Illustration by Jonathan McHugh / Ikon Images
What unites Reform, Your Party and the Greens? They all benefit from, and propagate, a zero-sum approach to politics. In its worst moments, Labour gets dragged into a similar mindset. But to beat populism, the governing party must offer an alternative vision: a politics of abundance.
Zero-sum politics assumes that for one person to be winning, someone else must be losing. According to More in Common, a zero-sum mindset underlies populism in France, Germany and the UK. It’s a common thread that runs through from the Greens’ demands for a wealth tax to Reform’s mass deportations. On the left, a zero-sum mindset says that if people are getting richer, others must be getting poorer. Billionaires, rather than creators of jobs and productivity, are extractors: their gain is someone else’s loss. Similarly, zero-summers on the right assume that migrants are a drain on resources, rather than productive participants who increase the amount of resources available.
Research from the US finds that zero-sum thinking is more prevalent at political extremes. Zero-sum Republicans are the most anti-immigrant, but also, interestingly, more sympathetic to redistribution, compared to others within their party. Similarly, zero-sum Democrats are most likely to favour redistribution, as well as gender or race-based affirmative action, but are also more likely to oppose migration than their peers.
The research also finds that a zero-sum mindset correlates with one’s family background and social mobility. Individuals who experienced (or whose ancestors experienced) greater intergenerational upward mobility – the “American Dream” – are significantly less zero-sum, whereas a family history of enslavement is linked to more zero-sum thinking.
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We should not be surprised, therefore, that decades of stagnation and reduced social mobility have pushed British voters towards zero-sum political narratives, such as those offered by Reform and the Green Party.
Young people are particularly vulnerable: today’s 18- to 30-year-olds are the first generation in history to be worse off than their parents. John Burn-Murdoch, of the FT, says: “The housing crisis is just one of many reasons that it should come as no surprise to see young people holding the strongest zero-sum attitudes. Recent years have seen steadily increasing economic transfers from young to old… More than half of young voters now back zero-sum parties of the right or left in the US, UK, France and Germany.”
Labour’s first 18 months in power have been defined by difficult, zero-sum choices to allocate limited resources between different groups. From cutting foreign aid to increasing employers’ National Insurance, the government has been constrained by scarcity. In scarcity, politics becomes a series of decisions between different groups and interests: working taxpayers vs the disabled; pensioners vs students; the NHS vs schools.
But it doesn’t have to be this way. Labour’s task is to offer a way out of scarcity, and an alternative to the zero-sum solutions. In the US, abundance has become a rallying device for Democrats searching for a new frame to take on Trump’s zero-sum politics of trade tariffs and border crackdowns. In their book, Abundance, Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson say, “To have the future we want, we need to build and invent more of what we need.” They push for “a liberalism that builds” rather than one of preservation.
Since the 1980s, progressives in the West have largely limited themselves to two levers: redistribution and regulation. The basic idea is that the state should largely stay out of the economy, let it grow, but use taxes to redistribute the gains from private-sector wealth creation, and regulation to temper capitalism’s worst excesses, from worker to environmental protection.
Arguably this model worked reasonably well from the late 1990s through to the financial crisis. When economic headwinds are strong, progressive governments don’t need to think much about growth: they can focus on redistributing the spoils and regulating bad stuff. Tony Blair’s government did this, introducing a minimum wage, investing in education and ending child poverty. But it is hard to imagine how he could have achieved this without a wider context of economic growth – over which he had little control.
Today’s defining challenges – economic stagnation and political populism – require different solutions. Redistribution and regulation are inadequate: they will not generate economic growth.
More redistribution is not the answer. You don’t have to be a banker to feel the pinch of Britain’s record high tax burden: a graduate with a student loan earning £30,000 (below the average UK salary) pays a marginal rate of 50 per cent on any income above £30,000. This has gotten worse since the recent Budget, which froze thresholds for tax and student loan repayment.
And regulation, rather than constraining capitalism’s excesses, is constraining the state’s ability to act. The Prime Minister recently said he was “frustrated” with the number of regulations he faces. Planning rules and building safety regulations mean London only builds a 20th of the housing it needs. A recent government taskforce found 47 ways the UK could build nuclear energy – critical for net zero, as well as reducing bills – more cheaply, largely through streamlining regulations. Local governments are hugely burdened by a range of statutory duties on education, the environment and public health, but lack the resources to meet them.
To achieve abundance, we must be more ambitious about the role of the state. It is not a passive actor, consigned to making difficult decisions between different groups. Instead, its role should be to expand the frontier of what we can collectively achieve as a nation, delivering more prosperity for all.
Sometimes, this will mean taking on well-meaning regulations. The government is right, for instance, to accept the nuclear taskforce recommendations, to help put the UK at the forefront of small modular reactor development. Similarly, Labour has made great strides towards meaningful planning reform, allowing development around train stations, and passing a landmark Planning and Infrastructure Bill.
But to truly win the argument on abundance, we will need to do more than “take on the blockers”. Framing growth as a choice between Yimbys and Nimbys falls into the same trap of zero-sum politics. Instead, we need to find solutions that enable growth with public support. There are plenty of examples: allowing local areas to approve new transport projects, such as the recently delayed tram in Leeds, would provide infrastructure while empowering communities. Similarly, granny flats, estate renewal, street votes and upward extensions of existing houses can permit more housing with the support of existing residents. A choice-based system for property taxation (to replace stamp duty) would move us towards a more economically efficient form of taxation, without making anyone worse off. Finding ways of attracting the most exceptional talent to the UK would boost growth, and is popular even among Reform voters.
Abundance is necessary economics, in a time of stagnation, but also good politics. It offers Labour a political path and narrative between both Reform and the Green Party. To illustrate what’s at stake, if the UK’s GDP had kept pace with that of the US, as it did when Labour was last in power, the Chancellor would have had an extra £150bn in last year’s Budget. That’s enough to reverse cuts on winter fuel, foreign aid and welfare spending, and have enough left over to upgrade our schools and hospitals, pay for families to replace boilers with heat pumps, build thousands of new council homes per year, and make sure no child goes hungry. In a political age defined by resentment, austerity and scarcity, abundance is the way out.
[Further reading: Why is Keir Starmer so unpopular?]
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