The Green Party of England and Wales has suspended Eleanora Sophie Folan, a trans communist elected by party members to its governing council, following a coordinated barrage of complaints and hostile press coverage.
Folan, better known as the founder of the electoral analysis platform Stats for Lefties, was elected on 19 August to represent the Eastern region in a female-reserved place on the Green Party Council (GPC). The result was reportedly decided by just six votes, with Folan receiving 784 votes against her opponent’s 778.
The GPC is no minor committee. It oversees the party’s political direction, strategy, policy, governance and internal culture. Folan had been endorsed by Greens for Palestine and stood openly as an anti-Zionist trans woman committed to building what she called a “radical anti-imperialist Green Party”.
Folan says she was suspended only eight days after being elected. The party publicly confirmed the suspension on 4 September but refused to give any reason, claiming that it doesn’t comment on disciplinary matters. Its official GPC page now lists the second Eastern-region position as vacant.
In a statement published on 7 September, Folan said: “The only reason given for my IMMEDIATE SUSPENSION was: EF’s recent election to GPC and the accompanying media interest”.
She added: “I was simply told that I had ‘brought the party into disrepute’ by being elected to a women’s role whilst trans.”
According to Folan, the decision was made through a private group-chat discussion involving only 13 of the GPC’s 36 ordinary members. She says her opponents submitted around 100 pages of hostile and transphobic articles as evidence, while she wasn’t allowed to see the charges or submit anything in her defence before the suspension was imposed. She also alleges that the suspension was leaked to the Daily Mail and that the party included a link to a suicide hotline in the email informing her.
These details haven’t been independently confirmed. But the essential sequence is clear: members elected Folan, the capitalist press manufactured a political scandal around the result, and a small section of the party bureaucracy removed her before any investigation or hearing had taken place.
Two campaigns converged on Folan
The media offensive involved two related but distinct attacks.
The first was a plainly transmisogynistic campaign against a trans woman occupying a female representative place. Gender-critical Greens threatened legal action, arguing that her election was incompatible with the Supreme Court’s 2025 interpretation of “sex” and “woman” in the Equality Act.
That judgment held that these terms refer to assigned sex for the purposes of the Act, while maintaining separate legal protections for trans people. It didn’t decide how the law applies to this particular internal party position, and no court has ruled that Folan’s election was unlawful.
Before suspending her, the Green Party publicly defended the result. A spokesperson said:
“All elections to Green Party positions are held in accordance with our rules and constitution, and we always act within the law.
“We do not accept that the flawed EHRC guidance prevents us from continuing to hold our elections in accordance with our rules, and we remain clear that trans women are women, trans men are men and that non-binary identities exist and are valid.”
Within days, Folan was suspended anyway.
The second campaign concerned her opposition to Zionism and Western imperialism. Newspapers including the Financial Times, Times, Telegraph and Daily Mail attacked her for supporting Iran’s resistance to US and Israeli aggression and calling for Israel to be abolished.
Months before the election, the pro-Israel pressure group GnasherJew had published a dossier accusing Folan of antisemitism. Whatever one thinks of every statement attributed to her, the article’s political purpose was made explicit in its concluding instruction: “Please submit a complaint to the Green Party concerning Ell’s online conduct, and report the matter to Norfolk Police as a potential case of stirring up racial hatred.”
This wasn’t simply journalism documenting complaints that already existed. It was an organised attempt to generate them.
Folan’s public remarks were known before the election. Members voted for her anyway. Her election therefore represented a limited but genuine democratic mandate for her political platform. That doesn’t place every statement she has made beyond criticism, but criticism and disciplinary punishment aren’t the same thing. No disciplinary body has found her guilty of antisemitism, misconduct or any other offence.
Punished without being found guilty
The Green Party calls what it imposed a “No-Fault Suspension”. Under its published disciplinary rules, the GPC or members empowered to act for it can suspend somebody immediately where they believe this is necessary to prevent “further harm” to the party.
A suspended member can’t volunteer, attend local or national party events — including conference — or access the members’ website. Folan is therefore correct that suspension isn’t technically a finding of guilt. It happens before the accusations have been examined.
The problem is that the concept of “harm to the party” is almost infinitely elastic. If hostile media attention itself constitutes harm, the bourgeois press acquires an indirect veto over the party’s internal democracy. Reactionaries need only identify a target, organise complaints and produce enough hostile coverage. The party bureaucracy can then cite the resulting scandal as evidence that the member must be suspended.
The people generating the “harm” are rewarded for generating it.
The rules provide for a respondent eventually to receive a redacted complaint and submit a response. But the ordinary appeal procedure applies to decisions made later by the Disciplinary Committee. There is no equally clear appeal against an immediate no-fault suspension.
There’s also an obvious gap between the rules for suspending party membership and those for removing a GPC representative. The Green Party constitution says directly suspending a council member from office requires a two-thirds majority, evidence of sustained conduct against the party’s interests and a right of appeal.
Temporarily suspending someone’s membership can, however, be done by a smaller group acting on the council’s behalf. Since a suspended member can’t participate in national party bodies, suspending Folan’s membership effectively removes her from the GPC without using the procedure specifically designed for removing elected councillors.
The bureaucracy can therefore reach the same destination through a door with fewer safeguards.
The class power behind “party reputation”
Under capitalism, ideas such as “reputation”, “responsibility” and “electability” aren’t politically neutral. Respectability is defined largely by a capitalist press owned by billionaires and integrated into the wider machinery of bourgeois power.
The Daily Mail doesn’t need a formal seat on the Green Party Council. It only needs the power to decide which members become a “scandal”. Party officials, dependent upon favourable coverage, electoral credibility and acceptance within parliamentary politics, then enforce the boundaries laid down for them.
This doesn’t require every official involved to be consciously taking orders from the ruling class. The pressure is structural. The Green Party isn’t an organisation based on independent working-class power. It is an electoral formation operating inside the capitalist political market, where media access, legal threats and professional respectability exert constant discipline over its leadership.
The contradiction is particularly sharp here. The party formally recognises trans women as women and allows members to elect a trans woman to a female position. But once that choice produces sustained pressure from the reactionary press and an organised anti-trans faction, the principle becomes subordinate to damage control.
The same machinery also disciplines challenges to British imperialism. Britain’s ruling class treats support for Israel and hostility towards Iran as basic requirements of respectable politics. An elected representative who aggressively rejects that consensus becomes a liability in the eyes of people whose overriding concern is maintaining the party’s acceptability within the existing order.
Folan’s case exposes the limits of formal membership democracy in a liberal electoral party. Members were permitted to vote, but another layer controlled membership status, disciplinary procedure and access to the office they had filled.
When the votes of hundreds of members can be rendered ineffective by a small group reacting to headlines, the real constitution isn’t simply the document adopted by conference. It is the party’s material dependence on the institutions that manufacture bourgeois public opinion.
