Sophus E Magill is a Green Party parish councillor on the Isle of Wight. On 24 July 2026, in a private WhatsApp group called Greens Against Imperialism, he wrote:
“Zionism has to go, it’s ultimately an apartheid, ethnosupremacist ideology.”
When asked what that meant, he replied: “That needs to go. The only solution is one equal state.”
The next question was direct: “You want to Israel wiped off the map, in essence?”
Magill answered: “Yes, I would like that.”
He continued: “I don’t think it’s violent to want an illegitimate apartheid state gone from all maps. Like Rhodesia.”
Only afterwards came the conventional rider about Israeli citizens who are not war criminals.
This is not a drunk teenager on an anonymous forum. This is an elected Green Party representative. The group he created is used by other party members. The same networks are currently running a highly organised internal campaign to force a motion titled “Zionism is Racism” to the top of the Green Party’s Autumn Conference agenda. Members are being instructed, through professional graphics and videos, to rank every single motion so the preferred text receives the maximum points. An independent security briefing notes that a determined group has joined the party specifically to push the motion through. It already has more than eight hundred co-signers.
The private language and the public machinery belong to the same people.
Rosie Latchford was elected in May as a Green councillor for Harringay in Haringey, a borough the Greens now run as a minority administration. Her own candidate statement records that she spent the previous two years as a campaigner for Fossil Free London, organising “for climate and social justice… and for a free Palestine.” Tyrone Scott, elected the same month in Hackney, previously chaired Greens of Colour. The direct-action climate networks and the anti-Zionist organising networks are not separate tribes. They are overlapping circles of the same activist class.
This is the concrete case. The larger pattern is older and more dangerous.
There is a particular mindset that tends towards leftist causes. It is incapable of independent thought and needs to be part of a herd. It is naturally attracted to a Manichean outlook in which everything is divided between pure good and pure evil, and it is highly susceptible to ideology. Such people are drawn to slogans like “hope not hate” — classic Newspeak. The thinking is done for them. The slogans invert reality so the chanters can continue to believe they are the good ones. This inversion tricks ordinary people into thinking the left must be good too, especially when it is reinforced by institutions such as the BBC. They are not good people. They are an irrational, combustible group convinced that their moral superiority places them above the law.
The Greens are massive hypocrites. No one may criticise their ideals or their favoured groups, because that is hate speech. Yet when a right-wing politician is attacked or murdered, the response is often soft justification: it would not have happened if the victim had not been so hateful. Their hate is treated as righteous. Everyone else is ordered to “be kind.” They keep the most inflammatory rhetoric in circulation partly to maintain certain alliances. As Western leftists eventually discover with Iran, once they are no longer useful the consequences show them what real hate looks like.
Progressivism — the “Be Nice” people — are very pleasant while they are getting their own way. The moment they are thwarted, all hell breaks loose. Idealists want an Ideal World, ideologically pure and completely dismissive of the idea that the best is the enemy of the good. Any apparent concession is only a short-term tactic on the road to the Perfect Society. There are no real concessions. They will impose their ideas.
“Just Stop Oil” — and oil is stopped in the North Sea.
“Your house is burning” — and we get Net Zero.
“Imagine there’s no countries” — and borders erode.
“Heal, don’t lock away” — and early release follows.
The fringe ideas become policy against the clearly expressed preferences of the majority because the people pushing them believe they are the true judges of right and wrong. Anyone who disagrees is fair game. It is the classic tribal mentality: they group together, feed off each other’s hatred, and then act.
This psychology is not new. In 1876 Mark Twain published The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. The boys form a secret gang, swear blood oaths, give themselves pirate names, and declare war on the grown-up world. The real thrill is not the treasure. It is the togetherness, the secret society, the feeling that they are bigger than their boring little lives. Seventy-five years later Eric Hoffer described the same machinery in its adult form. Mass movements attract those frustrated with mundane existence, who hate the present, and who surrender the individual self to a holy cause. The passion is not self-advancement but self-renunciation. Unrelieved boredom is one of the most reliable signs that a society is ripe for it. The true believer is often not the starving peasant but the person who has tasted possibility and still wants more.
The middle-class activists who dominate today’s direct-action scene are Tom Sawyer’s gang grown up. Their pirate island is a blocked stretch of the M25 or a disrupted dinner. Their treasure is moral superiority. Their enemies are their own society and the Jewish state. Twain showed how charming the impulse is when you are twelve and eventually go home for supper. Hoffer showed what happens when it is never outgrown. Some of us never come home for supper — and the sledgehammers are real.
The social composition makes the pattern clearer still. The progressive left corners the market in double-barrelled names. A striking proportion of its activists and adherents are lawyers, media people, NGO staff, senior managers, or the children of those professions. This is not the voice of the dispossessed. It is the voice of a culturally privileged, status-anxious section of the upper-middle class that has learned to convert personal dissatisfaction into political virtue. The ideology does not rise from the factory floor. It rises from the universities, the HR departments, the subsidised arts, and the dinner tables where certain opinions are forbidden. If there were a Battle of Cable Street today, a large section of these groups would stand with Mosley. Not because they have become 1930s fascists, but because their politics treats any pure enough cause as exempt from ordinary democratic restraint. The same people who claim to fight fascism would, under the pressure of their own moral logic, find themselves on the wrong side of the street.
The claim of a serious “far-right” threat has always been largely a myth. The National Front and the English Defence League were predominantly working-class and often Labour-voting. They were labelled right-wing because the left required a story in which nationalism itself was the original sin. That story was self-serving claptrap, but it spared Marxist blushes after the full scale of communist and fascist horrors became undeniable. The deceit stuck. It remains the protective myth under which today’s coalitions of neo-Marxists, anti-capitalists, Greens and Islamists operate. Remaining on the back foot while they form a united front against economic and political liberty is no longer affordable.
The electoral arithmetic makes the difficulty worse. Roughly one third of voters sit on the left or far left, one third on the right, and one third in the middle pay little close attention and mainly consume mainstream broadcast news. That inattentive third is steadily pushed left by institutional bias, allowing ideas with shallow popular roots to become entrenched policy.
It is difficult to see how this polarisation can be resolved inside current national arrangements. The darker thought sometimes occurs: a partition of the Indian kind. Those who want ordered liberty move one way; the progressives stay another. Within a decade the progressives would be building a wall to stop their brightest leaving. Plus ça change.
Revolutionary movements do not stop where the original idealists prefer. The Fabians and respectable Greens encourage more radical cadres. Those cadres eventually turn on them as insufficiently pure and sweep them away. The United Kingdom currently keeps the milder progressives safe. Once it no longer does, they will discover what powerlessness feels like.
Most politically coded hatred in Britain today comes from the left. The cult of nice is only nice while it is winning. The rest of the time it is a politics of erasure — of countries, of borders, of dissenting opinion, and of the ordinary rules that make democratic life possible.
The prioritisation ballot closes soon. The private messages are public. The method is visible. The elected representatives are already in place. The true believers are not hiding. They are ranking. And when they are stopped, they will not be kind.