This letter was in the Guardian yesterday. It was from Prof Mary Mellor, emeritus professor of economics at Northumbria University, who has written a great deal in monetary reform, and who I now engage with regularly.
Prof Mellor's Her commentary is on the weaknesses in Keir Starmer's so-called vision speech, made recently:
Your editorial (The Guardian view on Sir Keir Starmer: caught between scaring and inspiring voters, 5 January) is right to worry about Labour's rejection of big-spending government. Labour is nothing if it does not defend adequate public spending, social justice and a fair reward for work. Its vision is limited because it shares the neoliberal assumption that growth comes only from the market. This reflects the massive growth of the industrial era, when millions were employed in the new factories, and their supporting services, such as private finance.
However, in the modern era, industrial production has been outsourced by the older market economies and replaced by the financial sector and hi-tech. But high levels of employment in these areas have not followed. In economies such as Britain's, the main growth of mass employment has been in public and personal services, particularly health. It would seem logical, therefore, that public employment should be a focus of economic growth.
Neoliberal claims for the exclusive role of the market in creating wealth are mistaken. Both the market and the state generate wealth. This was understood by economists in the era of a mixed economy, before the ideologues of neoliberalism captured the political agenda.
Prof Mary Mellor
Newcastle upon Tyne
The sentiments closely reflect my own feelings.
Labour cannot make a difference to the UK without opening the government's cheque book.
Thanks for reading this post.
You can share this post on social media of your choice by clicking these icons:
You can subscribe to this blog's daily email here.
And if you would like to support this blog you can, here:
40 years after Regan and Thatcher pushed forward with their neoliberal agenda, but with two major financial crashes, I must admit, it was all looking like doom and groom. But then I discovered only in the last few weeks some hope:
1. Tony Myatt’s new book: The Macroeconomics Anti-Textbook: A Critical Thinker’s Guide (there is also a Microeconomics version), both of which are very good. See https://www.bloomsburycollections.com/book/the-macroeconomics-anti-textbook-a-critical-thinkers-guide/
2. Rethinking Economics, since 2010, “an international network of students and recent graduates building a better economics for the classroom, with the support of academic allies” https://www.rethinkeconomics.org/about/
3. Exploring Economics, “was developed by the Network for Pluralist Economics” https://www.exploring-economics.org/en/
Thanks
The good Professor from the small town in Scotland is wrong about neoliberalism assuming that growth only comes from the market.
As an example if the government permitted fracking to the same tolerances on tremors as geothermal then there would be growth, and the neoliberals are advocating this.
Growth comes up from permitting new technologies to flourish. Efficiencies come from markets. That’s much closer to the neoliberal view.
If you do not know Newcastle is a city in England I suggest everything else you have to say is wrong as well
He’s entirely wrong about the practicalities of fracking in the UK, too.
Our geology is too bent & fractured by aeons of island formation to be of any use to a fracking rig – you need vast level strata like you get in the US or Australia to have any hope of making it work. Companies like Cuadrilla that hoped to prove this wrong have spectacularly failed to make any headway. Even after a full test frack, they had to attach a propane cylinder to the output from the well just to keep the flare alight at Preston New Road.
In the US, despite ideal geology, the production costs for fracked gas are still way higher than that for conventional gas production in the North Sea, and that’s without taking into account the massive closedown/cleanup costs for fracking.
The issues with earthquakes were the least of Cuadrilla’s problems, they just offered them a way of saving face.
What Labour could say of course is in whose interests it proposes to govern and that it will NOT allow the already rich to further fatten themselves from the public purse
But it won’t
Starmer , Streeting , Reeves & co need to be challenged time & time again – about where money comes from & how much there is. That the economy is limited only by its labour, skills, technology, infrastructure….. battering them time and again with Keynes’ quote – ‘anything we can actually do we can afford’.
It is depressing.
In 2002, twelve years after she left office, Thatcher went to dinner with Connor Burns (later MP) where she was asked what she thought was her greatest achievement. Thatcher replied: “Tony Blair and New Labour. ”
Reference: https://conservativehome.blogs.com/centreright/2008/04/making-history.html
It is beyond me that after 12 years of the wrong medicine Laboured still are paying lip service to Tory ideas about how to turn the country around.
Our political class is probably the worst it has ever been yet we are so reliant on them to change things.
Thatcher was correct about her role on Laboured’s transformation and her impact on the party. She introduced doubt – but when you reflect on that, all she did was buy and bribe Britain to vote for her. Time has revealed how hollow that has been.
It is a tragedy for us that the Tories are in government but do not believe in government and that Laboured say they offer change but don’t want change.
Everyone here knows what I think about the Tories so I’ll reserve my ire for Laboured and Stymied.
The verdict?
Faithless and craven = useless to anyone but themselves.
There was a piece on Reeves in The Times magazine recently (either this weekend just passed or the one before). Bit of a puff piece, of course, as these interviews generally are.
The quote which stuck with me was that George Osborne apparently thinks Starmer and Reeves would be a ‘safe pair of hands’ in charge of the country. Reeves herself said she wanted a working relationship with Starmer more like Osborne/Cameron than Brown/Blair.
I realise that any Labour politician having an interview in The Times is going to do their utmost to avoid scaring the horses, but it was enough to get my klaxons going again.
The NHS is currently falling apart to a great degree because of Osborne’s ruinous austerity years and Labour should surely be shouting this from the rooftops.
Instead, it seems as though Starmer’s Labour is going to be well to the right of New Labour – Tory in all but name!
It comes to something when the only hope is that they are simply trying to gaslight the entire nation to win power before implementing more sensible policies!