At this moment, Zak Polanski, the leader of the Green Party, is under severe pressure. That’s because he reposted an Instagram post showing a chap wearing a t-shirt standing beside a guillotine with the words “We’re only making plans for Nigel”.
While you’re still reeling from the monstrosity of this news, let me tell you that the Reform Party sees it as aimed at Nigel Farage, their leader, and that it is an incitement to violence against him.
Polanski has acknowledged that he shouldn’t have reposted the image (along with twenty others) but he has refused to apologise for his actions.
To which I say, good man Zak. For the Reform Party, which has used all sorts of verbal tricks to indicate that Britain has too many immigrants and if Nigel gets made PM at the next election (pass the smelling salts, Virginia) that problem will be solved in quick time, for that party to accuse Polanski of inciting to violence is like Hitler Youth complaining about someone passing a Jewish synagogue without raising their hat.
If you want to incite people to violence, as we know in our neck of the woods, you come at it with a lot more blood and thunder. You hold rallies and roar about the Whore of Babylon, better known as the Pope. Or you accuse them in the House of Commons of being too close to the IRA (as the Finucane family know to their cost).
There’s a young chap who calls himself Robespierre who runs a website which features a guillotine. He regularly and quite properly kicks the tripe out of unionist politicians, when he sees that as called for. And you can hear a sound that sounds very like the downward swish of a guillotine blade. Is he inciting people to violence? For God’s sake have a titter of wit. If you were trying to do that, wouldn’t you feature something rather more up-to-date than an instrument of execution from the eighteenth century?
Anyone who calls Polanski an agitator for violence against Farage on the basis of an image he didn’t even create, either believes or doesn’t believe it. If he doesn’t believe it, he (or she) is a political hypocrite. If he or she believes it, he or she is a fool.
Robespierre is very good. I agree with just about everything he says. I think Farage and his ilk are hypocrites, they constantly defend Lucy Connolly for her demented incitement to violence yet cry whenever anyone so much as sneezes in Nigel’s direction. Having said that Polanski was foolish to retweet that image, especially in light of the horrific murder of Anne Widdecombe. Two wrongs don’t make a right.