Blue Labour is functionally de-growth in substance - hostile to the few clear avenues to growth that the UK has and tied to the same mercantilist fallacies currently driving economic damage in the US.
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To be clear, this represents a small subset of Labour MPs and not the government’s agenda. But the government is not doing anywhere near enough to push back against this kind of nonsense.
You can dislike the small state right, but they have a clear (if limited) theory of growth! Even have some support in the lit. Blue Labour is a smorgasbord of reactionary right and bygone left talking points
“We’re gonna fix the state by breaking a few more of our actual existing economically valuable sectors in the hope that a generation of academics all want to start producing Morris Minors”
This is not a dig at manufacturing - they’re mostly *highly skilled and specialised* jobs and not something you can just throw labour at in the hope there’s enough external demand for what is then produced.
It’s extremely backward looking. They seem to want an interventionist state that brings back the economy we no long have, that it thinks China/globalisation stole but is itself trying to move on from
The problem is few are offering a positive interventionist state or industrial policy based future
Exactly - and an interventionist state that is also strongly devolved and open to co-creating policy with stakeholders rather than dictating from an ill-embedded bureaucratic centre…
The economics of Blue Labour is Benn’s AES. That’s why they love Trump’s tariffs and his emphasis on re industrialisation. And the AES was already looking back to a lost world when he first advocated it.
My theory of this period is that an enormous amount of political effort is being expended in trying to shift the consumption preferences (mostly) in ways that would reduce aggregate welfare, all in order to assuage the concerns of a subset of voters who would *still hate* the outcome if successful.
It’s basically you can push your vanity policy projects once the state is functioning again, but you can’t make the state function via your vanity projects.
The damage that half-remembered Schumpeterian “creative destruction” has wrought on mental models of economic change is profound. It’s basically been forced backwards in people’s heads to “destructive creation”. You don’t need to break stuff to encourage progress.
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I've see labour doing the opposite of US in execution, slowly and with care not cause damage - something they're criticised for
Be aware if labour goes, all alternatives are looking to extreme measures, making what you stated a reality
The problem is few are offering a positive interventionist state or industrial policy based future