This strategy has been a success. Now 12% of non-white voters back Reform. A number of Mr Farage’s best-known colleagues, such as Mr Yusuf and Suella Braverman, a former Conservative home secretary, are from minority backgrounds. So why has he embraced a new, uglier way of thinking, which casts white people as a group that now requires help? Reform points to genuinely concerning examples of crimes committed by ethnic minorities being downplayed out of misplaced concerns about stigma or stereotyping— notably the “grooming gangs” scandal in which groups of Pakistani-origin men sexually abused (mostly white) girls. It is also possible that training designed to overcome the police’s history of mistreating non-white people has made some officers overly credulous when faced with claims of racism, such as those cynically made by Mr Digwa. Sir Keir has promised to investigate “how accusations of racism informed the decision-making in this case”. Official advice published last year which appears to suggest officers should treat ethnic minorities differently is now being reconsidered. But the idea of widespread “two-tier policing” that systematically discriminates against whites in Britain is a nonsense. White and black people are equally likely to be victims of crime. And black people are more than twice as likely to be arrested than their white counterparts. Mr Farage’s dark turn seems prompted by a threat, a grudge and an opportunity. The threat is from even more radical forces to Reform’s right: Rupert Lowe, the leader of Restore Britain, said that the killer should be executed and his family deported. Restore is endorsed by Elon Musk and an opinion poll recently showed the party on 7% in the upcoming Makerfield by-election—a margin potentially large enough to stop Reform winning the seat and hand it to Labour’s Andy Burnham. Tommy Robinson, a far-right rabble-rouser whom Mr Farage has previously repudiated, led a protest on the streets of Southampton on the evening of June 2nd which resulted in violence against the police from a handful of attendees. The grudge, privately admitted by allies of Mr Farage, is against the Black Lives Matter movement which began in America and had a worldwide
impact, including in Britain, after the death of George Floyd at the hands of a police officer in Minneapolis in 2020. (In his video on June 2nd Mr Farage refers to the response to the death of the “career criminal George Floyd”.) Many on the right have long resented the support that mainstream politicians gave the campaign, arguing that it helped import American identity politics to Britain; they now feel they are giving the left a taste of its own medicine. And the opportunity stems from Britain’s fragmented electorate. With Britain’s ethnic-minority population at 17% and rising, alienating non-white people will surely make it harder to build the broad-based voting bloc that used to be necessary to win power. But with voters now split between five different parties—more in Scotland and Wales—even Reform’s current polling of 26% may be enough for victory. Targeting the angry, and making them angrier, could be a winning formula. Never mind the dignified response from Mark Nowak to his son’s murder: “We do not want his death to be used to create further division, hatred or tension.”■ For more expert analysis of the biggest stories in Britain, sign up to Blighty, our weekly subscriber-only newsletter. This article was downloaded by zlibrary from https://www.economist.com//britain/2026/06/03/was-this-britains-george-floyd-moment
The Green Party’s ill-considered policy to cap CEOs’ pay It would hurt the lowest earners the most June 4th 2026 Denouncing fat cats is a purity test for the British left. It is one that Peter Mandelson failed in 1998, when as a Labour minister he said that he was “intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich, as long as they pay their taxes”. For Britain’s socialists, this was the dark lord’s original sin; his links to Jeffrey Epstein, the convicted child-sex offender, merely confirmed that he was a wrong ’un. Zack Polanski, the leader of the Green Party, has become the left’s darling in part because of his relentless prosecution of high earners. The Greens’ solution is to cap the pay of the highest earner in any public or private organisation at ten times that of the lowest. The idea is popular: 65%
of the public back it, according to a YouGov poll. Ellie Chowns, the party’s parliamentary leader, claims that “such a ratio would end obscene salaries for greedy CEOs while pulling up wages for the lowest-paid in organisations.” It is true that the policy would reduce executive pay. But the picture for lower earners is less rosy. Mr Polanski is right that pay disparities have grown. In the 1970s the median chief executive of a FTSE 100 company was paid only 20 times more than the median British worker, according to estimates by Alexander Pepper, an academic (see chart). In 2024-25, they were paid over 120 times more. Denise Coates, the founder of Bet365, a gambling company, made £280m ($377m) last year, more than the GDP of the Marshall Islands (population: 38,000). Corporate pay differentials started to widen in the 1980s, as trade-union power waned and falling marginal tax rates incentivised executives to demand more cash. America awarded ever-larger performance-related pay. Britain soon followed and, though its pay differentials have never reached American levels, they sit comfortably above those of continental Europe. Some argue that a superstar leader can generate returns that dwarf their pay packet. But the empirical evidence is unclear. Sceptics say that sky-high
salaries do not reflect a well-functioning talent market but rather failures of corporate governance, and that the benefits of high pay do not justify the inequality that it creates. Yet even if there is a case for making wages more equal, Mr Polanski’s proposal is an astonishingly poor way to do it. The closest precedent is San Francisco, where the exodus of rich people has been buoyed by a tax on firms paying CEOs more than 100 times the median worker’s salary. Bernie Sanders, a populist-left American senator, has proposed a national corporation-tax surcharge of up to five percentage points on companies breaching a 50-to-1 pay ratio. But both policies are child’s play compared with the Greens’ proposal. Mr Polanski claims it would increase the wages of the lowest-paid. The maths suggests such benefits would be minimal. Take Tesco, the country’s biggest supermarket chain, which employs 260,000 people in Britain. Its chief executive’s total compensation was £9.2m in 2024-25, whereas its lowest-paid workers earned £12.02 an hour (less than £24,000 a year full- time). Even if you assumed Mr Polanski’s cap covered all remuneration, not just pay, it would unlock only £9m of savings from reducing the CEO’s salary. That could barely pay for an annual pay rise of £34 per worker. Chuck in savings from other top executives, and there’s a little more to play with—but not much, as salaries fall rapidly below the c-suite. More importantly, this approach naively assumes that businesses will do what they are told. In reality their first instinct will be to evade the policy. High earners could be spun out into their own company, or rewarded via ways not covered by the cap (such as complicated loan structures). More worryingly, firms might fire their lowest earners to increase the maximum salaries, paying third-party contractors to do their work. Even if the Greens did design a watertight system, the consequences could be worse. Some multinational companies would move their headquarters abroad to evade the cap, while salary cuts (of over 95% in some cases) could be enough to cause an exodus of top talent. Studies suggest poor management is already a leading cause of Britain’s low productivity growth.
Firms would be more reluctant to take on apprentices or low-paid workers, already threatened by AI, as hiring them would drag down the maximum pay of the highest earners. When Francesco Caselli, an economist, modelled the impact of a theoretical pay cap in America, he found that the incomes of the bottom 50% of workers were “essentially insensitive” to the policy. A more pragmatic approach would be to tackle the causes of rising executive pay. This could include corporate-governance reforms to give shareholders and workers more say and to make remuneration committees more independent. A radical-left government could also increase the top marginal rate of tax to disincentivise CEOs from asking for big pay rises. This would still crimp growth and the tax take, but it would be less damaging than a pay cap. The Greens’ championing of a ten-to-one pay cap reveals a party still in the primary-colours phase of development, where everything is a purity test and complexity is an inconvenience. Its ill-considered design means that it is Mr Polanski’s disproportionately young and precarious voters who would lose the most. ■ For more expert analysis of the biggest stories in Britain, sign up to Blighty, our weekly subscriber-only newsletter. This article was downloaded by zlibrary from https://www.economist.com//britain/2026/06/04/the-green-partys-ill-considered- policy-to-cap-ceos-pay
British politics has passed peak Palestine The war in Gaza has turned a cohort of voters leftwards June 4th 2026 “First of all, they are very complicit in the genocide in Gaza,” says Ishan, a young Muslim in Manchester, asked about the Labour government. “That’s a big thing.” As the conflict in Gaza has ground on, Britons’ views of Israel have hardened. Fury at the Labour Party for its handling of the issue has fuelled the rise of pro-Gaza independent MPs, in constituencies with many Muslims, and of the Green Party elsewhere. But despite the passions around the matter, relatively few voters name Israel or Palestine as their most important concern. There are signs that the war is beginning to fade from people’s minds. Still, advocacy for Gaza has created a cohort of (often young) left-populist voters.