Bristol, the Green Party, Beijing, and Government. Ready to Join the Dots?
This Week in Politics. And It Can Only Get Worse.
[Four corners. One question. You're already in it. Illustration: The Almighty Gob]
So, the Green Party goes into the UK local elections on 7 May 2026 at the top of the polls for the first time in its history.
Zack Polanski says it’s hope versus hate.
Bristol City Council — Green-led, two years in — has a social housing waiting list of 22,000 households, a housebuilding pipeline gutted by 76 per cent, and a formal complaint about an off the cuff quip. Well, that’s the ‘hope’ sorted then.
As for the ‘hate’ — look further east.
The net zero infrastructure the Green Party is built on runs through Xinjiang supply chains. Forced labour. UN-documented. Unasked about in Parliament.
Nobody’s joining the dots. Funny, that. Even a five-year-old can join dots.
Bristol politics, however, is still doing what it always does. Telling you to look over there. While something else entirely happens over here.
So, let’s start where it always starts. City Hall.
This week, Bristol City Council’s legal services opened a formal assessment against Cllr Richard Eddy — Conservative, Bishopsworth, almost certainly the longest-serving sitting councillor on the council — over an off the cuff quip at a housing meeting. The complaint acknowledges it was a joke. It describes it anyway as “gratuitous, offensive and dangerous.”
The Bristol councillor refuses to apologise. He has made that absolutely clear.
Oxford defines dangerous as: likely to injure or harm someone, or to damage or destroy something. A man in a suit. In a council chamber. Who laughed. The word dangerous doesn’t just fail to fit. It fails to get within a postcode of fitting.
The police drew the line on exactly this kind of complaint last week. The government scrapped the entire non-crime hate incident system. Officers were being pulled into cases involving hurt feelings that appeared to contradict common sense. One recorded incident involved a man who reported people giving him funny looks.
Grown adults. Move on. We have actual crimes to investigate.
Bristol City Council legal services missed that memo.
You already knew they would, didn’t you.
While the machinery processed the complaint, 22,000 households sat on Bristol’s social housing waiting list. The affordable housing pipeline cut by 76 per cent. 1,200 council homes earmarked for sale. The Bristol housing crisis playing out in the development viability group — the room nobody asked about — where developers explain, with great professional courtesy, why the numbers don’t work and the affordable homes will have to go.
Twenty-two thousand households. Each one a front door that isn’t theirs yet. Each one a family that has stopped mentioning it at dinner because there’s nothing left to say. The institution too busy investigating the word ‘fascist’ to notice.
The Bristol Green Party administration has gutted the pipeline, sold the homes, and renegotiated the targets away.
One statement generated a complaint, an assessment process, and a potential investigation.
The other one hasn’t.
Now you know why.
While Bristol was processing a complaint, Zack Polanski launched the Green Party’s local election campaign.
“This election is between the Green Party and the Reform Party,” he told ITV Politics. “It is a straight-up battle between hope and hate.”
Labour, Liberal Democrats, Conservatives — apparently they don’t exist in this version of reality.
You know how this works, don’t you.
The Byline Times this week revealed the party has no nationally binding rules for selecting candidates. Polanski himself admitted vetting had been a “real challenge.” A formal complaint exposed serious procedural failures in a London selection process — the local party confirmed it had never used a secret ballot, had no constitutionally binding election process, and upheld the result anyway.
You don’t say.
Meanwhile, in Thurrock, the party’s candidate for Tilbury St Chads ward — Alfie Jay Rees — called himself a “Modern Day Che” on social media and posted calls to “flatten Israel” for a Palestinian state. The posts surfaced on 9 April, as journalist Charlie Simpson revealed, the day after the party’s campaign launch. No response from Rees or the party by the following day. The Green Party has no nationally binding vetting rules. It shows.
Somewhere a local party coordinator is filling in a spreadsheet. The column marked ‘vetting’ is empty. The deadline was last Tuesday.
This is the party currently leading the national polls. For the first time in its history.
Take your time with that one.
You see, on 7 May, the country votes, and the Almighty Gob will be watching. Some of the people on those ballot papers were selected by a show of hands in a room with no binding rules, no secret ballot, and no constitutional process. The results will be declared by Friday morning. By Friday afternoon, the Green Party will be calling it a mandate.
Remember this paragraph then.
The promise was affordable housing. The supply chain tells a different story.
China controls — according to the International Energy Agency — 85 to 90 per cent of global rare earth processing. Not mining — processing. Every wind turbine magnet. Every EV motor. Every solar panel. The supply chain for the Green Party’s entire political programme runs through Beijing. A significant portion of it runs through Xinjiang — where the UN has documented what it describes as potential crimes against humanity against the Uyghur population.
Therefore, it doesn’t take a genius to work out, or a five-year-old joining the dots, that the Green Party’s net zero infrastructure runs on forced labour. Documented. Raised twice in Parliament since 2024. Met with silence.
Nothing.
China doesn’t care. China has never cared. The Green Party has never asked.
Let that sit for a moment.
The Green Party — which boycotts Israeli goods, walks the streets of Bristol promoting the Bristol Apartheid Free Zone, and has a great deal to say about human rights — has said nothing about Xinjiang. Do you think someone might have missed that particular memo while their political eye was on rainbow coloured hair?
You’ve watched this before, haven’t you. The selective conscience. The curated outrage. The silence that lands exactly where the supply chain begins.
The Green Party has a China problem. Not party merchandised mugs, you understand. As much as China doesn’t have a Green Party problem. As in, Who? Nonetheless, in six weeks’ time, that asymmetry goes to the polls.
Are you ready to join the dots now?
Meanwhile — the White House was having a moment.
It was Easter Sunday. 8:03am. Somewhere in Florida, in a room that smells of fast food and grievance, the most powerful man in the world picked up his phone.
He threatened to bomb Iranian power plants and bridges. He demanded the Strait of Hormuz be opened. He closed the post by writing “Praise be to Allah.” On Easter Sunday. From a self-described Christian.
The Strait of Hormuz. Twenty per cent of the world’s oil and gas. An Iranian blockade. A deadline. And a man who admitted earlier in the week he had no plan to reopen the strait — suggesting it would “naturally open itself” — threatening civilisational consequences from the same phone he uses to order McDonald’s.
Churchill drank before breakfast. Lincoln was clinically depressed. Tesla talked to pigeons. All of them had something Trump doesn’t — the pause. The filter. The person in the room.
Trump has Truth Social. Two words that only a President can combine and make sense of.
As the phone went back on the table, somewhere in the Gulf, a tanker sat still. The democracies kept score. Somewhere in Brussels, a spreadsheet was being updated.
Freedom House and V-Dem — the two most cited democracy indices in academic and policy research — both document the same thing. Democratic backsliding across Europe and North America.
The same week that Trump threatened Iran. The same week the Green Party launched with no vetting rules. The same week Bristol City Council investigated a joke. The Chinese embassy in London quietly remains the largest foreign embassy in Europe. Twenty thousand square metres. Royal Mint Court. Approved while everyone was looking somewhere else.
Does any of this surprise you? It shouldn’t.
It wasn’t a coup. It was paperwork. Committee meetings. Press releases. Complaint procedures. That’s how you lose a room.
One week. The same pattern. Every section of the compass.
Bristol to Beijing. Parliament to the Moon. A Bristol housing crisis ignored while a complaint is processed. A Green Party with no vetting rules launching on hope. A net zero programme running on Xinjiang supply chains. A free world that mislaid its keys and couldn’t remember where it left them. A government conducting foreign policy by smartphone at 8am on Easter Sunday. Somewhere, a kettle boiled. Nobody noticed.
They told you to look over there. The Almighty Gob looked over here. That’s the job. That’s all it has ever been. The landscape The Almighty Gob operates in, however, is shrinking.
Press Gazette’s analysis this week found organic search traffic to 64 publishers has dropped 42 per cent since AI Overviews launched. The algorithm is consuming the space where independent voices used to live.
Which is exactly why building them properly matters.
The Almighty Gob this week joined Wikidata’s knowledge graph — formally connected as a named Bristol civic accountability entity alongside five years of documented output, 88 FOI-based investigations, and the electoral history that started all of this.
Not because anyone asked. Because the dots need joining. Somebody has to — and it clearly wasn’t going to be them.
Bristol, the Green Party, Beijing, and Government. I was up all night joining the dots for you, so you can get the facts, as they stand.
That’s all for now, folks. Come back tomorrow for more Almighty Gob.
The Almighty Gob is a Bristol-based publication founded by John Langley — independent candidate in Bristol’s mayoral elections of 2016 and 2021, and one of the city’s most forensic observers of institutional power. Publishing since 2020, with over 500 pieces including 88 FOI-based Bristol investigations, the publication covers politics, civic accountability, and the gap between what institutions say and what they actually do. Across seven platforms and Substack at thealmightygob.com — with no party allegiance, no press accreditation, and no interest in acquiring either.
SOURCES. If you’re that interested.
Richard Eddy formal assessment / complaint language / refusal to apologise — Bristol Post / Bristol Live, Adam Postans, 9 April 2026 — bristolpost.co.uk
Green Party has no nationally binding candidate selection rules / Polanski vetting admission — The Byline Times, 10 April 2026 — bylinetimes.com
Alfie Jay Rees / “Modern Day Che” / “flatten Israel” social media posts — journalist Charlie Simpson, 9 April 2026
22,000 households social housing waiting list / pipeline cut 76 per cent / 1,200 homes earmarked for sale — Bristol World, January 2025 — bristolworld.com
Non-crime hate incident system scrapped — GOV.UK, April 2026 — gov.uk. College of Policing, April 2026 — college.police.uk
Oxford definition of dangerous — Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary — oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com
China controls 85 to 90 per cent of global rare earth processing — International Energy Agency — iea.org
UN documentation of potential crimes against humanity in Xinjiang — UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, August 2022 — ohchr.org
Raised twice in Parliament since 2024 — UK Parliament Hansard — hansard.parliament.uk
Freedom House and V-Dem democratic backsliding documentation — Freedom House Freedom in the World 2026 — freedomhouse.org. V-Dem Institute Democracy Report 2026 — v-dem.net
Chinese embassy London — largest foreign embassy in Europe, Royal Mint Court, 20,000 square metres — The Guardian / planning records
Organic search traffic to 64 publishers dropped 42 per cent since AI Overviews launch — Press Gazette, April 2026 — pressgazette.co.uk
Zack Polanski “hope versus hate” / “straight-up battle” — ITV Politics, 9 April 2026 — itv.com