Zack Polanski has seized on Labour’s shift to the right on immigration and human rights by announcing that the Green Party would allow migrants who arrive on small boats to live and work in the UK.
The Green Party leader has accused Sir Keir Starmer and Labour of matching “the racist rhetoric of the far right, from Nigel Farage to Tommy Robinson” and insisted that a new approach is needed for the migrant crisis.
On a trip to France, Mr Polanski was seen assisting people getting on to small boats and filling their water tanks.
His intervention comes amid concerns that Labour is losing more support to the Greens than it is to Reform.
“We need to make racism unacceptable again,” he told The Times in France. “We’ve seen situations where people from Ukraine have rightly been welcomed into the country with open arms, and so they should be, they’re facing an illegal invasion. But where is that same hospitality to the Sudanese people, Eritrean people, people from Yemen?
“I don’t think that British people are inherently racist at all. But it’s the scarcity mindset that is true because we have a government committing austerity and underfunding of communities matched with the racist rhetoric of the far right, from Nigel Farage to Tommy Robinson. That’s what is fuelling all of this.”
He said: “I think Nigel Farage is setting the direction and Keir Starmer is catching up as quickly as he can. This is why we see a Labour Party that is tanking in the polls because they refuse to stand for anything and I think the British public are smarter than that. I think they’re kinder than that.
“Of course people will be concerned about heinous crimes, whether that’s from a migrant or whether that’s from someone who is born in Britain. But that’s a deliberate muddying of the conversation about lots and lots of people who are fleeing war and persecution who are stuck in Calais.”
On his own plans, Mr Polanski, who describes himself as a green populist, said: “I think from the moment they arrive in the UK, people should be able to work or should be given the ability to work, because that means they’re then paying into the tax system.”
He said that sticking the migrants into hotels and temporary accommodation with no means of earning money is “cruel.”
But it comes after Labour’s home secretary Shabana Mahmood recently announced new measures to tackle the migrant crisis and end abuse of the visa system as well as water down human rights such as the right to a family life.
At a Tony Blair Institute event earlier this week, Ms Mahmood said of the immigration crisis that the British people are “decent, honest and tolerant” towards immigrants – but only if they come here legally. And she claimed that there is support for strong controls on illegal and legal migration from both “white and non-white working-class communities”.