Tokyo, late July 2014. On the prompting of a friend, I’d arranged one evening to meet a young former Citibank trader. “He wants to campaign on inequality,” the friend said. “He’s had an interesting time.” This may have been an understatement. Shaven-headed, hoodied, two teeth missing – bike accident the week before – fizzing with eloquent indignation, Gary Stevenson didn’t entirely fit the LSE economics grad stereotype. Nor did the tale he told, round the bars and alleys of Golden Gai, about his years in Japan. He certainly wasn’t going to appear in some glossy City recruitment brochure any time soon.
Spool forwards a decade and that interesting time has become a bestselling book, and Gary is probably the foremost communicator of economic ideas we have in this country. Still eloquent, his combination of experience and background currently gives him a Teflon quality that drives his opponents apoplectic. The crypto hucksters and the von Mises fanboys hate him, truly hate him for this: he’s marched into their safe space and bagsied it, and their audience, for himself. Read the comments on Gary’s million-follower YouTube and what you see is an audience that very few can claim: one half online left, the other half online traders. Gary has short-circuited the culture wars with electric results.
What are his opponents so afraid of? Gary’s most consistent and constructive advocacy has been for a British wealth tax – an idea which is only becoming more urgent and practicable with time. Contrary to his opponents, a British wealth tax would work. We have the efforts of researchers including Arun Advani and Andy Summers at the Warwick/LSE Centre for the Analysis of Taxation to thank for a growing body of high-quality evidence to make the case. A 1 per cent tax on wealth over £10m could expect to raise around £11bn a year, and this is allowing for the so-called “behavioural impacts” from those facing the liability. The scare stories about the rich fleeing countries in horror have been hilariously overblown: of Norway’s 236,000 millionaires and billionaires, only 30 actually relocated after the introduction of its own wealth tax. Overall revenues from Spain’s wealth tax have risen consistently. And it’s always worth noting, if only to annoy libertarians, that the country with the highest wealth taxes in the developed world is Switzerland, which has administered them since the late 18th century.
In any case, complaints about the millionaires fleeing the country miss the point. It’s not the people we should be after, it’s their money. There’s been a concerted effort to claim the wealthy themselves are what matter – as if without super-rich around the rest of us would be left scratching our bums and gawking at the world. The truth is the exact opposite: whoever has been running the country for at least the last 15 years have made a truly awful mess of it. That means those at the top, with power and wealth, not the rest of us. It is this self-evident context that has made Gary’s message resonate so widely.
We’ve all been signed up, unwittingly, to permanent stagnation, and those most responsible – Cabinet ministers, senior civil servants, business leaders, the super-rich – have never been held properly accountable. Wages and salaries have gone nowhere and the public realm of the country is visibly crumbling. The cost-of-living crisis never ended, and is set to ratchet up a further notch this week as a handful of government-mandated monopolists, from water to gas suppliers, whack up their government-controlled prices to make government-controlled profits. The young can’t afford to buy a house and the old can’t afford to heat the house they have. The country has more billionaires than ever, and more people visiting foodbanks. If a lot of people think the economy is rigged against them for the benefit of a handful at the top, they’ve had a pretty good insight into how the place works.
This is the fundamental reason Gary is getting a hearing. But it’s not only that what he says matches people’s experience. It’s how he says it: frank and yet optimistic; demotic and yet sincere and earnest. It’s a message and a medium the left should want to get out there – in fact it represents the solution to a more generalised crisis of political communication. Too often, the left addresses an imagined audience, rising from the postwar mists, of boiler-suited shop stewards, mass meetings and solidarity strikes. That’s all gone, broken and defeated over the decades.
That same epochal defeat has had other consequences. In the fantasies of the alt-right, busily being translated into official policy by the Trump administration, academia is the new vanguard of the left: ideologically motivated professors corrupting the minds of pampered youths. The sad truth is the exact opposite: the left was forced into the universities because it had lost almost everywhere else, and there it sat, and festered, for the next few decades, its language curdling into the familiar mixture of sub-academese and Seventies clichés.
David Widgery, one of the founders of Rock Against Racism, put it well in his history of that movement: “If socialism is transmitted in a deliberately doleful, pre-electronic idiom, if its emotional appeal is to working-class sacrifice and middle-class guilt, and if its dominant medium is the printed word and the public procession, it will simply bounce off people.” That was true even in 1986 – the year of the Wapping print dispute, when 6,500 printworkers, along with thousands more supporters, picketed and blockaded Rupert Murdoch’s new London HQ, night after night. That world has gone – even to describe it emphasises its antiquity.
I disagree with Gary on a fair bit. His dogged attachment to the Quantity Theory of Money – the idea that increases in the money supply, like Quantitative Easing, quickly turn into general price rises – is daily confounded by a world where inflation comes from Russia invading Ukraine, or droughts cutting cocoa bean harvests in West Africa, or the Suez Canal being closed. It seems unlikely that QE in London stopped rains falling in Ghana, or prompted the Houthis to blockade the Strait of Bab El Mandab. We discussed these disagreements on my Macrodose interview with him.
But it also doesn’t really matter. There’s no point complaining that Gary, a campaigner against wealth inequality, focuses his campaigning on wealth inequality. Noises off from the more radical left about his failure to take account of capitalism’s structural failings and contradictions (comrade) also fall wide of the mark. Build a movement for a wealth tax, and we can discuss the rest as we go along. But let’s do it in a language people understand, and with a bit of confidence. That’s what Gary is selling – and it’s what his followers are buying.
[See also: Why you can’t trust economists]
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