Greens leader Zack Polanski delivers speech on economy

Thank you, Danny. And good morning. We live in rip-off Britain. Sky-high bills, stagnating wages, extreme inequality. It can't go on like this.

But we have a plan to change it. We've had this speech in the works for a long time now to celebrate 40 years of the New Economics Foundation. But no one could have quite predicted the context in which I'd be speaking to you now. 18 days ago, the US and Israel launched an illegal bombing campaign in Iran. Already well over a thousand civilians are dead, including 110 children, killed by a missile, now widely believed from the USA.

Despite the killing of the leader of the repressive Iranian regime remains in place, with many saying the new leader could be even more hardline than his father. This was not a war of self-defense. There was no imminent threat. Negotiations were ongoing. It was, as the BBC's international editor said, a war of choice.

People across the Middle East are terrified of what Trump and Netanyahu's war will mean for them and their loved ones. And the repercussions are echoing across the world as instability spreads and oil prices spike. Here in the UK, we watch in despair as those B-52 bombers take off from our soil. And as our economy reels from the shockwaves of this war. Struggling families are seeing price rises coming towards them like a freight train hurtling down the tracks, while they're stuck, helpless, and unable to see a way out.

Meanwhile, some are profiting off this misery and bloodshed. Oil company shares have soared to all-time highs. But here in the UK, it is ordinary people who are paying the price. People who were already struggling so hard just to make ends meet. People feel like they're running every day just to stay in the exact same place.

The idea that yet again, for the second time in just a few years, that we are going to have to deal with another enormous spike in the cost of basics is utterly unacceptable. It's unacceptable because we didn't need to be here. It's unforgivable that just 4 years after we last saw an energy price shock, that one triggered by Putin's illegal invasion of Ukraine, far too little has been done to protect our country, our people, our economy from the impact of yet another energy price shock. We could have seen a nationwide program of home insulation, going door-to-door, making sure every home can keep in the heat, so no one would risk getting sick or dying because they can't afford heating in the winter. My colleague in Westminster, Ellie Chowns, she has been pushing hard for the government to go further and faster on insulation.

Because right now, even if the government fulfill their plans, and it's a big if, there will still be 4.6 million households in the UK living in poorly insulated homes at the end of this parliament. Damp and moldy homes for no reason at all. There's so much this government should be doing to protect people in the future, not least doubling down on renewable energy, so we're no longer so vulnerable to these shocks. Instead, we could be ready to stand firm in the face of them. Last week, a report by the Climate Change Committee found that decarbonizing our economy by 2050 would cost less than it costs to deal with a single oil price shock.

But time and time again, governments have chosen to pay for each crisis as it comes, always playing catch-up, never getting onto the front foot. We should be grasping the nettle, dealing with the root cause, giving us security and strength in an unstable world. I also recognize talking about the future won't reassure people who want to know if they're going to be able to afford their bills tomorrow. For many people checking the news every single day, wondering what it means for us, constantly doing the maths in our heads, if we'll be able to afford the next energy bill that lands on our mats. That's why the government should guarantee right now it will not allow energy bills to rise beyond the April-June price cap.

Instead setting aside approximately 8.4 billion pounds to prevent a rise of up to 300 pounds per household that could be coming down the track. No, it's not cheap. But the alternative, it's unacceptable. If the price cap raises, interest rates rise. Mortgage rates up.

Bond yields up. Inflation up. We will be back into the doom loop that has done untold damage to our economy and caused misery for households across the UK for years now. And there are ways to pay. Instead of scrapping the windfall tax on energy companies as this government is planning to do, we should be strengthening it instead.

We need a real loophole-free windfall tax with no exemptions for reinvesting in fossil fuels. A robust tax that claws back every single pound of reckless profiteering from this crisis and repurposes it immediately to protect every home in the country. And while taxing extreme wealth in the ways we need to, it will take time to implement. There are levers the government could pull right now. Like equalizing capital gains tax in line with income tax and reforming the base to raise 12 billion pounds.

It is time for the government to act decisively. Eliminate the uncertainty that is plaguing people and the markets and insulate us from some of the worst economic effects of Trump's war. But while dealing with the crisis in front of us, we also need to ask ourselves why. Why our economy and the people who keep it running keep being so vulnerable to global shocks like this? Much more so than other major economies like Spain, which doubled its wind and solar capacities since 2019, which took it from having some of the highest energy bills in Europe to now the lowest.

Other countries have been able to learn the lessons from previous crises and prepare. Why is our response so weak when disaster strikes? The answer, put simply, is because 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 people find themselves constantly cutting back.

Today, I want to share my plan with you for how we end rip-off Britain. How to make life affordable for people in this country and rebuild our economy so we can weather the storms of this unpredictable world. But first, to understand how we got here and what has happened to our country, to people here, to our jobs, our housing, our wages, I'd like to take you back to when I was born. So, it's the '80s. It's all leg warmers and Wham.

You get me? I was born in the winter of '82 in Salford. And as a teenager, I lived right next door to a huge McVitie's factory, which actually happens to be next to a little-known constituency called Gorton and Denton. I still remember waking up to the smell of chocolate in the mornings wafting down the street. But look, it wasn't perfect, but we had everything we needed.

And we still had a sense of hope that working hard could get you places. But I was born into a changing Britain. The month I was born, Salford Docks shut down, 3,000 dock workers losing their jobs. By that time, 400,000 council homes had already been sold off under right to buy. And as I was growing up, Thatcher.

She was selling off the state's vital assets one by one. British Gas in '86, water in '89. When I talk to young people about this, they don't it. We used to own these things. And we sold them off.

And we know the impact of those changes. By the time the Tories left office, over 60 billion pounds worth of precious state assets have been sold. A bonfire sale of our water, our energy, our railways, and so many other fundamental public services meant UK public wealth went from the highest in the G7 to the lowest just over those two decades. And the consequences of this rigged economy are still with us today, biting at our heels as we try to make ends meet. Let's begin with water.

Since the water sell-off, bills have increased by 44% in real terms, while the industry has accrued 72 billion pounds of debt. And as customers, we carry the burden of that debt. A third of our soaring water bills goes towards paying dividends and servicing that debt, while the companies taking that money flush sewage into our rivers and seas seemingly at will. This sewage crisis is not just about dirty water. It's about the collapse of river ecosystems.

The insects, the fish, the birds that depend on them, and the farmers, fishers, and communities that depend on those in turn. Nature is not separate from our economy. It's the foundation of it. And right now, we are letting it be destroyed. And for what?

For shareholder returns. We will fix this. Ending the scandal of shareholder profit and bringing water back into public hands. So, every penny we make and pay goes into making the service better. And let's return to housing.

Over 2 million houses have now been sold under right to buy since it was introduced. Now, look. In the first place, those houses went to people who had worked hard and saved up to own the home they lived and loved. But now, they're increase increasingly owned by private landlords, property developers, investment firms who treat our homes and their tenants as cash cows. One in six private renters is now renting a former council home, often at extortionate rates and often partly paid for by the government in the form of housing benefit.

Another example of a system which is not only totally unfair, but utterly incoherent. Our Green MP, Shah Berry, she has been fighting hard to end this mess, calling for councils to be able to buy back homes lost through right to buy. So, we need to end right to buy completely. Build more council homes and control rents so everyone can afford a decent roof over their heads. In other words, the very basics.

The things we rely on to build the foundations of a good life. They've 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 homes that keep us safe. We used to save for a deposit, a summer holiday, or even just put a little bit away for the future. But so many of us are working right now just to cover the increasing costs of getting through every single day.

Working just to survive. It does not have to be this way. We can rebalance the scales so that our hard-earned money is ours again. So we can choose to save it for a weekend away, to pick up a gift for mum on the way to see her, or put something away for the kids when they need it. But to do that we need to make a wholesale change to how our economy works.

Because the damage did not end with Thatcherism. Instead, that damage was turbocharged by austerity after the crisis of 2008. It was cloaked in misleading analogies about maxed out credit cards, household budgets. Austerity was not a solution to the crisis, but a project which used the crisis. It was an opportunity for them to facilitate an enormous upward transfer of wealth from the many to the few.

Public spending eviscerated. Look at local government, for example. When accounting for population growth, spending power fell 27.5% in real terms between 2010 and 2020. In real words, that's our libraries, our parks, the public services we all rely on. The average working age adult in Blackpool, for example, lost nearly £1,000 a year under austerity.

The power of workers to organize for better pay and conditions has been crushed. And it's allowed big corporations to make greater profits by squeezing the wages of their workers. And this sustained project of privatization and deregulation, it has turned Britain from a place which made things people need to a place which made money for people who own things. Because while ordinary people have paid the price day after day, something else has been happening right out of sight. The wealth of those who own those precious assets, the ones sold out from us under Thatcher and then sold back to us for profit, their wealth, it has skyrocketed.

In 1990, I was going through primary school. There were 15 billionaires in the UK. By last year, that number had risen to 154. And let's look at how those people are making their money. Today, more than one in four billionaires draw some or all of their wealth from property and inheritance.

That is money being made not by putting anything into the economy like running a business, creating a job, or making a product, but simply from sitting on assets or charging somebody else for the use of them. It is clear that we have rewarded greed and punished compassion for far too long. Now, look, other politicians may shy away from talking about compassion, but it's what we need to bring back into our societies. It's literally been privatized. We only need to look at the scandal of privately owned children's homes.

A report by the Competition and Markets Authority was unequivocal. It said, "The largest private providers of placements are making higher profits than we would expect if this market were functioning effectively." If ever there was a sign of a sick economy, one which lacked care, which had been stripped of compassion. This is it. This is vulnerable children's lives, and people are putting their profit margins first. That is disgusting, and we need a government that cares again.

But 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 compassion and care will always remain. And it's our job as politicians to harness that potential. Because sadly, wherever you look across our country right now, that spirit of compassion, of care, of public service, it's in danger of being eroded by an economy that is grinding all of us down. And when we're struggling to put food on the table, and running just to stand still, the ties that bind us, they are at risk of fraying. Because the picture for people living in the UK right now is bleak.

Wages all but stagnated since 2008. Unemployment, that's on the rise, too. And the number of young people out of work is at an 11-year high. Growth literally ground to a halt, by the way, in spite of this government insisting that they're pursuing a policy of growth at all costs. AI, which in many ways has the potential to be a force for good, but it's already causing people to lose their jobs, consuming huge amounts of energy and water.

Planned data centers will produce little employment, blight communities, and it will obviously jeopardize further our climate targets. Our communities are facing increasing threats from wildfires and flooding, with all the damage that does, not just to the economy, but to people's lives. I'm incredibly proud of the work our MP Adrian Ramsay has been doing to put climate resilience at the top of the government's agenda right now. Because communities are being let down by this government's failure to take decisive action to protect them. And then there's Brexit.

The evidence of the impacts are so clear. Employment down. Investment down. Productivity down. The economy is 6 to 8% smaller than it would have been.

Hundreds of pounds added to the average household shopping bill. Leaving the EU has been a sledgehammer to an already weak economy. It's a grave time. It's filled with fear and anxiety. But it's also filled with a growing sense that we need to do things differently.

And that sense was abundantly clear just a few weeks ago when Hannah Spencer won the Gorton and Denton by-election. Yes. I have never seen anything like the enthusiasm I felt in those streets. Going door-to-door with Hannah, meeting people who were so excited to vote to make her the new MP. Hope up.

Energy up. Readiness to change the country up. And since Hannah stepped through the doors of the Houses of Parliament just a couple of weeks ago, we've seen the difference a green MP makes. Just on her second day as an MP, she created an all-party parliamentary group to tackle fuel poverty. And in her first week, she was already fighting for better transport links for her constituents.

Because it's not just hope we're bringing. It's hope and a plan. We will end rip-off Britain, make life affordable for people in this country, and rebuild our economy so that it's resilient and strong. And today, I want to talk to you about the three central planks of our plan. Tackling the cost of living crisis and bringing down inflation.

Overhauling our tax system so the super rich pay their fair share and modernizing fiscal policy so it's fit to tackle the challenges of today. And when it comes to the cost of living, let's go back to rent. Spiraling rents are ripping the heart out of communities across the UK. Renters are being forced to cut back on essentials just to afford the cost of a roof over their heads. And it's not just individuals who suffer, it's the entire economy.

So it's time to do things differently. We know rent controls can work and we can learn so much from the different models that have been tried elsewhere. Rent controls are an established part of private renting in 16 European countries. And it could not be clearer. The UK's got some catching up to do.

If we had frozen rents in autumn 2022, households in Britain would be saving over 3,300 pound per year on average. That's 3,300 pounds per year on average. Across Britain, that would put 18 billion pounds of purchasing power back in the pockets of ordinary people. Money that could be spent on local businesses, buying a coffee on the way to work, or a few pints at the end of a hard week. Instead, straight into landlords' pockets, leaving our high streets hollowed out.

And our brilliant Green MP, Carla Denyer, has been raising the alarm on the scandal, pushed for rent controls to be included in the Renters' Rights Bill. But this Labour government, they just wouldn't listen. We need to bring in rent controls. We would stop the chokehold of rip-off rents and breathe life back into our communities. Second, let's stop paying the privatization penalty, lining the pockets of shareholders.

And we can start with the water companies. Nearly a third of the typical water bill in England goes to funding shareholder returns and debt servicing compared to only around 10% for publicly owned Scottish Water. That's shocking. Hundreds of pounds every year that people work hard to earn going straight into the coffers of shareholders. Let's end private ownership of water, bring down bills, and make our water system fit for purpose.

And third, we need to cut energy bills. We need to massively scale up our investment in clean energy infrastructure to secure our energy independence and increase our resilience as a country. And in the shorter term, we need to stop the price of gas inflating the price of electricity, ending the possibility for gas plants to charge high prices when gas-fired electricity is needed to make up an energy shortfall. And of course, it's always important to point out what's the cheapest bill? Well, it's the one you don't have to pay at all.

We need to insulate people's homes and reduce energy need. With these three measures, rent controls, bringing water into public hands, and cutting energy bills, we start to end rip-off Britain. But we also know to change the game, we need to be clear about who is paying and what rules we're following. So I briefly want to talk about tax and who we're going to tax and why. Look, we know a wealth tax won't fix everything and no one has ever pretended it would, but it'd be a very good place to start.

Implementing a 1% tax on wealth over 10 million pounds and 2% on 1 billion pounds would raise around 15 billion pounds per year. And it would send a very clear message that those who have accumulated the most money will pay a little bit more. Get that money flowing through the economy. Make sure it is benefiting everyone. For a truly progressive government, a wealth tax needs to be a day one priority.

And to get our economy moving, we need to look again at all of the levers we have to pull. That must include equalizing capital gains tax in line with income tax, close down avoidance loopholes, and expand national insurance to cover income from investments as well as earned income. No one's saying economic policy is easy, nor that we need to make all the changes overnight. But let's face it. The framework right now is not working.

Nor is even the way we talk about our economy. Decades of fiscal tightening, often to meet fiscal rules, have meant stretched services and people suffering. That doesn't just harm the people who need the services now, but it strangles our economy. Because when we're sick, when our bus service is cut, when our parents are getting older and aren't getting the help they need, we're all less productive. It doesn't have to be like this.

Firstly, we've got to stop equating the government's finances with a household. This false equivalence has been a poison in British politics for far too long. Hospitals, schools, transport starved of investment, and that costs us every single day in money, in time, and in stress. And secondly, we need to exit the bond market doom loop. Our fiscal framework is hypersensitive to market movements.

And this creates policy uncertainty that then fuels the very market jitters it was there to supposedly prevent. And you don't just have to take my word for it. Even the IFS, the supposed custodians of fiscal responsibility, are saying the framework is dysfunctional. And thirdly, UK fiscal forecasting currently relies on rigid fiscal multiplier assumptions that constrain effective government policy. By assuming spending multipliers expire after just 5 years, the current model is prioritizing short-term fiscal targets over the longer-term economic and social gains that targeted spending could achieve.

Right now, we can't even plan major infrastructure projects. We can't invest properly in a healthy, educated population. Right now, we can't build our future. The sum of all of this is that successive governments have hemmed themselves in with an economics that denies people the services they require and support they rely on, often to placate a set of arbitrary rules. It is ridiculous.

We need to think again. More up-to-date multiplier assumptions could create greater fiscal space and allow a serious step up in government investment and in government vision. The government should change these failing fiscal rules and opt instead for fiscal referees. This is a panel of experts tasked with judging debt sustainability, which includes not only making sure the government isn't spending too much, but also ensuring they're not spending too little. This is closer to the model used in Australia and New Zealand.

And after almost 16 years, we need to look again at the OBR. It was born of promises to eliminate the deficit and take urgent action to reduce debt. I don't know if you've noticed, but it's clearly failed. Proposals such as transforming the OBR into the office for fiscal transparency are just one of the suggestions the New Economics Foundation are making, and they're definitely worth examining. Any politician who claims to have all the answers to the problems we're facing right now is frankly lying to you.

The world is increasingly unstable. We've got a rogue US president. We've got climate breakdown, which is increasingly unstable. And an uncertain Europe with our place in it looking increasingly uncertain. What we do know is that things have to change.

We will end rip-off Britain, pay people properly for their hard work, and give people a real plan for a better country. And we have to do this because we know the other parties won't. They have too much baggage, too many vested interests. From Labour, we just get managed decline. And a Reform Party, a Reform Party desperate to be seen as on the side, apparently, of working people.

But we've seen their policies, backing a dangerous US president, feeding fossil fuel funders addiction. They're wavering on NHS privatization. They oppose workers' rights. It is clear that Nigel Farage would, in fact, rip open the unhealed wounds of a failing economic system. And that is before I even mention that reform would have dragged us into this illegal and deeply unpopular war.

People are seeing every single day who reform really are. And that's where the Green Party come in. No longer can we be said to be on the fringes or dismissed as not able to win seats. No, we are breaking through every single barrier that is put in front of us. It's funny.

People ask me about defections all the time, and when I say people, I mean journalists. But you know what? I'm frankly a lot more interested right now in winning more elections. Because our membership is at a record high. We have a record number of counselors, and many of you have might not have noticed we've got a new MP.

As I said, this speech is just the beginning. We will be setting out our plans in more detail as we approach the general election. But at the center of everything, there will always be three very simple questions. How do we make life more affordable for everyone? How do we back the caring majority over the wealthy elite?

And how do we protect our planet for generations to come? We have a plan to end rip-off Britain, to make a country we can all afford to live in, to end the privatization penalty, protect us from energy spikes, and look after those who need care. We know this country can be a better place to live, and our plan is how we make hope normal again.