THE ‘WOKE’ RENT COLLECTORS

How Green and Rainbow Capitalism Betrays the Poor, Corrupts Progressive Politics, and Leaves a Dispossessed Generation Angry at the Movement That Was Supposed to Be on Their Side

This essay advances a single, uncomfortable proposition: that the progressive social movements of the last century (women’s liberation, gay rights, environmentalism, multiculturalism and biodiversity protection) have been systematically co-opted by those whose primary interest is not human flourishing but the extraction of economic rent.

Reforms that would return economic rent to the people who create it are blocked, diluted, or reversed. Reforms that redistribute nothing but the language of progress and the symbols of diverse identity sail through. The result is not a ‘progressivism’ that liberates all, but one that makes the poor poorer and the rich richer, and a population that feels the injustice without yet having a name for its cause. In poor communities, progressivism is no longer associated with wages, housing, or security. It is associated with the priorities of people who already have those things. That distinction is doing enormous damage, creating a dangerous rejection of progressivism by poor communities and the dispossessed young. Societies that extract without limit and reform without economic substance do not drift peacefully into decline. They break.

 

The argument proceeds as follows. Economic rent (the unearned surplus extracted from land, monopoly, intellectual property, and financial position) has grown as a share of economic output across the developed world and with accelerating force since the 1980s. Democratic governments, whatever their stated mandates, are principally organised around the protection and facilitation of this extraction. Social change, where it occurs, tends to occur when it serves that extractive interest or when the cost of suppressing it outweighs the rent foregone.

Women entering the paid workforce expanded the rentable labour pool and the consumer market. The normalisation of gay identity created new premium consumption niches. Environmental policy, particularly since the 1990s, has been increasingly structured around the creation of tradeable instruments (carbon credits, biodiversity net gain units, ecosystem service payments) that generate rent for landowners, financial intermediaries, and corporate platforms while doing little or nothing to arrest ecological collapse. The lower classes are impoverished by these processes, with lower wages and higher living costs. This economic reality has not been adequately described and lies behind the disillusionment and cultural backlash. It is not just prejudice, but economic force, driving people into the arms of populist politicians determined to drive back progressive reforms. We have watched each successive wave of liberation politics produce a society in which land, housing, and essential services cost more, wages purchase less, and the political class speaks the language of diversity while implementing the economics of extraction, impoverishing working people.

PART ONE

The Architecture of Economic Rent

What Is Economic Rent, and Why Does It Matter?

The concept of economic rent is among the most important and most systematically ignored ideas in mainstream economics. In classical political economy, the tradition running from Adam Smith through David Ricardo and John Stuart Mill to Henry George, rent referred to the surplus income accruing to the owner of a factor of production not because of any productive contribution by that owner, but solely by virtue of their ownership of something scarce or monopolised.

Ricardo’s original formulation concerned agricultural land. The most fertile land produces a surplus over the cost of cultivation; that surplus is captured by the landlord as rent. As population grows and less fertile land is brought into cultivation, the rent on good land rises, not because landlords work harder or invest more wisely, but simply because demand for scarce land has increased. The landlord is, in Ricardo’s phrase, paid for what the earth does, not what capital and labour do.

Henry George, writing in 1879 in Progress and Poverty, extended this observation into a comprehensive theory of capitalist inequality. George argued that as society progressed and productive capacity expanded, the gains flowed disproportionately to landowners. Rising productivity raised wages briefly, but higher wages drew more workers and drove up land values; the rentier captured the surplus that labour and capital had jointly created. George’s proposed remedy, a single tax on land values, was regarded as dangerously radical and was successfully suppressed by the very interests it threatened. His analytical framework was not refuted. It was simply excluded from the curriculum.

“The great cause of inequality in the distribution of wealth is inequality in the ownership of land. The ownership of land is the great fundamental fact which ultimately determines the social, the political, and consequently the intellectual and moral condition of a people.” (Henry George, Progress and Poverty, 1879)

In the twentieth century, the concept of economic rent was broadened beyond land. Monopoly rents accrue to firms that face no competition, whether natural monopolies like utilities, or artificial monopolies created by patents, regulatory capture, or network effects. Financial rents arise from the ability of banks and financial intermediaries to create money and collect interest on assets they did not produce. Platform rents are extracted by digital intermediaries (search engines, social networks, e-commerce platforms) that position themselves as the indispensable infrastructure of modern commerce and collect a toll on every transaction. Resource rents arise from the ownership of mineral deposits, spectrum rights, fishing quotas, and other natural endowments whose value is created by society, not by the owner.

The common thread is this: economic rent is income derived from ownership of position rather than from productive activity. A surgeon earns wages from skill and labour. A landlord who buys a house and lets it out earns rent from the scarcity of land and the productive activity of the city that surrounds it. A pharmaceutical company that patents a molecule discovered by publicly funded research earns monopoly rent from an intellectual property regime enforced by the state. An investment bank that borrows at near-zero central bank rates and lends to households at commercial rates extracts a financial rent underwritten by public monetary policy.

Estimating Economic Rent: A Century of Extraction

Comprehensive national accounts of economic rent do not exist, because mainstream economics has largely abandoned the classical distinction between earned and unearned income. The following estimates are constructed from land value data, corporate profit share analysis, financial sector size, and research by heterodox economists including Michael Hudson, Josh Ryan-Collins, and the work of the McKinsey Global Institute on corporate economic profit. These are orders of magnitude rather than precise figures, but the directional story is unambiguous.

Figure 1: Estimated Economic Rent as Share of GDP: United Kingdom, 1920-2020

 

The data tell a story of two economies. From the 1940s to the 1970s, the share of output captured as economic rent was compressed by war, reconstruction, rent controls, progressive taxation, trade union power, and a financial sector constrained by capital controls and regulation. Real wages rose, housing was affordable relative to income, and the distribution of income between labour and capital was, by historical standards, compressed.

From the 1980s, the story reverses. Financial deregulation, the abolition of exchange controls, the systematic weakening of trade unions, the privatisation of public utilities, the relaxation of planning controls (which perversely drove land values higher rather than lower), and the political suppression of land value taxation all combined to accelerate rent extraction. By the 2010s, UK residential land alone was worth approximately 5.5 times annual GDP. The annual rental value of that land (what economists call imputed rent) was of the order of 10-12 per cent of GDP, more than the entire NHS budget.

Figure 2: Components of Estimated Economic Rent, UK c. 2020

 

Two features of this table deserve emphasis. First, the scale. If these estimates are in the right ballpark, approximately a third of the British economy does not compensate productive activity; it compensates ownership. Second, the entry at the bottom of the table: environmental instruments. These are still small in absolute terms, but they are growing with exceptional speed, backed by government mandate, corporate ESG budgets, and financial sector enthusiasm. The political economy of why this enthusiasm exists is the central subject of Part Three.

The Structural Relationship Between Rent and Democratic Politics

A standard account of democratic politics holds that governments pursue the preferences of median voters, moderated by constitutional constraints and the need to maintain economic stability. This account is insufficient. A more accurate model, supported by empirical political science from Gilens and Page’s landmark 2014 study in the United States to British work on lobbying and policy outcomes, is that democratic governments predominantly implement the preferences of economic elites and organised interest groups, with majority preferences having near-zero independent influence on policy outcomes.

This is not because politicians are unusually corrupt, though some are. It is structural. Political parties require funding. Regulation requires expert input, which is disproportionately provided by the regulated industries. Media ownership is concentrated among those with substantial rentier interests. The revolving door between public service and the private sector means that regulators and legislators internalise the worldview of those they are supposed to oversee. And the complexity of modern government means that genuinely independent policy analysis is scarce.

The consequence is that policies which generate or protect economic rent are systematically favoured over policies which would reduce it. Land value tax, which would transfer rent from landowners to the public, has been discussed and rejected repeatedly since Lloyd George’s People’s Budget of 1909. The financial transactions tax, which would reduce the profitability of high-frequency trading and other purely extractive financial activities, has been blocked for decades despite broad popular support.

Conversely, policies that create new rent-extracting opportunities enjoy remarkably smooth political passage. The Private Finance Initiative, which handed long-term rent streams to financial investors in exchange for upfront capital, was embraced across party lines. The privatisation of utilities in the 1980s and 1990s converted public monopolies into private rent streams with minimal public debate. The intellectual property expansions of the 1990s and 2000s extended the duration and scope of patent and copyright protection in ways that primarily benefited large corporations and created almost no new innovation incentive. And, as this essay will argue, the architecture of carbon and biodiversity markets has been designed from the outset with rent extraction as its animating logic.

PART TWO

War, Technology, and the Productivity Imperative

Technology and the Expansion of the Rentable Workforce

If war provides the shock that forces rapid social change, technology provides the gradual underlying pressure. The key mechanism is simple: technology raises the productive output of each worker, increasing the surplus available for extraction as economic rent. But it does so unevenly, and the way it does so matters enormously for who captures the gains.

Labour-saving technology in agriculture drove rural workers into cities from the sixteenth century onwards. This urbanisation was a catastrophe for those it displaced, but it created the dense, geographically concentrated labour force that made industrial capitalism possible and drove up the rental value of urban land. The enclosures of common land, which ran from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, were simultaneously a technological rationalisation of agricultural production and a naked transfer of economic rent from common right to private landlord.

The contraceptive pill, available in the UK from 1961, was a technology that genuinely transformed the terms on which women could participate in the paid workforce. By decoupling heterosexual activity from reproduction, the pill made it possible for women to pursue careers with the kind of continuity that had previously been available only to men. The economic implications were enormous: the effective labour supply roughly doubled over the subsequent three decades. Standard economic theory would predict that this would depress wages (more workers competing for jobs) while enriching landowners (more workers requiring housing). That is broadly what happened.

The internet and the digital economy have produced a similar dynamic. Platform technologies (Uber, Amazon, Deliveroo, Airbnb, and their successors) have expanded the proportion of the population whose labour is formally commodified while simultaneously compressing the wages and conditions available to those workers. The platform extracts rent from the transaction; the worker receives the residual. The gig economy is not a disruption of the rent-extracting economy; it is its fullest expression.

The Female Labour Force and the Housing Crisis

There is a relationship that is almost never discussed in mainstream accounts of feminism and economic progress: the entry of women into the workforce in large numbers, from the 1960s onwards, was a major driver of house price inflation. This is not a criticism of women entering the workforce; it is an observation about the structural consequences of a large increase in household income without a corresponding increase in the supply of land.

In 1970, the average UK house cost approximately three times average annual earnings. By 2023, it costs approximately nine times average annual earnings. Much of this increase reflects the capitalisation of dual-income households into land values. When two earners could compete for housing where previously one could, the surplus purchasing power did not create better housing; it flowed to landowners in the form of higher land prices. The liberation of women from domestic labour thus had an ironic structural consequence: it enriched the landed class while making it progressively harder for working families of any composition to afford decent housing.

This is not an argument against women’s liberation. It is an argument that women’s liberation, implemented in the absence of land value reform, was systematically captured by rentiers. The gains in productive capacity and personal autonomy were real, but the economic surplus those gains created was extracted by those who owned the sites on which the newly liberated workers had to live, shop, and work.

PART THREE

The Progressive Movements and Their Capture

Class, Labour, and the Permanent Workforce

There is a filter on progressive politics that nobody in progressive politics wants to discuss. The movements that have attracted the most attention, the most funding, and the most political traction over the past half-century have been those that speak to the condition of the educated middle class: equal access to professional careers, recognition of sexual identity, the right to live openly as one chooses. These are genuine goods. But they are goods whose value is greatest to people who are already economically secure, people who have the luxury of caring about the ceiling because the floor beneath them is not about to give way.

Below that filter, the issues that affect the majority most directly, homelessness, child poverty, the slow collapse of affordable housing, the erosion of everything that makes a working life bearable, have not merely been deprioritised. They have been getting worse, year after year, throughout the same period that progressive politics congratulated itself on its expanding compassion. The filter does not just select which problems get attention. It selects which problems get solved. And the problems that get solved are, with remarkable consistency, the ones that enhance the unearned income of our rentier class.

Working-class women in 1960 were not primarily frustrated by glass ceilings. They were frustrated by poverty wages, dangerous working conditions, inadequate housing, lack of healthcare, and an educational system that wrote off the majority of children at eleven.

It is worth being blunt about a historical fact that the progressive narrative tends to elide: the working class has always worked. The male breadwinner model that second-wave feminism critiqued was itself a relatively recent historical phenomenon, and one that was always more characteristic of the skilled working class and lower middle class than of the unskilled labouring poor. Women who worked were not beneficiaries of patriarchal protection. They were workers, and often dreamed of greater leisure time to care for children and family.

The liberation movements of the 1960s and 1970s were, in significant part, the liberation of a newly educated middle class from social restrictions that the working class had never had the luxury of being constrained by. The working-class woman could not be a housewife because she could not afford to be.

What has changed in the fifty years since? The middle class, broadly defined as those in professional and managerial occupations, with university degrees and sufficient income to own property, has expanded, diversified, and become genuinely more inclusive. It now contains more women, more openly gay people, and more people of colour than it did in 1970. This is progress. But it is progress that has been achieved at least partly by drawing the cream of previously excluded groups into a class whose position depends on the continued extraction of economic rent from the majority below them.

Meanwhile, the working class (those who depend on wages rather than ownership, who rent rather than own, who consume services rather than sell them) has not been liberated. It has been impoverished. Real wages for the bottom quintile have barely risen in forty years. Housing costs have consumed an ever-larger share of working-class income. Public transport, social care, and legal aid have been cut to the point where access to justice, mobility, and old age security are increasingly determined by wealth rather than citizenship. The progressive movements that promised liberation have, in their institutionalised form, delivered inclusion into a hierarchy whose foundations they have not challenged.

Figure 3: UK Real Wage Growth vs. Land Value Growth, Selected Periods

 

PART FOUR

Green Capitalism: The Rentierisation of the Environment

The Genuine Environmental Crisis

Any honest account of environmental policy must start with the natural world, because the capture of that policy by rent-seeking interests only makes sense against the background of a genuine and worsening ecological emergency. The crisis is not manufactured. It is real, it is severe, and it threatens everything. But a threatened world is also a world of opportunity for those positioned to profit from the response. The public’s entirely legitimate fear for their children’s future has been turned into a financial instrument. That is not neglect. That is the deliberate conversion of human fear into private profit, and it is the greatest theft ever committed in plain sight.

Biodiversity loss is the most acute and least discussed of the global environmental crises. The Living Planet Index, compiled by the Zoological Society of London and WWF, tracks populations of vertebrate species globally. Between 1970 and 2020, it recorded an average decline of 69 per cent. This is not a marginal adjustment in species composition; it is a collapse. The primary drivers are habitat loss (driven overwhelmingly by agricultural expansion), overexploitation (fishing, hunting, logging), pollution, invasive species, and climate change.

In the United Kingdom specifically, the State of Nature reports published since 2013 have documented a country that has lost more of its natural environment than almost any other in the developed world. Britain now ranks among the most nature-depleted nations on earth, below the global average for biodiversity intactness. Fifteen per cent of species are threatened with extinction. Farmland bird populations have fallen by more than half since 1970. Ancient woodland now covers less than 2.5 per cent of the land area, down from approximately 50 per cent in Mesolithic times and 15 per cent in 1086.

Climate change, driven by greenhouse gas emissions, is both a cause of biodiversity loss and an independent catastrophe in its own right. The physics are not in serious dispute: carbon dioxide and methane in the atmosphere trap heat; human industrial activity has raised atmospheric carbon dioxide from approximately 280 parts per million before the Industrial Revolution to over 420 parts per million today; the consequences include rising average temperatures, altered precipitation patterns, more frequent extreme weather events, and ocean acidification.

These crises require responses of proportionate scale and seriousness. The question this essay addresses is whether the policy responses that have been developed, and particularly the market-based mechanisms that have attracted the most political and financial support, have been hijacked by rent-seeking interests.

Carbon Markets: The Architecture of Inaction

The concept of carbon trading was first developed in an American regulatory context, applied to sulphur dioxide emissions in the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments. Emissions trading, or cap and trade, was theoretically elegant: set a total cap on emissions, issue tradeable permits up to that cap, and let the market find the lowest-cost means of achieving the reduction. Firms that could reduce emissions cheaply would do so and sell their surplus permits; firms facing high abatement costs would buy permits. The aggregate result would be the required reduction at minimum economic cost.

The application of this logic to carbon dioxide was advocated primarily by economists and was adopted as the centrepiece of European climate policy through the EU Emissions Trading System (ETS), launched in 2005. The voluntary carbon market, in which companies and individuals purchase credits representing emission reductions or carbon removals to offset their own emissions, developed in parallel as a mechanism for firms that were not covered by mandatory trading schemes to make climate commitments.

The theoretical elegance of carbon trading has not survived contact with political reality. The EU ETS was initially undermined by the over-allocation of free permits to industrial incumbents, a concession extracted by the very industries the scheme was supposed to regulate. Carbon prices collapsed in the early years, providing no meaningful incentive for decarbonisation. The scheme was reformed, but the initial allocation of permits was effectively a transfer of billions of euros from consumers (via higher energy prices) to industrial landowners and utilities that had received permits for free.

The voluntary carbon market has been more thoroughly discredited. A series of investigative reports, most comprehensively by The Guardian in 2023, found that the majority of rainforest offset credits approved by Verra, the largest carbon standard, had no basis in actual emission reductions. A 2023 study published in Science found that voluntary forest carbon credits claiming to prevent deforestation in Brazil, Zimbabwe, and Peru had, in the vast majority of cases, prevented no deforestation at all. The forests that were supposedly at risk were not, in fact, being deforested; the credits claimed avoided emissions that would never have occurred.

The value of the voluntary carbon market peaked at approximately 2 billion dollars in 2021. Much of this value was extracted by project developers, standard-setting organisations, verification bodies, brokers, and financial intermediaries. The forests themselves, and more importantly the people who live in and depend on them, received a small fraction of the nominal value. The communities whose land was enrolled in carbon offset schemes frequently reported loss of access to forest resources, eviction from traditional territories, and the imposition of conservation rules that benefited distant asset managers rather than local people.

“Carbon offsetting is not a solution to climate change. It is a financial instrument designed to allow those who generate emissions to continue generating them while directing a small portion of the proceeds to activities that may or may not absorb carbon, in amounts that cannot be reliably verified, over timescales that are inherently uncertain.” Adapted from Kevin Anderson, Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research

The political economy of carbon markets is straightforward once the rent lens is applied. Carbon markets create a new form of rent: the right to emit, or the right to absorb. Landowners with forests, peatlands, or degraded land suitable for tree-planting can convert their land into a rent-generating asset by selling carbon credits. Financial intermediaries can create structured products around aggregated carbon credit portfolios. Consultancies can charge for the complex verification processes that no one else fully understands. Rating agencies can charge for carbon credit quality assessment. The entire architecture generates fees, spreads, and margins at every node, just as a complex financial instrument generates rent for every intermediary in the chain.

Meanwhile, the policy question that would actually address climate change, namely a sufficiently high and universally applied carbon price that makes fossil fuel combustion uneconomic, remains politically impossible, because it would genuinely impose costs on fossil fuel producers and their investors. The voluntary carbon market is not an alternative to that policy; it is a substitute that makes the real policy less urgent by creating the illusion of action.

Biodiversity Net Gain: Green Finance and the Land Grab

Biodiversity Net Gain (BNG) was made mandatory for most development in England under the Environment Act 2021, taking full effect in 2024. The policy requires developers to demonstrate a net gain of at least 10 per cent in biodiversity value, assessed using a standardised metric, as a condition of planning permission. Where gains cannot be achieved on-site, developers may purchase biodiversity units from off-site habitat creation or enhancement projects.

The principle behind BNG, that development should leave nature in a better state than it found it, has a superficial plausibility. The reality of its implementation illuminates the capture of environmental policy with unusual clarity.

The biodiversity metric used to quantify gains and losses is the Defra habitat metric, a formula that assigns numerical values to different habitat types, multiplied by condition assessments and strategic significance factors. The metric has been extensively criticised by ecologists for producing results that bear little relationship to actual ecological value. Ancient woodland, which is essentially irreplaceable on any human timescale, scores poorly compared with newly created grassland, which can be created relatively cheaply on agricultural land. The metric creates an incentive to destroy high-value irreplaceable habitats and replace them with low-cost, low-value “biodiverse” habitats that happen to score well.

The off-site biodiversity unit market that BNG has created is, in economic terms, a new form of land rent. Agricultural land that can be converted to habitat (typically rough grassland or woodland) generates income from biodiversity unit sales. The price of biodiversity units in 2023 ranged from approximately 15,000 to over 100,000 pounds per unit, depending on habitat type and location. For landowners with suitable land, BNG represents a substantial windfall: the right to extract rent from developers who have degraded nature elsewhere, funded ultimately by house buyers and infrastructure users.

The environmental effectiveness of this system is deeply uncertain. The 30-year maintenance agreements required under BNG are unenforceable in practice: the regulatory capacity to monitor hundreds of thousands of hectares of habitat over three decades does not exist. The habitats created are often of poor quality, rushed into being and have no certain future.

What is certain is who benefits. Landowners with agricultural land near areas of development pressure receive a new rent stream. Land agents, consultants, and habitat bank operators earn substantial fees. Financial investors, including major institutional funds, are accumulating biodiversity credit portfolios as a new asset class. The Environment Bank, one of the largest habitat bank operators, attracted investment from NatWest’s venture capital arm. Large landowners, including estates and pension funds, have been among the early accumulators of habitat bank sites.

The Rewilding Gentry: Large Landowners and Conservation Rent

No analysis of the political economy of British environmental policy can ignore the role of large landed estates. Britain has one of the most unequal land distributions in the developed world: approximately 0.36 per cent of the population owns approximately 50 per cent of the rural land. This extraordinarily concentrated ownership is the direct consequence of decisions made in the medieval period and never reversed: the Norman land settlement, the enclosures, and the entail system that preserved large estates through inheritance.

“In many ways, nature conservation has become just another method of rent extraction by landowners who are trying to hide the fact that modern farmers’ fields are essentially deserts, devoid of wildlife, and the taxpayer must pay ‘rent’ if we want wild animals to occupy ‘their land’.”

Peter Smith

Large landed estates benefit from a range of public subsidies and tax breaks that are rarely described as such. Under the Common Agricultural Policy and its successor, the Basic Payment Scheme, land-based payments went disproportionately to the largest landowners: the Duke of Westminster’s agricultural holding received millions in annual subsidy. The Countryside Stewardship scheme pays landowners for management practices that, in many cases, represent a modest improvement on agricultural damage that the same owners had been paid to cause under previous schemes.

The emerging environmental markets create new opportunities for this class. An estate that has long since converted its ancient woodland to shooting drives or its upland moorland to grouse management can, under appropriate policy conditions, convert it back to semi-natural habitat, claim biodiversity credits, sell carbon from the trees, and apply for agri-environment payments for the whole. The land that was producing rent through shooting or farming is now producing rent through conservation. The landowner does not change. The public subsidy, in one form or another, continues.

The rewilding movement, which advocates the restoration of large-scale ecological processes including the reintroduction of apex predators, is genuinely motivated by ecological science and represents a serious attempt to address biodiversity loss at the landscape scale. But in its popularised form, particularly as promoted by figures like George Monbiot and the rewilding charity Rewilding Britain, it tends to focus on the ecological aspiration without adequately addressing the question of land ownership.

When George Monbiot was setting up Rewilding Britain, he called me, knowing my background in building successful rewilding charities. I gave him one piece of advice above all others: build your base from the bottom up. Fund it from the genuine aspirations of ordinary people who want to see nature restored. Keep the landowners at arm’s length, because the moment they are in the room with chequebooks, the mission bends toward their interests and never bends back.

He did not take that advice. Landowners offered money, and with it came trustees, influence, and the quiet, persistent pressure of people whose wealth depends on land remaining cheap to own and expensive to reform. The rewilding movement was captured before it found its feet. It became a vehicle for channelling public money to the very class whose ownership patterns are the primary obstacle to ecological restoration at scale, while carefully avoiding the two things that would actually work: land reform and a Land Value Tax. A properly applied Land Value Tax would do one hundred times more for rewilding than a generation of subsidised habitat schemes. You will not hear that said at a Rewilding Britain event. The trustees would not allow it.

Net Zero as a Finance Product

The corporate net-zero pledge has become ubiquitous since the Paris Agreement of 2015. As of 2023, more than a third of the largest companies globally had made net-zero commitments. The financial sector has developed an extensive infrastructure to service these commitments: ESG ratings agencies, climate risk consultancies, green bond standards, sustainability-linked loan frameworks, transition finance taxonomies, and the TCFD (Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures) reporting framework.

For ten years, I sat in boardrooms watching C-suite executives compete with each other over net-zero targets, and I can tell you with complete certainty what it was: theatre. Elaborate, expensive, professionally enforced theatre. The targets were fantasy. The timelines were fantasy. The PowerPoint decks were works of corporate fiction dressed in the language of science, designed to produce a badge on the annual report and silence anyone who pointed out that none of it would ever be delivered. To say so out loud was to risk your career. So most of us did not say so out loud. We endured the meetings, signed off on the strategies, and eventually, quietly, voted with our feet, unwilling to let our professional reputations be buried alongside the targets when the inevitable reckoning came. What strikes me now is who bears the cost of that reckoning. Not the executives who built the fantasy and were paid handsomely to maintain it. Never them.

I know this world from the inside. I have been the house guest of billionaires promoting their latest green investment fund, brought in to perform my environmental credentials in front of rooms full of investors being sold the idea that paying a premium will somehow save the planet. The performance was for the audience. The real conversation, the one conducted in knowing looks and careful omissions, was about something else entirely: how to extract maximum return from the gap between what people desperately want to believe and what is actually happening to their money.

The environmental effectiveness of green bonds, ESG standards, and green private equity funds is, to put it charitably, unproven. Academic research on the environmental additionality of green bonds, specifically whether they finance projects that would not otherwise have been funded, consistently finds little or no evidence that green labels direct capital to projects that are materially different from conventionally financed ones. The green bond market takes existing infrastructure, attaches a green label, and charges a premium for the label. The premium is more economic rent. The environment is the excuse.

The IPCC’s assessment of pathways to 1.5 degrees of warming consistently finds that achieving that target requires immediate, massive reductions in fossil fuel production and use, not gradual transition facilitated by financial instruments over several decades. The financial sector’s preferred timeline (net zero by 2050, with extensive use of carbon offsets, carbon capture, and hydrogen as bridging technologies) is incompatible with the physics of the carbon budget. But it is highly compatible with the business model of financial intermediaries who earn fees on each year of transition activity.

Figure 4: Estimated Rents Generated by Environmental Finance Instruments, UK c. 2023

 

Note: Rent extraction estimated as intermediary fees, unearned land value uplift, and financial spread. Direct renewable energy generation is ecologically beneficial, but the land rent component is pure extraction.

PART FIVE

What Genuine Reform Would Look Like

The Failure of Progressive Politics and the Poverty of Identity

The political left in Britain has spent the last four decades gradually abandoning the analysis of class and economic power in favour of an identity-based politics that is, for structural reasons explored throughout this essay, highly susceptible to capture by the very interests it claims to oppose. This is not an argument against identity politics as such; the legal and social gains achieved by women, gay people, ethnic minorities, and disabled people are real and valuable. It is an argument that identity politics, in the absence of a serious analysis of economic power, tends to produce diversity of representation within existing hierarchies rather than a challenge to those hierarchies.

The capture of progressive movements by institutional actors is not new. The trade unions of the early twentieth century were systematically neutralised as institutions of working-class power and converted into bureaucratic interest groups that negotiated the terms of labour’s participation in a capitalist economy rather than challenging the basis of that economy. The environmental movement of the 1970s, which contained significant strands of radical critique of industrial growth itself, was converted by the 1990s into a technocratic lobbying operation focused on reforming existing market structures rather than questioning them.

The Green New Deal, in its most radical forms, represented an attempt to reconnect environmental politics with class politics, insisting that the costs and benefits of the transition must be distributed fairly and that the transition must be publicly directed rather than market-led. That instinct was right. But it has been presented, deliberately and misleadingly, as a binary choice between ruinous public spending and the status quo, when the reality is far simpler and far more threatening to those who currently extract rent from both the economy and the environment.

Extinguish rent seeking. Price environmental harm honestly. Use the revenue those two things generate to protect the poorest from the costs of transition. Do those three things and the Green New Deal pays for itself, enhances the lives of everyone, and does not require a penny of additional borrowing. The choice was never between public spending and the market. It was between an economy that prices things honestly and one that allows a minority to extract value from the majority while socialising the costs.

The versions that have actually been implemented, the US Inflation Reduction Act, the UK’s various net zero strategies, have preserved the market-led logic while layering large public subsidies on top of it, subsidies directed primarily at private investors. This is not a compromise. It is a theft from working people to benefit the investing class, dressed in the language of climate action, and it has had zero measurable net effect on the trajectory of emissions. The rent collectors found the Green New Deal. They are very pleased with it too.

What the Environmental Crisis Actually Requires

The environmental crisis, comprising climate change and biodiversity loss together, is a market failure because we need to price environmental harm and withdraw the income from those that profit from that harm, not try to divert it to a new asset-owning super class while protecting the rents of existing landowners.

Addressing it requires, at a minimum, honest pricing. Tax fossil fuels at their real cost to the climate and tax land at its full unimproved value, and the market does the rest without subsidy or ceremony. Fuel use becomes more efficient because waste becomes expensive. Land shifts from the hands of those who simply own it to those who can farm it most productively, because sitting on underused land becomes financially punishing. Mixed farming, habitat restoration, and genuine ecological recovery become economically rational rather than charitable gestures dependent on public grants. The concentration of land ownership that makes all of this politically difficult does not survive a properly applied Land Value Tax. And the public money currently funnelled into tradeable environmental instruments can be redirected to genuine, measurable habitat restoration under public oversight rather than private profit, where land acquisition costs are a tiny fraction of what they are now.

None of this is facilitated by carbon markets or biodiversity net gain as currently designed. Carbon markets, in the absence of a hard and declining cap that genuinely constrains total emissions, are a mechanism for deferring action while extracting rent from poor workers to a privileged elite. BNG, as currently implemented, is a mechanism for legitimising the destruction of irreplaceable habitats while directing public money to landowners who create biologically inferior substitutes.

The land question is central to both crises and to the social questions addressed in the earlier parts of this essay. In a country where half the rural land is owned by a tiny fraction of the population, where urban land values have absorbed the majority of the productivity gains of the past century, and where the political system is structurally responsive to the interests of asset owners, no policy that requires a redistribution of land value will be implemented without a fundamental shift in political power.

That shift has not occurred. It will not occur through the existing mechanisms of progressive identity politics, corporate diversity policy, or environmental finance. It would require a revival of the political economy tradition of Ricardo, Mill, and George, which understands wealth distribution as a political question about who owns what.

The Lower Classes: A Note on Continuity

Throughout this essay, the liberation movements of the twentieth century have been assessed partly by asking who they liberated and from what. A final note is required on the condition of those who have been consistently absent from liberation discourse: the working poor.

The working class of Victorian Britain lived in conditions of material deprivation that are difficult to comprehend from the vantage of modern Britain. Child mortality was high; life expectancy at birth for a labourer in Manchester in 1840 was seventeen years (accounting for infant mortality; the average age of death was higher, but the figure conveys the scale of the catastrophe). Housing was overcrowded, insanitary, and expensive relative to wages. Working conditions were dangerous. The hours were long.

By the early twenty-first century, material conditions had improved enormously. Life expectancy had more than doubled. Mass literacy was achieved. Sanitation, heating, and basic security were no longer privileges. That progress was real.

Which makes what is happening now all the more important to understand. Average life expectancy is now falling. Housing quality is deteriorating. Child poverty is rising. Public health is worsening. The public services that took a century to build are decaying in front of us, not through lack of wealth, but through the systematic redirection of wealth upward to the rentier class.

This essay is a plea for clarity about why. The progressive movement has been hijacked. Its language has been kept. Its economic substance has been gutted. And in its hollowed-out form it now serves the interests of the very class it was built to challenge. If that is not understood and reversed, the deterioration will continue. And the elites who engineered it will do what elites have always done when the consequences of their extraction become politically dangerous: fund the demagogues, direct the anger downward, and let the working class tear itself apart over the wrong questions. We are already watching that happen. Trump, Farage, and their successors did not emerge from nowhere. They were made possible by a progressive politics that talked about identity and the environment, while the rent collectors took everything else.

What has not changed is the fundamental dynamic identified by Ricardo and George two centuries ago: as long as productive activity generates a surplus and that surplus can be captured by the owners of scarce land and monopoly positions, the tendency of market economies is towards the concentration of wealth in the hands of those who produce least and the immiseration of those who produce most.

Conclusion: Seeing the ‘cat’

This essay has argued a number of connected propositions. Economic rent (unearned income from ownership of scarce resources, monopoly positions, and financial instruments) has grown as a share of the British economy over the past century, with a marked acceleration since the 1980s. Democratic governments are structurally more responsive to the interests of those who receive economic rent than to those who produce economic value. Social and progressive movements, however genuine in their origins, tend to be captured by rent-extracting interests when they achieve sufficient political salience, because capture is cheaper than suppression and produces more durable political outcomes that benefit those rentier economic interests.

The environmental movement has undergone an accelerated version of this capture in the past two decades. The genuine scientific urgency of climate change and biodiversity loss has been converted into a rationale for the creation of new markets in environmental commodities, markets that generate substantial rents for landowners, financial intermediaries, and consultancies while providing minimal or negative benefits for the actual ecological problems they claim to address.

Women’s liberation and gay rights achieved genuine legal and social advances. But in the absence of a political economy that challenged the ownership of land, capital, and monopoly, the economic surplus generated by the expanded, more productive workforce that liberation enabled was captured by rent-owners. The liberated are freer, but they are not richer; and in many cases, particularly for working-class women and men of any orientation, the collapse of the structures that once protected wages and made housing affordable means that they are materially worse off than their parents.

The lower classes, those who have always worked, who never had the luxury of being liberated from labour, and whose living standards have always depended more on the price of rent, have received the smallest share of the gains from a century of social change and have borne the largest share of its costs.

What this essay has tried to demonstrate is simple, even if everything conspiring against it is not. Social progress cannot be parcelled into competing identity groups, each fighting for recognition within a system that continues to extract from all of them. That is not progress. That is management. Real progress means making the lives of everybody materially better, which requires confronting who owns what and why, not curating which faces appear at the top of an unchanged hierarchy.

There is one more argument threaded through this essay that deserves to be stated plainly. Efficiency, real efficiency, not the corporate euphemism for cutting services or the consultant’s word for redundancies, is at the heart of every solution proposed here. Efficiency in how government spends public money. Efficiency in how we use natural resources. Efficiency in how we address the social problems that rent extraction creates and perpetuates.

Price land honestly and you get efficient land use. Price carbon and pollution honestly and you get efficient use of natural resources. Strip out the rent-seeking intermediaries that insert themselves between every public service and the people it serves, and you get efficient government. The beauty of honest pricing is that it does not require a vast bureaucracy to enforce good behaviour. It simply makes waste expensive and productivity rewarding, which is what a market is supposed to do before rent extraction corrupts it.

But there is a harder truth beneath this. Rent seeking is not only a class pathology. It is a human one. It lives in the landlord extracting maximum rent from a desperate tenant, but it also lives in every institution, every profession, and every individual that has learned to extract more than they contribute and call it success. Eradicating it as a system requires changing the incentives. Eradicating it as a culture requires something more demanding: the honesty to recognise it in ourselves.

Class has become almost unspeakable in modern progressive politics. That silence is not accidental. It serves those who benefit most from the confusion. And Henry George, writing nearly a hundred and fifty years ago, identified the substitution that is still being made today: charity, he wrote, is false, futile, and poisonous when offered as a substitute for justice. The same is true now. Identity politics is not justice. It is the appearance of justice, deployed to prevent the real thing. United we stand. Divided, we are managed. The rent collectors know which they prefer.

Select Bibliography and Further Reading

Classical & Modern Political Economy

The work of Fred Harrison - his bibliography forms the basis of much of my work, published by Shepherd Walwyn: https://shepheardwalwyn.com/product-category/authors/fred-harrison/

Ricardo, David. On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation (1817). The foundational account of differential rent and its relationship to wages and profits.

Mill, John Stuart. Principles of Political Economy (1848). Extends Ricardian analysis; advocates land value taxation.

George, Henry. Progress and Poverty (1879). The most thorough popular account of rent extraction and its social consequences; proposes the land value tax.

Veblen, Thorstein. The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899) and Absentee Ownership (1923). Analyses the cultural dimensions of rentier class formation.

Land, Finance, and Economic Rent

Hudson, Michael. Killing the Host: How Financial Parasites and Debt Bondage Destroy the Global Economy (2015). Comprehensive modern account of financial rent extraction.

Ryan-Collins, Josh, Toby Lloyd, and Laurie Macfarlane. Rethinking the Economics of Land and Housing (2017). Essential account of the relationship between land values, mortgage credit, and housing affordability.

Christophers, Brett. Our Lives in Their Portfolios: Why Asset Managers Own the World (2023). Documents the rise of asset management as a rent-extracting institution.

Social Movements and Political Economy

Ehrenreich, Barbara and Deirdre English. For Her Own Good: Two Centuries of the Experts’s Advice to Women (1978). Critical account of the relationship between professional ideology and the control of women.

Fraser, Nancy. The Old Is Dying and the New Cannot Be Born (2019). Analyses the relationship between progressive neoliberalism and the capture of left politics.

Davis, Angela. Women, Race and Class (1981). Foundational account of the class and race dimensions of feminism.

Gilens, Martin and Benjamin Page. “Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens.” Perspectives on Politics 12.3 (2014). The empirical demonstration that US policy reflects elite preferences rather than median voter preferences.

Environmental Policy and Green Finance

Anderson, Kevin. “Duality in climate science.” Nature Geoscience 8.12 (2015). The case that official climate scenarios systematically understate required action.

Lohmann, Larry. “Carbon trading: a critical conversation on climate change, privatisation and power.” Development Dialogue 48 (2006). Early critical account of carbon market limitations.

West, Tara et al. “Action needed to make carbon offsets from forest conservation work for climate change mitigation.” Science 381.6660 (2023). The study documenting the failure of voluntary forest carbon credits.

Sullivan, Sian. “Banking Nature? The Spectacular Financialisation of Environmental Conservation.” Antipode 45.1 (2013). Critical analysis of biodiversity markets.

Carver, Toby and Pete Smith. The Biodiversity Net Gain Policy in England: Early Assessment of Outcomes (2024). Assessment of BNG implementation and ecological effectiveness.