The Green Party has become one of the most extreme in the UK following its annual conference. If the Church of England bans clergy from being members of other extreme parties, why not this one?
At their annual conference, the Green Party passed a number of measures, most of which went unreported. They included:
- Inclusive Terminology: Enforcing rigid linguistic rules that ban everyday words like “mother,” “father,” “homosexual,” and “female politician” under threat of internal party discipline and expulsion.
- Abortion: Total decriminalisation, allowing a woman to end a pregnancy at any stage for any reason with zero criminal prosecution or consequences.
- Euthanasia: Legalisation of assisted dying for terminally ill adults via independent medical sign-off.
- Trans Rights: Absolute gender self-identification granting biological males claiming a female identity full access to all biological women’s spaces, refuges, and sports categories.
- Defence: Complete unilateral nuclear disarmament by scrapping Trident, undermining traditional military alliances like NATO, and slashing military budgets.
- Net Zero: Forcing net-zero carbon emissions by 2030 through an immediate fossil fuel ban, a trillion-pound Green New Deal, and heavy consumption taxes on meat and dairy.
- Reparations: Enacting state-backed financial compensation and structural reparations for the British Empire and the transatlantic slave trade. (Thanks to Jason Swan Clark for this summary.)
But the one that, perhaps rightly, attracted most headlines was that they voted for and adopted a policy which explicitly calls for the establishment of a “single democratic Palestinian State in all of historic Palestine”, which means the dissolution, complete dismantling and eradication of Israel as a sovereign Jewish nation-state, replacing it entirely with a single Palestinian state spanning all of historic Palestine. (That last claim is actually false, since the original mandate for British Palestine included what is now Jordan, and the term coined by the Romans also covered a larger area. This illustrates the problem with calls for a ‘free Palestine’ since the boundaries of such a theoretical state have never been defined because no such state has ever existed. We also need to remember that there are no functioning democracies in the region other than Israel.)
The vote was controversial not only because of its outcome, but because of the process by which it was reached. The motion passed 1,022–813, but the Green Party had around 230,000 members. The vote therefore represented only about 0.8% of the membership. Green MP Ellie Chowns said the party needed to ask “searching questions” about a system in which less than 1% of members participate in policy-making, and argued that its governance arrangements needed modernising. The few attending the conference were effectively deciding policy for the whole party.
And the motion had been put before but failed on procedural grounds. At the March 2026 spring conference, the motion did not get voted on. The session was repeatedly delayed by procedural disputes, including no-confidence motions concerning the party chair, arguments over whether the motion was admissible because it conflicted with existing two-state policy, and eventually technical problems with the online conference system.
Three amendments, designed to soften the impact of the main motion, were defeated. One sought to remove the commitment to a single Palestinian state; another sought explicit protection for Jewish members so that they could not be pressured or disciplined because of affiliation with Jewish institutions such as synagogues which describe themselves as Zionist; other amendments similarly sought safeguards around the implications for Jewish members. The single-state amendment was defeated, including on a subsequent card vote. The Jewish-community safeguard was defeated 1,026–684. So in the end delegates were not simply voting on the proposition “is Zionism racist?” They were also voting down amendments that would have substantially changed the policy’s practical implications—including addressing concerns about antisemitism.
Perhaps the greatest concern relates to the person proposing the motion. Lubna Speitan was identified as a “close friend” of a man later jailed for supporting al-Qaeda. Speitan had called Heathrow bomb plotter Minh Quang Pham one of the “kindest, honest, most sincere, trustworthy and respectful people I have ever known” in written testimony in his defence for a US court. She is also on record as saying that Zionists should be “hunted in the same way as the Nazi aggressors were”.
Both in her person, and in the Green Party motion, we see the bizarre conjunction of radical left politics with violent Jihadism, whose paradoxical association can only be explained by an essentially Marxist outlook, where it is power dynamics alone which determine morality. (The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a terrorist group involved in October 7th alongside Hamas, is a Marxist-Leninist organisation founded by Palestinian Christian George Habash.)
How, then, should the Church of England respond? A number of diocesan inter-faith advisors have issued a statement, which I include below; you can also read it, along with their press release, here.
Given the appalling actions at General Synod, and the visit of the Archbishop to Palestinians who are known to have publicly supported anti-Israel terrorism, there is not a second to lose for the Archbishop, the House of Bishops, and the wider Church to take decisive action.
Rising antisemitism, Zionism and the Green Party
A statement from Church of England Inter Faith Advisors
As a group of the Church of England’s Diocesan Inter Faith Advisers, charged with nurturing relationships of trust between faith communities and ensuring that public discourse does not endanger those relationships, we feel compelled to express our concern at the recent Green Party vote and the antizionist rhetoric surrounding it, without defining what is meant by the term ‘Zionism’. For many Jewish communities in England, this vote has deepened an already acute sense of vulnerability. It risks further eroding the trust that has been carefully built between Jewish communities the Church of England and wider society over many years.
This vote does not stand alone. It forms part of a wider and troubling pattern in public life, a pattern we have been monitoring closely in our advisory capacities that has included:
- the dismissal or minimisation of the realities of the Hamas led pogrom of 7 October 2023, including the rape and murder of Israeli civilians and the profound trauma this caused to Jewish communities in England and worldwide;
- the casual and repeated claim of “genocide”, a term that is experienced by many Jewish people as a libel against their collective identity and history;
- the recent debate at our own church’s General Synod, which included a decision to “hear” the Kairos II document which contained language that Jewish leaders described as false, harmful, and erasing of Jewish identity. This not only caused real and acknowledged pain, but also ignored the years of work, dialogue, and theological exploration that led to the Faith and Order Commission’s God’s Unfailing Word (2019).
- Pro-Palestinian demonstrations in London which are held close to prominent synagogues on Shabbat and where slogans, symbols, and messaging often including people expressing support for Hamas and denial of the legitimacy of Israel as a sovereign state. The Jewish communities’ concerns about these demonstrations are largely ignored, leaving Jewish Londoners feeling unseen, unheard, and unsafe in the very heart of the city and prevented from attending some of their places of worship;
- and the succession of attacks and alleged plots directed at Jewish communities in Manchester and London: the fatal vehicle and knife attack outside Heaton Park Hebrew Congregation in Manchester; an alleged further Manchester plot involving reconnaissance of Jewish sites and preparations for an explosive device; the arson attack that destroyed four Hatzola ambulances in Golders Green; attempted arson at Finchley Reform Synagogue; and the stabbing of two visibly Jewish men in Golders Green.
We agree therefore, with the Movement for Progressive Judaism’s condemnation of the Green Party’s motion as antisemitic in its formulation and intention, and with similar statements by the Chief Rabbi Sir Ephraim Mirvis and the Rabbi Jonathan Wittenberg the Senior Rabbi of Masorti Judaism UK and with the joint statement of the Board of Deputies of British Jews and the Jewish Leadership Council that it constitutes an attack on the Jewish community and risks further stoking anti-Jewish hatred. It dismisses as inherently racist the idea of Zionism, that for most Jewish people, expresses the centuries-old longing for safety, home, belonging and self-determination woven through Jewish history, prayer, ritual and communal life and therefore immediately ostracises religious Jews in the Green Party who worship at synagogues all of whose liturgies affirm this longing for Zion and pray for the well- being of Israel. It also fails to acknowledge the great diversity of ways Zionism is understood within the Jewish community.
Taken together, these developments reveal a slippery slope, contributing to a climate which undermines Jewish strength and participation in wider society and increases Jewish vulnerability and marginalisation, Jewish trauma is sidelined, and a strong and visible Jewish identity is treated as politically suspect rather than a societal, theological and communal reality that adds to the diversity of our nation.
As Inter Faith Advisers, we have seen how legitimate advocacy for Palestinian dignity, legitimacy and self-determination—which we affirm—can be distorted when it is not held alongside an equally robust commitment to Jewish safety, Jewish self-identity, and Jewish flourishing in all its diversity.
We therefore state the following:
• We stand with Jewish communities in England, and support the statements issued by the Movement for Progressive Judaism and the Board of Deputies of British Jews and the Jewish Representative Council
• We reject language that erases Jewish peoplehood, denies Jewish trauma, or repeats patterns historically associated with antisemitism and anti-Judaism.
• We call on Christians in the Green Party to stand in solidarity with Jewish Greens and work to change their party’s policy or reconsider their membership of a party that is now institutionally antisemitic.
• We call on the Church of England to continue to develop resources to facilitate the study and understanding of Jewish – Christian relations as outlined in the Faith and Order Commission’s God’s Unfailing Word particularly in its explorations of Zionism and Jewish relationship to the land of Israel.
• We affirm that condemning antisemitism and raising these issues cannot mean any lack of deep concern for the extreme sufferings of Palestinian people and of all those caught up in violence, and so we call on all political parties, churches and faith leaders to exercise moral responsibility, avoiding simplistic narratives that erase the lived experience of Jewish people and seek to appropriate blame. Instead supporting an approach to Israel–Palestine that encourages real dialogue and holds Israeli security and Palestinian freedom, dignity and self-determination together; and giving practical support to reconciliation initiatives such as those promoted by the Alliance for Middle East Peace that emphasise sustained Israeli Palestinian civil-society dialogue, grassroots peacebuilding and an International Fund for Israeli–Palestinian Peace.
The Green Party vote is part of a wider deeply concerning drift towards an increasingly antisemitic culture in our country. As Diocesan Inter Faith Advisers, we believe the Church of England and other churches and religious communities must become a bulwark against that drift, repenting where we have played our part and ensuring any debates on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are conducted with theological integrity, historical awareness, and pastoral responsibility.
We call upon political leaders, Church institutions, and citizens across England to join us in resisting the current drift in our national life towards increasing antisemitism.
The Statement has been endorsed by
The Rt Revd Dr David Walker BISHOP OF MANCHESTER
The Rt Revd Dr Michael Volland BISHOP OF BIRMINGHAM
The Rt Revd Esther Tamisa Prior BISHOP OF ASTON
and the following Diocesan Inter Faith Advisors
Canon Mark Poulson LONDON
Canon Steve Williams MANCHESTER
Canon Dr Andrew Smith BIRMINGHAM
The Revd Alec Corio ST ALBANS
Canon Guy Wilkinson CBE BRISTOL
The Rev’d Ray Gaston LICHFIELD
The Rev’d Dr David Gifford HEREFORD
Dr Jane Clements MBE OXFORD
The Ven Jonathan Sedgwick SOUTHWARK
The Rev’d Katie Hodkinson WINCHESTER
The Rev’d Devin McLachlan ELY
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Half of my relatives are Jews and so I feel this personally. While I utterly condemn much of what the Israeli government does (demolishing Christian villages to make room for settlements?), I am a firm zionist (small z).
The Jews finally got back to their homeland after two millennia of persecution but many on the Left want that reversed. The single Palestinian state is more logical (if grossly offensive) than the Two State Solution so beloved by our government and others because the Palestinians themselves have rejected all three offers of that in the past (What? Have to provide our own electricity and clean water rather than get them from Israel? Nah) but it is still racist and should be condemned as such.
Now that the Greens have left their environmental focus behind, they will probably fade away, but the Corbynistas (like exorcised demons) will find another home. The hard Right are correctly labelled as dangerous, whereas the hard Left are seen as well-meaning. This needs correcting and soon.
Thanks David. That history of rejection seems bizarrely to be forgotten by most people.
Btw, you might be right in your concerns. But when I have looked more carefully, I have repeatedly found that the headlines about ‘demolishing villages’ are not what they seem.
It is quite clear from your introduction that the Green party are actually anti God. They want to destroy everything that Christianity stands for.
The attitude to Jews and Zionism is utterly naïve as well as illogical.
Put them in a theological frame. The Chloros Party.
Clever. Death rides upon a chloros horse. How is a horse green? Because it’s already dead. A zombie horse! Satan gives life to the dead — after a fashion.
Andy – well, you’ve basically shown the answer to the question stated at the header of the article: ‘If the Church of England bans clergy from being members of other extreme parties, why not this one?’
If the C. of E. were to insist that clergy professed themselves to be Christian – by which I mean the candidate acknowledges that he personally is a sinner and he repents of his sin, that the wages of sin is death, that Christ took his wages on the cross at Calvary; if they were required to make a profession along these lines – and this profession were sincere, then it’s difficult to see how any of them might actually want to belong to such a party. It does seem wholly incompatible with what is wrought in a person through the Holy Spirit when the person comes to faith.
They are very socially liberal and woke and anti Israel as the traditional home of the Jews, the people of the old Testament. So much for the C of E to disagree with the Greens about. However, the Greens are also very redistribution to the poor and those on low incomes too and for high taxes on the rich. Now that may not be good for economic growth but it has some alignment with the teachings of Jesus
Examination of these policies is a useful checklist on the anti Christ spirit,
and also secondly a confirmation that it is unified and coordinated,
with one part of it leading to the other parts being predictably more likely to be present.
Glad however that, being Greens, they have not, in the midst of all this flummery, forgotten their roots, to coin a horticultural phrase.
We are to pray for those who persecute us. I defy anyone to come up with a more incisive soul-saving prayer for Muslims than God give them the strength to convert. A petition for Christians to consider making daily, especially Christians who believe in our Gospel. Too much to hope for any contemporary organized church to do with regularity, if at all, but we can all pray in private.
The Green party is red.
the original mandate for British Palestine included what is now Jordan, and the term [Palestina] coined by the Romans also covered a larger area
But the British mandate was always for more than what we understood by Palestine. During World War I Britain encouraged the Arabs to rise up against their Ottoman overlords by stating that it was “prepared to recognize and support the independence of the Arabs within the territories in the limits and boundaries proposed by the Sherif of Mecca”. That was in a letter of 24th October 1915 from the British High Commissioner in Egypt, Henry McMahon, to Hussein bin Ali. Hussein was, under the Turks, the Sherif or ruler of the Hejaz, an area that includes the Islamic holy cities of Mecca and Medina; he had proposed a wide Arab State in the Middle East. McMahon made one reservation: “portions of Syria lying to the west of the districts of Damascus, Homs, Hama and Aleppo… must… be excepted”. McMahon restated what land he had referred to in a letter to Sir John Shuckburgh of the British Colonial Office, indicating that he had made it clear to Hussein that Palestine was excluded from the future Arab kingdom: “My reasons for restricting myself to specific mention of Damascus, Hama, Homs and Aleppo… were (1) these were places to which the Arabs attached vital importance and (2) that there was no place I could think of at the time of sufficient importance for purposes of definition, further south of the above. It was fully my intention to exclude Palestine as it was to exclude the more northern coastal tracts of Syria. I did not make use of the Jordan [river] to define the limits of the southern area because I thought it might possibly be considered desirable at some later stage of negotiations to endeavour to find some more suitable frontier line east of the Jordan.”
In recent years I’ve increasingly wondered how many of the Green Party’s policies actually relate to environmental matters. Their understanding of many issues on which they comment – such as the industry in which I work – is lamentable.
I think it reveals a kind of childishness in terms of its raw ignorance and lack of cognitive application to practical reality that must be telling us something about what’s happening to at least some people’s minds more generally. Does it not suggest that the abracadabra world of smartphones and top-down controlling of people’s lives is starving them of the kind of normal human observation, activity and contact with the natural world which feeds the brain and trains it to think objectively, independently, and imaginatively? I’m not saying everyone is thus affected; but at least enough people to support the Green party clearly are.
Look at the demographics of their supporters and you will get a good idea of where their mental formation is coming from. It looks to me that support for the Greens comes largely from young, urban middle class secular females whose mental worlds are significantly shaped by social media and especially by images, and by superficial modern mass education. It’s a world fixed on catastrophism, fear and struggles over identity, with a strong dash of leftwing urban activism. It begins with environmentalism- which for 30 years or more has been marked with a doombeat of imminent death – to which anxieties over disease (covid), and obsessions over race and immigration have been added. Throw in some lesbianism and massive student debt for flimsy degrees in social sciences, and you have a cohort of people as isolated from traditional British Christian conservatism as you could imagine.
Add a massive Muslim presence in English cities- something unheard of even in 1980 – anf you have the crucible in which antisemitism has entered the mainstream of British politics.
Yes, the hilarious irony that the party most wanting to be labelled as “progressive” is, in reality, the most reactionary of them all.
I do so wish the ‘antisemitism’ mantra would be dropped once and for all. The reason is threefold.
1. Clearly it’s a word which alleges racism against one specific group of people. We all understand why a historical event of supreme horror gave rise thereafter to extreme sensitivity regarding any potential or real injustice and aggression against Jewish people. However, the language people choose to use can have subtle effects on perception and emotion. In this case, it can actually carry its own racist overtones by implying that one particular race should have superior rights of protection from racism. Regardless of all the heinous acts we humans have perpetrated against each other throughout history, racism in word or deed remains universally ignorant and wrong – full stop.
2 The mantra can be, and sometimes is, a direct cause of injustice against people who have no hatred of Jews but feel compelled publicly to call for justice on behalf of a less well represented or less popular group of people who happen to be caught up in a political dispute over which they have no control. The charge of ‘antisemitism’ is now so weaponised that good people dare not risk speaking out for fear of possibly serious personal repercussions; there’s reason to believe that kind of self inhibition has been intentionally promoted for political reasons. That is a significant threat to free, honest, and open public discourse – and therefore to justice itself.
3 The effect of 1 and 2 above can only be negative in terms of any chance of resolving the Israel/Palestine problem. When there is anger, and damaging charges are traded, truth and justice are likely to be the first victims.
I’m particularly concerned that we Christians, unintentionally or not, should be contributing by our use of words to a problem everybody ought to be doing their bit to resolve.
Don, I agree that racism is not the only evil and that antisemitism is not identical to antizionism, but there is increasing antisemitism in our land and its violent form is due to a minority whose scriptures explicitly command antisemitism. In order to discuss this important problem in the life of our nation the word can – and indeed should – be used. I agree, of course, that inflammatory words should not be used thoughtlessly.
Aren’t the greens supposed to be about saving the planet?
Do they now believe that the best way to save the planet is to eliminate the Jews from it?
If so, they are not the first to have that idea. Its most prominent recent adherent died, I believe, some time in 1945.
To be fair, it seems more they think Jews in Israel and Palestinians should live in a single state/country.
The Jewish people were harassed and persecuted in many European countries and Russia at the start of the 20th century, so with hindsight it wasnt really surprising how that progressed to death camps. One wonders how much of Europe actually cared about their fate as opposed to Germany invading their own countries.
No one seems to have commented on the inter-faith advisers statement. Important, I think, that it’s a lengthy and substantial statement and it came out very quickly. And important that it hasn’t come from one ‘wing’ of the church: just looking at the bishops we have David Walker, leading liberal catholic due to retire next year, and Michael Volland, one of the youngest evangelicals in the House of Bishops. Perhaps one of the first tasks of the new Synod is to see if they are at least willing to ‘hear’ this statement?
Thank you for mentioning this. We are from most of our cities, but also from rural dioceses and have in common a deep concern for all our parishioners, spiritually and materially.We are in the midst and are authorised by our bishops,so we speak from the heart of the Cof A
What a good idea!
There isn’t a single Arab democracy. Not one. Not a single state among the twenty or so Arab nations where true free speech, free elections, freedom of association and freedom of religion exists. Everyone is marked by some degree of oppression, not to mention backwardness and violence.
And the crypto-Islamo-communists who are the Greens think Israel should dissolve itself and be absorbed into another Muslim Arab state. There can be no doubt that they are now clear antisemites and the violence represented by Mothin Ali is their default setting.
Allowing Muslim immigration was one of the biggest mistakes in British public policy in thr past 40 years. No country has peace whrn Muslims reach a critical mass. When the school riots in France (and now Belgium) are property analysed, I am pretty sure a significant Muslim immigrant element will be found to be a catalyst.