Will the Labout Party remember its interest in the Foundation Economy ?

With a General Election in the UK now called for July 4^th, 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, 

stronger rights to collective bargaining, higher wages, and investment 

in technological innovation and skills.

• Second, families and households. Austerity, low wages and the 

burdens of care are putting millions of families under pressure. We need to protect services that support families and do much more to eradicate child poverty, which is rising.

• Britain is one of the most centralised countries in Europe. We must 

devolve decision making, resources and tax-raising powers to cities, towns and counties. Involving local communities and their insights will lead to better policy, and more responsive and cost-effective public services”.

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 on 

shared 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

The New Municipalism

There has been an upsurge of recent interest in Britain in what Cynthia Cockburn in 1977 called “The Local State” – best exemplified by John Benington’s “Local Government becomes Big Business” which I used to be able to download but am no longer able to. So I’ll have to fall back on one of the last CDP’s publications - Gilding the Ghetto” (1977) to give readers a flavour of the critical challenge the radicals of the day were posing to the Labour government of the time. Little did they realise what was waiting for them with Margaret Thatcher! Sadly, local government has become a mere shadow of itself as a result of Tory government austerity and the severe budget cuts this has inflicted on municipalities since 2010. For readers wanting to have a sense of the  damage this has done, I would recommend Reclaiming Local Democracy – a progressive future for local government by Ines Newman. It may be a decade old but it is a very clearly written celebration of the ethical importance of this body which contains a useful glossary.

As far as the idea of a new wave of radical municipalism is concerned, the best article is probably Whatever happened to municipal radicalism? by Matt Thompson (2023) which is a very useful overview of the literature on MR which focuses particularly on cooperatives, social enterprise and the Plymouth and Preston examples

Other Recommended Background Reading

Cake and Ale – the role of culture in the new municipalism M Banks and K Oakley Cultural Trends vol 33 2024 Glasgow was one of the first cities to gain the award of of European City of Culture and this is an article on the relative neglect of culture in the municipalist movement

Radical Municipalism in Crisis Roch, Russell and Thompson; Urban Studies vol 60 issue 11 2023 which delves into what are identified as four salient dimensions marking this terrain – economic reorganisation, democratisation of political decision-making, feminisation of politics, ecological transformation – as a multi-dimensional lens through which to introduce, and situate within the wider literature.

Strategies for a New Municipalism Russell et al Urban Studies journal 2023 A rather academic article arguing that while recent contributions on new municipalist practices have focused on a wide range of themes – including technopolitical participatory innovations (Charnock et al., 2021), municipal energy democracy (Angel, 2021), water remunicipalisation (Popartan et al., 2020), participatory governance (Bua and Bussu, 2021), care regimes (Kussy et al., 2023), urban food policy (Morley and Morgan, 2021), refugee reception (Garce´s-Mascaren˜ as and Gebhardt, 2020) and electoral platforms (Blanco et al., 2020) – there has been little focus on the issue of land, and the role that alternative approaches to land ownership and stewardship may play in municipalist strategy.

Bridging Bureaucracy and Activism Urban Studies 2023 An interesting article which looks back at the work of the GLC in the 1980s

Placing the Foundational Economy “Environment and Planning” journal; B Russell et al (2021)

an excellent analysis of recent Labour thinking about the FE which I posted about here

Community Business in Scotland – an alternative vision of enterprise culture 1979-1997 
 G Murray 20th Century British History vol 30 number 4 (2019) A fairly definitive and 

overdue review of a rather different approach to the local State which developed in 

Scotland in the recent past  

From self-help to class struggle – revisiting Coventry CDP in the 1970s M Carpenter etc Community Development Journal 2017. An excellent assessment of one the various phases of the first of several community-based projects funded by a Labout government

The Limits of Local Power – a Sheffield Case study (1986); the thesis of Alan Cochrane, one of the key writers about local economic development

Community Business Works Gulbenkian 1982. An important report which leftists have tended to ignore