Gone are the days when the Green Party of England and Wales was full of hippie tree-huggers singing ‘Kumbaya’ around a campfire. Today, the party is unrecognisable – and far more sinister. It has been intolerant of dissent in its own ranks for a few years. Now, it is turning that intolerance against the media.

The recent death of former Cambridge professor Jason Arday has provided Green Party leader Zack Polanski with his latest pretext for going after the media. Speaking last week, he blamed Arday’s seeming suicide on the media’s reporting of Arday’s plagiarism, academic fraud and rampant fabulism. He called on the government to ‘ensure a responsible [media]’, by holding an inquiry into its ‘culture and behaviour’.

This came just days after he’d made a similar demand in response to some newspapers’ refusal to toe the ‘climate emergency’ line in their coverage of the heatwave. ‘It’s time we sorted out the press’, Polanski posted on X. ‘Constant misinformation to protect their donors and fossil fuels is destroying lives and our planet. The government must step up and stop being cowardly.’

If you think the talk of ‘sorting out’ and changing the ‘culture and behaviour’ of the press sounds ominous, that is because it is. It is also deeply authoritarian.

In the comments to his X post, Polanski posted two links that he encouraged his followers to sign. The first was a petition to parliament calling for a ban on foreign media ownership, the establishment of a social media levy and restrictive regulation. The second link directed followers to Hacked Off’s website, and a petition demanding that the government launch an inquiry into the British press.

Polanski has since doubled down on these comments. He has claimed that ‘freedom of the press should never have been freedom to own and dominate the press’. He has insisted that the UK regulate its media ‘now’. He is particularly obsessed with a ‘tiny number of billionaire firms’, which Polanski seems to believe control the media like a sinister cartel.

It should surprise nobody, in fact, that behind that gap-toothed grin, Polanski does not like the media much at all. And that’s because he doesn’t like to be challenged or scrutinised. After all, columnists have ridiculed him for his claim, made over a decade ago, that he could enlarge the size of a woman’s breasts through hypnotherapy. Reporters also exposed the fact that he failed to pay council tax on his houseboat, and that he dishonestly claimed to have worked as a spokesperson for the Red Cross.

It’s not just the thin-skinned Polanski who wants to muzzle the press. It seems to be a widely held desire throughout the Green Party. Last week, the Spectator revealed that 89 members had endorsed a motion, submitted ahead of the party’s Autumn conference, with the title: ‘Justice for Jason Arday: Stopping Racist Smear Campaigns and Reforming Media Power.’

This censorial motion calls for two state regulators to ‘map and address racism’ and ‘ableism’ in the media. It also wants a regulator to have the power to clamp down on ‘harassment’, which is the term Green supporters have used for press scrutiny.

The Greens’ ultimate aim would be to force every major national newspaper to join a state press regulator. And the already overpowered media regulator, Ofcom, would be given powers to force large social-media platforms to remove ‘hateful, discriminatory and conspiratorial’ material, seemingly even where it falls within the bounds of lawful speech.

Recently, we witnessed just how menacing Green Party supporters can be. Writing in the Spectator earlier this month, Jonathan Sacerdoti revealed an attempt by activists to have him silenced by the police. After a disagreement with a canvasser who visited his home in April, Sacerdoti was told that an allegation of ‘harassment’ had been made against him. Conceding that there was no evidence for the complaint, the police eventually closed the investigation. But it was another telling insight into how these people operate.

The current militancy of the Greens has been a few years in the making. In 2022, Shahrar Ali was sacked as the party’s policing and justice spokesperson – and later expelled from the party – for expressing his gender-critical beliefs. This censorial trend has accelerated under Polanski.

The Green Party is no longer a benign force in British politics. It seems to have jettisoned its old environmental concerns to pursue a string of culture-war issues, championing trans rights (at the expense of women) and demonising Israel. And now it’s coming after press freedom.

The Greens have now shown their true, authoritarian colours.