I’m torn. I have to admit to having been a Zack Polanski sceptic long before it was cool. He’s been in my rear view mirror for quite a while, joining the Lib Dems as I was noping out, getting involved in democratic reform campaigns like Make Votes Matter just as my own democratic reform campaigning career was going down in flames.
He’s always struck me as a bit of an egotist, someone who can’t conceive of working within an organisation that doesn’t have him at the front of it, and it hasn’t been clear to me that said organisation had to be a progressive one as much as it had to be small enough for him to advance within its ranks very quickly. His original beef with the Lib Dems didn’t seem to be its politics — as far as I can tell he joined the party at the height of its coalicious period — his problem was that it wasn’t small enough.
All this remains true, and yet the fact remains that this is true of pretty much every party leader you can think of. The fact that Polanski has climbed the greasy poll during the era of social media only means that he’s shown his arse in public more prominently than his competitors.
I’ve always seen party leadership as a necessary evil. A good leader can make or break a political party’s fortunes, but even at their best they will tend to steer a party in an undemocratic direction whenever possible. Don’t trust them, and call them to heel at the first sign of trouble — but if you don’t let them run and do their thing then you might as well be a debating club.
The Greens themselves learned from this mistake as they transitioned from a system of “principal speakers” to leadership — and then undermined it by insisting on two co-leaders for years. It may be a little unsightly to see Zack Polanski challenge that wet blanket notion by putting himself forward, but he was essentially correct in his analysis.
And to be clear, so far he has done a blinder of a job. His election broadcast hit exactly the right note and his media performances have felt like a breath of fresh air. A politician who not only answers the question but will doggedly defend it articulately — such a novel concept! Not only that, but on “risky” topics ranging from a cultural boycott of Israel to trans rights.
During the period it has taken him from announcing his candidacy to becoming leader and hitting the ground running, Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana have attempted to get their Your Party initiative off the ground. It has highlighted exactly why Corbyn’s leadership was such a disaster, descending into acrimony and infighting, and how Zack Polanski is different in very fundamental ways.
They appear to have got their act together at last, for now at least, but where Polanski’s offer to the public is “hope”, the best Your Party can offer is “committees”. They are holding a series of events to allow people to “decide” what priorities their new party should have, and how it should be structured. It is notable that what is not up for debate, or at least the membership will not be allowed to decide, is who leads the party (if only they could agree on that among themselves?). It is fair to say that I am more than a little sceptical of the notion that the cabal which has formed around Sultana and Corbyn will end of not getting their way on every single matter of substance. The only issue the membership appear to actually have a real say in is the name, making it the road gritter of British politics (only, if the events of the past couple of months are anything to go by, they contain vastly more salt).
Polanski has not had a bad word to say about Corbyn and Sultana and has expressed an interest in working with them. How have they responded? By dismissing him outright for not being a socialist, and accusing him of being a “tool of the Imperial War machine” for not being sufficiently against NATO despite calling for it to be dismantled (some would argue that the advocates for dismantling NATO are tools of the far more aggressive Russian Imperial War Machine, but I digress).
Corbyn’s utter failure as a party leader is only becoming more apparent as Polanski rides the airwaves and responds to hostile questioning not with grumpiness and exasperation but with clarity. That gives me real hope. Clearly I’m not the only one. The Green Party has reported its membership more than doubling since Polanski was elected, and they have been going up in the opinion polls.
The Lib Dems have been typically dismissive, pointing out that this hasn’t actually turned into electoral success, something which is a) true, b) probably too soon to say, and c) reflects the Lib Dems’ own obsession with by-elections which has not yet resulted in them so much as eclipsing the Tories yet. Ed Davey’s preference for stunts over substance may have worked in the short term, but he has yet to articulate his position in a way that Polanski has managed in just over a month — and he’s had six years now.
So it’s fair to say that I’ve been quite inspired by Polanski’s rise and have, on occasion, been tempted to even join the Greens, so why the hesitation?
In terms of joining, it’s simply that I read their code of conduct and realised that I couldn’t agree to it in good faith. I’m sure it’s well meaning and is intended to prevent entryists and people with bad intentions from disrupting the party, but I simply could not join a party in which I would be prohibited from criticising any other members — including the leader — in public. I could go on about why that document is ill suited for a vibrant political party to continue to grow, but I’m content to just wait and watch; I suspect it will either be radically redrafted or seriously dog them as bad actors abuse it.
But the key thing that concerns me is their position on a wealth tax.
Now, in the past, if you were to ask me if I support “wealth taxes”, I would say “of course”. I’ve been a supporter of land value taxation for over 25 years now, and I’ve always been keen to explore other ways to penalise rentierism. But what seems to be increasingly the norm is some variation of the proposal by Gabriel Zucman, who called for a wealth tax of a 2% tax on assets above €100 million. The Green Party proposals are for a wealth tax of 1% on assets above £10 million and 2% on assets above £1 billion. This is a lower rate than the joint proposals of Tax Justice UK and Patriotic Millionaires UK; it isn’t immediately clear to me why, but that’s probably the least of my concerns.
My main worries about such proposals is that I haven’t yet seen much evidence that these proposals will be particularly harder to evade than, say, income tax always has been for wealthy people. While I quibble with some of Dan Neidle’s criticisms, the facts remain that a lot of assets can simply cross borders to where they won’t be taxed, or are easy to conceal by simply changing a number on a spreadsheet. It will tax investment into new innovations and infrastructure as if it was exactly the same as a yacht or a painting. And sorting out what is a legitimate claim and what is a stretch too far will create a huge regulatory burden.
Supporters of these wealth taxes claim that they are so low that billionaires won’t notice them. For me this itself is a red flag. If the reason why the wealthy are so dedicated to tax evasion was that the taxes were so onerous, then we wouldn’t need new taxes on top of the ones we already have; no-one is registering in a tax haven because they feel that UK taxes on the super-rich are too high.
I think it’s a more correct assessment that billionaires don’t like paying taxes more out of principle and ego than some idea that taxes are too high. After all, if it wasn’t about ego and vanity, it’s hard to see why anyone would be discontent with living on just a few hundred million dollars. Meanwhile Elon Musk is set to become a trillionaire; he’s already halfway there.
While I might consider egotistical political leaders to be a necessary evil, I’m not convinced that egotistical billionaires are anything but evil. Notably, I might have qualified that statement a few years ago by saying that I’m not saying that billionaires are evil people, but rather the economic system has evil effects. However, the last 12 months of global politics, complete with Nazi salutes, cuts to aid programs, open loathing of democracy and Mark Zuckerberg’s dress sense, have made me wonder if even that is true. Modern capitalism, combined with big tech, has resulted in corporations turning into rent and labour extraction machines in a way that steel factory owners in the 19th century would find jawdropping. What little protection we have here in the global north was largely established a century ago, and is being actively undermined — very successfully in the US, and you can bet that they have the UK and Europe in their sights. The global south meanwhile is simply being soaked.
For me, the last 17 years have highlighted quite how wrong a path our global economic system is headed down and that the concentration of too much wealth in too few hands is the key shibboleth that needs to be torn down. At best, these wealth tax proposals are about skimming from the surface while letting the fundamental problem to go unchallenged. Interestingly, Alice Chappelle, a leftist YouTuber I follow but often disagree with, has similar thoughts.
So here’s the thing: I think Zack Polanski has pulled a blinder in his first few weeks as party leader and I want him to do well and for the Greens to surge in the opinion polls. Ten years ago, I briefly felt the same way about Jeremy Corbyn before it became blindingly obvious that he simply lacked the ability to articulate a leftwing alternative without getting sidetracked into pre-cold war leftist rabbit holes and dogma; something which he and his acolytes remain dedicated to continue under the guise of Your Party.
I desperately want a leftist movement in the UK to challenge the current political hegemony and gain widespread support — even one I don’t completely agree with — because it will open up the political space for fresh thinking. It doesn’t need to be successful electorally as much as it needs to threaten Labour seats, in the same way that UKIP pushed the Tories to the right in the 2010s.
But what happens next? If we sell people on this idea that we can introduce a small tax on billionaires that they won’t even notice, and it doesn’t provide the public with tangible results (even if were introduced tomorrow, the infrastructure is likely to take years — after the next election — to be implemented), where do people go from there?
I can’t help but feel that we need to start making the case for more radical, structural change. I’m not convinced that the concentration of wealth is ultimately a tax issue as much as it is a failure of regulation and of global cooperation. And it’s fundamentally a good thing that the burden of taxation falls on the middle classes; the problem with billionaires is not that they aren’t paying their fair way in tax but that they exist at all — by extracting wealth from the rest of us.
My worry about the current Green policies around taxing wealth is that it is somehow promising pain-free solutions: tax should be paid by The Other, not by the community as a whole. And unfortunately this is a bit of a trend by the Greens. After all, they support public transport — except when it affects them (even more weirdly, the Greens reversed their position on HS2 as soon as the government threatened to scrap it). They support green energy — except when their constituents have to deal with — shock! horror! — pylons.
Under Adrian Ramsay and Carla Denyer, the Green Party had come to resemble the caricature of the Liberal Democrats as hyper localist NIMBYs who offered overly simplistic solutions to fiendishly complex problems (a caricature that is neither as unfair as the Lib Dems like to think nor as accurate as their greatest detractors believe). The current wealth tax policies of the Greens are a relic of that era. My hope is that once Polanski manages to widen the scope of the national debate on the ultra-rich he will gradually de-emphasise these policies in favour of more radical, structural reforms.
At the moment, I think I am most likely to vote Green at the next election. In 2024, for the first time in my life and having voted Labour in every election since 2015, my vote actually went to elect an MP. I am perfectly happy with my decision to vote tactically to vote the Tories out, but the calculus changes when you are holding an MP to account, and thus far I have been overwhelmingly disappointed at both a national and local level.
The likes of Morgan McSweeney deemed that votes such as my own were worth less to Labour than the comparative handful of votes going to Reform, and that minorities such as immigrants, disabled people and trans people were easy scapegoats. MPs such as David Pinto-Duchinsky have made the calculation that they can take votes such as mine for granted, despite sitting on a pile of progressive tactical votes and a majority of 15; he no longer even bothers replying to my letters.
By the logic of accountability, if you believe the incumbant is doing a bad job, your civic duty is to withdraw your support; otherwise you are implicitly endorsing their record. My best alternative locally are the Greens; they’re the only left wing party to increase their share of the vote locally, and the Lib Dems not only went from third to fifth place but now appear to have suspended the local party due to a lack of members interested in running it.
So I have a stake in the Greens either doing well enough that they could provide a real threat in 2029, or force Labour to change their Reform-lite strategy. But that is four long years away, and a lot of time for Zack Polanski to run out of steam. Hopefully however that is enough time for him to add substance to his message. Eco-populism, as he puts it, may well earn him attention, but if he wants to actually change things for the better, he should pay attention to what happens when populists find themselves in power (hint: it’s not good).
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