In the summer of 1972, Lesley Whittaker walked into a pub in rural Warwickshire. She had something for her husband Tony. It was a copy of Playboy magazine. In that issue, there was an interview with the biologist Paul R. Ehrlich, who died this month aged 93. In it, he repeated the thesis of his 1968 book The Population Bomb, where he wrote that ‘in the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death’. There were simply too many of us. Worldwide famine was imminent.

Lesley and Tony were terrified. Along with a local businessman, Michael Benfield, and his future wife, Freda Sanders, they talked about it over pints at the Bridge Inn, becoming known as a ‘Gang of Four’. Over several months, they roped in 39 others, and set up the People party in 1973. This became the Ecology party by 1975, and then settled as the Green party in 1984.

If Ehrlich’s prediction had come true, there wouldn’t be a Green party. No Lesley, no Tony, no Michael, no Freda. Evidently, overpopulation did not cause everyone to starve. The prediction was wrong but its logic would prove far more enduring.

The Green party’s origin story reveals the sentiment that endures today under Zack Polanski’s leadership: the worst thing is always happening. Overpopulation, global famine, animal slaughter, ecological devastation, Boris Johnson, rampant terfdom, genocide. The Greens have been the most hospitable political home for the apocalyptic, the anxious and the scared.

This weekend’s Green conference is a perfect opportunity to witness the party’s paranoid style. Looking through the motions, a picture emerges of a movement consumed by its neuroses. It is no longer possible for the Greens to be just green: the party has been eaten up by what some people call the ‘omnicause’. If you’re a conservative with environmental leanings, then you’re not welcome. If you’re a gender-critical eco-warrior… well, there’s no such thing. Climate activism begets trans activism begets Palestinian activism. The author Sally Rooney gave a speech at a progressive conference this month that’s a good example of the sentiment. ‘The adversaries we confront in the Palestinian solidarity movement… are the same forces driving catastrophic climate change and destroying the very basis for our shared survival,’ she said. Each issue is yet more proof of a permanent crisis.

At this weekend’s online-only conference, party members will have an opportunity to vote on a motion declaring that ‘Zionism is racism’. Two similarly named splinter groups – Greens Anti-Zionist Alliance and Greens for Palestine – have been leading the effort, and Polanski (himself Jewish) hasn’t really condemned it: ‘If we’re talking about the definition [of Zionism] that this Israeli government are clearly perpetrating through a genocide in Gaza, then yes, absolutely. That’s racist.’

Backing the motion more vehemently is........

© The Spectator