Never have the Greens been so successful. Never has the fighting been so bad

Some words among the list of adjectives thrown at me about Councillor Hanif Alli are: disrespectful, unkind, liar, manipulative, egotistical, misogynist, but at first, a charmer.

61, with a well-trimmed beard and a wave of black hair pushed back from his brow, he was elected as the Greens’ first ever Bolton councillor in 2024, rising through the ranks to become what he is now: chair of the Bolton Greens. In that time he’s seen three further councillors join his offices. He’s also seen a slew of Green party infighting, so much so that, as a direct result of our reporting on the matter, all four councillors have now threatened to quit.

So we have a rift in the Bolton Greens. On one side there’s your dyed-in-the-wool party members — among them Liz Spencer, mother of Hannah, who first joined the Green Party when it was still called the Ecology Party, though she tells me she expects to be expelled after what she’s told me for this article. She tells me just how the party has changed in the last few months: “It’s not what the Green party used to be; nice people who wore hemp shoes. That opened the door for lots of less than nice people to enter. And no one was primed for it.”

On the other you have the four Bolton councillors, including Hanif Alli and, perhaps most notoriously, Baggy Khan — a man who upset fellow party members and made national headlines for his penchant for fast cars and filming himself speeding down side streets.

The former group claim that Alli rigged an election to become the party chair, that he shuts down any sort of challenge, is misogynistic, bullyish, and that he brought in councillors – like Khan – who aren’t aligned with Green Party values. One party member, Helena Carman, goes so far as to refute the idea that he's a Green at all. “I will stand on rooftops and shout 'that man is not Green!'” she says. “He walks around as if he is, but he is truly not.”

Alli, on the other hand, describes these dissenters as “racists”: a “core ‘white’ group who have now become a ‘dab hand’ at orchestrated abuse and press leaks”.

So what’s the truth?

Hello! Alec here — the writer of this piece, and The Mill’s newest recruit.

This is a tale specific to Bolton, but the story I think is relevant to UK politics as a whole. As Green Party membership has grown following the spark of Zack Polanski’s election to leader, how has the soul of the party changed?

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