Keynesian economics, de-growth, critiques of meritocracy, green industrial planning - the ideas informing left politics today are quite an amalgam. But one central thread seems to be connecting them all: state power has the solutions. As Labour’ conference comes to a close, former Tony Blair speechwriter Philip Collins reflects on the intellectual shifts on the left.

Has the left run out of ideas? Since the marriage of free market economics with social liberalism collapsed, first under the weight of governing and then in the 2008 crash, parties of the left have struggled. The share of the vote taken by social democratic parties fell from 30% in 2008 to just above 20% in 2023. There are some notable exceptions. Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump in the United States’ 2020 presidential election. A year later, Olaf Scholz became Chancellor of Germany. In 2021, Anthony Albanese’s Labor Party triumphed in Australia. Next year, Keir Starmer’s Labour Party looks certain to win the UK’s general election. Together, these parties may be the source of electoral renewal for the centre-left. But where are their ideas coming from?

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While not a full return to the demand-side approach of Keynesian economics, this new interventionist approach does include a bigger role for the state.

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Joe Biden’s victory in 2020 might have heralded the return of an old consensus. But the consensus his advisers turn to for inspiration is very old indeed. Today in Washington, the new is old. Joe Biden’s economic advisors speak of “moving the pendulum back” before Reagan. Jared Bernstein, chair of Biden’s Council of Economic Advisers, has long envisioned building an economy from the “bottom up and the middle out”, a rejoinder to the trickle-down approach of the post-Reagan years.^[1] Brian Deese, another (now former) Biden insider is more explicit, citing the “importance of Keynes” to what has become dubbed “Bidenomics”.^[2] While not a full return to the demand-side approach of Keynesian economics, this new interventionist approach does include a bigger role for the state, with investments in infrastructure, social security and healthcare. It’s a sort of Keynes plus Eisenhower.

SUGGESTED READING Rethinking the left By Susan Neiman

In the summer, Labour’s Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves was in Washington to outline what she calls “securonomics”, her own answer to the Biden plan^[3] In a speech, Reeves said we “now live in an age of insecurity where tensions are rising between the two world powers, America and China”. Her focus on global insecurity owes something to the work of British political scientist Mark Leonard, who in his book The Age of Unpeace, suggests increased connectivity forged by economic globalisation has become a source of world conflict.^[4] Such a world demands, in Reeves’ view, a “more active state” and greater “care about where things are made and who owns them”.

In Australia, Anthony Albanese’s Labor Government is pursuing a similar line of thinking. In the 1980s and 1990s, the Labor governments of Bob Hawke and Paul Keating, forerunners to Clinton and Blair, took a third way approach to the Australian economy, overseeing a programme of privatisation and reductions in trade union activity. Today, however, Australian Treasurer Jim Chalmers, a disciple of Keating, expresses a desire to break away from this old ideology. Appointed in 2021, Chalmers outlined his political philosophy in The Monthly magazine.^[5] It begins, somewhat surprisingly, with a dictum from pre-socratic philosopher Heraclitus (“no man ever steps in the same river twice”). The quote is instructive. Chalmers believes today’s crises cannot be solved by returning to familiar economic waters. He calls his new approach “values-based capitalism”: a partnership between business, labour and government.

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