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I just interviewed Zack Polanski.
It was a big opportunity, and there were so many things I could ask. If you don’t know, Zack Polanski is a budding UK politician. He’s the leader of the Green Party, which has had an extraordinary ride in the polls over the last year. Under Zack’s leadership, the Greens have grown to become a genuine third force in British politics. In March this year they did what would once have sounded absurd: a YouGov poll put them ahead of both Labour and the Conservatives, with only Reform UK in front.
For a moment, the Greens were the most popular party in the country for every age group under 50. That surge has now cooled, and Labour has clawed back ground since Andy Burnham took over in Downing Street, but the fact it happened at all tells you something real is shifting in how people, and especially younger voters, think about politics.
Does the king know about this?
While I don’t think Zack will become Prime Minister any time soon, he is an extremely relevant voice in UK politics right now. He is also a passionate vegan. When we spoke, I was representing Plant Based News, so naturally, topics would include the environment and food production. However, I was also tempted to broaden the interview in a bid to reach a wider audience and bring more people into the conversation.
For example, I wondered if I should ask Zack about the economy, as he’s attracted both praise and criticism for his economic ideas. Or, I wondered, should I ask him about kosher meat? Zack is Jewish, and Restore Britain’s Rupert Lowe, one of Zack’s biggest antagonists, has said he would ban kosher and halal slaughter. Finally, I wondered if I should ask him about what I believe is his boldest action as a politician so far: joining the campaign group Project Slingshot to shine footage of CO2 pig slaughter onto some of London’s most famous landmarks.
Those landmarks notably included Tower Bridge, the Houses of Parliament, and finally, Buckingham Palace, where the campaigners asked a pointed question of the building’s most famous resident: does the king know about this?
‘What that tells me is they are on the right track’
For me, it was that last topic that was the biggest highlight of the interview. Zack said, “Normally, if I sneeze, the billionaire press cover it all over the place. […] But that story, other than the brilliant Plant Based News, it got very, very little pickup. And I think it’s because the media realised that if they covered that story, people would be curious about what was happening in those animal factory farms, and that would create more questions than I think that they’re prepared to answer.”
He added, “A green government, as I’ve said, would end animal factory farming. It’s really clear that it’s cruel. It’s really bad for people’s health. The antibiotics that we’re pumping into animals are also creating a health crisis that we’re already on the road to.”
On why he thinks the media silence itself is telling, Zack said, “So what that tells me is they are on the right track. I think we live in an attention economy, and the question is how do you grab people’s attention to give them that information in a way that isn’t forcing it on people, but actually is done in a compassionate way that creates questions.”
This, in particular, struck me, because it was so true. I had never thought about it quite like that before: The mainstream media, which will cover almost anything Zack does, suddenly goes quiet the moment he highlights what happens to pigs before they reach supermarket shelves.
‘The science is unambiguous, the public is waking up to this’
The action highlighting CO2 pig slaughter was organised with Project Slingshot and the comedian and animal advocate Diane Morgan, and it did exactly what Zack said it would. It made people ask questions.
Zack put his name to the campaign publicly, and at the time, said that the images projected onto London’s landmarks told a story that “the government has been trying to avoid.” He added that “The science is unambiguous, the public is waking up to this, and Ministers need to act now.”
The numbers as the center of the campaign are brutal. Around 90 percent of pigs slaughtered in the UK die in CO2 gas chambers, a method the government’s own Animal Welfare Committee has recommended banning because of the pain and distress it causes.
Overall, roughly 85 percent of all farmed animals in the UK, and 90 percent globally, are raised in factory farms, which are intensive systems designed to maximise output for a small number of enormous companies ((it has been reported that just five firms control most of the UK’s meat supply) rather than to treat animals as anything other than units of production.
The scariest thing the media is ignoring
That’s the part that has always stayed with me. Most of us love animals. Most of us would be horrified to watch what actually happens inside a gas chamber or a broiler shed. And yet the system runs in the background of daily life, hidden behind labels like “farm assured” and “locally produced” that tell you almost nothing about how an animal actually lived or died. It goes against every instinct most people have. We’re a nation of animal lovers, by reputation and by self-image, and somehow it barely registers as news.
This, I came to realise, really is the scariest thing the media are ignoring.
The full Zack Polanski interview is available now on the Plant Based News YouTube channel.
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