Green Party Inclusive Terminology Guidance Bars Women from Brighton
“The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink.” – George Orwell, Politics and the English Language, 1946
On Friday, as the largest conference in the Green Party’s history opened in Brighton, two of its members gave an interview from outside the building. Zoe Hatch and Jude English, directors of the Green Women’s Declaration, had been refused entry. Hatch said they had all been suspended or expelled, and that what they believed amounted to agreeing with the Supreme Court about single-sex provision for women, which she thought most of the British public did too. Saying it inside the Green Party, she said, is no longer allowed.
Shahrar Ali, the party’s former deputy leader, was outside as well, telling GB News he had been barred from attending and intended to go back to court. Inside, the party was holding what its own spokesperson had called, a fortnight earlier, the most democratic conference of any political party in Britain.
Two days before any of this, the party issued its members a glossary.
What the Green Party Terminology Guidance Says
“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.” ― George Orwell, 1984
The Inclusive Terminology Guidance instructs members to stop using words and phrases including “elderly”, “female politician” and “mothers and fathers”, and recommends replacing gendered job titles with gender-neutral terms wherever possible. “Homosexual” and “transsexual” are to be treated with caution, the latter because it does not encompass non-binary people. “Sexual preference” is listed as unacceptable because it implies attraction is a choice. “Bame” is discouraged on the ground that many people are uncomfortable grouping diverse experiences under a single label. “Lunatic” and “nutter” fall foul because they reinforce negative stereotypes and stigma about mental health.
This is not advice. The guidance warns that wrong terminology can create unwelcoming or exclusionary environments and contribute to bullying and harassment, that getting it wrong occasionally is forgivable if members are trying, and that repeated behaviour may be deemed harassment and so breach the party’s code. Members face sanction under that code if they fail to comply. The party’s response was that it is a guide and nothing else. It would not say when the guidance was published.
A guide and nothing else, with a disciplinary procedure bolted to the end of it.
Words do Land. That is the point.
Part of this document is defensible, and the Tribune is not going to pretend otherwise. “Nutter” and “lunatic” are not neutral descriptions. They are what people shout at someone in the middle of the worst week of their life, and a political party telling its members not to use psychiatric abuse as a punchline is behaving decently. Nobody serious objects to that. Nobody is meant to.
That is what the opening entries are for. If you want people to swallow something indefensible, you bolt it onto something nobody could disagree with and present the whole as a single act of courtesy. By the time the reader reaches “mothers and fathers”, the document has established its own good faith at the expense of words nobody will defend. The glossary moves, in a few lines, from insults to descriptions. “Nutter” is something you call a person. “Mother” is something a person is.
“Nutter” is something you call a person. “Mother” is something a person is.
J K Rowling, describing herself as an elderly mother of three who had not had a sex change and knew many homosexuals, offered the able-bodied and sexually-preferred opinion that the Greens were turning into total nutters. One sentence, nearly every forbidden term, and a demolition the party will find harder to answer than any of the lawsuits.
Orwell’s Warning Was About the Gap Behind the Words
Half the press has reached this week for the word Orwellian, and meant Newspeak: the vocabulary shrinking, the range of available thought shrinking with it. That is the right book and the wrong chapter. The chapter is the essay he wrote two years before the novel, where he set out how the thing actually happens, and it has nothing to do with dictionaries.
“The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink.” -George Orwell, Politics and the English Language
Bad language, he argued, is the symptom of a gap. When what someone is really doing and what they say they are doing have come apart, the euphemism arrives on its own, unbidden, to cover the distance between the two, and he reached for the image of a cuttlefish spurting out ink. The words do not get muddier because people have become careless. They get muddier because clarity would expose the aim.
So apply the test to this document. The declared aim is kindness, and the party has said so: members are being protected from environments that feel unwelcoming. The real aim is visible in who was standing outside the Brighton Centre on Friday. “Mother” has not been added to a list because the word wounds anybody. It has been added because it is the word in which an argument the party has lost in court is made, and a word that cannot be used is an argument that cannot be put. The glossary is not the cause of anything. It is the ink.
Why Sex-Based Language Matters for Women’s Rights
In June 2025, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls, Reem Alsalem, presented report A/HRC/59/47 to the Human Rights Council. Its central assertion was that the shift away from clear, sex-based language in law, policy and service provision is undermining the tools needed to protect women and girls from violence. She told delegates that erasing women’s specific language and needs based on their sex is not only wrong, it is also demeaning. “Simply put, you cannot protect what you cannot define,” she said.
Read that back and sit with what it took. A United Nations official had to formally argue, in 2025, in front of the assembled representatives of the world’s governments, that women are a category defined by sex.
This is why the entry for “mothers and fathers” is not a question of manners. Maternity provision, refuge funding, prison allocation, the collection of crime statistics and the design of every service built for one sex all rest on a word that names a material fact. Replace the word with an administrative euphemism and you have not removed an offence. You have removed the hook the protection hangs on. A refuge cannot be funded for a category the funder cannot name. A pattern of violence cannot be measured in data that has stopped recording sex.
The Greens, of all parties, understand this argument perfectly. They have made it for fifty years about something else.
Shahrar Ali, the Green Party and the Equality Act
Gender-critical belief is a protected philosophical belief under the Equality Act 2010, settled in Forstater and reinforced by the Supreme Court’s unanimous ruling of 16 April 2025 that “woman” and “sex” in that Act mean biological sex. The Act does not only cover employers. Sections 100 to 103 cover associations, which is what a political party is.
The Greens know this, because they have already been through it. On 9 February 2024, Judge Hellman found that the party had discriminated against Shahrar Ali because of his protected belief, contrary to section 101 of the Equality Act. The Mayor’s and City of London County Court awarded him £9,100. The court found the party had failed to identify any misconduct. The Greens said they acknowledged procedural shortfalls in how they had deselected one of their spokespeople, and apologised for failing to live up to the standards that both they and the court expect.
Hold that apology against what followed. In September 2024, Ali was excluded from the party altogether, told that readmission would depend on publicly retracting tweets and undertaking safeguarding training. In October 2025, the party cancelled the Green Women’s Declaration’s conference stall, and GWD began legal action, its pre-action letter alleging the decision discriminated against members holding the protected belief that biological sex is immutable. This year the Green Party Executive, which includes Polanski, ruled that the group could not have a presence at conference at all. Two years after a court told the party what the law required of it, the party is being asked the same question again, by more people, in more courtrooms.
The apology was not a change of heart. It was a change of audience.
The EHRC Code and the Green Party’s Legal Position
The Greens’ defence is not stupid and deserves stating properly rather than sneered at. Good Law Project, acting for the party, argues that the Greens recognise the right to hold gender-critical views, but that a party’s right to organise and operate in line with its own manifesto and code of conduct is protected by Articles 10 and 11 of the European Convention on Human Rights, and that parties must be able to keep all their members safe. The Ali judgment itself upheld the right of political parties to dismiss spokesmen whose views differ from party policy. That is a real argument and it wins part of the ground.
The Green Party urged the EHRC to withdraw its earlier guidance as ill-considered and impractical, and Polanski, on the Telegraph’s account, has called the single-sex guidance deeply regressive. A party is entitled to say all of that, loudly, and to campaign to change the law.
Here is where the two things come apart. Choosing your spokespeople is party business. Disciplining your members for a belief Parliament protected is not, and no Article 11 right to organise has ever included a right to do it. The Code that came into force on 5 August 2026 covers services, public functions and associations, does not create new law, and explains the law as it stands. The Greens are an association. They are inside the document they are calling regressive, not outside it filing objections.
You may campaign to change a law. You may not punish your own members for agreeing with it while it is in force.
Room 101: When Green Party Terminology Becomes Disciplinary
“Under the new orthodoxy, science is not the discovery of reality. It is the process by which reality learns what it is permitted to be.”
What makes a glossary into something else is the sentence at the end about the code of conduct. A style guide tells you what reads well, and you are free to ignore it. A list of unacceptable words attached to a complaints system tells you what you may think out loud, and the cost of finding out where the line is falls entirely on you. In the cell, the point was never the number. The point was that the man holding up four fingers decided what the number was, and that you would be the one to pay for getting it wrong.
Nobody in Brighton will be dragged anywhere. That is not how it works, and Orwell knew it was not how it works, which is why he spent more pages on the essay than on the cell. It works by attrition. A member with thirty years’ service reads the list, notices that two of the words describe her own life, and says nothing in the meeting. Multiply her by a membership that has grown threefold under this leadership to more than 220,000, and you no longer need a tribunal. You have a party in which the dissent has gone quiet and the leadership has mistaken the silence for agreement. We have watched this done to other people in other rooms, and it ends the same way every time.
The party that became the Greens was founded in 1973 out of an argument made the year before, in Blueprint for Survival: that the numbers were what they were, that the curves pointed where they pointed, and that no amount of political discomfort would move them. That is the whole moral authority of environmentalism. It tells you the thing you do not want to hear and refuses to soften it, because softening it is how the thing gets away from you. It is why Caroline Lucas spent years pushing Parliament to stop saying “climate change” and start saying “climate emergency”. The milder word was the lie.
So put it to the floor. The party’s own spokesperson calls this the most democratic conference in British politics, and the Green Party’s conference is sovereign over its policy in a way no other party’s is. Then publish the Inclusive Terminology Guidance in full, name the committee that wrote it and the date it was issued, and let the members vote on whether “mother” stays on the list. Restore the Green Women’s Declaration’s stall. Readmit the members suspended for a belief the courts have twice confirmed is protected. And answer the question the party has now declined to answer for three years, which the Tribune puts to it again here: which word in “mother and father” is the harm, and who is harmed by it?
Nobody is going to be forced to stop saying, mother. They will simply notice, each time, that they were the only one who did.
The Green Party’s one unanswerable argument has always been that reality does not take instruction. In Brighton this week, it issued some anyway: “Follow the science when it commands obedience. Rewrite the science when it demands dissent.”
