The Labour leader of Brighton & Hove has reached for the same weapon a Labour predecessor tried in 2017: threatening to lock a national party out of a city-owned conference hall because of what it voted on inside the building. Bella Sankey calls the Green Party’s “Zionism is racism” motion — passed at the party’s October 2026 conference — “divisive, discriminatory and wrong,” and is now considering refusing the Greens the use of the Brighton Centre. Zack Polanski, the party’s Jewish leader, calls that conflation “antisemitic.” The council and the Jewish leader of the targeted party are not having the same argument; they are having opposite ones, and a venue lease cannot adjudicate between them. The ban is not new — and that is the point.
The object at stake is the Brighton Centre: the council-owned hall that has hosted Labour, the Liberal Democrats and the Greens themselves for decades — and all three in a single season. It is, as Sankey herself puts it, “owned by all of us in the city.” Funny, then, that the only genuinely exclusionary act on the table is hers. Polanski has replied that he will “not accept any exclusion, or refusal to engage with anyone, because of the religious or communal body they are part of.” He is right.
Sankey says the motion “dangerously” conflates Jewish self-determination with the actions of the Israeli government and risks “the safety of Jewish members and Jewish people more broadly.” Polanski, who is Jewish, says the opposite: that blurring the line “is not only wrong but antisemitic, and makes Jewish people less safe.” The council claims to act in defence of Jewish safety; the Jewish leader of the targeted party says the defence is the danger. That is not a difference of degree. It is a difference of claim. And the venue lease cannot settle it.
It is not Sankey’s case to litigate with a venue booking. That is a debate for the Greens, for their members, and, if anyone can be bothered, for the ballot box. It is not a debate to be closed by a Labour council wielding a council-owned conference hall. Declaring a category of belief — Jewish self-determination in a Jewish homeland — to be racism is the motion parties pass when they have stopped counting the votes they will lose. The party is small; the motion is maximalist. That is a strategic choice, not an accident. The lesson Brighton should have learned years ago is that venue owners do not get to be the speech-screening committee for British political parties, no matter how loudly the loudest voices insist otherwise.
The 2017 precedent is instructive. Sankey’s Labour predecessor, council leader Warren Morgan, threatened to ban his own party over antisemitism concerns. A Labour council, a Labour mayoralty, a Labour-aligned venue operator. The threat receded — the lever stayed where it was. That is the point. It works because conferences need a hall and a city-owned hall answers to the council chamber. What the Liberal Democrats, who also used the venue this autumn, will learn when their turn comes is what the Greens are learning now: the building answers to whoever holds the council chamber when the booking lands.
This matters well beyond one motion in one seaside town. The British state has spent years drawing lines about which views on Israel and Iran are tolerable in public life — Miliband telling Iran’s Araghchi in September that the UK will not tolerate Iran-linked hostile activity — and the lines keep being drawn by the people who claim to be guarding against exclusion. The Brighton Centre is owned by the people of Brighton & Hove. It will host whoever comes next, and that whoever will arrive carrying whatever motion the host council happens to find uncongenial at the moment of booking. If a Labour council can refuse a booking because it dislikes a motion the Green membership passed, then any council can refuse any booking for any political reason — and “inclusive city” is just the queue-jump ticket. The lever does not discriminate by ideology. It discriminates by who is holding it when the booking lands.
That is the precedent Sankey is now setting. It is the precedent Morgan set in 2017. It is a lever the next council, the next mayor, the next convened majority will inherit and turn on whatever party is using the building that year. Polanski’s framing — that antisemitism and criticism of the Israeli state “are, and must always be, completely distinct” — is the line the British left has not yet learned to hold. Sankey’s framing — that the gate is hers to close — is the line British local government should not be allowed to learn at all. The Greens are today’s target. They will not be the last.