Polanski positions Greens’ economic policy as radical alternative to Reeves

Offer to reform taxes, tackle ‘rip-off Britain’ and overhaul fiscal rules could tempt exasperated Labour supporters

• Zack Polanski says Greens would ditch GDP targets and focus on wellbeing instead

The venue for Zack Polanski’s economic speech on Wednesday – a sunny north London garden centre – could hardly have been more different to the sombre City backdrop for Rachel Reeves’s Mais lecture on Tuesday.

The chancellor was, as it happens, the last politician to give a major economic speech at the New Economics Foundation (NEF), the leftwing thinktank that invited the Green party leader, Polanski, to set out his stall as part of its 40th anniversary celebrations. Back in 2018 it hosted the speech in which, as a backbencher, Reeves called for an “everyday economics” that would prioritise the needs of low-paid workers.