Smear of the Week: Zack Polanski hits back at Telegraph for ‘literally making up quotes’

The latest media attack aimed at the Green Party leader Zack Polanski was especially bizarre, claiming he said, “food is too cheap.”

In response, Polanski accused the Telegraph of misrepresenting his remarks and crossing the line from spin into outright fabrication.

Taking to social media, he said:

“We’re at the point where the Telegraph are literally making up quotes. I said when veg is sold for pennies in supermarkets, it’s a sign someone’s not being paid properly. Farmers being paid a pittance for their produce. Workers on less than a living wage in supermarkets.

“Sections of the media are just absolute bullshit. They’ve always been a problem – but now they’re literally lying and making up things that have never been said. The only way to defeat the billionaire media is to organise around them.”

And supporters agreed with his assessment.

One commenter wrote: “You’re right Zack. It’s hard not to react, but keep going in correcting them and moving on.”

Another added: “I see the spin on Zack’s words, I knew there would be more to this, so checked out what Zack really said and of course it made sense.”

The controversy stems from a Telegraph headline that declared: “Zack Polanski: Food is too cheap.” The article opens by stating that “Zack Polanski has said food is too cheap and called for new rules to force supermarkets to pay suppliers more.”

Yet the article itself went on to explain that Polanski had been discussing vegetables being sold for as little as 7p, arguing that such prices point to exploitation somewhere within the food supply chain.

Speaking to the Bakers, Food and Allied Workers’ Union, Polanski said:

“That is not a sign of a healthy system. Someone is being exploited somewhere, and if you’re paying 7p for vegetables, then something is not right.

It is those supermarket bosses who are taking record profits … meanwhile paying their workers poverty wages. We cannot go on like this.”

He also called for tighter regulation of supermarkets, arguing that the sector has “not been regulated enough” and is exploiting “both the workers in the supermarkets and the farmers and agricultural workers.”

Polanski supports a £15 minimum wage and a proposed 10-to-one pay ratio that would limit how much more senior executives can earn compared with their lowest-paid employees.

Taken at face value, those remarks are not an argument that food prices in general should rise. Rather, they are an argument that extraordinarily low prices for some products may reflect unfair treatment of workers and producers elsewhere in the supply chain. Concerns about low pay, corporate profits and exploitation have long been central themes of both Polanski’s politics and Green Party policy.

And, Polanski was speaking specifically about vegetables being sold at exceptionally low prices, yet the Telegraph misleadingly broadened this into a claim about “food” as a whole.

While the use of single quotation marks indicates a paraphrase rather than a direct quotation, many readers may not appreciate that distinction. The result is a headline that conveys a much stronger and more sweeping claim than the one Polanski actually made.

Made at a time when millions of households are struggling with the cost of living and food insecurity remains a major issue, any suggestion that a politician wants food prices to increase is likely to attract a strong reaction.

Unsurprisingly, other right-wing outlets quickly followed the Telegraph’s lead.

The Spectator ran with the headline: “Polanski pushes price hikes.”

“When he’s not ranting about Gaza, Zack Polanski is mostly to be found despairing about the cost of living. And aren’t we all?” fumed Steer Pike, adding:

“The Green leader has made a series of economically illiterate suggestions about how he would bring down prices for struggling Brits and improve the dire state of the economy.

“Which makes his intervention on food prices today all the more bizarre. The intrepid Green leader, in all his glory, has called for the cost of supermarket goods to rise. That’s right: Polanski fumed that the likes of veggies are far too cheap.”

Yet this interpretation depends on accepting the original Telegraph framing. Polanski’s actual comments focused on exploitation within the supply chain and the gap between supermarket profits and workers’ wages. Whether one agrees with his proposed solutions or not, that’s a different argument from simply declaring that “food is too cheap”.

What Polanski said was clear: if vegetables are being sold for pennies, somebody in the chain is likely paying the price. What appeared in the headlines, was something else entirely.