I was rooting for the Green Plumber. Weren’t you?

A  long time ago a colleague in Hampstead Labour Party reported this response from his doorstep canvassing: “I’m not voting Labour, because I can’t stand that Tony Benn. He’s so extreme. Mind you, I agree with a lot of the things he says.”

That’s how I feel about Zack.* 

I’ve been following him on X (ex-Twitter.) He’s one of the few left wing tweeters who hasn’t blocked me. 

Blocking usually happens when my favourite radical influencers are listing the miseries of the world and the dangers we’re facing: genocide, racism, world war, destruction by runaway AI, incompetent & psychotic leaders, financial collapse, extinction due to climate change, etc., and I politely point out the Odd Man Out in their list. I’ve been blocked by Jonathan Cook, who risked his life reporting from Palestine for years; a bloke called @ireallyhateyou whom I really liked; and even Stats for Lefties. They know they’re being lied to by Trump, Putin, Netanyahu, Zelensky, the Democrats, the FBI, CIA and WEF, yet they still trust Michael Mann and John Kerry. What’s wrong with them? 

Most of Zack Polanski’s tweets are about poverty and inequality, and I’ve been commenting frequently, congratulating him on concentrating on real life problems and not the imaginary danger of climate catastrophe. It seems to me obvious that redistribution of wealth should the principal, possibly the only, subject of concern for a leftwing party. (To this end, its leaders should be economically competent people with ideas about how to achieve this, i.e. not Starmer, not Corbyn, and not Polanski. But still, at least he’s saying the right things.) 

(Redistribution should also be of concern to rightwing parties of course, if they want to survive. Covid, Trump, and the Epstein affair have combined to provoke a hatred of the billionaire class which I would never have believed possible a few years ago.)  

I’m obviously not the only person who’s noticed that Zack has been straying from the true green path. In this interview with George Monbiot :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3xx6lNFx8tI

He even opens the discussion with a mea culpa:

“Why don’t you talk about the environment any more Zack? Why are you always talking about social justice issues?” Well, here we go. With the writer, journalist activist general troublemaker, the phenomenal Geoge Monbiot.

Zack addresses his illustrious guest with all the deference due to the elder statesman of climate doom – not as a fellow activist, but as a National Treasure, a kind of David Attenborough without Atters’ youthful enthusiasm. And Monbiot returns the compliment, treating Zack as a beloved disciple, fit to carry on his great work.   

Monbiot hardly touches the climate, as if he and Zack were both aware that the subject is no longer the vote winner it used to be. Instead, he sticks to the more general subject of environmental collapse. To Zack’s question on his hope for the future he replies:

Along the lines of the current process I have no hope at all. There is no hope in that process, and it’s designed to prevent hope from materialising. But in the extraordinary creativity & mobilisation of the world’s people, well I have tremendous hope there. Because every time  in the past when I’ve gone: “Oh! that’s it! We’re doomed! Nothing, nothing is going to save us now!”  Someone, somewhere proves me wrong. It might be a 15 year old schoolgirl sitting outside the Swedish parliament. It might be a new leader of the Green Party in the UK. It might be a new mayor elect of New York. You know, people come from often very unexpected places and just smash the status quo apart.

And having expressed this faith in his interviewer, he then turns his ire, not on the deniers and fossil fuel merchants, but on those on the own side who don’t share his optimism: 

There is a sub movement of people in the West of people saying: We might as well give up. Let’s walk away. There’s a whole bunch of sort of rage critters who are just : “Oh! It’s all a waste of time, we’ll just walk away, we’ll preside over the ruins one way or another. Let’s look at what happens with ‘collapses’ and let’s make the best of collapse.” 

Well, (a) they’ve absolutely no right to speak on any one else’s behalf, to say “on behalf of the world’s people, we give up,” particularly if you’re in the rich nations like ours. Where us giving up means imposing horrendous impacts on other countries. You know, it’s not up to us. We can’t unilaterally decide that we’re going to walk away from this. We’re all enmeshed in it. And of course there is no”away” to walk to. There’s no place on earth that is not going to be affected by climate breakdown or by ecological breakdown in general. Also, we don’t know which particular increment of harm will push us past a tipping point.

That’s point (a). You’ll note George’s insistence that the doomers have no right to speak on anyone else’s behalf. Unlike George, who was (and possibly still is) the appointed honorary president of the Climate Action Network, an organisation that boasted eight million supporters, if you count all the members of the National Trust, the Women’s Institute, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, etc., and if you double- and triple-count them, as one might count degrees of heat reflected off the airport tarmac, or molecules of methane in a cow’s fart.  

He never got to point (b) but instead trailed off into erudite burblings about complex systems & hysteresis.

There’s also an attack on Bill Gates, who finances the Guardian, George’s employer, to the tune of a few million, and on billionaires in general, particularly the ten richest, “..whose increase in their wealth last year could resolve world poverty 10 times over.”

I’m not sure how that would work. If they all sold the shares that correspond to their increased earnings last year, the world economy would collapse, wouldn’t it? 

Perhaps they’d better keep their loot after all. Practically the only things we still make in the West that the Chinese don’t are hand-tooled superyachts, and if there weren’t the Bill Gateses to buy them, where would we be?

The $645 million, 390-ft. BREAKTHROUGH gigayacht was commissioned by Bill Gates and is the world’s first hydrogen powered superyacht. With 14 balconies, 7 swim platforms, an underwater and 27-foot wide infinity pool, the yacht runs on liquid hydrogen and its only emission is water.

https://fortune.com/2025/07/31/bill-gates-645-million-superyacht-hydrogen-engineering/

 A 130-yard long floating apartment block with an underwater infinity pool running on hydrogen must have a lot of pipes. Lots of well paid jobs for plumbers there.   

[*For non-Brits, Zack Polanski, né Poulton, is the leader of the British Green Party, which has just scored a surprise win over the ruling Labour Party in a by-election.]