In his barnstorming 2015 and 2016 Labour Leadership campaigns Jeremy Corbyn outlined a series of, very enthusiastically received policy offers of a distinctly left Keynesian, anti-austerity hue. These proposals ranged from renationalising the railways, to fully re-nationalising and refunding the NHS, establishing a universal free national education service, nationalising key utilities, controlling the banks more closely (the last two, significantly, subsequently dropped in the 2016 contest) and creating a National Investment Bank. Unfortunately since his 2015 victory essentially nothing has been done to put flesh on the bones of these proposals, or indeed to position these disconnected proposals within a wider comprehensive radical Left Economic Programme.

This seems most peculiar to those of us old enough to have imbibed in our socialist youth the concept of socialism as intrinsically involving the modification, amelioration, and re-direction of priorities created by the unfettered free play of the capitalist Market, and their eventual replacement by a better, fairer, more rational, society beyond the capitalist marketplace. This transformational process was always seen by socialists as being driven forward by conscious, democratically determined, state-led comprehensive overall direction and planning, even in a still capitalist, “mixed” economy in a process of transition.

The collapse of the socialist tradition of planning

Thirty years of neoliberalist free enterprise capitalist hegemony has bitten deeply into even the ideological mindscape of many people who see themselves as socialist radicals. So much so that the term “State-led Planning”, is too often seen as only suggesting the establishment of the oppressive structures and practices of Stalin era Soviet Five Year Plans, rather than as a normal part of not even particularly radical social democratic practice and philosophy. We certainly seem to have misplaced the left radical interventionist ideology, that still survived intact up to and including the 1980’s ‘Bennite’ Alternative Economic Strategy.

Some of the most successful examples of large scale integrated economic planning actually derive from reforming administrations in capitalist states, e.g. Japanese State-led industrialisation from a feudal base, the Roosevelt New Deal Programme in the USA in the 1930’s, or Singapore’s post-independence ‘economic miracle‘. Not something the capitalist media or neoliberalism’s apologists generally, want us to remember, and much of the left seems not to do so either.

Ironically, even the Labour Right/Centre still periodically toy with long term planning proposals. For example, Ed Miliband and Ed Balls were happy to propose ‘Wilsonite’ forward planning infrastructure development proposals in their 2015 Policy Review document One Nation Economy proposals:

Government too needs to take a more long-term approach when it comes to the major investment decisions facing the UK….. the Armitt Review, commissioned by Labour, has recommended a coherent 25-30 year national infrastructure strategy…

However the dire record of both Labour and Tory governments over the last 40 in all areas of economic forward planning cannot but cast doubt on the seriousness with which these proposals have been put forward at election time. And, unfortunately, for the PLP Right, despite recent allusions to a need for a more interventionist economic approach, we can be sure that any return to forward planning under a non Corbyn Labour government would be in the interests of Big Business, not the majority of citizens.

The centrality of state-led planning for Left Social Democracy

Large scale national economic planning was once a key feature of all European social democratic party manifestos, and political practice when in office, for much of the post WWII period. For instance, the first Harold Wilson government of 1964 to 1970 tried initially to pursue an ambitious national planning agenda. A main theme of Wilson’s economic approach was to place enhanced emphasis on ‘indicative Economic Planning’. He created a new Department of Economic Affairs (DEA) to generate ambitious targets that were in themselves supposed to help stimulate investment and growth, and to counterbalance the conservatism of the Treasury. A Ministry of Technology (known as Mintech) was established to support the modernisation of industry. The faith in indicative planning as a pathway to growth, embodied in the DEA and Mintech, was at that time, of the “Butskellite” consensus, by no means confined to the Labour Party. Wilson built on foundations that had been laid by his Conservative predecessors, in the shape, for example, of the National Economic Development Council (known as ‘Neddy’) and its regional counterparts (the ‘little Neddies’). The Wilson government’s policy of selective economic intervention was also characterised by the establishment of a new super-ministry of technology, under Tony Benn.

The various serious economic crises during the first Wilson government, and its always very limited, timid, “management of national capitalism” objectives, significantly derailed the ambitions represented by these plans and strategies from achieving a significant breakthrough in restructuring the UK economy. No such ambitions marked the 1974 to ’79 Wilson government. Nevertheless the ambitions and forward planning objectives, and establishment of powerful “driver ministries” to implement the strategy, can be contrasted very favourably with the current Left’s apparent lack of similar ambition to intervene comprehensively in the workings of the capitalist market.

What should a radical Labour Comprehensive Economic Development offer look like?

Simply assembling a bundle of disconnected desirable economic aims and outline policies, as the Corbyn team have done so far, amounts to little more than a pick’n’mix of ideas connected only by being favourably regarded on the Left. To have credibility a left economic agenda must outline our overall objectives in the economic field, then identify some key problems with the UK economy, and then outline coherent solutions. We will need a lot of carefully worked out economic statistical detail to support the basic arguments. A consultative nationwide campaign required to create such a programme would be a key part of the process.

Such a strategy would need to take a holistic approach to our economic development, from regional policy, the role of services and finance in our economic sectoral mix, forward planning of labour supply and skills – interconnected with long term education, and apprenticeship provision, forward housing needs, health service provision, etc. The document Building An Economy For The People: An alternative economic and political strategy for 21st century Britain, produced a few years ago now by a group of radical Left economists in the orbit of the CPB created an excellent benchmark model for just such a radical, transformative, strategy. Many trades union research departments also already have on their shelves important potential component parts of a future Comprehensive Economic Development Strategy.

Conclusion

Without such a plan, as a core strategic mobilising and narrative changing weapon, and without the required nationwide consultation campaign involved in creating such a National Plan, the Left in the Labour Party will never recover its ideological power as a mobiliser of a genuine anti-austerity and radical Left alternative to the current neoliberal status quo. In the event of a radical Left Corbyn-led Labour Government taking office, without a hard-nosed, well thought out, radically transformative Plan to guide its path, and anticipate the inevitable hostile Market response to an even mildly reforming anti Austerity government, a Left government with a haphazard ‘policy offer’ of disconnected ‘nice things to achieve’ will be immediately blown of course by the first harsh winds of Market reaction it meets.