Zack Polanski's Bold Politics Requires and Even Bolder Economic Vision: The Case for Democratic Public Finance

The Green Party of England and Wales is attracting new members in unprecedented numbers and achieving polling percentages that would have seemed impossible a year ago. However, tensions are building behind the scenes over the party’s economic programme. On December 12, 2025, just over 3 months since Zack Polanski’s election as party leader – the event responsible for the Greens’ surging popularity – Bloomberg reported on the impending launch of a new economic think tank named Verdant, a move motivated by the need to “convince voters” that the Green Party “can produce credible economic policy,” and described elsewhere as an effort to rein in Polanski’s radical economic vision. As Aaron Teater recently observed in the New Statesman, Polanski’s economic arguments sound “a lot like Modern Monetary Theory (MMT).” For some, this is reason enough to celebrate Verdant as a necessary effort to dissuade the Green leader from further upsetting the infinitely wise protectors of all things good (otherwise known as bond traders). Other voices on the Marxist left of the Green Party dismiss MMT as a distraction from the task of challenging the widening inequalities and imbalances of class power in our society. Beyond these disagreements, Democratic Public Finance (DPF), a new framework developed by the Money on the Left editorial collective, stands ready to defend, recast, and extend the fresh economic thinking that continues to gather new supporters to Polanski’s “Bold Politics”. DPF takes us beyond questions such as “do we have enough fiscal space to fund green energy or to solve the crisis in higher education?” Instead, it asks: How can we empower local governments and universities to prioritise ecosocial justice and sustainability by redesigning money creation, underscoring their roles as allocators of public credit?