Tony Greenstein's March 1 membership fuels Saiqa Ali Green Party Suspension row
Tony Greenstein’s March 1 entry into the Green Party has become central to the saiqa ali green party suspension row, after he said his involvement was used to argue that the party was attracting people expelled from Labour. The dispute sharpened after a March 28 article linked him to fears about the party’s direction.
Greenstein is a Jewish anti-Zionist and a founding member of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign. He said the reporting turned his membership into evidence for a broader claim about the Greens, while the party was already coming under renewed scrutiny after its recent gains.
Tony Greenstein and the Greens
The Green Party won its first parliamentary by-election at Gorton and Denton, taking 40.6 percent of the vote. That result came after a period in which the party had just one member of parliament between 2010 and 2024, before it secured four seats in parliament in the July 2024 election.
Membership then rose from 65,000 in July 2025 to about 220,000 today. Zack Polanski was elected leader in October 2025, and he described Israeli actions in Gaza as a genocide. Those shifts left the party more visible, and Greenstein’s case quickly became part of the argument over who the party was attracting.
March 28 Jewish Chronicle report
On March 28, the Jewish Chronicle ran an article about Greenstein joining the Greens. It suggested that his involvement had fueled fears that the party was becoming a magnet for people expelled from Labour during the height of its anti-Semitism crisis.
The timing mattered because the anti-Semitism smear campaign against the Greens had already begun in earnest after the by-election victory in Gorton and Denton. That campaign also tracked the party’s Spring conference, where a motion declaring “Zionism is racism” was attempted and failed only because Jewish Greens filibustered it.
Green Party Spring conference
Greenstein’s membership now sits inside a wider dispute over how the party’s support for Palestinians is being portrayed. The conference motion and Polanski’s use of the word “genocide” gave opponents material to fold into a broader anti-Semitism argument, while supporters of the party have to answer for how those claims are being used in public debate.
For Greenstein, the immediate issue is not a vote or a ballot paper but the way his membership has been presented in print. For the party, the pressure now comes from whether that coverage keeps defining its expansion by association with Labour’s anti-Semitism crisis rather than by its own election results and growing membership.
