This is the phenomenon that has clearly underpinned Reform UK’s rise in popularity. The key question there is whether Reform offers the sort of radical economic shifts people want. Probably not.
For a start, Reform’s candidate in Gorton and Denton Matt Goodwin has talked in general terms about wanting “to invest in our own people and prioritise the British hard-working majority” but stopped short of detailing the economic strategies to achieve this. Moreover, Reform’s economic policies may not depart much from orthodoxy — the Economist this week argues that the policies outlined by Reform’s Treasury spokesperson Robert Jenrick “sound like a covers album of Rachel Reeves’s greatest hits”. My own colleagues at NEF have shown that some of Reform’s policies would be very costly in terms of jobs.
This is perhaps why the Greens’ ability to “join the dots” between the cost of living, climate action, housing, and economic justice, and their willingness to challenge key economic assumptions that have underpinned Labour and Conservative policies of recent years, seems to have such traction.
This might also explain why, despite being ridiculed by the mainstream, some of the ideas of the new Green Party leader Zack Polanski around wealth taxes and fiscal policy are cutting through in ways others are not.
In her victory speech early Friday morning, the newly elected MP for Gorton and Denton, Hannah Spencer, talked about people in her constituency working hard only “to line the pockets of billionaires”. She's right: Only by acknowledging and addressing the extractive ways our economy works can we deliver meaningful change to people's lives.
Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves often talk about ‘working people’ - indeed there were no fewer than 17 and 16 mentions of working people in their last party conference speeches, respectively. But I cannot recall them joining the dots between an economy that worsens the everyday struggles of increasing numbers of people but delivers everyday windfalls for a small elite.
