I’ve Never Taken Drugs or Drunk Alcohol, Says Zack Polanski

THE GUARDIAN: Green party leader wants to legalise all drugs, regulate their use and not be ‘the fun police’

The leader of the Green party, Zack Polanski, has said he has never taken drugs or “even drunk alcohol” in his life, but wants to legalise all drugs and regulate their use.

Polanski was asked on the BBC’s Sunday With Laura Kuenssberg programme if he had taken drugs at university. “I’ve actually never taken a drug in my life, or even drunk alcohol, but I still don’t sit here as the fun police,” he said. “I very clearly believe people should be able to do what they want to do. It just wasn’t for me.”

He told Kuenssberg that politicians who admitted taking drugs and then advocated for incarcerating drug users were taking a “hypocritical approach”, when a “public health approach” was needed to prevent deaths.

“It’s about legalising and regulating. If someone has a problematic relationship to drugs then surely the answer is to make sure they’re seen by a medical professional who can help them,” Polanski said. » | Donna Ferguson | Sunday, February 1, 2026

Legalise drugs? How absurd! How about you clowns stop the war on smoking cigarettes first? Talk about killing joy, you are the killjoys killing it! I’ll tell you one thing for nothing: Were I to be a father, I’d prefer my son to come home and tell me he had taken up smoking cigarettes than come home all tattooed up, pierced God knows where, and high on drugs! Little wonder people are pissed off with democracy! — © Mark Alexander

Lib Dems, Plaid Cymru and Greens Launch Pro-remain Electoral Pact

THE GUARDIAN: Exclusive: parties will step aside for each other in 60 seats to give single pro-remain candidate a free run

The Liberal Democrats, Plaid Cymru and the Greens have finalised a plan to step aside for each other in 60 seats across England and Wales in the general election. The alliance is intended to give a free run to one pro-remain party in each constituency.

The agreement, which does not include Labour, covers 49 seats in England and 11 in Wales. It was made under the banner of a cross-party group called Unite to Remain, which has spent several months trying to broker the plan.

A so-called progressive alliance plan, also including Labour, was attempted before the 2017 election but arrangements were only made for a handful of seats, in part because of the difficulty of getting local parties to agree. » | Peter Walker and Heather Stewart | Wednesday, November 6, 2019

Blunt Warning about Greens Under the Bed
TIMES ONLINE: Once the lure of communism seduced the idealistic. Today’s environmental ideologues risk becoming just as dangerous

Britain is, thankfully, an ideologically barren land. The split between Right and Left is no longer ideological, but tribal. Are you a nice social liberal who believes in markets, or a nasty social liberal who believes in markets? Anthony Blunt’s memoirs, published this week, reveal a different age, one in which fascism and communism were locked in a seemingly definitive battle for souls.

Blunt talks of “the religious quality” of the enthusiasm for the Left among the students of Cambridge. There is only one ideology in today’s developed world that exercises a similar grip. If Blunt were young today, he would not be red; he would be green.

His band of angry young men would find Gore where once they found Marx. Blunt evokes a febrile atmosphere in which each student felt his own decision had the power to shape the future. Where once they raged about the fleecing of the proletariat and quaked at the march of fascism, Blunt and his circle, transposed to today’s college bar, would rage about the fleecing of the planet and quake at its imminent destruction. If you squint, red and green look disarmingly similar.

Both identify an end utopia that is difficult to dispute. The diktat “from each according to his ability, to each according to his means” sounds lovely on paper. Greens promise a world in which we actually survive a coming ecological apocalypse. A desirable outcome, undoubtedly.

But the means to these ends seem similarly insurmountable. Both routes demand an immediate suspension of human nature.
Ideologies often credit man with either more nobility or more venality than he deserves. In reality he is a mundane creature. He wants a home for himself and those he loves, stocked with food. And he wants to have the right to control his own destiny, own his own stuff, and to acquire more if he can without interference or fear of imminent death. Such low-level acquisitive desires support high concepts: property rights and the rule of law, without which there would be no foundation for democracy. >>> Antonia Senior | Friday, July 24, 2009

Al Gore has fallen out of love with politics; but the greens haven’t fallen out of love with him

Photo of Al Gore courtesy of Google Images

TIME: Let's say you were dreaming up the perfect stealth candidate for 2008, a Democrat who could step into the presidential race when the party confronts its inevitable doubts about the front-runners. You would want a candidate with the grassroots appeal of Barack Obama—someone with a message that transcends politics, someone who spoke out loud and clear and early against the war in Iraq. But you would also want a candidate with the operational toughness of Hillary Clinton—someone with experience and credibility on the world stage. The Last Temptation of Al Gore (more)

Mark Alexander