Should Polanski be arrested for his Farage Insta post?

**SPEAKER_1** (0:02)
This is a Global Production.

**Jon** (0:04)
The Reform Party have reported Green Party leader Zack Polanski to the police over an image which they say is incitement to violence. If you can say that Zack Polanski was a clutz and may have broken the law for posting this stuff inciting violence, how can you simultaneously be defending Lucy Connolly saying, you know, let the fucking bastards burn? It cannot simply be that the police are asked to and ought to, in your view, investigate incitement to violence or call for political violence when it's against you, but not against people that you like.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:42)
Zack Polanski, the leader of the Green Party, has just posted to his 700,000 followers on Instagram a photo of a man wearing a T-shirt calling for the beheading of Nigel Farage.

**Jon** (0:55)
It is undoubtedly shocking. That is Zia Youssef, the Reform Party's Home Affairs Spokesperson, also saying that the matter has been reported to the Metropolitan Police as a potential case of incitement. Zack Polanski is a political leader who's made his name online and might be bringing about his political undoing online. But should Reform be careful of throwing stones in glass houses? Welcome to The News Agents.
It's Jon. It's Lewis. And this story we broke late yesterday afternoon, and it involves the Reform leader, Nigel Farage and Zack Polanski, the Green Party leader. Two figures we spoke about last week as potentially having perhaps peaked in British politics. This story might contain some of the clues respectively as to why. What happened was that Zack Polanski on his Instagram accepted a collaboration request for a carousel of photographs from a Green Party event. One of the images on this carousel showed a man wearing a t-shirt featuring a guillotine beneath the words, We're only making plans for Nigel. Of course, a play on the song, the 1979 song Making Plans for Nigel. After the image was highlighted, Polanski did remove or unshared the post, but of course it had been seen many, many times since then. A Green Party spokesperson said that he had not realized the image was included, condemned it as a dangerous message, and said that Polanski did not support it. But in the interim, Nigel Farage and the Reform Party said that the incident was insightful and he should expect to be arrested. Yes, and it's all very well saying didn't realize. But you are the leader of a political party with all the responsibility that comes with it. And the Reform Party was seemingly on a one-way trajectory, like Reform, going up and up and up. And Zack Polanski has got a bit of a track record now emerging on his social media posts, where things get put up and then they get taken down, or he then apologizes for something he said, but several hours later. And the thing that puzzles me about Zack Polanski is, look, I saw it for years with Donald Trump, where he would repost things from a white supremacist, say, then hours later, take it down. But in the interim period, an awful lot of people would have seen what he posted. It sort of sent out a dog whistle to his base, don't worry guys, I'm with you, I share these views, but then taking it down when the controversy rages. That's one explanation. Or is he, to put it bluntly, a bit of an idiot on social media for spending so much time there, and isn't really checking and verifying in a way that a party leader should with all the responsibility that comes with it. That is the bit I'm still unclear about when it comes to Zack Polanski. Yeah. The first thing we should say, of course, just to reiterate the message, which I think Reform are perfectly legitimately entitled to say, which is that sort of image, that sort of message, that sort of content should not be being shared by anybody, let alone the leader of a major political party with such a substantial following, whether he saw it or not. I mean, that is absolutely self-evidently clear. Youssef is right to say, we're only two weeks on from the appalling murder of and Whitcombe circumstances that obviously still being investigated, but we have developed this really, really toxic and appalling recent lineage of political violence in this country. It's not as bad as somewhere like the United States, but it's certainly as bad as it's ever been in this country, with perhaps the exception of the period of the IRA.
So I think that all of that being said, it is also true to say, as you say, Jon, Zack Polanski has a history now of making missteps, misjudgments largely related to the online sphere. Of course, people will remember that during the Golders-Green, after the Golders-Green attack, Polanski re-shared a post alleging that the Metropolitan Police officers had been repeatedly and violently kicking the suspect in Golders-Green. The Met Commissioner then actually ticked Zack Polanski off about that, saying the claim was inaccurate and misinformed. Polanski had to apologize for it.