The Green Party has launched a crackdown on banter by telling its members to snitch on friends who crack unwoke jokes.
Diversity training, developed by Zack Polanski’s party, has shown how it intends to suppress jokes between friends, in what has been described as “akin to Stasi East Germany”.
The training, seen by the Mail on Sunday, detailed how members should seek out more diverse friendship groups and assess the race of their closest confidantes.
Delivered to Greens this summer, a party official said in the event of a joke which might make someone feel uncomfortable, they should take note of “what happened, including dates, times, locations” to make a permanent record.
The record could then be passed on to party officials should a complaint ever come to light, though the training emphasised “immediate action” should take place.
An example used in the training was someone making “derogatory jokes” about a Polish person in the room.
They said: “We see that everyone’s laughing, including the person who the jokes are about. So we don’t really know what dynamic is going on here.
“It’s possible that the Polish person is the person who started all of this, that these are really good friends… everyone’s absolutely fine with what’s happening here.
The Greens encouraged their members to seek out more diverse friendship groups
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PA
“We want to be a safe space for everyone… so even if this person is fine with the jokes, we’re actually creating an environment in this space where derogatory jokes are allowed to happen.”
Asked on how to act, members suggested speaking to the deliverer to understand what was “funny” and to “use reasoning”.
The Green party members were told: “The key thing is don’t do nothing.
“We can interrupt the situation… changing the subject, creating diversion, giving the person targeted an opportunity to leave, just creating something that stops whatever is happening from happening.”
The Green Party leader, Zack Polanski, is hoping to become an MP as candidate in the Holborn and St Pancras by-election
Diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) training documents from the party said the word “banter” was “often used to defend seemingly small incidents of harassment”.
The Greens code of conduct stated that “those kind of [comments] are not okay”, though the official training the members insisted she was not there to be “the joke police”.
Another example was discussed, where a woman tells a man that a good partner is “so hard to find these days” and says it is “such a waste that you are not straight”.
Members were informed that while the joke on the face of it “can seem harmless”, it could be classed as “sexual harassment”.
In a separate session on overcoming bias, Greens were asked to write down the names of their five closest friends.
They were then instructed to tick next to each name if they shared the same ethnicity, nationality, gender or education level.
The trainer then told participants to “sit back and reflet on what it shows”.
She said: “This can be something called affinity bias… studies show that in general people extend greater trust, hold in positive regard, cooperation and empathy to people who are more similar to themselves and less with people who are more dissimilar to themselves.”
Green members were then told to seek out “diverse friendships” in order to overcome bias.
Labour MP David Taylor told the Mail on Sunday the diversity training was “more akin to Stasi East Germany than 2026”.
He said: “Green Party membership should rest assured that everyone else already assumes they have no sense of humour whatsoever.
“Perhaps they should just save everyone else the trouble by printing T-shirts that have ‘fun police’ emblazoned across them.”
GB News has reached out to the Green Party for comment.
