With a General Election in the UK now called for July 4th, I thought it appropriate to remind readers of a post from last year on the Foundation Economy. Keir Starmer has been the Leader of the English Labour party for some 4 years but has made little impact. The party has enjoyed a 20% lead in the polls for several years but that is basically down to the total mess Conservative governments have made of things - not just since the June 2016 Brexit referendum but since the austerity Cameron and Osborne imposed on the nation in 2010. That’s 14 years of suffering for those on low and insecure income
(about a quarter of the British population). The Labour party’s 2017 Manifesto,
developed under Jeremy Corbyn, was very popular not least for its commitments
to bring privatised industries back into public ownership and had been underpinned
by this earlier report on Alternative Models of Ownership. But Corbyn’s leadership
was under constant attack by both the mainstream media and the majority of
the parliamentary Labour Party and the party crashed in December 2019 to its
worst defeat since the 1930s – losing almost 50 seats in the north of England
which had been Labour for almost a century (but which had voted for Brexit). Starmer (unlike Corbyn) had been on the Remain side of the argument and, on
Corbyn’s resignation, clothed himself in respectable leftist garments for his
campaign for the leadership which were discarded quickly on his victory. In 2018 Rachel Reeves (who became in 2021 the party’s Shadow Minister of
Finance) published a significant 66 page pamphlet entitled “The Everyday Economy”
and the “Political Quarterly” ran a short but well-referenced article about it,
leading to a further series of articles in the journal in 2022. Since then,
various articles and pamphlets have appeared about the concept which was
developed a decade ago by the Foundational Economy Collective people at
Manchester University. Reeves meant three things by the term -
“First, work and wages. People need more control in their workplace,
in technological innovation and skills.
Second, families and households. Austerity, low wages and the
Britain is one of the most centralised countries in Europe. We must
But that was some years ago. Keir Starmer upped the ante in a series of
announcements about Labour party policy culminating in “Mission Economy”
which is as technocratic statement of commitment to economic growth as
you are likely to see – with the prints of Mariana Mazzucatu all over it.
The question is how on earth this can be squared with the very different
approach embedded in the discourse about the “Everyday/Foundational economy”?
In such diverse places as Barcelona, Wales, Scotland and Manchester,
experiments have been underway in the past few years – often with the help
of the Centre for Local Economic Strategies (CLES), to embed this
more localist approach which runs so counter to neoliberalism
The foundational approach differs from the “productive economy” approach which
has dominated centre-left (and centre-right) politics in the UK and elsewhere since
the late 1940s. Its focus is on the possibility and necessity of local initiative in a
foundational politics which breaks down the established distinction between
economic and social policy. Senior figures in the UK Labour party have been searching for a narrative based onshared values or national identity – but an electorally credible narrative has to be
based on the deliberative and performative basis of successful local initiative.
So that the social democratic offer becomes “trust us to do more of what we have
already done to deliver a future that works for you”.
We have feminism to thank for this – it was 1996 when the feminist collective
Gibson-Graham published The End of Capitalism (as we knew it), a much-neglected
classic which set in motion a way of looking at economics which has clearly
inspired such authors as Kate Rawarth and Ann Pettifor. It was followed by
2 further books, one of which occupies the first place in the list below. The full Resource on the Foundational Economy (in chronological order)
can be downloaded from
https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2023/02/labour-schizophrenia.html
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