EVERY time the question of taxes and public expenditure comes before a TV or radio audience we are invited to consider it as a scaled-up version of the household budgeting of the stereotypical household.

Naturally, in the contemporary version of this framing of the matter the role of the careful housewife is played by the Chancellor, Rachel Reeves.

We will not demean her by suggesting that she actually carries out her duties with any sense that this fable actually guides policy.

She worked in the Treasury and no matter how far from the determination of policy she was today she will, like the entire political class, understand that the only alternative to challenging the power of the bond markets is submission to the workings of global capital.

The Green leader, Zack Polanski, made a powerful intervention in a BBC Radio 4 debate a couple of days ago with a powerful call for a wealth tax. He presented this in the context of a sharp contrast between the concentration of extreme wealth in the hands of a few families and the the rest of us.

Inevitably he gained an enormous and spontaneous round of applause from the audience who were then compelled to listen to each of the other speakers recite various versions of the conventional Treasury view.

The practical expression of the Treasury view can be found in the policies of this nominally Labour government.

These include the partial ending of the winter fuel allowance for many pensioners and resistance to demands to lift the two-child benefit cap.

Labour’s attack on disability claimants has engendered disgust, Tories and Reform UK have delighted in the cuts to overseas development aid.

In the face of a general consensus that Britain’s investment programme needs a boost, the government has abandoned any sense that it can marshal the resources and investment to revitalise in productive industry and raise labour productivity through a “dirigiste” policy and instead relies on a policy of what is dubbed “military Keynesianism.”

There can be no more unproductive “investment” that spending on arms.

This is both dead capital and deadly capital expenditure in that, costly though it is, it produces nothing unless used and then it destroys productive investment as extensively as it destroys human beings. We can see this in operation everywhere that Nato member states wage war on the people of the Middle East. In Nato’s proxy war fought out on the terrain of Ukraine, and with both Ukrainian and Russians as collateral damage, the role of arms corporations in resisting successive peace deals has so far been decisive.

Every Western commitment to buttress Ukraine’s armed forces comes as a mortgage on the future of Ukraine’s productive economy.

Rheinmetall, a key part of the Nazi war machine, is now Germany’s largest arms manufacturer. Three years ago the Bundestag boosted arms spending by €100 billion, to the delight of CEO Armin Papperge and the firm’s share price. His acquisitions policy includes taking over arms firms in other EU countries and opening ammunition and weapons systems factories in Romania, Lithuania, Latvia and Ukraine, as well as deals with the Indian state-owned Munitions India.

Channelling even more tranches of public money into Britain’s deeply corrupt military-industrial complex entails the surrender to Donald Trump’s demands to buy US weapons.

Bear in mind that there is no such thing as an exclusively British arms industry and that US and British capital are deeply entwined and it becomes easier to understand why this “Labour” government is at one with the US on every significant aspect of Israel’s war of extermination.

At some level, everyone understands that the contrasts of wealth and poverty is rooted in private ownership and the profit system. The structures of domination that flow from wealth normalise these great disparities and every aspect of the ideological superstructure of capitalist states is mobilised to ensure the dominance of ideas which sustain this state of affairs.

It is not envy of the rich that drives the instant popularity of a wealth tax but a sense of justice which is rooted in the experience of wage robbery.

Where workers understand that the profits accruing to employers are that part of the value of their labour appropriated in the form of their unpaid wages, they understand how capitalism works. Thus Polanski has hit a political seam of pure gold.

What he doesn’t understand — and this will weaken the Greens’ appeal — is that a wealth tax will intensify the resistance of big capital like no other policy save the abolition of private property itself.

War spending, which essentially entails an extra tax on working people — like privatisation, PFI and all the other instruments of robbery — arises from desperate attempts to deal with the tendency of the rate of profit to fall.

Plundering public property — the robbery of the nation’s “crown jewels” — signifies the general crisis of the capitalist system and the failure of capitalism’s foundational myths.

Every measure to deal with this runs out of road until war or depression.

The Greens have an expectation that they will gain a share of state power. It is not clear that even with their infusion of more socialist-minded new members — gifted them by the new left party’s birth pains — they fully grasp that unless this entails a break with the big business and the banks, includes controls on the City of London and big capital, an end to the Nato/European Union drive to war and a fundamental breach with the US that any government of which they are a part will be no less beholden to the bond markets than the hapless Rachel Reeves.

Of course, the same considerations apply to the new left party.

A rupture with the system is politics of a new order. It throws into play new forces and engenders new forms of struggle from both the capital and labour. It strips away illusions and compels innovation in every aspect of politics.

For the Greens, who bring to the struggle a demand to tackle the planet’s existential crisis, it requires an act of courage to abandon the illusions they have about the European Union and junk the bizarre idea that a European Defence Pact is a progressive alternative to the North Atlantic Alliance.

Many Greens understand that they are not the monopoly-holders of progressive views about the environment and they have a future only in alliance with the working-class and labour movements, the peace, anti-imperialist and anti-racist movements.

The British working class, when organised and mobilised in its own interest, has the capacity to attract diverse layers of society, most especially those drawn to the Greens, in a programme of national renewal and peaceful reconstruction of our productive economy in harmony with nature.

The alternative has been mapped out by the German Greens whose submission to German capital’s march to war in the east is ensuring their collapse.

Contrast this to the complicated but generally productive unity of Ecologists, communists, La France Insoumise and many socialists in France and we can see how stark is the choice for our own Greens.