The Green party leader, Zack Polanski, is offering voters “unicorns” and Labour must confront his “fantasy” solutions such as the idea that a wealth tax would fix the public finances, according to the Fabian Society’s general secretary, Joe Dromey.
Much of the government’s fire is trained on Nigel Farage. But in an end-of-year interview, the head of Labour’s internal thinktank urges his party to take on the “twin populisms” of Reform and Polanski.
“We’ve got the populism of the left in Polanski. And the populism of the right in Farage. Their politics are very different but both of them are pushing simplistic solutions to challenging problems that just don’t stand up to scrutiny,” he says. “One is offering you a unicorn, the other’s peddling hatred, and we need to expose that.”
A wealth tax – an annual levy on the assets of the super-rich, which Polanski strongly backs – “won’t solve the kind of fiscal challenge that we face,” Dromey says. “We won’t be able to fund the public services that we need just by a wealth tax that affects the top 0.1% of the population.”
He adds: “The idea that squeezing a tiny elite of billionaires will pay for everything that we want and everything that we need is fantasy and we do need to expose that.”
The argument is not the kind of pragmatism that the Fabians’ fiercest critics might expect. Part brains trust, part members’ association, the UK’s oldest thinktank has come under extraordinary scrutiny of late, with Farage calling it “far left” and the TalkTV presenter Alex Phillips accusing it of being a secret cabal promoting the end of capitalism and the nation state.
Founded in 1884 and initially most closely associated with the pioneering social reformers Beatrice and Sidney Webb, the Fabian Society was a co-founder of the Labour party and has been affiliated with it ever since.
The colourful grid of pamphlets displayed across one wall of the Fabians’ office covers issues including pensioner poverty, energy reform and Labour’s path to power in 2019 (ahem), but conspicuously lacks calls to overthrow capitalism.
The Greens’ Zack Polanski backs a wealth tax, an annual levy on the assets of the super-rich. Photograph: Linda Nylind/The Guardian
Dromey, 40, is from a Labour dynasty, the son of the former deputy leader Harriet Harman and the late Jack Dromey MP. He was a councillor for the party in Lewisham, south London. “I’d be lying if I said that they did not shape my passion for and interest in politics and my commitment to a more equal society,” he says of his parents. But he insists he wants to be judged on his own merits.
Less than 18 months into a Labour term that began with a landslide majority after 14 years in opposition, Dromey shares the exasperation of many in the party at the government’s deep unpopularity. “It has been a challenging first year and a half,” he says.
He praises some of the policies pursued by Keir Starmer, who was a member of the Fabians’ executive committee – and penned a pamphlet of his own – before becoming prime minister. In particular, Dromey highlights the Renters’ Rights Act and the Employment Rights Act, which became law on 18 December.
“These things are quietly radical. They’re things that significantly change the balance of power in our housing market and in our labour market,” he says.
But it is clear that, like many in the party, Dromey would welcome a more robust assertion of its values, including on Reform’s favoured battleground of migration.
“We need to demonstrate competence, and that’s most obviously around small boats,” he says. “But the government also needs to demonstrate and expose that Reform do not speak for the British public on immigration. I think on that latter one, we’ve not done that enough. We should go harder on that.”
After the chaotic run-up to Rachel Reeves’s November budget, Dromey also traces part of Labour’s predicament back to its decision in opposition to support Jeremy Hunt’s cuts to national insurance contributions (NICs) – and to fight last year’s general election promising no increases in income tax, NICs or VAT.
“The previous government was making fiscal promises that they had absolutely no intention of delivering. It was a bear trap. It was a landmine,” he says. “I think it would have been better just to not commit to matching that NI cut. I don’t think it would have had a material impact on the election result. People were done with the Tories.”
Sticking with that pledge pushed Reeves towards using employer NICs as a revenue raiser instead at last year’s budget, he says, “which undoubtedly has had an impact on unemployment, on business confidence, on relations with businesses”.
Having made the clear promise, however, Dromey believes breaching it by raising income tax, as the chancellor flirted with doing in her second budget, would have been disastrous. “To make that the central commitment and then to break it would, I think, have led to an irreversible loss of trust among the electorate.”
‘The previous government was making fiscal promises that they had absolutely no intention of delivering.’ Photograph: Martin Godwin/The Guardian
He is most vehement on the subject of social care, where Fabian research has highlighted the benefits of increasing workers’ pay.
Labour recently announced details of its planned fair pay agreement, set to be negotiated between employers and unions and come into force in 2028. Dromey welcomes the policy but calls on the government to confront the wider challenge of funding the overstretched sector, now under review by the government fixer Louise Casey.
“It’s a large proportion of the workforce who are doing some of the most important work in our economy and our society, helping people live decent and independent lives, who have been routinely undervalued,” he says.
Labour has set aside £500m to fund the agreement in its first year, but Fabian research suggests equalising social care workers with the lowest NHS pay band and improving pay progression would cost four times that. “We need to fix social care and address the workforce crisis, because the treatment of care workers is a disgrace,” Dromey says.
With speculation about Starmer’s future at fever pitch, Dromey sticks to the Fabians’ time-honoured neutrality – though when his team exchanged jokey secret Santa gifts, one colleague got an Andy Burnham mug, another a lifesize cutout of the prime minister. As the Fabians plan their annual conference in January, at which Starmer’s leadership will inevitably be the subject of frenzied gossip, this unsettling artefact currently occupies a corner of the office, like a cardboard elephant in the room.
