The Wealth Tax campaigners have a blueprint for responding to fatalism
Things can feel pretty bleak sometimes, so I wanted to write a one-off newsletter to applaud the work of wealth tax campaigners this week!
I love the fact that taxing wealth is now at the top of the political agenda in the UK.
The fact that taxing wealth contends with “cutting immigration” as Brits’ preferred means of meeting this government's unnecessary fiscal fetish IS A GOOD THING.
Brits are fed up, there is a pervasive sense that the economic and political system is rigged. The question we need to answer is: how do we respond? My belief is that progressives need to be showing that there are alternatives to the miserable, inward looking xenophobia of the hard right and that there are alternatives to the fiscal fundamentalism of the governing Labour Party too.
The fact tax justice campaigners have created a situation where politicians can't do anything without facing demands for a wealth tax, is unquestionably a good thing. And wealth tax campaigners are a brilliant example of what can be achieved when the left campaigns effectively. Politicians take note. *
Celebrating wins
The salience of wealth taxation right now is a consequence of years of hard graft by a group of small NGOs like Tax justice UK, the Patriotic Millionaires, academics such as Arun Advani, Andy Summers at LSE and others too. It’s important not to overlook their work whilst acknowledging the individual impact people like Gary Stevenson have had. Not to mention the role played by movement infrastructure actors like NEON.
As someone who worked at Tax Justice UK in its very early years, I can testify that today’s successes are the result of an all round effort by a small group of NGOs with a clear sense of purpose and a willingness to play an insider and outsider game. Literally a handful of people at times.
I see very few examples of others having their impact.
Lessons for progressives: we need more campaigning!
If you speak to people in and around this Labour government it’s clear those close to the Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, would rather the left avoid talking about taxing wealth AT ALL.
That should be a cue to turn the volume up. If tax justice campaigners are making politicians frustrated, making them squirm, that's a good thing.
The campaigning toolbox
There’s so much that could be learned from wealth tax campaigners, but I think the theory of change can be distilled into three things, all of them interchangeable, with no single tactic enjoying priority over another.
Use the media. Feed the insatiable 24/7 appetite for news. The media has huge power to insist that certain ideas be on the political agenda. You don’t have to agree or even like the media, but you can harness its insatiable appetite for controversy as a means to put your issues on the agendas of the powerful. Fight for every column inch and broadcast second.
Insider advocacy in a world of crisis. When you speak to people with experience of Number 10 or the Treasury, the big message I hear is about time. Put simply, there’s none.
Treasury civil servants aren’t prioritising alternative or radical ways to re-engineer the economy. Their time is dominated by the pressure of merely keeping what we’ve got on the road. There is little time for creative or radical thinking for people on the inside and this feels like a big barrier to change.
A SpAD in No10 has basically zero time to read your latest 70 page report. A three bullet whatsapp of no more than 100 words is sometimes all the bandwidth they have.
But to have already done the hard work, such that you enjoy a whatsapp relationship with an insider, that’s where the power of insider advocacy often lies today.Movement building: we can quibble over definitions, but building a movement can be as simple as publishing a newsletter and getting people to sign up to it. People are insanely busy and many, many more have simply tuned out of our politics because they feel the economic and political system is rigged. Getting them to attend an event is hard. But petitions, newsletters and other small bits of digital connectivity can still provide an outlet for people’s frustrated sense of agency. Being able to show politicians that your campaign is not a lone voice, that you have an army of supporters behind you (more than they likely have in their own constituency) is a powerful card to play.
And it’s not just about the public, the power of a movement lies in the other organisations that can align with you too. The tax justice movement has excelled at bringing different groups into a broad tent (in the early days of Tax Justice UK we even visited the Libertarians at Tufton Street, the better to understand what we were up against). The point isn’t purity of purpose, it’s okay to disagree on specific aims and tactics. The point is to have enough agreement and trust in the room such that the movement feels big and legitimate. More unites us than divides us, but the left has an awful addiction to fighting itself.
These are tactics the tax justice movement has excelled at. For me, another problem with the wider - particularly soft and liberal left - is that it often seems allergic to it. There’s a place for research and policy but the valorisation of policy ideas remains far too dominant. Do we really need another 140 page PDF on climate or fiscal rules? Would some of that money still being pumped into recruiting another economist or researcher be better spent on something else?
Anyway, this is meant to be a celebratory blog, an opportunity to talk up agency and wins. So big up to @TaxJusticeUK, big up @PatMillsUK and @garyseconomic and @LSEInequalities and all the rest. Your work is so important and needed and admirable.
*The danger here lies in a hard right party like Reform publicly endorsing wealth taxation AND cutting immigration and building a strong coalition off the back of it. Should that happen, the Labour politicians will only have themsleves to blame.