Over the past eighteen months, Renewal’s editorials struck something of a recurring note: under Keir Starmer’s leadership, Labour was shrinking from ideological arguments, and lacked any sense of political direction; the government was sinking into a tepid managerialism, when what was needed was a politics of conviction.1
As I write this editorial today, Labour is heading into its first party conference with Andy Burnham as leader. In stark contrast with his unmourned predecessor, Burnham has been comfortable making explicitly ideological claims about his own beliefs, and about the country he now governs. Together, this has enabled him to paint a far clearer picture of how he sees his purpose as prime minister.
To readers of Renewal, this may prove unsurprising: after all, in our re-launch issue last spring, we carried an interview with the then-Mayor of Greater Manchester, who called for social democrats to ‘move faster, be clearer, and not get overly bogged down in the nuance’, and for the left to ‘be more confident in what it does believe is right and wrong’.2
Since becoming prime minister, Burnham has regularly advanced the argument that Britain took a wrong turn in the 1980s, when political power was centralised and economic power was privatised. He now pledges to repair the damage wrought by Thatcherism through ‘radical devolution’ to shift power outside of Westminster, and through a new economic model that will reassert ‘public control over essentials’, deliver ‘good growth in every postcode’, and (most ambitiously) put an end to ‘four decades of neoliberalism’.3
These promises have provided a new sense of purpose to the Labour Party, and a clearer orientation for the government. But key questions remain: what does ending neoliberalism look like in practice? And what is the horizon beyond it?
This issue of Renewal opens with the text of this year’s Rita Hinden Memorial Lecture, in which Yuan Yang – the Labour MP for Early and Woodley, currently serving as Parliamentary Private Secretary to Chancellor of the Exchequer John Healey – attempts to answer precisely this question.
Yang argues that the defining features of the ‘neoliberal consensus’ are the way in which neoliberal economics is presented as a totalising ‘Theory of Everything’, to which no alternative is possible, and the way in which the economy is hived off from democratic politics by neoliberalism’s establishment of false divisions between state, society, and market. She suggests, however, that this consensus does not reflect reality: internationally, neoliberalism faces sustained challenges from new forms of economic mercantilism variously practiced by China, the US, and the EU; domestically, the UK state continues to play a major role in the management of privatised utilities, albeit through regulatory agencies insulated from democratic input.
For Yang, the end of neoliberalism should not mean the end of markets or capitalism, but rather an acceptance of economic pluralism, in which different development strategies and forms of economic governance can co-exist alongside each other across different sectors and regions, with devolution enabling more experimentation. In practice, she suggests this would represent an abandonment of economic certainty, re-empowering local electorates against technocratic institutions, and giving new importance to political vision and values.
Yang’s vision of the end of neoliberalism is thus not just about a new economic model, but also about a new social and political model. Breaking down neoliberalism’s artificial distinctions between state, society, and market, she imagines a future with far greater scope for democratic participation and collective experiments in living. This is a very great strength: ultimately, a purely economistic social democracy would be a narrow and most likely unsatisfying one.
Back in the 1950s, this argument was made fiercely by Rita Hinden, the activist intellectual for whom the lecture Yang delivered is named. As editor of Socialist Commentary, and as Secretary of the ethical-socialist group Socialist Union, Hinden promoted a version of social democracy centred on the ideal of ‘fellowship’.4 Responding to the writings of her more technocratic contemporaries like Anthony Crosland and Douglas Jay, Hinden insisted that the aim of socialist politics was to reshape ‘the values which dominate our society and our thinking’.5 Redistributing material resources was insufficient: socialism was also about enabling people to ‘share in some finer, more co-operative way of living’.6
Today, there are some signs that Andy Burnham may share a similar understanding. In an essay in this issue of Renewal, the writer Julian Coman suggests that Burnham’s Catholic religious formation has attuned him to a ‘crisis of missing reciprocity and empathy’ in the country, and inclined him to a form of politics grounded in a notion of ‘common good’. In his first speech on the steps of Downing Streeting, Burnham explicitly declared his intention to ‘help people to live well’.7
Like Burnham’s promise to put an end to neoliberalism, the rhetoric of enabling people to ‘live well’ raises wider philosophical and political questions: how should we live? What does it mean to live well? And how as social democrats can we promote our version of the good life? Much of this issue is devoted to confronting these questions – and to doing so from an eclectic range of angles.
Rebecca Goldsmith, a historian, explores the changing ways in which children have written and spoken of their expectations and identities over the decades since 1945. She contrasts the contemporary prevalence of young people defining themselves in terms of a fixed ‘type’ of person (one they already believe themselves to be) with an earlier model of self-understanding centred on the question of whom one might become. Positing that this change – which forecloses the possibility of self-development – reflects social and economic conditions in which the future is occluded and young people lack feelings of agency, Goldsmith suggests ‘[t]he task for social democratic politics today is … to provide the conditions whereby people, once again, feel able to ask, ‘who shall I be?’’.
Alexandra Wanjiku Kelbert, a sociologist, uses the example of mutual aid and housing groups in neighbourhoods in Newcastle and Newham to highlight the kinds of practices that are most effective at nurturing solidarity between people of different backgrounds. While emphasising the hard work of organising that often lies behind celebrated images of multicultural working-class ‘conviviality’, she argues that such organisations ‘show that it is possible to start living today in a communal and solidaristic way that undermines the drumbeat of neoliberal Britain’.
Josh Westerling meanwhile examines his own personal struggles with living a life that conforms to his communitarian values, and with resisting the lure of ‘friction-free individualism’ and personal optimisation. Crucially, he reflects on the collective action problems and the structural features of our economy and society that make doing so considerably harder, and considers not only what individuals can do to live more connected and solidaristic lives, but also what policies at the national level could make being a communitarian somewhat easier.
Other essays consider how these questions get framed politically. Anna McShane confronts the failure of progressive politics to directly address ordinary family life, preferring to silo it into specific problems like ‘childcare’, ‘housing’ or ‘schools’; instead, she argues, we must treat social reproduction as essential to the economic supply-side. Archie Cornish critiques the tendency of social democrats to treat sport – like civic nationalism – as a kind of cultural safety valve, arguing that club football in fact offers a model of collectivism rooted in ‘affiliation’ rather than essentialist identity.
Finally, Sarah Stein Lubrano links the question of how we live to the much-discussed ‘death of deliverism’, hypothesising that part of the problem with ‘deliverism’ may have been that progressives have been trying deliver the wrong thing. Drawing on evidence from social psychology which suggests that (above a certain baseline) ‘human happiness correlates far more closely with the quality and quantity of an individual’s social relationships than with any material gains’, she argues that social democrats need to develop policies designed to build the ‘collective social wealth’ of interpersonal connection. Specifically, we need to tackle the problem of what she terms ‘social atrophy’ – the gradual habituation of individuals to living more solitary lives – and its dangerous implications for political subjectivity.
Together, these essays all make the case for a social democracy in which the ‘social’ is heavily emphasised; one animated by a belief in the importance of human connections and relationships, and which views individuals not as static or fixed in character or identity, but as constantly evolving and developing through their relationships with those around them.
Indeed, it is this distinctive moral anthropology that (in tandem with its thoroughgoing egalitarianism) most clearly distinguishes social democracy from liberalism on the one hand, and from conservative forms of communitarianism on the other. Social democracy aims neither to free individuals from their obligations to and dependence on others so as to enable the expression of an internally-located ‘true self’, nor to fix them in place as members of a predefined community, tribe, or nation, as holders of particular social roles, or as inheritors of unchanging traditions. Rather, it aims to create the social, political, and economic conditions in which individuals can develop, flourish, and find meaning through the construction of relationships with those around them.
If this definition of social democracy has at times been lost sight of, it is urgent to rediscover it today. Faced with the hollowing out of civic and associational life, the predations of the Big Tech companies which seek to dominate our lives, mediate all our social interactions, and alienate us from our own humanity, and the linked threats of what the sociologist Sacha Hilhorst characterises as the ‘radical domestication of existence’, and what Stein Lubrano diagnoses as ‘social atrophy’, we need a social democracy that is self-consciously and pro-actively pro-social, and that treats enabling and encouraging social connection as one of its defining purposes.8
For inspiration, such a ‘pro-social social democracy’ can draw on a wide range of philosophical sources, and the final section of this issue considers some examples. First, the historian Maurice J. Casey excavates the stringent activist ethic of the Internationaler Sozialistischer Kampfbund (ISK) – a Kantian socialist sect active in pre-war Germany, whose members went on to play leading and heroic roles in the anti-Nazi resistance (and whose British arm eventually became the Socialist Union group of which Rita Hinden was Secretary). For Casey, the ISK demonstrate ‘what it means to live wholly for an idea’ – specifically, an uncompromising notion of justice rooted in Kantian principles.
The ISK was firmly secular (and indeed so violently anti-clerical that they were expelled from the SPD in 1926). However, many social democrats have drawn inspiration from various forms of Christianity. Julian Coman traces the influence of Catholic Social Teaching on Burnham’s politics, while Phil Christman reviews Rowan Williams’s new book on ‘solidarity’ – a complex, theologically-grounded work that nonetheless has lessons for the left. Specifically, Christman highlights Williams’s sophisticated exploration of what it means to recognise another, and his reminder that sustaining solidarity requires symbolism and ritual comparable to Christian liturgy – ‘speech acts that are also just plain acts, in which the doing is the saying and vice versa’.
Finally, Julian McCabe reviews the latest book by the deeply strange yet deeply sincere American conservative writer Rod Dreher, exploring how Dreher’s attempt to pursue a politics of Christian enchantment has crashed into the harsh realities of the contemporary right-wing project – a violent reassertion of social hierarchies stripped of any mystifications.
There is perhaps a warning here: as we strive construct a political economy beyond neoliberalism, and a richer, more interconnected social world than that envisaged by many forms of contemporary liberalism, we cannot lose sight of who our real opponents are, or what we are up against ideologically. Practicing pro-social social democracy may at times require looking beyond liberalism; but it also requires resisting the lure of new forms of political romanticism, whose promises of meaning and community can all too often mask a politics of exclusion and of cruelty.
David Klemperer is co-editor of Renewal: A Journal of Social Democracy.
Notes
- Lise Butler, Jack Jeffrey, Morgan Jones, and David Klemperer ‘EDITORIAL: A relaunched Renewal’, Renewal: A Journal of Social Democracy, 33/1, 8 May 2025, pp5-9; Sacha Hilhorst, Jack Jeffrey, and David Klemperer, ‘EDITORIAL: Beyond Aesthetics’, Renewal: A Journal of Social Democracy, 33/2, 16 September 2025, pp5-8; David Klemperer, ‘EDITORIAL: The challenges of social democracy’, Renewal: A Journal of Social Democracy, 34/2, 14 June 2025, pp5-8.
- Andy Burnham, Morgan Jones, and Frances Foley, ‘INTERVIEW: Andy Burnham’, Renewal: A Journal of Social Democracy, 33/1, 8 May 2025, p12.
- ‘Read Andy Burnham’s first speech as Labour leader in full’, https://labourlist.org/, 17 July 2026; ‘Andy Burnham’s first speech as Prime Minister’, https://www.gov.uk, 20 July 2026; ‘PM statement to the House of Commons’, https://www.gov.uk, 1 September 2026.
- Lawrence Black, ‘Social Democracy as a Way of Life: Fellowship and the Socialist Union, 1951–9’, Twentieth Century British History, 10/4, 1999, pp499–539.
- Rita Hinden, ‘Socialism by half’, Socialist Commentary, March 1962, p14 [cited in Ben Jackson, Equality and the British Left: A Study in Progressive Political Thought, 1900-64, Manchester University Press, 2007, p187].
- Rita Hinden, ‘Equality with quality’, Socialist Commentary, July 1955, p199 [cited in Jackson, Equality and the British Left, op cit., p187].
- ‘Andy Burnham’s first speech as Prime Minister’, op cit.
- Sacha Hilhorst,bPlaces to come together: Rebuilding local solidarities against the far right, Institute for Public Policy Research, 2025, p8.