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What do Liz Truss, Rishi Sunak or Keir Starmer imagine is happening in Britain today, as crops fail, food bank queues lengthen and profits soar? How do they understand the unique combination of social, economic and ecological crises of 2022 that is already wreaking havoc on many people’s lives? The truth is, we don’t really know, and maybe neither do they.

Truss has certainly articulated a coherent ideological position – that taxes and bureaucracy have prevented the British economy from growing – but it is a thesis so easily refuted, so detached from everyday life, so obviously rooted in Thatcherite nostalgia, that it is worthless. to explain where we are. Suna, who clearly believed he could waltz through a leadership contest with the same professionally managed Instagram plays that got him there in the first place, may have been robbed by political reality, but the result has been to push him further towards the authoritarian. Tory right-wing fantasies.

And then there is Starmer, who has spent the summer in several battles with his MPs over the right to picket, and who is struggling to define Labour’s position on some increasingly heated economic policy issues. Whenever he or shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves take to the airwaves, they are met with a barrage of questions about public sector pay, nationalization and unions, and answered defensively and tentatively. They may believe (as did Tony Blair) that traditional Labor issues should not define a modern progressive party, but they have not defined an alternative vision. The contrast with Gordon Brown’s thoughtful interventions on the cost of living crisis has been stark.

If mainstream politics feels surreal and inadequate, it is partly due to the mysterious absence of a phenomenon that was treated as an integral feature of politics and policy for most of the last 150 years: ideas. Ideas have come in many shapes and sizes and from many different sources. Some, such as those who formed Keynesianism, are associated with a single individual. Others, such as those at the heart of Thatcherism, were created through an alliance of thinktanks (eg the Institute of Economic Affairs) and public intellectuals (eg Milton Friedman and Keith Joseph).

In these cases, ideas about economic reform were developed with the explicit aim of systemic transformation. For Keynes, the goal was to overturn the outdated shibboleths of laissez-faire economics that had led to the disaster of the 1930s; For the Thatcherites, it was specifically to replace the Keynesian regime that had been established since 1945. But despite the lack of political radicalism, the ideas have been important. New Labor was full of nerd talk about the “knowledge economy”, “globalisation” and the “network society”. As leaders, David Cameron and Ed Miliband sought to revive the credibility of their parties by seeking the advice and support of political gurus.

In the 1990s, political scientists and political economists developed a fascination with ideas, not just for what they contain, but for what they do in politics and policymaking. US scholars such as Peter Hall, Sarah Babb and Mark Blyth argued that changes in intellectual consensus were a crucial component of economic transformations. When the status quo is somehow disrupted (as it happened in the UK in the 1970s or on the left after 1989) ideas and intellectuals are most important in identifying ways forward and establishing a new normal. Few would argue that Britain’s status quo is working well in 2022, Truss, Suna and Starmer say the exact opposite, but there are still no new ideas. Why?

A decisive factor is the background to the most disruptive political campaign in recent British history: Vote Leave. Although Dominic Cummings may be a sharp strategist, he has never posed as an intellectual; indeed, it scorns such figures, just as Vote Leave did with the pundits. Vote Leave offered no road map to a better ‘economic model’, and little explanation or evidence of how Brexit would improve the UK. He focused entirely on the signal, connecting with people through the power of symbols and insinuations. It was policy after policy, and it worked, as Boris Johnson and Cummings showed again in 2019.

In fact, it worked so well that Britain is now mired in a policy whose consequences are clearly disastrous, but which no front-line politician yet dares to question. Against this background, Truss, Sunak and Starmer have chosen to focus all their efforts on expressing who they are and what they identify with, and to say as little as possible about how they understand the world and its crises. Where Starmer has worked closely with political thinkers, including Claire Ainsley and Deborah Mattinson (now his policy director and strategy director, respectively), has been primarily in finding ways to connect with lost voters, rather than developing a policy agenda. As all media become social networks, and as parties become perpetual campaigns, all politics become identity politics. That’s why the question of who’s in the photo standing on a picket line — instead of the actual demands of those workers — has become so important to Starmer.

Many of the think tanks that influenced Thatcherism and Blairism still thrive, but not in the same way. Shrouded in secrecy about their funders, the great New Right think-tanks of the 1970s are now better understood as… well, who knows? Liberal left think tanks such as the IPPR and the Resolution Foundation do invaluable work as critics and analysts of Britain’s dysfunctions, but none can claim to be the ‘brains’ of the Labor leadership.

Starmer’s distaste for big ideas may stem from his constant struggle to separate himself from his predecessor: Corbynism was an unusual flowering of critical economic thought, from John McDonnell’s council of economic advisers to The World Transformed festival of ideas, Starmerites are sure. ask what good it did to the party in the end.

Reality will eventually catch up with whoever finds itself in power in the coming years, just as it finally caught up with Johnson. The last six years have shown that a policy without ideas is possible, but not necessarily desirable, neither for the country nor for those in power. The abstract narrative does not solve anything by itself, but – when it comes to reality – it helps to coordinate the tools of governance, campaigning and communication, especially when the future is the most uncertain. The alternative, to borrow Cummings’s helpful metaphor, is government by broken shopping carts, running aimlessly.

William Davies’ latest book Unprecedented? How Covid-19 exposed the politics of our economy

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