As I scavenged Gary Stevenson’s brash rhetoric on the internet for a deeper insight into his views, it dawned upon me that he was something I had not really come across before: a left-wing populist. The signs were clear; Stevenson thrives off of polarising language, extreme abstractions and one-size-fits-all solutions. Like his counterparts on the right, he targets the uninformed, the naive and the disillusioned. As he floats podcast to podcast he escapes largely unchallenged. The left-wing papers, specifically the Guardian, adore him; right-wing papers, like the Telegraph, mostly ignore him. Technocratic media, like the FT and The Economist, understand that their readers are, for the most part, uninterested in demagogy. Stevenson sits comfortably in the eye of the storm, spreading his gospel unabated.
Nobel prize winning Physicist Richard Feynman is often remembered for saying “if you think you understand quantum mechanism, you don’t understand quantum mechanics”. I would say the same holds for global economics. Very few people have truly grasped all the mechanisms behind the billions of individuals, millions of businesses and thousands of institutions that form the global economy. Whilst studying economics at A-Level, I would leap at opportunities to discuss economic problems plaguing the UK economy. Today, with four years of university level economics under my belt, I cower at the thought. Such a discussion would require an encyclopaedic knowledge of the stats and so much added nuance that it wouldn’t be enjoyable.
Having studied economics at the LSE, one would think that Gary understands the necessity of nuance when discussing economic issues. To quote proud Oxford man Sir Humphrey Appleby in Yes Minister, “even the LSE is not totally opposed to education”. It’s clear that Stevenson omits nuance to strengthen his arguments.
A recent video on Stevenson’s channel summarises his plan to “fix the UK”. In his view the “key, fundamental economic problem” facing the UK is economic inequality, and of the two types, income and wealth inequality, he generally focusses on the later. Without much explanation he says that wealth inequality is squeezing the government and the working and middle classes. He also adds that the political landscape of the UK means that successive governments refuse to tax the very rich, and instead continue to levy taxes on the working and middle classes. His solution to all of this: a (nondescript) wealth tax.
I cannot too harshly criticise the final stages of Stevenson’s logic; if one truly believes that wealth inequality is the crux of the UK’s economic woes, a wealth tax seams a reasonable solution. It’s his diagnosis that I take issue with; a half-century of domestic and international economic evidence would suggest that UK’s true economic ailment is a much more complex story.
In 2000, an hour of work by a British worker produced approximately the same amount of output as an American worker. In 2024, a UK worker produced 18% less than his or her US counterpart1. Given that workers are generally paid in accordance to what they produce, this is incredibly worrying. The plight of the British working and middle classes that Stevenson discusses extensively can be attributed to this phenomenon. He was challenged with this fact by Rory Stewart on The Rest is Politics podcast. Stewart broke down the problem very clearly for Stevenson; he explained how Britain is now poorer than the poorest of American states, how relatively egalitarian European nations have struggled to keep up with US productivity growth and that the US has achieved this feat despite extreme inequality. Stewart goes on to retort, rather sardonically, that “they didn’t do it through wealth tax”. To my dismay, Alistair Campbell soon bails Stevenson out as he struggles to provide a cogent response, instead blathering about fracking, big tech and natural resources.
Explaining the lack of economic dynamism in the UK is a difficult task. Stevenson is right to mention “big tech”; the UK can’t claim to be the birthplace of any big-tech company. Our closest competitor is probably chip-designer Arm with a market cap of c. $145 billion – nowhere near the trillion dollar valuations of the US tech-behemoths. Although Stevenson may try and pass this off as exogenous in an attempt to refocus on inequality and wealth taxes, this is simply not the case; this FT Big Read argues that a lack of investment is the key culprit with the US accounting for 83% of the total of VC funding in G7 economies over the past decade. Doubtless, there are hundreds of interconnected factors at play.
Stevenson follows the populist playbook to a T. The purpose of this article isn’t to provide a thorough case for productivity growth being the true economic ailment Britain faces. Nor is its purpose to provide a simple solution to this issue. As I have tried to emphasise, economic problems are incredibly complex. I do not deny that income inequality is an issue facing Britain; I do however resent the notion that is is the problem. Simple diagnoses such as these are misleading. Simple solutions do not generally exist. Stevenson’s inequality problem, wealth tax solution is no less harmful than Trump’s China problem, tariff solution. Populism exists on both extremes of the politcal-economic spectrum – if you aren’t fooled by one side, don’t find yourself fooled by the other.
laisseth-faire 
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