3 hours ago
4
Successive governments have turned the UK from a manufacturing economy to one where the basics of life have been privatised and are rented back to people at a crushing cost, Zack Polanski will say.
In a speech billed as the Green leader’s biggest policy intervention since he took over as leader six months ago, Polanski will argue that decades of gradual economic rebalancing in favour of a minority who own assets has left much of the country vulnerable to economic shocks such as the current rise in fuel prices.
Polanski will call for the government to offer more support for households amid the uncertainty of the Iran conflict, asking for £8.4bn to be set aside to cover a possible increase in energy prices of £300 a household in the coming year.
A “sustained project of privatisation and deregulation has turned Britain from a place which made things people need into a place which made money for people who owned things”, he will say in a speech to the New Economics Forum thinktank in London.
“We live in rip-off Britain: an economy built to reward the few off the work of the many. A country where people work so hard and try to do the right thing but still struggle to afford the basics, and find themselves constantly cutting back.
“The very basics, the things we rely on to build the foundations of a good life, have been taken out of our hands, sold for profit – and then sold or rented back to us at crushing rates. The water that keeps us alive. The energy that warms us. The home that keeps us safe.
“We’ve stopped working to save for a deposit, a summer holiday or even to put a bit away for the future – so many of us are working just to cover the increasing cost of getting by every day.”
Polanski has overseen a surge in membership for the Greens in England and Wales, with the party now ahead of Labour and the Conservatives in some polls. The Greens won last month’s Gorton and Denton byelection.
While he has been an energetic media presence since becoming leader, Polanski has said relatively little on policy, in part because the Greens’ high decentralised structure means these are decided by members.
The speech will nonetheless include some specifics, including the call for more help on energy prices to be paid for by a proposed tightening of the existing windfall tax on energy companies.
More broadly, Polanski will set out a three-point vision for the economy, covering measures such as rent controls, re-nationalising water, and decoupling electricity prices from the cost of gas; changes to the tax system, including an already-announced proposal to equalise the rate of capital gains tax with income tax; and ways to change the wider fiscal framework to make it work more effectively.
The speech has been billed as a chance for Polanski to spell out his wider economic philosophy, beginning with a critique of recent decades of government, including the wave of privatisations under Margaret Thatcher and the later policy of austerity.
Another part of the speech will lament the economic impact of Brexit, saying it has left the economy between 6% and 8% smaller than it would have otherwise been. “Leaving the EU has been a sledgehammer to an already weak economy,” Polanski will claim.
Calling for a fundamentally changed philosophical approach to economic policy, he will say: “While successive governments have embraced the economics of managed decline, and actively corroded many of the things we hold dear, the human spirit is such that compassion and care will always remain, and it’s our job as politicians to harness that potential.”
