Sunday, July 5, 2026
But the state we’re in goes beyond the pros and cons of any individual politician. No mainstream party in the UK or Europe at large shows the slightest sign of acknowledging, as prelude to serious conversation, the plight we’re in due to the West’s shift, green lit by Thatcher-Reagan and driven by rentier elites, from industry to finance. The myopic greed driving that shift – offshoring wealth creation to the global south, with supply chains extended across continents as underemployment soars and corporate oligarchies enriched by neo-feudal rents capture government – is revealed and exacerbated by the war on Russia in Ukraine, though its antecedents go back much further.
And no one, Andy Burnham included, is talking about it.
The king is dead. Long live the king!
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One of the few Guardian columnists I take seriously is John Harris. Not that I agree with him on much, once we move from observation to understanding, but I do respect his willingness to get out to talk to Britons about their concerns. In yesterday’s piece he rebuts (though not enough to have me wiping egg from face) my claim. Not only is John Harris talking about the plight we’re in. So, it seems, is prime minister in waiting Andy Burnham.
Trouble is, Burnham speaks much the way, once we adjust for oceans of difference in style and tone, Donald Trump spoke until recently of Bringing American Jobs Home. As if those jobs had somehow wandered off course and wound up in Asia as a result of federal carelessness to be corrected by his steady hand – and not because America’s most powerful elites found it more profitable to have them there. 1
But back to Andy Burnham and John Harris, who writes:
Back [in 2005] even if it was the defining condition of whole swathes of the country, no one in a position of power really talked about deindustrialisation. Margaret Thatcher’s governments had already blitzed the relevant parts of the UK economy; as Labour politicians must, some of them paid lip service to an industrial revival, but the Blair-Brown era presented a decidedly mixed picture: in the absence of any meaningful industrial policy, between 1997 and 2005 more than one million jobs in British manufacturing were lost.
Twenty one long years later, the kinds of notions Blair extolled in 2005 have long since fallen from favour. Donald Trump and the populists of mainland Europe are believers in the supremacy of national economies and the glories of protectionism; even Rachel Reeves has declared that “globalisation, as we once knew it, is dead”. In that sense, the bundle of ideas Andy Burnham calls “Manchesterism” is hardly a political bolt from the blue. But as well as the radical, unprecedented devolution of power, at its core is a striking word that will soon be endlessly heard in Westminster, Manchester and beyond: reindustrialisation.
Globalisation begone, says Burnham. “We need to safeguard sovereign manufacturing and production capability across the country in critical sectors like steel, defence, energy, food and farming, rather than just being prepared to let it go, as we have sadly done in the past,” he insisted in his big speech this week. And whereas the New Labour milieu in which he cut his teeth put its faith in the featherlight wonders of financial services, Burnham clearly has visions of bustling 21st-century factories, universities that will put new industry at the cutting edge, and a country in which every region can “set clear and credible industrial ambitions”.
Harris then spends a few paragraphs reminding us of the yawning churchyard in which previous attempts at ‘safeguarding economic sovereignty’ have been interred, before continuing …
To which [Burnham’s] people have an optimistic answer: this time, government will be strategic, agile and devolved enough to deliver something much better. For all the southern sneers about the huge jump from overseeing Greater Manchester to running the country, the years Burnham spent as that city-region’s mayor fizzed with creative industrial policy, and gave him a schooling in how to make it work (witness his mayoral Good Growth Fund, which is helping firms specialising in life sciences, advanced manufacturing and green technology). Note also the critical change he has planned for the structure of his government. At the new No 10 North in Manchester, the prime minister himself will be in charge of “reform of essential utilities, reindustrialisation and the regeneration of places”. This looks like a brazen challenge to the Treasury …
Except it won’t be, as we shall see. Harris goes on:
But big questions for Burnham and his comrades are inevitably piling up. He may have given himself 10 years to succeed – which is still a long shot, electorally speaking – but how on earth can he pull off his intended revolutions while sticking to the government’s fiscal rules? Some places may reindustrialise halfway successfully, but what will AI and automation mean for actual employment opportunities?
Let me park both questions for a moment and move to another.
… My former colleague Larry Elliott has just co-authored a forthcoming book titled Reindustrialise Britain: A Strategy for Wealth Creation, which sets out how the titular transformation might be done. Here is the killer quote about what it proposes: “The total programme is about £1.41tn over 10 years, with about £850bn provided publicly and the balance private.”
Does that sound like the Great PFI Heist to you? The years of public infrastructure funded by private cash injections, with upfront financing blared across the airwaves while its swingeing repayment terms stay buried in the small print? Yeah, me too. Here’s where we get to the crux of the matter. Those fiscal rules cited by Harris, mindless adherence to which made Starmer’s regime Tweedledum to the Tweedledee of its Tory predecessors, have to be broken with. But that means breaking, by deed not gallery-playing rhetoric, with a neoliberal orthodoxy which for all its ideological bankruptcy and reality defiant models of self correcting free markets has held sway for half a century.
So not for the first time in recent weeks I’m minded of the need for a set of posts rebutting the central lie of neoliberalism; viz, that money is a divinely ordained essential of wealth creation when it is in reality a metric, switch or enabler – I’ll go into these things in the promised posts – whereby the real essentials, namely nature’s bounty plus human labour, may be utilised to their fullest potential.
(One minute spoiler: entities like the UK, USA or EU (though not Eurozone members) are not like businesses, households or local governments. Those last can run out of money but a sovereign issuer of a fiat currency cannot. If Burnham truly wants to reindustrialise the UK he must not be bound by those ‘fiscal rules’, informed by the deeply irrational claim that ‘balancing the books’ matters more than getting an economy working, which made Rachel Reeves no more effective at reducing poverty – see Margot Miller’s report yesterday on UK baby banks – than George Osborne, but did make even more obscenely rich the rentiers who rule. Instead of borrowing its own currency from the markets, the sovereign issuer of a fiat sterling can print the money it needs to get the economy working. Once the two factors of wealth creation just identified are at capacity, it may use taxation not to ‘raise money’ in the plausible but quite wrongheaded tax-to-spend model 2 but to syphon excess money out of an economy at full capacity and in danger of overheating. Other uses – wealth distribution, say, or social engineering goals like discouraging smoking and alcohol abuse – are secondary and in any case beside the point here. 3 )
And since such a break with neoliberalism, requiring as it does a defiance of the most powerful interests on the planet, would be nothing short of revolutionary I may as well go the extra mile. I said I’d return to that other question put to Andy Burnham by John Harris.
what will AI and automation mean for actual employment opportunities?
Easy. To break with fiscal rules, and neoliberal tithes to the few at exorbitant cost to the many, will require a force so revolutionary we’d no longer be talking of jobs but economies managed by and for humankind in a world where technological advance would be what it should always have been: a release from drudgery, not an instrument of our deepening impoverishment and perpetual precarity. 4
John Harris’s piece isn’t long and is worthy of your attention. Here again is the link.
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- In fairness to Andy Burnham, he does see the need for an industrialisation plan, even if his won’t stand serious scrutiny. Trump had no plan at all. His promise rested – if we’re being charitable – on the stupendous act of faith that by imposing tariffs right, left and centre, American jobs would find their own way back home: forty years of rusting plant, backward transport links, generations of lost knowhow – and a China light years ahead on all three – be damned!
- The tax-to-spend model is plausible but wrongheaded the way the pre-Copernican model of a sun orbiting the earth was.
- Talk of a sovereign government printing its own money as needed is not some manifesto for a brighter tomorrow. It is a description of what already happens. When I speak of the British state as “sovereign issuer of a fiat sterling [which] can print the money it needs to get the economy working”, I’m not saying it doesn’t already exercise that ability to create strings of noughts on Treasury computers. Just that it does not do so to benefit the many by creating prosperity and fixing the problems – from ridding our streets and woodlands of litter, and delivering quality healthcare, to giving Andy Burnham’s reindustrialisation dreams a chance of actualisation – crying out to be fixed wherever we cast our gaze on this neoliberally septic isle.
- In the case of AI that welcome would be cautious and carefully managed, for reasons that have nothing to do with protecting jobs. As with replacing capitalism’s rape of nature by economic planning no longer warped by the dictates of private profit and accumulation, that’s one for another day.
That is the situation in a nutshell. And as we can observe over the past 100-plus years of the existence of the ‘Labour’ Party, it is not (and was designed not to be) a revolutionary organisation. So really, as you say, just expect more of the same old miserable and shameful kow-towing to capitalism in its incipient neo-fascist phase.
Parliamentary Socialism by Ralph Miliband – who shares with Tony Benn the distinction of having a son or two well to the right of him in The House – did a good job more than sixty years ago of charting the party’s already long history of betrayal.
But up to that point and beyond there was cause to support Labour “as a rope supports a hanged man” (Lenin) without being a “parliamentary cretin” (Marx). Prior to Blair, Labour still had organic ties to the organised working class – making Labour “entryism”, along with Ireland and the Soviet Union, for decades the most divisive issue on the British left. Now it’s hard to make the case for Labour even being a social democrat party. Burnham may bring a short bounce but it looks like the end of the road – not just for Labour but for both of the centrist parties which have dominated British politics for a century.
Pretty much everything I write points to the need for revolution, yet the vanguard model of Marx-Leninism no longer has currency in the deindustrialised West. For reasons I’ve gone into elsewhere, that ship has sailed and if there’s another in sight nobody told me about it. To borrow from Gramsci, when that which must happen cannot happen, we live in a time of monsters …
… and to borrow from Sartre, we look to the future not with despair but stern optimism.
Of those three, the lost knowhow is the most problematic. It’s not simply knowledge per se its also skills, expertise and experience which has been deliberately and systematically purged from not just the economy but the culture. Because in the never-neverland of neo-liberalist faith the only valid and legitimate skill is management.
Just how and where, in practical terms, do you start – in a context in which the existing cultural mindset and Zeitgeist no longer has the foggiest idea about skills, knowledge, expertise and experience – in terms of pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps?
No apologies for once more dusting off Patrick Armstrong getting to the nub of that aspect of the issue:
https://patrickarmstrong.ca/2025/03/03/an-idiots-guide-to-war/
As Trump found out last year, a deindustrialised US population no longer has the necessary skills, knowledge, expertise and experience to turn investment into productive value added output. With multi-million dollar production facilities standing idle because the only way to make it work is to import the labour with those necessary attributes from outside the West and the Western mindset can’t cope with that notion. Because it means accepting the reality that Western “culture” and “civilisation” is not the state-of-the-art template and the biggest baddest and bestest in all of history (which has now ended) and which can never ever be improved upon by those self-serving Western defined “inferior” cultures and civilisations outside the West.
Hence, the USA shooting itself in the head by deporting some 300 or so Korean workers in chains rather than accept the reality of what it means to reindustrialise when you’ve spent the best part of half a century purging what is required to achieve that objective from the entirety of the system.
Which brings us to the other boot which needs to be dropped. Because the faith based dogma of Western neo-liberalism also does not do organisation either. Every unit, subunit and sub-sub-unit right down to the atomised individual is its own profit centre, operating to maximise its own profit at the expense of all the other silos. Where the left hand doesn’t give a FF what the right hand is doing and vice versa.
Cue, once more, Alex The Yorkshire Ranter on Coasian Hell:
http://www.harrowell.org.uk/blog/2018/01/31/in-the-eternal-inferno-fiends-torment-ronald-coase-with-the-fate-of-his-ideas/
And boy, the West’s cultural neoliberal mindset really, really doesn’t care. Because systemic organisation is planning; and planning is “Communism”. I could fill volumes with real life examples of the nonsense outcomes this produces which demonstrates why nothing works from the number of potholes in the road (within a decade of record investment in road resurfacing) right through to the inability of the supposed best military in all of recorded history to last more than a couple of rounds with Yemen.
The sheer inertia of the Western cultural paradigm alone will be sufficient to derail Burnham – even giving him the benefit of the doubt that he is sincere and genuine.
No quarrel from me Dave, though your craftily embedded and parenthesised allusion to our friend Francis Fukuyama neglects to say he did recant on the absurd notion of history having ended – with neoliberalism!
Whilst Fukuyama has certainly recanted his thesis, the Parish Guardians of neoliberalism and its adherents have not budged a nanometre on the basic supremacist tenet that Western neoliberalism and the culture from which it sprang represents the pinnacle which cannot be surpassed of what it means to be human.
With all other cultures and civilisations being, by definition, inferior and worthy only of either destruction or assimilation into the cult.
Like Monty Pythons Black Knight, neoliberalism continues to insist that its manifest and obvious to a blind man on a galloping horse failures are mere pinpricks which have no effect on the dogmatic belief that life has only two options – neoliberalism or total extinction.
The latest piece from Simplicius…….
https://simplicius76.substack.com/p/ukrainian-authorities-panic-as-patriots
…..provides a stark example of why neoliberalism has zero efficacy.
Quoting the Wall Street Journal on the fact that it takes two years to build a single Patriot missile (which has proven to be ineffective against more modern munitions produced by those considered to be inferior cultures and civilisations to that of the West).
Because, to quote:
And each of those different companies will have pairways contracts in the chain with penalty clauses etc as explained in the previous link provided above from the Yorkshire Ranter’s Coasian Hell series of articles.
Despite the lesson of Carillion’s collapse the Prime Contractor model remains in place simply because it is the very essence of the neoliberalist approach.
Trying to reform such a system is like attempting to prevent a scorpion from stinging the fox ferrying it across the river or the fox itself from killing chickens.
If Burnham is serious about achieving his stated objectives he will need to dismantle and throw away the neoliberal paradigm. A task that is beyond him and his pay grade.
Yes to all, though the scorpion’s boatman was not a fox but a frog.
Here’s a deep dive into the swimming abilities of Old Reynard …
The thing about deindustrialisation that Burnham must also confront is that the UK’s Defence Industry seemingly grows in size fattens itself on the decaying rump or at the expense of UK industry.
Today we are looking at a defence anchored industrial landscape created by the long decline of civilian manufacturing under the impact of neo liberalism.
UK deindustrialisation made defence one of the last remaining high tech manufacturing pillars, which in turn amplified its economic, political, and engineering influence.
It is also unusually large and growing relative to other engineering sectors and coinciding with the start of the SMO in Ukraine employment in major UK defence firms grew 19.9% between 2022 and 2023, indicating rapid expansion of a sector that is dependent on geopolitical conflict.
Does this tell us something about the workings of neo liberal fratricide it’s capacity to both destroy itself and us at the same time?
I doubt Burnham’s capacity to understand this!