This is the abstract for the article 'Labour's choices: The political economy of Keir Starmer's party', by Colm Murphy. It reads: 'This article explores the dilemmas at the heart of the economic strategy of Keir Starmer’s government by tracking developments in British (centre-)left political economy since the Global Financial Crisis of 2008. It first traces the emergence of a shared narrative of political economy circulating among the UK and transatlantic centre-left, as well as some further left and right, over the 2010s and into the early 2020s. Identifying the core diagnoses and prescriptions contained within this narrative, this article situates them in economic, ideological, and political developments since 2008. It then traces the fragmentation of this economic imaginary from 2022. In combination with an unhappy transition to office, this fragmentation has generated a deeply confused and internally contradictory economic strategy in the UK Labour government. This paper then explains this process by placing ideological and political developments in their material and external contexts. A worsening macroeconomic and geopolitical context actively decomposed the constituent parts of the narrative and challenged some of its assumptions; in turn, this revived submerged disagreements within the governing party. The paper consequently argues that while these tensions can be explained partly by ideological closure, they derive to a significant and probably greater extent from institutional and material factors, especially questions of statecraft and the UK’s misfiring growth regime in an increasingly gloomy global context. The paper ends, however, by cautioning against an overbearing determinism. It indicates the remaining arenas for political agency open to the government, should it prove able and willing to act.'
My latest article is out in British Politics. I try to account for the distressed confusion gripping the UK government's economic strategy. In honour of the article's namesake, I include a tortured football analogy.
It's free to read (open access) here.
link.springer.com/article/10.1...
