{"id":2748,"date":"2026-03-18T18:14:30","date_gmt":"2026-03-18T18:14:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/2026\/03\/18\/polanski-positions-greens-economic-policy-as-radical-alternative-to-reeves-the-guardian\/"},"modified":"2026-03-18T18:14:30","modified_gmt":"2026-03-18T18:14:30","slug":"polanski-positions-greens-economic-policy-as-radical-alternative-to-reeves-the-guardian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/2026\/03\/18\/polanski-positions-greens-economic-policy-as-radical-alternative-to-reeves-the-guardian\/","title":{"rendered":"Polanski positions Greens\u2019 economic policy as radical alternative to Reeves – The Guardian"},"content":{"rendered":"

Offer to reform taxes, tackle \u2018rip-off Britain\u2019 and overhaul fiscal rules could tempt exasperated Labour supporters
Zack Polanski says Greens would ditch GDP targets and focus on wellbeing instead<\/a>
The venue for Zack Polanski\u2019s economic speech on Wednesday \u2013 a sunny north London garden centre \u2013 could hardly have been more different to the sombre City backdrop for Rachel Reeves\u2019s Mais lecture<\/a> a day earlier.
The chancellor was, as it happens, the last politician to give a major economic speech at the New Economics Foundation (NEF), the leftwing thinktank that invited the Green party leader, Polanski, to set out his stall<\/a> as part of its 40th anniversary celebrations. Back in 2018 it hosted the speech in which, as a backbencher, Reeves called for an \u201ceveryday economy\u201d that would prioritise the needs of low-paid workers.
But with their determination to appear sober and moderate, Reeves and Labour<\/a> have struggled to communicate in government a willingness to shake things up, even where they have in fact made significant changes.
Enter Polanski. His speech was by far the most wide-ranging attempt to set out a distinctly Green economic policy since he took over as the party\u2019s leader in England<\/a> and Wales a year ago (although as he made clear, any final manifesto will ultimately be decided by party members).
Much of his diagnosis was familiar: via Thatcher\u2019s privatisations and deindustrialisation and 14 years of Tory austerity, the UK economy had been transformed \u201cfrom a place which made things people need, to a place which made money for people who own the place\u201d.
\u201cIt is clear that we have rewarded greed, and punished compassion,\u201d he said, pointing to the growth in the number of billionaires, one in four of whom, he said, made some of their money from property wealth or inheritance.
Polanski\u2019s tone was noticeably more pessimistic than Reeves\u2019s promises on Tuesday<\/a> of growth led by AI, a northern renaissance, and a closer relationship with the EU. Instead, he described an economy in which \u201cpeople feel like they\u2019re running every day just to stay in the exact same place\u201d.
There was little acknowledgment of anything Labour had done: he complained about diminished workers\u2019 rights, for example, without mention of the government\u2019s employment rights bill. And he repeatedly underlined the importance of borrowing for investment, without noting that Reeves had changed the fiscal rules to allow a sharp rise in borrowing.
Polanski\u2019s solution to the country\u2019s ills came in three parts: tackling \u201crip-off Britain\u201d and bringing down inflation, by introducing rent controls \u2013 which, he made a point of saying, were in place in 16 other European countries \u2013 and renationalising the water industry.
His plea to protect Britain\u2019s rivers because of \u201cthe insects, the fish, the birds that depend on them\u201d was in stark contrast with Reeves\u2019s much-repeated irritation that \u201cbats and newts\u201d<\/a> can hold up development projects.
Polanski\u2019s second plank was major tax reform. He has been pilloried for advocating a wealth tax as though it could solve all the country\u2019s ills, and was keen to make clear it would be only one change among many, including equalising capital gains and income taxes. But he did insist a wealth tax would be a \u201cday one priority\u201d for a Green government \u2013 levied at 1% on assets above \u00a310m, and 2% over \u00a31bn. He did not specify whether, for example, property or pension assets would be included.
Third, he called for an overhaul of the fiscal rules, which, he complained, made tax and spending policy too sensitive to small moves in the market for UK government bonds or gilts, calling this a \u201cbond market doom loop\u201d<\/a>.
Reeves has tried to avoid this by planning to meet her fiscal rules with a much larger margin for error, or headroom, and asking the Office for Budget Responsibility to judge her against them once a year instead of twice<\/a>.
But Polanski called for a much more radical approach \u2013 of scrapping the OBR altogether in favour of what he called \u201cfiscal referees\u201d, who would give a general ruling on whether the government\u2019s plans looked sustainable, rather than a pass or fail against narrowly drawn rules.
That would be a significant shift, and might cause market anxiety, but steers well short of modern monetary theory, which Polanski has previously been accused of flirting with, and which suggests governments can simply print money.
The response of the Labour chair, Anna Turley, to the speech was that economists had criticised \u201cthe Greens\u2019 \u2018catastrophic\u2019 plans to print money, which would hammer working people and their living standards\u201d \u2013 but Polanski made no such suggestion.
In the subsequent Q&A, the Green leader cautiously avoided falling into potential elephant traps, such as promising billions of pounds in unfunded spending.
On the looming energy price emergency, he promised to cushion every family \u2013 even the wealthiest \u2013 against soaring utility bills, paid for through a \u201cloophole-free\u201d version of the windfall tax on energy companies<\/a> and capital gains tax rises.
That is a somewhat surprising policy for an environmental party. As Michael Jacobs, a professor of political economy at the University of Sheffield and a former Labour adviser, puts it: \u201cMost economists would say in circumstances in which prices are rising: you should subsidise energy saving, not bill-paying.\u201d But it is a concrete offer to cash-strapped households that will help Polanski to put Labour on the spot.
If the Greens continue riding high in the polls, their economic stance will come under intense scrutiny in the months to come \u2013 including by the bond markets. But as Reeves wrestles with how to protect households against the shock unleashed by the war in Iran, Wednesday\u2019s carefully written speech showed Polanski\u2019s party positioning itself cannily as a potential home for left-of-centre voters exasperated with the status quo.<\/p>\n

source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Offer to reform taxes, tackle \u2018rip-off Britain\u2019 and overhaul fiscal rules could tempt exasperated Labour supportersZack Polanski says Greens would ditch GDP targets and focus on wellbeing insteadThe venue for Zack Polanski\u2019s economic speech on Wednesday \u2013 a sunny north London garden centre \u2013 could hardly have been more different to the sombre City backdrop […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2749,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-2748","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-business"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2748","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2748"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2748\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2749"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2748"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2748"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2748"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}