Hau-Yu Tam, deputy leader of the Greens in Lewisham, South East London, also backed a campaign to remove Hamas from the UK’s terror group list and shared social media posts that branded Zionism – support for the state of Israel – “the Nazism of our time”.

An MoS investigation can reveal that Ms Tam is one of a string of Green candidates standing at next month’s local elections who have made deeply offensive comments or have highly questionable pasts, including criminal convictions.

Our audit discovered one candidate in London boasted of storming Stansted Airport and blocking an aircraft from deporting 25 criminals, including a murderer and child rapist, and another threw orange powder over a £300,000 garden at the Chelsea Flower Show.

Others contesting council seats next month have defended the vandalism of Winston Churchill’s statue or peddled conspiracy theories, including a candidate who questioned whether a drone attack on an RAF base was a so-called “false flag” attack.

The revelations come as the Greens are expected to win hundreds of council seats at the May 7th elections, with one poll last month even putting the far-Left party ahead of Labour.

The MoS can reveal that Ms Tam, described as “brilliant” by Green leader Zack Polanski when she defected from Labour last year, lambasted Mr Lammy after he reportedly told ministers he has a family member who is on benefits when they probably should not be.

Writing on X last year, Ms Tam said: “It’s reminiscent of Priti Patel admitting her family wouldn’t get in under her own immigration rules, but somehow even more callous. These coconuts.” The post was later deleted.

Coconut is a highly offensive racial slur, meaning that someone is black or brown on the outside and white on the inside. …

Would-be local politicians identified by the MoS audit include Jo Dowbor, who is fighting to win a seat in Islington, North London.

Ms Dowbor grew up in Argentina and appears to back Buenos Aires’ claim over the Falkland Islands, reposting a picture on social media of a football fan wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the slogan “The Malvinas [Argentina’s name for the Falklands] belong to Argentina.” …

Other candidates can be revealed as eco-fanatics involved in some of the most notorious protests of the past decade.

Ed Thacker, a psychotherapist and self-proclaimed “anarchist”, who is standing in Haringey, North London, received a suspended jail sentence in 2016 after he and 12 others cut through a fence at Heathrow Airport and chained themselves together on one of the runways. The protest caused 25 flights to be cancelled and resulted in “immense” costs. …

Stephanie Golder, a candidate in Tower Hamlets, East London, was one of three Just Stop Oil activists who threw orange powder across a prize-winning display garden at the Chelsea Flower Show in 2023.

Later that year, she received a six-month suspended prison sentence after she was part of a group that caused £100,000 of damage at a service station on the M25.

She is not the only candidate who seemingly regards vandalism as a legitimate form of protest.

Zoe Garbett, a London Assembly member and the Greens’ mayoral candidate in Hackney, provoked uproar last month when she appeared to justify an attack on the statue of Winston Churchill.

Ms Garbett dismissed the outcry over the vandalism as “over-reach and hysteria pushed by the Right”. …

Meanwhile, other would-be Green politicians have pushed wild conspiracy theories.

TV producer Mark Adderley, a candidate in Croydon, South London, regularly rants about Israel on his YouTube channel alongside his wife, Nadia Sawalha, a presenter on ITV’s Loose Women.

After a kamikaze drone – believed to have been fired by Hezbollah militants in Lebanon – struck a British base in Cyprus in March, Mr Adderley released a video entitled ‘Could drone attack on RAF be Israeli false flag?’

“The Western Zionist-supporting, Israeli-complicit media and governments are all going to say, ‘Well, it must have come from Hezbollah,’” he added. …

Meanwhile, despite repeated allegations of anti-Israeli bias and editorial failures at the BBC, Karishma Patel, who is standing in Brent, North London, quit her job as a journalist over what she described as the corporation’s “failure to hold Israel to account”.