Masoud Golsorkhi Why did you join the Green Party? What is the Greens’s decisive claim to being a progressive political movement?

James Meadway It became apparent to me during the Covid-19 pandemic that the environmental crisis would shape all of politics and economics, and how human society operates, from this point onwards. I ended up in the Green Party by looking at that big picture. Our policy should lean into the fact that there is an almighty environmental crisis. There’s no point thinking, “business as usual” or “this stuff will correct itself”. Conventional Westminster politics hasn’t caught up at all. It was striking that the UK’s new Prime Minister, Andy Burnham, came to London and gave his big speech on his political vision in the middle of the heatwave, without referencing even the most basic environmental policy demand. People are dying because of this heat, and he didn’t mention it. At Verdant, we say we’re for a “Just and Green Future”. What does fairness look like when you have wildfires all the time? Not what you’d see in California, which has privatised fire brigades. Policy making needs a response that builds in social justice, if it’s concerned with any vision of fairness or egalitarianism.

MG I recently interviewed Ann Pettifor, who co-authored the term “Green New Deal” in 2008. Have you reflected on the policy platform it promoted?

JM The Green New Deal became something of a backbone for how the left thought about the world. I think it is largely inapplicable to the world we’re in now. The claim that heavy spending will result in large numbers of jobs I don’t think really stands up. We now inhabit a world where climate change adaptation needs to be prioritised, starting with obvious policies, like planting loads of trees in cities. But we need to be much more ambitious in how society and the economy operate. If we’re in a world where there are frequent heatwaves, nobody wants to work. We need to think seriously about reducing working hours, giving people the option to work from home, having a benefits and welfare system that can support everybody to work in this way, and not necessarily working the standard hours that we’ve all gotten used to over 200 years of industrial capitalism.

Caroline Issa The mayor of New York City, Zohran Mamdani, has shown us that political changes can be enacted very quickly. What is the strategy for a progressive think tank like Verdant in light of what one politician abroad has demonstrated?

JM Mamdani has succeeded by focusing on small but important changes you can see straight away. He also has a bigger idea of what he would like to do in the future, and getting those two things to fit together is the sweet spot. The left in Britain has done this quite badly over the last few years. Andy Burnham uses phrases like “decade-long programme” when talking about bringing water companies back into public ownership, even though it’s three years to the next election. If Thames Water were transferred tomorrow into some form of public ownership, would the water coming out of your tap look or taste any different? You shouldn’t pretend to have big, grandiose schemes. You should direct policy towards changes that are immediate, visible and obvious.

Sohrab Golsorkhi-Ainslie  What does a think tank do, and what is distinctive about Verdant’s approach? How does its involvement of the public in policymaking differ from a focus group, for example?

JM The traditional role of a think tank is to be a fairly elitist body. It’s a mechanism for describing what a government might look like, which is directed towards the top. There’s an enormous gap between what the public thinks the government could or should be doing, and what government insiders think is actually possible. If you want to crack that Westminster carapace, you need some form of participation method. On national security, we’ve set up a panel of 20 people, randomly selected from across the country to be broadly representative, and held a series of discussions facilitated by defence experts, asking what national security really means to people. What we found is that for most public or media discussion, national security comes down to a single number: whether defence spending is 5% of GDP, and therefore it’s fine, or at 4.95%, at which point it’s a disaster and we’re told the Russians will invade. The discussion is fixated on the size of that number, with few questions asked beyond it. But what about everything else that actually affects people day to day, and the country as a whole? That’s the conversation you get to when you force open the doors and ask what people outside the system are actually saying. It breaks the elitist model of policymaking and makes room for a larger, more interesting conversation.

Amelia McGarvey What is the big answer to the food crisis and the future of British farming?

JM The broad answer to the food crisis is developing policies for resilience, largely by removing our dependence on imported fertiliser. Changing farming techniques doesn’t mean going back to the Middle Ages: you can have vertical farming, data-intensive monitoring of water use, tiny sensors in the ground and computer processing that monitors the best time to water crops. We must reduce dependence on imported food, adapt our techniques to cope with violent extremes in the weather, protect farmers’ incomes and defend against the volatility we’re starting to see.

Matteo Pini  What are the fundamental problems with the NHS? What is your diagnosis of the situation, and what role, if any, should the private sector play in solving those problems?

JM The real problem is the context in which the NHS operates. Some of it ought to be relatively easy to solve, like the crisis in social care, underfunded for years: people who could get social care end up in the NHS instead, which is far more expensive. You can keep pumping in resources to cope with an increasingly unhealthy population, or you can step back and ask about the social determinants: people in insecure housing, poorly paid, their life chances taking a battering. Free healthcare at the point of need is a good principle, but we can’t sustain it in an economy that’s badly damaging people’s health in the first place.

Our health service relies on major healthcare suppliers and pharmaceutical companies. The pharmaceutical industry is one of the few truly significant manufacturing exports left: it depends on significant public funding and a publicly funded research system on one side, and a huge market, the NHS, to sell into on the other. Broadly, the private sector should play as small a role as possible. That includes companies like Palantir and the expansion of data use within the NHS, which shouldn’t be left to US Big Tech to exploit.

MG Much AI innovation was created in this country and was unceremoniously moved to San Francisco. At Oxford, Cambridge and Warwick, huge amounts of public investment went into generating that knowledge, which was then squandered, and there doesn’t seem to be any sense of national outrage. Is there a case for claiming national ownership and sovereignty over AI and data in this country that we can rally around and formalise?

JM The EuroStack initiative shows an approach to AI that aligns with our values, and with genuine digital and data sovereignty. In the US, the rush to build AI data centres is becoming a significant local protest movement, and you can see the same starting here. I’ve been involved in one over a data centre in Brick Lane. Why slap a data centre into the historic heart of the Bangladeshi community, purely because it’s close to the City and shaves a few milliseconds off high-frequency trading? You get no jobs from it; it’s just a stack of computers, and it risks guzzling all the local water and electricity. Tower Hamlets has the largest number of data centres in any London borough: there are parts where you can’t get a house built for the next decade because data centres have used up the electricity and water connections. If we can build a protest movement out of that, it’s a very good start.

The central question is ownership. The outstanding example is ARM Holdings, the British software company which designed the chip in basically every mobile phone on the planet. This was originally a publicly funded institution: it was BBC money that funded the launch of what would become ARM Holdings in the early 1980s.They lucked out, as their designs were perfect for mobile, and they made a fortune licensing them. In 2016, we sold ARM Holdings to SoftBank, a speculative Japanese fund, and now it’s floated on the US stock exchange. Had the government been more serious, we could have taken a golden share, a 5–10% equity stake, which would have given the government huge leverage over how the world’s phones operate, and enormous public value. You could have built an entire ecosystem of public technology around it. Instead, there was a belief that the free market would sort it out. That ship has largely sailed, but the need to think about data and digital sovereignty remains. Even now, buying a stack of ARM shares would make the government money if nothing else.

Thomas Roueché Reform UK has effectively mobilised opposition to clean energy proposals by going around the country and identifying technologies like wind turbines as wedge issues. How can that be addressed?

JM We’ve privatised the energy system and shaped how the market operates, including allowing the price of gas to determine the general price of the system. Thirty years ago, when gas was cheap, it wasn’t such a problem. Generally, it’s better not to be so dependent on volatile commodities, like fossil fuels and natural gas, and instead to invest in energy supplies generated here in Britain. That includes renewables, but also in the future things like geothermal energy and tidal energy. 75% of all new power generation capacity installed in the US last year was from renewables, despite all the government opposition. It’s now incredibly cheap to install solar panels; it’s the cheapest kind of energy you can get. I think Reform is pushing to oppose net zero and climate change adaptation, something you can easily translate into: “Here’s our particular version of a kind of mad row that we’re going to insist on having.” The Reform council in Lincolnshire recently said they would scrap our useless spending on electric buses and spend the money on flood defences instead. That starts to look like a wedge issue, because why would you spend this money on technologies whose benefits are cosmic and distant?

MG British foreign policy seems to have its own kind of engine, often running independently of what the British people really feel. I think the genocide in Gaza has heightened that contrast between what most people think and how the British government’s foreign policies tend to operate.

JM It’s been 60 years since the US Secretary of State Dean Acheson said, “Britain lost an empire and has not yet found a role,” and this still applies. There is this ongoing attempt to be a “middle power”, to use Mark Carney’s phrase. We are not a great power in the way that you have a mighty empire. If you start from that point of view of being a middle power, the world looks a lot more interesting in terms of what you might do with progressive foreign policy.
In a world where everybody is dealing with an erratic US, which was the historic guarantor of the multilateral system, suddenly there are all sorts of new alliances you can create. We’re starting to see a new multilateralism emerging around climate diplomacy and biodiversity, and that would be a smart thing for Britain to start doing. But it does mean getting rid of a lot of illusions that we otherwise have in foreign and defence policy about being a great power. This fantasy implies we have to spend an absolute bloody fortune on an army and navy, and everything else that we don’t really know what to do with and can’t afford.

With Gaza, the public response has been hugely shaped by the globalisation of technology, access to the internet and cameras, and being able to see things immediately. It was witnessed in ways that haven’t happened in the past, injecting issues that historically would have been foreign policy concerns into the daily lives of people in Britain. Foreign policy has been visibly dragged into a more democratic space in the last 20 years or so, and Gaza is a pointed example of that. .