to a generation that thinks it can have something for nothing.

Most people with a modicum of common sense know that its redistributive economic policies would precipitate the country’s collapse.

Yet what gets less attention is the party’s airy idealism, its childish belief that ‘hope’, ‘compassion’ and faith in human goodwill are all that’s required to bring about a perfect world.

This worldview is manifested in the call by one candidate in Scotland to have all prisons abolished and the proposal that there be no school education till the age of seven, no homework in primary schools and no exams in secondary schools.

While the abolition of rules and boundaries on a small scale always leads to chaos or despotism – witness how hippy communes established in wilderness environments inevitably descend into chaos or end up under the iron grip of an alpha male – utopian schemes created at scale inevitably conclude with ruination or tyranny of a far more horrific magnitude.

This is where Green Party idealism would lead us. Their insistence that ‘migration is not a criminal offence under any circumstances’ and desire for a ‘world without borders’ which would see ‘the concept of legal nationality abolished’ would signal the disappearance of Britain as we know it. The perils posed by this idealism surpass even its infantile idealism on economics, its delusional belief that everything in life should be free.

One of the paradoxes of people who believe in the unshakeable goodness of their cause, and the inherent goodness of human beings, is that they tend to be intolerant of those who dissent from their worldview, as well as aggressive and bullying towards people who disagree with them.

This is why there is no contradiction between the ultra-progressives’ claim to ‘be kind’ and their desire for anyone who says something ‘offensive’ – invariably about immigration or the growing influence of political Islam – to be cancelled, censored or thrown in jail. It is also why there is no fundamental incompatibility between woke liberalism and a politicised version of Islam. They are both intolerant creeds that preach hatred of this country and its values, and are united in their rampant anti-Semitism.

This contradictory ethos is replicated in a Green Party leadership which endlessly repeats that it stands for ‘hope not hate’, yet whose leader’s default mode when it comes to deflecting criticism is to label opponents ‘fascists’. As Polanski let slip in comments made recently, he wishes to see people of a conservative persuasion re-educated. Or worse.

In an interview on his podcast, he laid out his vision for a country in words that should chill everyone to their marrow. ‘Before we go into a complete Utopia, which I’m totally there for, there are people, though, who would identify as Right-wing, or indeed far-Right,’ he said. ‘Do we think we can change their minds? Or is it a case of building a society that doesn’t include them?’

Polanski’s vision of a future society that ‘doesn’t include’ dissenters will do nothing to assuage the suspicion that the road to Utopia always ends at the guillotine or in the gulag.

What should be on our radar now is not so much the street-level bigots or impressionable youngsters with fantastical names who will be running in local elections in England and Wales and for seats in Holyrood north of the border.

W hat should be of utmost concern are the policies of the Green Party that emanate from the top, the fantasy-world thinking that drives this movement.

This informs the economically illiterate notion that by simply fleecing Britain’s 156 billionaires, everything in the country could be paid for and no one need ever have to work for a living again.

Yet these billionaires – and a good number of this country’s millionaires and other wealth-creators – will be long gone before a government involving the Greens gets the key to the door of 10 Downing Street.

This is the historically amnesiac, intellectually vacuous belief that ‘compassion’ by itself can carry the day.

This is not only a foolish notion, but a dangerous one. Because ‘being nice’ – and expecting everyone else to behave likewise – is an approach guaranteed to end in penury, misery and despotism.

• Patrick West is a columnist for Spiked and author of Get Over Yourself: Nietzsche For Our Times.