Polanski positions Greens’ economic policy as radical alternative to Reeves

Zack Polanski’s speech was by most wide-ranging attempt to set out a distinctly Green economic policy since he took over as the party’s leader in England and Wales a year ago. Photograph: James Manning/PA

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 a day earlier.

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 economy” that would prioritise the needs of low-paid workers.