I've now had the chance to read this. I have also read some of the other articles posted up here subsequently. The FT piece isn't bad. It is quite correct to suggest that Johnson and Starmer, and the parties that they lead, do not have an idea, or a convincing vision, of the type of economic landscape that needs to be adopted post-Brexit and that large swathes of Britian's political and narrating class is currently paralyzed as a result: rabbits in the economic headlights. The article doesn't say, but should, that one effect of this is that they do not have a serious approach to dealing with the current crisis either, caused by rising prices and inflation caused by excessive corporate profit and the historically unprecedented transfer of wealth from us to the 1%. A process which frankly dwarves the sum of £40bn discussed by the FT in its article.
The article also, conveniently, overlooks 40 years of economic activity and policy making in the UK - whilst it was part of the EU economic arrangements - that perhaps better suggests why the UK economy is tanking and why wages are falling. Low levels of investment, poor productivity, a lack of international competitiveness and exports failing to keep up with imports are not problems that have arisen in the last 5 years. They have been gradually embedding facts and deformities of the British economy since 1973. The manufactured goods base in the accounts for less than 10% of the economy: the smallest in the G7 and across much of Europe. Almost everything that we buy – TVs, washing machines, mobile phones – is imported (and imported from outside of the EU) and has been for decades. Britain has not had a trade surplus for almost 50 years and our trade deficit has grown each year (arguably the decline has been sped up since the pandemic and Brexit but the underlying trend is much longer run). So, when economists say that the British economy is performing worse than the EU (which is true, but is merely comparing two dreadful economic forecasts) they are correct but conveniently overlook the structural economic reasons.
The reality is that in or out of the EU the grim spectre of the Thatcherite market economy on the British economy and its operation for the last 40 plus years has led to decades of falling wages, a historic rise in the gini coefficient that measures inequality, a collapse in the ability of ordinary people to build decent lives and an economy floating on a sea of debt, credit and property speculation. Money is used to buy money. It is not invested, it is accumulated and retained.
What would be a disaster for the left, compounding other disasters, would be to now swim along with liberalism in assuming that the answer and the necessary debate about these systemic problems is best done through the prism of the EU. What is needed instead is a vision for what a better economy: based on economic justice, collective bargaining and a generational shift in money and wealth away from the 1% and back towards the rest of us: and to consider how that might be achieved post Brexit. Neither the EU or the existing order in the UK offers anything like this.
As we are on the Brexit thread I will say again that its real tragedy was the defeat of a disorientated Labour leadership and a manifesto that at least pointed in that direction, and would in a post Brexit economy have taken a small but seismically important step away from the path we've been on since 1973. As for those who say an alternative vision is too ambitious and can't be done I'd point out that the left used to possess such ambition and ideas and went out and argued for them and stood by them:. In fact, in 1973 the Labour Party's Alterative Economic Strategy set out an economic plan - also ground in an anguished debate about the EU - based on a political understanding of economic policy as class struggle and aimed to impose greater working class political control on each of the forms of capital and approach that in 2022 is essential to unpick the damage of the last 50 years. Perhaps, the need - and the method of achieving it - for a similar strategy is a more pressing question than which form of neo-liberal economic arrangements is the least worst?
