Zack Polanski has been left embarrassed after fresh comments were unearthed defending his former party's decision to hike university tuition fees. Mr Polanski defected from the Liberal Democrats to the Green Party in 2017 after failing to get selected as their candidate in a by-election. However, the Mail has discovered that he was still issuing full-throated defences of the centrist party's time in coalition with the Tories as late as November 2016.
These included backing Nick Clegg's decision to join the austerity-pushing government, and the trebling of tuition fees. Despite the hard-left Green Party condemning Labour's move to raise fees in line with inflation, Mr Polanski told a podcast that there were 'defences' of the Lib Dems' manifesto-breaking decision.
Speaking on the 'Getting Better Acquainted' podcast, Mr Polanski defended the former Lib Dem deputy Prime Minister: 'Nick Clegg's a really interesting one, because it would be so easy for me now to reject the coalition - especially from the place I'm coming from, which is much more now anti-party political, much more anti-the system. I would still defend most of the things that the Liberal Democrats did in coalition.'
Mr Polanski suggested that the party's U-turn on promises of no rises to tuition fees, which Nick Clegg was forced to apologise for, has 'defences'. He is known to have spoken at the Lib Dem conference in Autumn 2015. These latest comments were made over a year later. He criticised the party's MPs' decision to back bombing in Syria that year, adding: 'The irony here is actually I have more problems with what the party have done post-coalition.'
Addressing the U-turn on tuition fees, which saw trust in his former party collapse, Mr Polanski insisted: 'I think tuition fees is the obvious thing to have a discussion about and I think there are defences there. I think knowing much more about the parties now in intimate detail I did make the right choice for where my values generally sit.'
Despite losing the party's selection to be the Liberal Democrat candidate in the December 2016 Richmond Park by-election, he also called on Labour and the Greens 'to step aside and support the Lib Dems'. The comments, made in late 2016, appear to be the last time Mr Polanski publicly defended his then party before jumping to the Greens. Until now his only known public defence of the party took place over a year earlier at their 2015 Autumn conference.
Reacting to the emphatic defence of the Liberal Democrats, a Labour Party spokesman told the Daily Mail: 'Zack Polanski has tried to hypnotise voters into forgetting what he once stood for. This is the latest example of the Green leader telling people what they want to hear. Polanski previously gave his full-throated backing to the Tory-led Coalition government's policies, which left people poorer. Voters have a chance on Thursday to tell Polanski that they haven't forgotten and back Labour.'
The Greens insisted: 'Zack joined the Greens from the Lib Dems because he realised that the Green Party best represented his values. Trebling tuition fees was a Lib Dem policy. Scrapping them is our policy. No wonder the Green Party is by far the most popular choice for 18-22 year olds.'
