02.04.2026
Getting the right headlines
James Meadway’s ‘DOGE of the left’ is very much about marketing and very little about substance. Despite the technocratic wonkery, there can be no escaping basic class and global realities. Paul Demarty assesses eco‑populism and finds it wanting
A strange document crosses our desk: Waste not,1 the first production of a Green Party-aligned think tank calling itself Verdant.
A lot of effort seems to have been put into ensuring the right splashy headlines appeared in the right places: “‘DOGE of the left’ could save UK taxpayers up to £30 billion, says new green thinktank,”2 wrote The Guardian. Questioned on social media about the wisdom of this framing, James Meadway - left-Keynesian economist, formerly of Counterfire and Corbynism, and the report’s primary author - asserted that “it gets us the headline and the story”. Perhaps we could also launch a Green ICE, or a left Proud Boys, quipped the Weekly Worker’s Twitter account. “Read the report,” an increasingly testy Meadway harrumphed.
I say that too. There are things to say about the content of the report, and we will get to that, but, given the enthusiasm with which Meadway pursued his scandalous headline, one has to begin with the basics here. This is an extremely boring report. But for the colour scheme, it has the strong impression of some document farted out of the bowels of Whitehall. Examples are given of public-sector wastefulness, and plausible-sounding, wonky fixes are proposed. The original, American DOGE is denounced - the ‘DOGE of the left’ bit seems basically to come down to hiring a government waste tsar - sorry, a ‘Chief Savings Officer’.
Marketing
Is this the exciting new phenomenon of eco-populism before us? With this document - all infographics and colourful boxouts, like a slide deck from one of the management consultancies so frequently denounced in its pages - it would seem not. There is nothing populist per se about a policy slate that includes better training for HMRC officials, more audits of third-party contracts by sensible experts, and the expansion of the civil service to include its own “consultancy” organisation.
On the other hand, it might be argued, the right has made a lot of hay denouncing waste - not only DOGE, but, as the report reminds us, the various oddballs who have set themselves up as Reform UK councillors, who seem genuinely to have believed that millions of pounds were being spent by district councils on racial sensitivity training and pronoun badges. It is perfectly consonant with a broadly leftwing outlook to denounce, as Waste not does, tax takings left on the table, extraordinary failures of procurement in the military, and so on.
The truly eco-populist character of all this, however, lies precisely in the coincidence of the technicolour media launch and the battleship-grey wonkery. Because, at the end of the day, eco-populism is not some elemental upsurge from the dispossessed, as the original populism, in the American upper Midwest, was a quite genuine popular revolt on the part of smallholders and proletarians against robber barons and political corruption. Eco-populism is a clever branding strategy cooked up by professional political marketers. As the old cliche goes, the most important thing in life is sincerity: if you can fake that, you’ve got it made.
Once the word, ‘marketing’, has attached itself, in your mind, to all this, it will get stuck there. This is from Verdant’s self-description in the report: “We are committed to shaping inclusive policies that don’t just analyse ideas: we build them collaboratively, bringing citizens and experts together to design the next chapter of progressive politics in the UK.” This could be taken more or less verbatim from any ‘socially conscious’ branding agency in Clerkenwell or Shoreditch. They will take care of the ideas; the grateful plebs will be stunned by the popular appeal of the proposed measures, as Melanesian natives supposedly were by the flying machines of the US air force during World War II, and dutifully troop out to vote for them.
Populisms
Lest I be accused of picking unfairly on Meadway and other peripheral figures in the Polanskiverse, I think this is basically a problem with every compound noun suffixed with “populism”. We have left- and right-populism, and even the ‘techno-populism’ of the soi-disant ‘radical centre’. All are quite clearly attempts to marry particular substantive programmes with the rhetorical style of populism.
More honourable, I think, are those - like Christopher Lasch, say, or some writers associated with the American magazine The Baffler, such as Thomas Frank and Chris Lehmann - who genuinely think the positive programme of 19th century populism has some value and contemporary relevance. That programme, as described a little over-romantically in Lasch classics like The true and only heaven, is a strongly producerist doctrine of self-reliance within thick social bonds, and in the name of such an idea of the good life, the decadent rich and plebeian scroungers alike are denounced. There are problems with this, to put it mildly, but it remains a prima facie serious position, deserving of intellectual respect.
Modern ’populism’ simply detaches the substance; what remains is merely the tactical manoeuvre of framing one’s own political hobby horse, whatever it happens to be, as a battle between honest, salt-of-the-earth ordinary folks, and a manipulative, tyrannical and somehow alien elite. This is intrinsically manipulative in a way that the sermons of William Jennings Bryan were not. But it is also sort of ridiculous - because, of course, this political topography of the elite and the people is contested. Reform’s ‘populists’ will denounce the woke ‘elite’ and take pleasure in listing Meadway’s various different degrees; Meadway can hit back, as many of the left do, by describing the vast flow of dodgy American billionaire money into Reform coffers.
Of course, people continue to vote for such outfits. How closely the general run of Green or Reform voter really buys this ‘populist’ framing is imponderable. Once a voter has discovered that the various political parties are trying to manipulate them, they still have the same choice of candidates before them, and will decide one way or another. My suspicion is that it is not the voters who are the gullible cargo-cultists in this scenario, but the political operatives, who have convinced themselves that a few off-the-peg branding tricks carry overwhelming force in political combat.
The problem with populism, even in its honest, substantive form, is that it assumes a unity of political-economic interests through the popular classes that does not in fact exist. Of course, for the quasi-populist political operator, it does not matter per se that this is false - only that it is effective in deceiving the marks (but that means hiding the problem).
Waste not illustrates this problem quite strikingly in its pages on the leakage of tax revenue. The report identifies an enormous “tax gap” - that is, the difference between what is paid and what, in aggregate, HMRC thinks must be owed - specifically in the small business sector: “If the small business tax gap were closed at the same rate as large and medium-sized businesses, £9.5 billion in extra tax would have been collected”.
Small business
True enough, no doubt, but of course the Greens are a party fundamentally of small business, and so there immediately follows a bunch of throat-clearing and embarrassed waffle:
We note the difficulties currently faced by small businesses, which may well be reflected in this rising tax gap, and suggest a constructive approach from a better-resourced HMRC would aim to close much of this gap, in addition to also seeking opportunities to close remaining tax gaps from medium-sized and larger enterprises … [and] disregarding special interest pleading for the protection of obscure loopholes in the tax system.
Does Meadway really think he has found a way to ‘close the tax gap’ without getting more money out of small businesses (or, on the other hand, massive tax cuts)? Of course not: but here is a situation where there is real conflict of interests between the petty bourgeoisie and the proletariat; that is, a situation where the ‘people’ of the populists is shown not, precisely, to exist. (Is the “special interest pleading” denounced here, moreover, to include green tech subsidies …?)
The classic populist opposition between the direct producers and the banks, landlords and big capitalists ultimately produces a primarily moralistic account of class division. The producer is virtuous; the man who lives off interest or rent is given to dissolution and vice. This in turn produces the illusion we have already seen, of a greater commonality of interest among the plebs than in fact exists; but it also tends to oversimplify the problem of the ruling class. For if the problem of the government is that it is captured by the preterite, then it should be possible - surely? - to put in place a virtuous government. (Among contemporary writers, this idea is best expressed by the rightwing Catholic, Patrick Deneen, and his concept of ‘aristo-populism’.)
Thus the impression one gets reading this report: the government is wasteful because it is run by the incompetent and the corrupt, and a new broom could fix a lot of the leaks. ‘Waste’ is defined up-front indifferently to substantive political goals: “If the government spends money that it need not have spent to achieve some policy objective, this is waste.” Meadway makes a good case that a lot of money is, in this way, wasted on management consultants from the ‘Big Four’ largest professional service networks, plus McKinsey, etc, and a lot more wasted in defence procurement. In this, he is surely correct in the narrow sense of whether the weapons we are supposedly paying for actually appear at the end of the contract.
The wrinkle is that Britain has what prosperity it does on account of its role in the world system, which is as America’s money laundry and occasional military sidekick. Defence procurement is wasteful, in part, as a bribe to the Americans, who supply most of the arms - in return for which we get some measure of ‘military protection’ and the right to pretend we have an independent nuclear deterrent. The free hand of the global consultancy firms, meanwhile, is merely one aspect of the ‘money laundry’ (another, of course, is the leakiness of HMRC).
These larger structures of power also, ultimately, make initiatives like this into duds. “For too long, the language of efficiency has been ceded by progressives,” Waste not opens. “This report argues that reclaiming it is not just possible, but essential.” Meadway cannot, surely, imagine that he is the first leftwinger to complain about military industrial waste. It is not that ‘progressives’ are shy about denouncing waste, as they see it, and therefore the right has the upper hand on this matter, but more or less the exact reverse - the right has the upper hand because of capitalist control of mainstream politics and the media, and therefore the left cannot ‘control the narrative’ without challenging that power itself.
That, of course, is no small problem, but it can be done, even on a relatively small scale. Coherent, disciplined party-movements have the potential to coerce the capitalist class and to pierce the veil of bourgeois media obfuscation. Pseudo-populist wonkery is, in the end, the politics of despair: if everything is a matter of canny marketing, then we are doomed, since we will never have the biggest marketing budget, and so cunning tricks like rebranding waste as a ‘progressive issue’ will inevitably look ridiculous. The point, rather, is to stop marketing from working at all.