Does Westminster need another think tank? According to the founders of Verdant – a new Green Party-aligned think tank, the answer to that question is yes. Following Zack Polanski’s election as leader of the Green Party last year, the economist (and New Statesman contributor) James Meadway and civil society expert Deborah Doane, both Green Party members, began discussing how a left-wing party might work out a smoother programme for government. As a former adviser to John McDonnell during his time as shadow chancellor under Jeremy Corbyn, Meadway had seen up close how difficult it can be to advance, prepare and communicate a left-wing economic programme. Verdant launched today (25 March) near London’s Barbican.
The left, Meadway says, struggles to narrow the gap between what it would like to do “and what being in government is actually like”. “Some of this is self-inflicted from the point of view of the left,” Meadway told me when we met at Charing Cross Waterstones on 23 March. Developing a manifesto is only the first hurdle, Meadway explained, “then suddenly you move into a world where it does matter and the scrutiny’s there… that’s the challenge of being so close to power, because then it’s like, how do you pick apart this system? How do you get to where you want to go? How do you convince the Treasury?”
That last element is key to Verdant’s ambition. Meadway’s first job after he completed his MA was at the Treasury under Gordon Brown, working in what was then its in-house think tank, the Productivity Unit. Throughout his career, Meadway has built up a critique of the Treasury’s methods, especially the extent to which officials are set in their ways. “Challenging that is quite hard,” Meadway said, “it needs to be systematic, and you need to have a really clear set of priorities.”
Verdant will initially focus on developing plans in three policy areas – energy, housing and food strategy. Though comparisons have been drawn between Polanski’s economic programme and that put forward by Corbyn and McDonnell, Meadway argues that the cost of living crisis will necessarily mean that Polanski’s economic plans (so-called Zackenomics) will have to operate differently.
“We can’t do Corbynism anymore,” Meadway said, “Corbynism had it relatively lucky because we were in this peculiar position where we had the lowest interest rates in human history.” UK borrowing costs have hit their highest level since the 2008 financial crisis. “That relatively luxury thinking – that we can end austerity and patch things up, and its going to be cheap and easy – is gone. And that means the task of government becomes really quite difficult because suddenly there’s a load of things you want to do and it’s really hard to make them happen,” he said.
In this context, governing from the left will require innovative thinking: Verdant hopes its research will help to fill that gap. Though it has links to the Green Party, Verdant will not aim to work solely with Polanski, and Meadway’s team will reach out beyond the party and onto the Labour benches. Despite his Green leanings (he is running for election as a Green candidate for Tower Hamlets council), Meadway seems convinced that the next general election will be more a question of Reform versus a progressive alliance rather than a straight Green-Reform fight. “There’s an opportunity for the left,” Meadway concludes, “to be able to say, actually, we have some solutions to deal with this.”
[Further reading: Inside Lucy Powell’s Gorton and Denton post-mortem]
Content from our partners
Related
Join the debate
Subscribe here to comment