The latest media attack aimed at the Green Party leader Zack Polanski was especially bizarre, claiming he said, “food is too cheap.”

In response, Polanski accused the Telegraph of misrepresenting his remarks and crossing the line from spin into outright fabrication.

Taking to social media, he said:

“We’re at the point where the Telegraph are literally making up quotes. I said when veg is sold for pennies in supermarkets, it’s a sign someone’s not being paid properly. Farmers being paid a pittance for their produce. Workers on less than a living wage in supermarkets.

“Sections of the media are just absolute bullshit. They’ve always been a problem – but now they’re literally lying and making up things that have never been said. The only way to defeat the billionaire media is to organise around them.”

And supporters agreed with his assessment.

One commenter wrote: “You’re right Zack. It’s hard not to react, but keep going in correcting them and moving on.”

Another added: “I see the spin on Zack’s words, I knew there would be more to this, so checked out what Zack really said and of course it made sense.”

The controversy stems from a Telegraph headline that declared: “Zack Polanski: Food is too cheap.” The article opens by stating that “Zack Polanski has said food is too cheap and called for new rules to force supermarkets to pay suppliers more.”

Yet the article itself went on to explain that Polanski had been discussing vegetables being sold for as little as 7p, arguing that such prices point to exploitation somewhere within the food supply chain.

Speaking to the Bakers, Food and Allied Workers’ Union, Polanski said:

“That is not a sign of a healthy system. Someone is being exploited somewhere, and if you’re paying 7p for vegetables, then something is not right.

It is those supermarket bosses who are taking record profits … meanwhile paying their workers poverty wages. We cannot go on like this.”

He also called for tighter regulation of supermarkets, arguing that the sector has “not been regulated enough” and is exploiting “both the workers in the supermarkets and the farmers and agricultural workers.”

Polanski supports a £15 minimum wage and a proposed 10-to-one pay ratio that would limit how much more senior executives can earn compared with their lowest-paid employees.

Taken at face value, those remarks are not an argument that food prices in general should rise. Rather, they are an argument that extraordinarily low prices for some products may reflect unfair treatment of workers and producers elsewhere in the supply chain. Concerns about low pay, corporate profits and exploitation have long been central themes of both Polanski’s politics and Green Party policy.

And, Polanski was speaking specifically about vegetables being sold at exceptionally low prices, yet the Telegraph misleadingly broadened this into a claim about “food” as a whole.

While the use of single quotation marks indicates a paraphrase rather than a direct quotation, many readers may not appreciate that distinction. The result is a headline that conveys a much stronger and more sweeping claim than the one Polanski actually made.

Made at a time when millions of households are struggling with the cost of living and food insecurity remains a major issue, any suggestion that a politician wants food prices to increase is likely to attract a strong reaction.

Unsurprisingly, other right-wing outlets quickly followed the Telegraph’s lead.

The Spectator ran with the headline: “Polanski pushes price hikes.”

“When he’s not ranting about Gaza, Zack Polanski is mostly to be found despairing about the cost of living. And aren’t we all?” fumed Steer Pike, adding:

“The Green leader has made a series of economically illiterate suggestions about how he would bring down prices for struggling Brits and improve the dire state of the economy.

“Which makes his intervention on food prices today all the more bizarre. The intrepid Green leader, in all his glory, has called for the cost of supermarket goods to rise. That’s right: Polanski fumed that the likes of veggies are far too cheap.”

Yet this interpretation depends on accepting the original Telegraph framing. Polanski’s actual comments focused on exploitation within the supply chain and the gap between supermarket profits and workers’ wages. Whether one agrees with his proposed solutions or not, that’s a different argument from simply declaring that “food is too cheap”.

What Polanski said was clear: if vegetables are being sold for pennies, somebody in the chain is likely paying the price. What appeared in the headlines, was something else entirely.

The post Smear of the Week: Zack Polanski hits back at Telegraph for ‘literally making up quotes’ appeared first on Left Foot Forward: Leading the UK's progressive debate.

In one of those headlines that makes you stop and do a double take, the Spectator recently published an article entitled: “Once we Brexiteers get our Irish passports, we can go anywhere.”

The piece, written by columnist Melissa Kite, meanders through anecdotes about a dead rat in her Irish home before eventually arriving at its central point: her and her partner’s plan to sell up in Ireland and relocate to southern France, complete with a swimming pool and acres of pasture for their horses.

There is, however, one obstacle.

“We can’t really sell and implement stage two of our dastardly plan until we get our Irish passports,” Kite writes, explaining that she expects to qualify for Irish citizenship within the next few years.

She continues:

“Once we, a couple of Brexiteers, get these Irish passports, we can then go and live anywhere in Europe.”

Kite openly acknowledges the contradiction, noting that some readers will regard the move as hypocritical. One particularly unimpressed correspondent apparently sent her a card bearing a shamrock and the message: “Clear off then!”

Yet the criticism is not difficult to understand.

After declining to revisit the reasons she supported Brexit, claiming they would be too “boring and unfunny” to explain, Kite nevertheless celebrates the prospect of regaining the very freedom of movement that Brexit removed for millions of British citizens.

Looking forward to obtaining an Irish passport through long-standing Anglo-Irish arrangements, she writes enthusiastically about being able to “wander the entire continent,” settle in “the best bits of Europe” and enjoy life in places such as the Dordogne.

The article reaches peak irony when Kite compares her plan to reclaim EU mobility rights with people seeking alternative routes into Britain, writing:

“We are only doing what the whole world does in relation to our country of birth, which is to say access it in a sneaky way.”

Whether intended as satire, self-awareness or neither, the column quickly sparked a wave of ridicule online.

As one commenter observed:

“The year is 2026. The Brexit referendum is nearly ten years in the past, and a Brexiteer is finally coming to terms with the benefits of having an EU passport.”

Another asked:

“So she messed it up for others and now goes for an EU passport?”

Others were even less charitable.

“Just the sort of person you expect to find writing in the Spectator.”

“I’m all right, Jack, pull up the ladder.”

The reaction reflects a broader trend. Since Brexit, hundreds of thousands of UK residents have sought Irish passports in order to retain access to EU citizenship rights.

In 2024 alone, almost a quarter of a million people living in the UK applied for an Irish passport, the highest figure since the UK formally left the European Union. More than half of those applications came from Northern Ireland. Before the Brexit referendum, demand was notably lower. In 2015, just 873 applications were recorded from Great Britain.

For critics, Kite’s article perfectly encapsulates what they see as the defining contradiction of Brexit: supporting the removal of freedom of movement for everyone else, while enthusiastically pursuing personal routes back into the EU when the consequences become inconvenient.

The post Spectator columnist mocked for admitting: “Once we Brexiteers get our Irish passports, we can go anywhere” appeared first on Left Foot Forward: Leading the UK's progressive debate.

How dare a British exam board allow GCSE French students to use gender-neutral language, especially when, according to the outraged right-wing press, “the French don’t even use it themselves.”

The latest culture-war panic was triggered after it emerged staff at exam board Pearson Edexcel had been advised not to penalise students who use inclusive pronouns, nouns and adjectives in GCSE French, German and Spanish exams.

The story, first circulated by the Sunday Telegraph and eagerly recycled by GB News, the Spectator, and the usual anti-woke outrage machine, treated the issue as though civilisation itself were under threat. French students, readers were warned, may now use pronouns such as iel or ille in place of il and elle, and iels instead of ils and elles.

What particularly inflamed the anti-trans commentariat was the claim that France itself supposedly rejects such language entirely, because French grammar traditionally assigns masculine and feminine forms to nouns and adjectives.

As usual, the coverage also relied heavily on loaded language. GB News described iel and iels as “made-up neutral terms,” as though every word in every language was not, at some point, literally made up.

What the outrage ignores, of course, is how languages evolve constantly. French already contains recognised debates around inclusive language, and terms such as iel are not imaginary inventions dreamt up by British activists.

In 2021, Le Petit Robert, one of France’s most respected dictionaries, added iel to its dictionary, prompting outrage from traditionalists on what they called the latest incursion of US-inspired “wokeism.”

Pearson Edexcel’s guidance was reportedly developed with input from the LGBTQ+ charity Stonewall. The predictable parade of culture-war groups soon followed. Among them was Sex Matters, a campaign organisation routinely quoted by conservative newspapers whenever trans rights are discussed.

Its spokesperson warned about a “pro-trans agenda” and the “pernicious creep of gender ideology throughout the curriculum,” before taking a predictable swipe at toilets and changing rooms.

What goes almost entirely unmentioned in these stories is the broader reality of trans people’s lives. France, far from being some anti-woke fortress, allows legal gender recognition without requiring medical intervention. It’s among the few European countries that have prohibited conversion therapy practices targeting gender identity.

At the same time, trans people in France continue to face severe discrimination and violence. Reports suggest that around 80% of trans people in France have experienced discrimination or violence, with trans women of colour facing especially high levels of abuse. Yet the British right-wing press appears far more transfixed on the possibility of teenagers writing iel in a GCSE exam than by the actual conditions trans people live under.

The Spectator, attempting a more intellectual spin on the outrage in a piece entitled: ‘The irony of the woke war on GCSE French,’ argued that France has resisted “the excesses of wokery” because it views such ideas as an American cultural import.

The real irony is that the people most obsessed with policing language are often those accusing others of authoritarianism. No student is being forced to use gender-neutral French. Examiners are simply being told not to penalise pupils who do.

The post Woke-bashing of the week: Je suis outraged – the right’s GCSE French panic appeared first on Left Foot Forward: Leading the UK's progressive debate.