When Hannah Spencer took her seat as a Green MP earlier this year after a campaign in which the Palestinian flag and claims of genocide loomed large, she made sure to mention Gaza in her maiden speech.
But careful listeners will have noted that any talk of the environment was entirely missing.
It would once have been an extraordinary omission for a party founded on ecological principles.
Yet the traditional agenda of the Greens has been transformed in recent years – as demonstrated in the most dramatic terms last week by the conference voting to declare that “Zionism is racism”.
Spencer’s mother, Liz, who first joined the Greens when it was called the Ecology Party, said: “It’s not what the Green Party used to be; nice people who wore hemp shoes. That opened the door for lots of less-than-nice people to enter. And no one was primed for it.”
Hannah Spencer delivering her maiden speech in March 2026 (Parliament)[Missing Credit]
Among the continuing fallout from the motion which has prompted accusations of antisemitism, the JC has investigated how a party which was once universally respected for its idealism and integrity has been hijacked, replacing the environment with the Middle East conflict as the top priority of its agenda.
Green insiders have revealed their dismay at the party’s “total failure of governance” which enabled an effective takeover by Corbyn-era Labour outcasts, George Galloway supporters and former members of Your Party.
Zack Polanski’s position as leader may now be in doubt after his by-election defeat in St Pancras and Holborn, but party membership rose from 70,000 to 240,000 after he took over.
The surge has shifted the party’s position on key issues. Some new members had left Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour Party over its position on Israel and handling of antisemitism. Others were supporters of Galloway’s hardline Workers Party.
The “one member, one vote” structure gives anyone who pays as little as £6 a year a vote on policy. There have been accusations of entryism after activists urged new members to join to support the “Zionism is racism” motion.
Former leader Caroline Lucas said “an unknown number” of people “were actively encouraged to join” to push it through. She said she feared the Greens direct democracy and “cumbersome” complaints process leaves it “woefully exposed” to “entryism”.
Former co-leader Andrian Ramsay told the JC there was a “strong case to move to delegate conference,” bringing the Greens closer in line with other mainstream parties. At the moment, any member can choose to come along to vote, and it does mean if you’ve got a very determined group of people, they can have a big impact on the vote.”
The warning was echoed by former Green councillor and parliamentary candidate, Andrée Frieze, who resigned from the party last week after 14 years of membership.
“A small, very organised minority of people have taken over the party,” she said. “They have infiltrated party positions and they have abused the policy process to get things through.
“The tail is wagging the dog. There are extreme Islamists in the party and also radical leftwingers who have decided that the Green party is to be a vehicle for them to push their extreme antizionist agenda.”
Her former Jewish Green colleague, David Zell, who served as co-chair of the group when Polanski was treasurer, said his committee had warned party leadership about the direction.
“The party has been hijacked, it has been infiltrated and we saw it coming,” he said. “We had warned the party – we being the [Jewish Green] committee – about entryism… we tried to tell the party leadership how this was affecting Jewish Greens, and affecting the Jewish community.” An offer for dialogue with the Jewish community was rejected by the party, Zell added.
“There was a certain amount of naivety and also arrogance, saying ‘we don’t need to talk to the Jewish community institutions, they’re against us anyway.’”
Greens in Bolton asked on October 7 the council fly the Palestinian flag (Facebook)[Missing Credit]
In 2023, the Jewish Labour Movement (JLM), which fought antisemitism in the Corbyn years, warned that the Greens were “in danger of providing a refuge” for antisemitism.
The warning went unanswered.
Tracing the political backgrounds of backers of the “Zionism is racism” motion provides abundant evidence for the extent of the takeover by extremists.
After winning the vote, four of its supporters gathered for an impromptu press conference outside the Brighton Centre’s main hall.
They were Lubna Speitan, the motion’s author; Kieran Andrieu, a spokesperson for Greens for Palestine; Holocaust survivor Stephen Kapos; and Salma Yaqoob, a former ally to George Galloway. All four were once Labour members.
In 2018, Speitan identified herself as Greenwich and Woolwich Labour’s disabilities co-ordinator.
But in April this year, she told Labour-to-Green convert and motion supporter, Ashok Kumar in an interview that Labour’s treatment of the Corbyn movement had left her politically homeless. Speitan said she had joined the Greens to influence its policies on antisemitism.
She had also supported Corbyn’s Your Party, but speaking on Palestine Deep Dive she explained her switch to the Greens.
“Like many of us, we joined up for Your Party and then decided, OK, until they get off the ground, let’s prepare the ground somewhere else so at least there’s a foundation built and ready.”
Speitan is now under investigation by the party after the JC exposed her 2016 written testimony in defence of a “friend” who was on trial and then convicted as an al-Qaeda terrorist.
She has also been reported to the party over comments in which she said Zionists should be “hunted like their Nazi oppressors” and synagogues supporting Israel “confronted”.
Yaqoob previously led Galloway’s Respect Party and sought Labour’s West Midlands mayoral nomination in 2019, the same year she apologised for sharing an article invoking an antisemitic conspiracy theory about the Rothschilds.
In 2020, she accused her then party of “capitulation to unaffiliated lobbies of extreme right-wing governments”.
At last week’s conference last week, she asked if the Greens had learned from the “attacks” on Corbyn in the media, asking a panel including co-deputy Mothin Ali and Friends of Al Aqsa’s Ismail Patel: “The growth of the Green Party has been a result of people who been disillusioned, who feel they haven’t been heard.”
Co-deputy Leader of the Green Party Mothin Ali speaks during the Green Party Conference at Brighton Centre on October 3, 2026 in Brighton, England. (Getty Images)Getty Images
Andrieu was first an election agent for Labour’s Bell Ribeiro-Addy in the 2019 general election campaign, then head of external relations for Lutfur Rahman, the mayor of Tower Hamlets who was previously found guilty of electoral fraud.
Kapos, meanwhile, resigned from Labour in January 2023 after being warned that speeches he had given at socialist events could result in disciplinary action.
Helped on to the conference stage by co-deputy leader Mothin Ali, he declared: “Zionism is an extreme form of racism.” Afterwards, he told journalists: “I don’t think we can accept and tolerate Zionism anymore.”
Up and down the country, former Labour figures now hold Green council seats, several having left the Labour following disputes over Israel and antisemitism.
In Lewisham, Hau-Yu Tam was elected as a Labour councillor before being suspended during a dispute over a pro-Palestine protest. She regained the Labour whip but later resigned, joining the Greens in March 2025.
Tam backed the Zionism motion and has previously responded to a post on X referring to a Jewish Labour donor and alleging a “Zionist coup in Britain” by claiming that “the Zionist lobby” was coordinating “strategic masterstrokes”.
In Bolton, Councillor Ismail Ibrahim previously represented Labour and was once named as a potential parliamentary candidate for the party.
By May 2024, he had been nominated to represent Galloway’s Workers Party, although he subsequently withdrew, emerging in May 2026 as a Green councillor.
On October 7 this year, the third anniversary of the Hamas attacks, he asked Bolton Council for the Palestinian flag to be flown at Bolton Central Library on November 15, Palestinian Independence Day.
Even co-deputy leader Ali, who voted for the Zionism motion and backed the readmission of Green members suspended over alleged antisemitism, was previously a Labour member before moving to the Greens in 2020.
On October 7, he wrote: “White supremacist European settler colonialism must end.”
At the party conference, Ali was spotted with James Giles, an independent councillor in Kingston upon Thames who worked for “Gaza independent” MP Ayoub Khan, and played a role establishing Your Party while Zarah Sultana’s head of communications.
Former campaigner for Corbyn, Ashok Kumar is a key defender of the motion on national media. He called for police to “arrest all the landlords and Zionists” and on October 7 posted images of the Nova music festival with the caption: “Sometimes partying on stolen land next to a concentration camp where a million people are starved has consequences.”
The former secretary of Brighton and Hove Momentum, Greg Hadfield was suspended by Labour during a probe into alleged antisemitism after tweeting that Israel has always been a “racist endeavour,” and is also now a Green. He was at the Brighton conference and said he cried “tears of joy” after the Zionism motion passed.
Dr Shahrar Ali, the former deputy leader, accused the leadership of “burying their head in the sand” over the influence of members.
“It is much worse than incompetence, it is a total failure of governance,” he told the JC.
He alleged that the party had been infiltrated by Islamists, whose influence became increasingly apparent during the Gorton and Denton by-election won by Spencer.
“At that point we understood what was going on, they certainly felt emboldened over that.”
Ali, who is taking the party to court over its treatment of gender-critical beliefs, described an “identitarian ideological turn” within the Greens.
“You do as you are told, stop thinking for yourself, stop criticising and scrutinising, you do politics in slogans,” he said.
“That’s what happened with this Islamist adjacent movement.”
His concerns predate the start of Polanski’s leadership in 2025.
In 2024, Ali – who is Muslim – said he was barred from speaking to Muslim Greens at the party’s conference. He had wanted to speak about “what influence, if at all, their religion should be having in the Green Party or on democratic politics.”
He said it was a sign of a “paranoid and deeply insecure party” that he was not able to speak to members.
Ali accuses the party of failing to acknowledge a connection between its campaigning over Palestine since October 7 and rising antisemitism.
“What I find contemptible is the prioritising, the way the party has been campaigning since October 7 2023 on this, the way they have singularly failed to see the connection between their obsession over pro-Palestine campaigning and the rise in antisemitic hatred.”
He has now been suspended for allegedly bringing the party into disrepute after criticising the antizionist motion.
In response to allegations of antisemitism in the Green Party, Polanski said: “I take seriously my responsibility to make sure everyone feels safe and welcome in our party. Under my leadership, no-one will be made unwelcome because of their background, their faith, or where they worship.
“Antisemitism and criticism of the Israeli state are, and must always be, completely distinct – blurring the line between the two is not only wrong but antisemitic, and makes Jewish people less safe. It’s our role as a movement for justice to protect both the rights of Palestinians and our Jewish communities here in the UK.”
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