Was it dumb luck or a correct application of the dialectical method that saw me ending up in the Green Party? We may never know.  Either way, looking at the permanent civil war going on in Your Party conducted by bureaucrats and people who’ve been in the left for decades I’m bloody glad I joined the Greens.

Large numbers of young people are joining. Those squabbles are incomprehensible to them, and they want to go out and do stuff.

OK, they like putting photos of themselves eating vegan cake on Instagram and I doubt too many would be interested in my delicious rabbit, apple and cider recipe, but it is a breath of fresh air.

It has been drawn to my attention that “The Workers’ Liberty National Committee of 10 January 2026 adopted the proposal below for reconnaissance in the Green Party.” The Alliance for Workers’ Liberty (AWL)have noticed that the organisation now has about 180 000 members.

As anyone who has ever seen a war film will know, reconnaissance is a dangerous mission. You don’t know what you are going to find and you must accept that you are expendable for the higher good. Hence clause 25 of the resolution:

“We should construct a small team of comrades excluded from the Labour Party (and not essential to YP intervention) to do a reconnaissance in the Greens.”

To be honest, instead of hidden machine gun nests, concealed pits with sharpened stakes at the bottom, land mines or tanks they are going to find nothing more than hundreds of WhatsApp groups discussing QR codes, leafletting sessions and refreshments at meetings. There may be moments when the prospect of falling onto a sharpened stake would feel like a blessed relief. “Reconnaissance” is a ludicrous word to describe a handful of people paying a fiver a month to attend the odd meeting in a community centre and get bombarded with messages on their phones all day. There will be no need for face paint, a dagger between the teeth and hiding when there is a full moon. No one will have to crawl into No Man’s Land to snatch a prisoner for interrogation.

Rather than Trotsky’s French turn, the AWL cite an older precedent: “a small Marxist group intervening within the Greens, on a similar basis to that on which Engels did not condemn late 19th century Marxists such as Eleanor Marx intervening in Liberal-linked Radical Clubs.” For the benefit of the uninitiated, Trotsky’s French turn is not a euphemism for a sexual position, referring instead to his advice to his supporters to enter the Socialist Party.

A lot of the reasons for this “reconnaissance” are self-evident. They boil down to “we are a small Trotskyist group, and we want to be a bigger Trotskyist group.” The resolution says nothing about using the people sent on this safest reconnaissance ever to see if they can make a sincere effort to build the Greens into a radical left party to replace Labour.

The worst part is what they say about Palestine, or “Israel/Palestine” as they call it.  This reeks of cynicism. They say “Recent Green policies on Brexit/EU, Ukraine, and Israel-Palestine have been closer to our positions than the default-left policies on these issues. This may now shift, under the influence of a post-Corbynite influx into the Greens dragging the party’s policies in a worse direction.”

The reference to Palestine is the main point here and says a lot about how they intend to intervene and explains why the “reconnaissance” “team should include at least one or two comrades with experience and proven competence in organising and in intra-left debate.”

Without exception, every young member of the Greens I have met who has recently joined has said explicitly that the Gaza genocide and Labour’s support for it has been their motivation for getting involved. The AWL want their people to go in and argue for their brand of Zionism. They want the Green Party to dilute its message of unconditional support for the people of Palestine and are sending in cadre for that purpose.

Let me do them a favour and tell them straightaway that they will be wasting their time. Occasionally one or two people pop up on the local chat groups saying things like “when are you going to condemn Hamas?”, “why are people always going on about Gaza”. Newbies engage with them for a while before quickly working out that there is no point wasting energy on an argument.

As far as I am concerned, if members of organised left groups want to join the Green Party with the sincere intention of trying to build it as a radical mass alternative, they are very welcome. If they want to waste everyone’s time with sterile arguments about reactionary niche positions Your Party will still be there for a few months.