The Green Party is considering using taxpayers’ money to help people targeted in immigration raids, the Daily Mail understands.
Several Green-run councils in London have already pledged to limit cooperation with Home Office officials carrying out raids across the capital.
Hackney Council, which is controlled by the Greens, is now considering funding a public information campaign designed to explain to undocumented workers how they can respond to immigration raids.
Speaking at the Green Party conference in Brighton, where Zack Polanski appeared alongside MPs Hannah Spencer and Sian Berry, Seema Syeda of the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants said the organisation was “working with Hackney Council to potentially do a public information campaign”. The initiative, she said, would provide information about people’s rights and “how they can resist raids”.
Nadia Barton Ahmad, a Green councillor in Brighton and Hove who addressed the conference, put forward a motion during the summer to support migrant-owned businesses and people affected by raids. Labour councillors voted down the proposal.
Ms Barton Ahmad said yesterday: “We have local elections here in May, and so we are hoping that within a year we will be able to pass something similar.”
The developments come as two former Green Party leaders criticised a controversial motion declaring that “Zionism is racism”.
Green members are also due to consider another contentious proposal: concealing criminal convictions from background checks after five years.
Zack Polanski speaking during the Green Party conference in Brighton on October 2, 2026
Employers and voluntary organisations can currently request a Disclosure and Barring Service check to examine a prospective employee’s criminal record.
Under the proposal, convictions for offences including theft, assault and drug possession could be withheld from DBS checks once five years had passed.
The plans would allow people given prison sentences of less than two years, or suspended sentences, to have their convictions omitted from DBS disclosures after five years.
Alicia Kearns, the shadow safeguarding minister, accused the Greens last night of appearing to be “criminal apologists”.
A Green Party spokesman said: “Any member can submit a motion. These do not become policy until they are debated and voted on at conference.”
The party’s increasingly radical policy agenda appears to have intensified internal divisions.
At the conference yesterday, former party leaders Caroline Lucas and Adrian Ramsay spoke out against the motion on Zionism and racism.
The proposal describes Zionism as support for “an ethnonationalist Jewish State” and says the term would be treated by the party as “any other form of racism”.
Zack Polanski, Hannah Spencer and Sian Berry pictured together at the party conference
Ms Lucas, the Greens’ first MP, told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “There is no single definition of Zionism, and irrespective of the intentions of the people who put that motion forward, I think there is a real risk that it’ll be divisive and could be seen as a sign that Jewish people aren’t welcome in the party. I will not be supporting it for that reason.”
Zionism is a movement that supports the creation and preservation of a homeland for Jewish people and is now associated with support for the state of Israel.
The motion, as first revealed by the Daily Mail, seeks to declare that the party is ‘opposed’ to Zionism.
It also supports the ‘establishment of a single democratic Palestinian State in all of historic Palestine with Jerusalem as its capital’.
Mr Ramsay, who was the Greens’ co-leader until Mr Polanski took over as sole leader last year, told The Times: ‘The Green Party has a strong position already on challenging the Government and I think it would just be wrong to adopt a policy that could be seen as not supporting the rights of both Israelis and Palestinians to statehood.
‘I stand by the position the Green Party had in the 2024 manifesto, which made clear we want to see equal rights for Israelis and Palestinians.’
Jewish Greens were horrified last night that Hamas-sympathetic group ‘Friends of Al-Aqsa’ had backed the motion.
The group’s founder Ismail Patel said in 2009 that Hamas is ‘no terrorist organisation’ and ‘we salute Hamas for standing up to Israel’.
An immigration enforcement officer outside a house during a raid in Batley, West Yorkshire
Labour was forced to remove an event run by Friends of Al-Aqsa from its own conference agenda after fierce backlash from MPs.
A Jewish member of the Greens told the Daily Mail: ‘I’m deeply troubled that my party, a party with its roots in anti-discrimination and non-violence, is getting support for a divisive motion from outside groups and individuals with a problematic history of hatred towards Jews.’
Another said: ‘The motion endorses a one state solution. This is Hamas policy. It goes beyond all sensible discourse for a two-state solution and calls for the Jewish State to be dismantled.
‘Anyone recognising Israel’s right to exist will be tarnished as a racist. This is an Islamist motion.’
Mr Polanski, who is Jewish, recently declared himself to be ‘an anti-Zionist’.
A Green Party spokesman said: ‘The Green Party, like any party, has a wide, diverse range of views and opinions. [Ms Lucas] is entitled to say what she thinks, and if that influences members in a particular way then that’s how it works.’
