I'm now officially scared of the Green Party – and you should be too

If you had better things to do over Easter than scrutinise opinion polls, good on you. But those of us sad enough to check party ratings even on the holiest day of the year will have been struck by one in particular. Brace yourself. It actually had the Greens in first place. Yes, I’m afraid so. Although the headline figures from this Lord Ashcroft stick of polling dynamite had Reform, the Tories and Green all joint first on 21%, look at the small print, and you find the Greens, by a few decimal points, out in front.

Now, okay, it could be an outlier. Okay, Reform led in all other polls over Easter, and have led in everything going way back to this time last year. And, okay, mid-term polls can throw up some crazy stuff. But the Green surge is undeniable and is reflected across all polling companies, and get this, this is the first time ever that a party to the left of Labour has led in any poll at any stage in British polling history. Let that sink in.

Scared yet? I am. Because much though I warm to Zack Polanski as an individual, and I say that as someone whose breasts don’t need enlarging, I find the Green policy agenda a mixture of the hilarious and the mortifying.

They want to allow even more asylum seekers to settle in Britain, and to give them the right to vote. At a time when we must confront Putin with strength not weakness, they want to cut defence spending and scrap our nuclear deterrent.

They want to bring forward our absurd net zero target of 2050 to the even more ludicrous 2040 or even 2030. They want to do a Trump and pull out of Nato. They want to ban domestic flights that take less than three hours.

They want to increase the minimum wage, which is already costing businesses through the nose. And they want to introduce a wealth tax, which has been economically damaging wherever it’s been tried.

These policies would be ruinous, yet the party is, I repeat, leading in a major national opinion poll, and might very well surge yet further in the local elections in May. Millions of Britons think that these policies are jolly good ideas.

What this shows is that Britain, or a large portion of it, has taken exactly the wrong lesson from the first 21 months of this appalling and ever more left-wing Labour government.

Instead of realising that Britain is being slowly impoverished by Labour’s higher taxing, higher borrowing and higher spending, these millions of voters think the government somehow isn’t leftwing enough, and that the solution is to tax, borrow and spend yet more.

Now you might think, hope and pray that the country will come to its senses by the time of the next election, peer into this far-left abyss, and turn back before chaos ensues. But we cannot be sure of that.

It is now horrifyingly possible that this appalling Labour government does not in fact represent a bottoming out of Britain’s fortunes, but is a mere staging post in our descent.

Even if the ultimate calamity of a Green majority government is too far fetched, and let’s pray it is, I fear that a coalition of lefty madness involving the Greens, Labour led by Miliband, Rayner or Burnham, and one or two crazed independents thrown in, is all too plausible.

If you think it can’t happen, I hope for all our sakes you’re right. But don’t bank on it.