Something more significant than the move against Andrew Fisher happened on the right of the Labour Party last week. It was Tuesday morning, in fact, and the occasion was Liam Byrne’s speech to the Policy Network.
Of course, MPs, particularly former ministers, give speeches to think tanks all the time and most float under the radar, noted only by the hardest of hardcore politics watchers and professional policy wonks. It’s just a shame this one hasn’t received wider coverage because in it, as one of its leading figures, Liam reads Blairism and New Labour the last rites.
In a nutshell, neoliberalism is dead. The unthinking application of its policies are undermining the health of capitalism, both in terms of destroying the social capital on which market economies depend and proliferating the short-termist culture that goes hand-in-hand with widening global inequality. Hence Labour has to move away from an unquestioning embrace of markets and start thinking another kind of capitalism, or what Liam refers to in his speech as ‘entrepreneurial socialism‘. Continue reading
