In an interview with Trevor Phillips, Green Party leader Zack Polanski has said he opposes raising income tax:

Trevor Philips, “You don’t want a rise in income tax?”

Zack Polanski, “No, people are tired and exhausted”

“Their wages haven’t gone up, food prices are going up”

“How can you take from the hardest working people with extra tax, while allowing multimillionaires and… pic.twitter.com/yLTREXRqs4

— Farrukh (@implausibleblog) November 9, 2025

This comes in the same week that Rachel Reeves hinted she’ll raise taxes in the next budget.

Tax wealth, not work, says Zack Polanski

In the video above, Zack Polanski says:

How can you take from the hardest working people with extra tax, while allowing multimillionaires and billionaires to continue to not paying capital gains?

Polanski has done a good job at keeping on message when it comes to tackling wealth inequality, having said the following earlier this week:

Zack Polanski is speaking for all of us:

‘It’s about the message’ ‘About lowering bills and taxing billionaires’ ‘He [Zohran Mamdani] wants to make a city people can afford to live in’ ‘I want to make a country people can afford to live in’

And catch the guest reaction- “Wow”! pic.twitter.com/zDAJhHZu0O

— Howard Beckett (@BeckettUnite) November 9, 2025

Appearing on BBC Question Time, he said this:

The four wealthiest people in this country have more wealth than 20 million people.

Inequality in our society is absolutely huge.

There will be people who go to sleep tonight who can make more money than any of us can earn in an entire year. We need to be taxing the super rich. Not plumbers, not hairdressers, not people trying to get by, but those who have huge wealth.

Why is is always hard choices for working class communities? For people in poverty? For people working but not being paid enough? And why are these not tough choices for multimillionaires and billionaires?

We need to tax wealth and not work.

It is time for a tax on the super rich.

Polanski isn’t the only one making the same point:

Look at everything that’s been stolen from you since 2010

UK billionaire wealth has more than doubled in the same time period from £250 billion to £620 billion

The government must tax multi millionaires and GIVE US BACK our public services pic.twitter.com/SukTGgmdxg

— Cat Hobbs (@CatHobbs) November 4, 2025

Private jets pay no fuel tax, no VAT, & in many cases no passenger tax?

JK Rowling’s $150m yacht is registered under the Cayman Islands flag because – well you know why.

Oxfam reports global billionaires (inc UK) pay effective tax rates of close to 0.3% of their wealth.

— Gyll King Post Skip Diplomacy (@GyllKing) November 8, 2025

“Assets can’t just leave!”

Back in September, Zack Polanski spoke to us about wealth taxes, telling Ed Sykes:

the question that I’m not asked, that I would love to be asked is, ‘is that enough?’ And the answer is ‘no, it isn’t’. But actually, that’s the beginnings of tackling inequality.

On the topic of how he’d ensure the rich don’t throw their toys out of the pram and leave, he noted:

if we’re in government, you would have an entire civil service, an entire institution to go, ‘here’s the principle of what we want to do. Now let’s invest in making sure we’ve got tight structures to be able to avoid tax evasion or tax avoidance etc’. And I think all of those things are possible.

He added:

assets can’t just leave!

In other words, if someone owns UK properties or businesses, they can’t cram them all into a suitcase and run off to the Cayman Islands. If it sits on British land, HMRC can tax it.

Economist Gary Stevenson has spoken on the same topic, noting:

The truth is, and I’ve always said this, I’ve never tried to hide this, actually raising taxes on the rich is going to be really, really hard for a variety of reasons, right? One of the biggest reasons is obviously they control a lot of the media narrative.

They can sell lot of scare stories. “If you tax us, we’ll leave.” Or they can do a lot of sort of personally attacking of me as an individual. But the truth is there are things they can do and you need to deal with those things. Like the truth is they can leave, right? And I’ve always said, and I constantly believe, you know, look at the Abramovich situation, which shows like here’s a rich man who tried to leave. And we just said, “Okay, well you can leave, but if you’re going to own British assets, we can tax British assets.”

And that’s always been my comeback to that. And that is true, but you need make sure that you have your legal systems in place.

Labour in danger

If Labour do raise taxes for working people in the next budget, it will be yet another betrayal, and Zack Polanski touched on that too:

I’m not alone in my disillusionment with Labour.

A poll yesterday showed the majority of the population have lost trust in Keir Starmer, who ditched every single pledge since he came into power. The two child benefit cap, the disability cuts, the genocide in Gaza.

Keir Starmer is not a man I would be willing to work with.

He added:

More widely, I was answering about Keir Starmer. I don’t think he will be the Prime Minister at the next election.

So will I work with a future Labour leader? It depends who the future Labour leader is.

This is one topic where Polanski is in line with the political consensus, by the way, as no one thinks Starmer will last another year.

Featured image via Trevor Phillips (YouTube)

By Willem Moore

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