UK police clear Green leader over Farage guillotine post

The Metropolitan Police has confirmed it will take no further action against Green Party leader Zack Polanski after he shared an image of a T-shirt featuring a guillotine and the slogan "we're only making plans for Nigel".

After a careful review, the force concluded that sharing the image did not meet the criminal threshold. The post had been shared by around 130 accounts, and investigating all of them was deemed a disproportionate use of police resources.

While the Met cleared those who shared the post, it referred the matter of the T-shirt wearer to Avon and Somerset Police. That force also concluded that no offence had been committed, noting the use of song lyrics and the satirical marketing of the garment.

The episode highlights the increasingly volatile nature of British public life, where political polarization is turning social media missteps into police matters. For investors and businesses, the normalisation of inflammatory rhetoric and the resulting friction over policing priorities signal a deeply fractured political environment.

Reform UK, which reported Polanski on Monday, framed the outcome as evidence of a broken system. "Once again we see that we are living in two-tier Britain," a party spokesman said. "Zack Polanski is allowed to get away with inciting murder whilst ordinary people up and down the country get a knock at the door for making a joke online."

Reform leader Nigel Farage had earlier argued that a political figure with a large following "cannot put out on his social media the image that he did, my name, the guillotine, without some consequences". He called for an apology, but Polanski has refused.

Polanski told BBC Newsnight: "If I'd done it deliberately I'd be apologising but because this was a mistake I think the important thing is that I point out this was a mistake." The Green Party accused Reform UK of using the incident as a "political football for their own cynical purposes".