Rita Hinden memorial lecture: What do we do at the end of neoliberalism?

This is the text of Renewal’s annual Rita Hinden Memorial Lecture, delivered this year on 8 September at City St. George’s University of London by Yuan Yuang MP. This lecture exists because Renewal revived it, in honour of Rita Hinden, a socialist and internationalist activist. As many of you know, after her death, an earlier iteration of the Rita Hinden Memorial Lecture ran from 1972-1981, which Renewal then revived in 2025. 

My friend and colleague The Rt Hon Dame Anneliese Dodds gave the first of this revived lecture series last year – and it’s such an honour to follow her today. 

Anneliese’s argument in her lecture last year was that delivery is necessary but not sufficient¹. In a time of fragmentation and rising far-right movements, Labour will not win simply by making the state more efficient – we also need to answer questions about power and who should have it. 

Looking back, the political events that followed her lecture in late 2025 have served as proof of her analysis. The previous Government channelled billions more spending into our essential public services, strengthened protections for workers and renters, and made great strides on the clean energy transition. These positive and popular steps were not reflected in the polls, in part because we had failed to provide the public with our analysis of power and for whom we are wielding it.

The new Prime Minister has begun to address this problem. He is able to do this because he has an analysis of the state and a political economy. He has described the goal of his premiership as ‘good growth in every postcode’, and the political economy that will get us there as ‘the end of neoliberalism’. 

So this evening, I’m going to speak about what neoliberalism is, what it gets wrong about the world, and what happens at the end of neoliberalism: the rise of pluralism and experimentation.

What do we do at the end of neoliberalism? 

At the very start of the Makerfield by-election, Andy Burnham proclaimed ‘the end of neoliberalism and trickle-down economics’. Ever since, he has used the term ‘end of neoliberalism’ to emphasise the scale of his ambition: to upend the entire system of thought that governed politics for the last four decades. Rather than just changing a policy or two, he wants to change the paradigm. 

In his first speech as Prime Minister, Burnham spelt this out as ‘a new political model and a new economic model’. The wrong turns of the past four decades were that ‘political power was centralised, economic power privatised, large parts of the country de-industrialised’².

Burnham’s use of the term ‘neoliberalism’ is at once a challenge, a provocation, and an opportunity.

It’s challenging, because the term isn’t generally used for public consumption. When More in Common polled voters in July, about four-fifths of respondents said they couldn’t describe what neoliberalism is – although those who had voted Labour or Green in 2024 were most confident, with one-third saying they could.

No wonder then that a majority – around two-thirds – of all voters say they don’t know if neoliberalism has been to blame for Britain’s problems. Labour voters were strikingly bolder than other groups on this, with around a third of our 2024 voter base saying neoliberalism was to blame for most or some of Britain’s problems.

I myself have never tried to put ‘neoliberalism’ in a Facebook caption. In many years of door-knocking, no constituent has ever said the word ‘neoliberalism’ to me on the doorstep. But they do consistently bring up not just single-issue concerns, but structural, systemic concerns, problems that are the root of all other problems. Too often, I hear their despair at the failure of our system of government as a whole: ‘politicians are all the same – they don’t change anything’. There is a general felt sense of system-level failure, even if it doesn’t come with an ‘ism’.

My former FT colleague Martin Wolf connects these two problems in his book, The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism, warning that the slow growth and inequality of rich democracies has led to popular disillusionment with both capitalism and with democracy.³ A widespread loss of faith in democracy in favour of authoritarianism and strongman rule, particularly among young people, makes it all the more urgent for social-democratic governments to rise to the occasion.

Burnham’s ‘end of neoliberalism’ is a provocation because it urges us in the Labour movement to get to grips with what has gone wrong over the last four decades. And it is an opportunity because the ‘end of neoliberalism’ also implies the rise of something new – or multiple new ideas. In short, Burnham’s provocation invites us to build a new political economy.

For the purpose of this lecture, I will treat neoliberalism as an ideology that says that all economic outcomes should be decided through market competition, where that competition happens not just nationally but globally. Under this view, the state should create and regulate markets and enforce competition, but shouldn’t be an asset-owning participant.

The neoliberal consensus relegates national borders, culture, social norms and ethics to the sidelines. It sees politics as the corrupting influence that messes up a perfect equilibrium when citizens insist on exercising democratic influence over their economy. Governments should therefore be weak relative to market participants, in order to minimise citizens’ ability to exert their political influence over the economy.

Many words have already been written about what ‘isms’ might replace neoliberalism: Manchesterism, productivism, localism, or in Burnham’s own words, ‘business-friendly socialism’. What interests me most is not the idea of a switch from one ideology to another, but the end of the neoliberal consensus: the idea that there is one economic theory to rule them all. 

Neoliberalism’s theory of social science is to see itself as the final theory at the ‘end of history’. It says that its approach is the only possibleapproach to economic governance: that it is rational, scientific and free of value judgments. It is an economic Theory of Everything. 

The neoliberal view of the world sees itself as inevitable: in Margaret Thatcher’s words, ‘there is no alternative’. It hides its political values by casting itself as post-political, by separating politics from a neutral sphere called ‘the economy’, which can be measured and governed technocratically and objectively.

What does the neoliberal consensus get wrong about the world? 

The neoliberal consensus creates a false division between the state, society, and the market. Much of the work done by governments around the world consists in maintaining markets and making market exchange possible. Thatcher’s privatisations increased the number of government agencies, through creating new markets and franchises from sectors that were previously nationalised monopolies, and thus also creating a whole load of work for regulators to maintain these as competitive markets. The state wasn’t cut back – it was repurposed to create new markets and to protect the interests of private asset-owners in those new markets.

To make exchange possible across countries, governments and central banks engage in international discussions and agreements, including in multilateral organisations that they set up following World War II for the purpose, like the World Trade Organisation, the International Monetary Fund. In short, it takes a whole lot of politics and government action to keep the global economy running. And the international cooperation that does so is already incredibly stretched.

This brings us to the second problem with the neoliberal consensus: it is a poor description of our current reality. Neoliberalism has been in crisis for some time, and for most of my adult life, since the start of the Global Financial Crisis.

This is why the Conservative Party’s criticism that Burnham wants to ‘take us back to the 70s’ is fundamentally misplaced. What it most reveals, in fact, is the lack of imagination on the right for any form of political economy that could succeed neoliberalism. It is the Conservative Party – as well as Reform – that is clinging on to a world order that is already disappearing in front of us. 

I saw this happening across the global economy in my previous role at the Financial Times. From 2016, I covered the rise of China’s economy and how it used industrial policy to protect and nurture infant industries. After the first election of President Trump, I covered the blow-by-blow of trade sanctions and tariff wars, whih pierced the post-war consensus that the WTO was built on.

When I came back to the UK to cover China-Europe trade and supply chains in 2022, the Biden administration passed the Inflation Reduction Act and the CHIPS and Science Act to funnel an unprecedented amount of public investment into clean energy and the domestic semiconductor industry. Earlier that year, in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the EU relaxed its previous prohibitions against state aid to allow member countries to offset higher energy costs.

After that, the European Commission proposed the Net-Zero Industry Act as its answer to Chinese and American green-energy industrial strategies, and in 2025, it made permanent the temporary relaxation of state aid rules to promote European competitiveness and domestic investment.

Martin Wolf heralded it in the FT: ‘we are living in a mercantilist era’.⁴ For better and for worse, the global economy has already moved on from the free-trade consensus of the 1980s, and the UK has no choice but to move with it.

What went wrong with neoliberalism in the UK? 

In the UK, the Manchester University professor Mick Moran summarised our state of affairs in his series, Manchester Capitalism, thus: ‘post-1979 structural reform promised the market, and delivered an extractive, financialised capitalism that benefits elites while ordinary citizens suffer growing problems about the supply of foundational goods and services necessary to everyday welfare.’⁵

Those foundational goods – such as housing, energy, water, and transport – are being produced at too high a cost to consumers in the UK. Therefore, as I argued previously in the pages of Renewal, the state needs to lower costs by making these sectors more productive, including through using state control more effectively.⁶

This can be seen most clearly in the example of housing: two million council homes have been sold off since Right to Buy was introduced in 1980 – and 4 in 10 of these are now owned by private landlords⁷. And yet private developers have failed to respond to price signals, meaning that Britain has consistently underbuilt housing since the 1980s, even as house prices have risen dramatically. The result is a chronic shortage of homes - a housing crisis - and deepening inequality between homeowners and renters.

The neoliberal illusion, that privatisation liberated markets from state interference, obscures the reality that the state already significantly controls our privatised utilities, but through a maze of arm’s-length regulatory agencies which operate outside of democratic influence.⁸

In the case of water, for example, the Water Act of 1989 privatised the industry. But the same year, Ofwat was created as the economic regulator to prevent monopolistic behaviour in what was a natural monopoly. If a water company doesn’t like an Ofwat ruling, it can appeal to another regulator, the Competition and Markets Authority, instead. The Drinking Water Inspectorate was created because the state still had to enforce water quality rather than leave the public-health risk to the companies. The National Rivers Authority, which later became the Environment Agency, was created because of the need to control sewage pollution from the water companies. The government also created WaterVoice committees, now the Consumer Council for Water, to advocate for consumers, who had no ability to choose between providers. In the words of the National Audit Office, despite the plurality of regulators, ‘none of the regulators have a duty to ensure there is a coherent national plan for the water sector.’⁹

Everyone knows how this story ends: with our rivers polluted and our water infrastructure dangerously lacking. The story illustrates the tensions that pile up when the state attempts to reduce responsibilities that it can’t reasonably be expected by its citizens to discharge completely, while also trying to fit natural monopolies into the model of market competition. Neoliberalism has led to a transfer of power, from the public and elected representatives, to technocrats and judges: in short, to bodies that do not have to respond to pressure from citizens. 

When I as an elected representative have problems with Thames Water, I can’t simply speak to the Water Minister in the corridors of Parliament, because she alone lacks the powers to resolve them. I have to make representations to regulators that were explicitly set up not to make political decisions – that is, to not be influenced by the democratic process. Nor can I simply negotiate with the management of Thames Water, because they answer to a much more distant set of creditors, the private-equity companies that control the company. 

Searching for accountability under neoliberalism means often trawling through layers of ownership and ending up with faraway actors whose doors are not open to us and who do not act in our public interest. Accountability is hard to pin down – and if I feel that as an MP, imagine how my constituents feel.

Now some argue that privatisation was doomed in theory, and others think it failed in practice but could have succeeded on its own terms. I am a pragmatist about this debate, as I see it as a debate about economic history, not just about theoretical models. And, to quote the statistician George Box, ‘all models are wrong, but some are useful’: all economic models simplify and thus misrepresent the real world. ¹⁰ Privatisation did have its initial benefits: investment into the water industry rose significantly in the 1990s. But it has piled up problems: that rise in investment was short-lived and plateaued from the 2000s. The financialisation of the water industry has now left the companies highly leveraged, with over £60bn of debt. And it has failed to take care of public goods. No new reservoirs in England and Wales have been built since privatisation. There may have been a version of the economy under which privatisation worked, but it’s not the one we’re living in.

Now here I want to point out that the architects of neoliberalism probably also didn’t know what they were in for, and thus they failed on their own terms. The economic historian David Edgerton argues that Thatcher, for instance, thought her methods would unleash a more competitive, more dynamic British manufacturing sector¹¹. In 1990, she told the Commons that ‘we are seeing the re-industrialisation of Britain’. She resigned two weeks later. Thatcher also envisaged a property-owning democracy where wealth was spread amongst all citizens. Evidently, this is not the case. Home ownership has become - in the words of my former colleague John Burn-Murdoch - a ‘hereditary privilege’.¹²

In his 1951 paper, ‘Neo-Liberalism and its Prospects’, Milton Friedman distinguished neoliberalism from the 18th century laissez-faire individualism that had gone before it, saying that a neoliberal state would actively police competition and maintain a stable monetary framework.¹³ He simply hoped that such a state could get us to a high level of market competition without the need for significant intervention. Sadly, the problems of the 21st century show that the most significant problems we now face – in building essential infrastructure, in transitioning to a clean-energy future, in maintaining a role for British industry in a globalised world – cannot be done without state coordination and direction. I’m not claiming to be wiser than Friedman – I simply have the benefit of seeing how things turned out.

We must take the opportunity to learn from history, not just the failures of the Thatcher era, but also what went before it, so we can design better markets and new public bodies for the 21^st century.

The end of consensus, the start of pluralism 

The end of the neoliberal consensus does not mean the end of capitalism or of market economies. It means the recognition of the economic pluralism that has always existed: that many varieties of capitalism and economic governance can co-exist between different regions, sectors and businesses, even within one country. 

For those who see neoliberal economics as a Theory of Everything, the end of neoliberalism can sound like the end of private enterprise. Yet pluralism means a place for competitive markets. There are important truths in the idea that humans and companies seek to maximise their own benefits and respond to incentives. Market competition is a powerful dynamic that can drive down prices for consumers and bring about new innovations. Enabling individuals to set up their own businesses, and opening up to global trade, was arguably one of the biggest drivers of poverty alleviation in living memory. My own grandparents count among the 800 million people that rose out of extreme poverty in China following its 1980s market reforms. I write about the incredible transformation of the Chinese economy and its impact on families in my book, Private Revolutions. 

Yet no state leaves everything down to market competition, nor does there exist any country in which everything can be privately bought and sold. In many parts of the UK, the boundaries of the market and public control have been drawn in the wrong places and with the wrong effects. Unregulated and undeserved monopolies abound in too many places. Property management agents, for example, enjoy the unfettered ability to raise rents from the captive residents of new-build estates and blocks of flats. 

Competition is not present or impossible in some sectors, benefitting the tiny elite who can enter those markets at the expense of consumers: what Brett Christophers has analysed as ‘rentier capitalism’.¹⁴ In other sectors, competition has meant a race to the bottom for unsustainable labour practices, not a race to the top for innovation. Martin Wolf has called this ‘rigged capitalism’.¹⁵

Varieties of capitalism 

By being a totalising view, the neoliberal consensus obscures the many varieties of capitalism that exist not only across countries but also within one country, and the role that culture and institutions play in shaping business behaviour. Different forms of corporate governance, culture, and ownership abound in our economy: a board of local residents will run their nursery differently to a board of foreign private equity managers.

In the UK energy sector alone, we have hyper-local co-operatives like Reading 

Hydro, a slew of privately-owned or publicly-listed retailers like Octopus and SSE, as well substantial amounts of foreign state ownership in gas and electricity distribution networks, and foreign government control as well as ownership of generators through France’s EDF.

We also, of course, have traditional private businesses that lead the competition around the world. As the Chancellor said on Monday: ‘The UK is home to nearly half of the most innovative companies in Europe. We’re world-leaders in life sciences, in defence technology, in creative industries, financial services. Our science and research base is world-beating; our capital markets are some of the largest and most vibrant anywhere in the world, and the UK stock market is hitting all-time highs.’¹⁶ Many of these companies are situated near my home – in Reading in the Thames Valley – but there is more we can do to build world-leading companies in every part of the UK.

Doing so will require strong and capable local government. And here there’s already a variety of development strategies being pursued by local authorities and local communities. The ‘Preston Model’ popularised community wealth-building within the UK, with local authorities like Wigan adopting their own programme to keep public money, land, jobs, goods and services in the local community.

Since regional devolution began in 2009, Greater Manchester has grown by nearly 45%. As the Prime Minister regularly reminds us, this is a former industrial heartland that has become the fastest growing city region in the country.

Greater Manchester became the first city-region outside London to franchise its buses in 2017. Public control over fares, routes and timetables, led to a huge uptake in usage. And despite Thatcher-era laws to limit what local authorities can own and do, we have ten councils that own their own bus services (Reading being one). In Greater Manchester, there are similar success stories to tell in housing, employment and health. That’s not to say there haven’t been issues along the way, but we should learn from success and embrace the variety and diversity that exists within capitalism.

The neoliberal consensus obscures this diversity. We already have a variety of economic models within one country, some chosen through local democratic deliberation. We are already quite eclectic, and we can – and should – get more so. 

Devolution means experimentation 

In his first speech to Treasury staff as Chancellor, John Healey described his priorities as ‘bringing down the cost of living and beginning a new era of devolution and public control.’¹⁷ Fiscal devolution means the ability of regions to choose their own economic strategy.

Whether you are comfortable with this idea depends partly on whether you think economic governance is, essentially, a solved problem: one for civil servants to oversee from the centre, rather than one for local people and their elected politicians to determine.

In my view the existence of uncertainty in economic outcomes, and the presence of multiple paths or equilibria which we can select from, means that the power to decide between economic strategies should be placed in the hands of the people living in the places that will pursue those strategies. In his speech on Monday, the Chancellor began to set out how this will work: ‘a strong, strategic centre – with No10 North and the Treasury, changed to enable business, charged to enable economic growth.’¹⁸

After all, growth is not something that the state can achieve alone: it is achieved by the millions of people who make up our country. 

Embracing uncertainty 

Neoliberalism was built for a more stable time than ours. During the Great Moderation era, a time of low inflation, steady growth and few shocks from the mid-1980s onwards, central banks and governments could keep a light hand on the tiller while steady growth and low inflation prevailed. That period ended abruptly with a financial crisis that central banks and governments failed to foresee. Since then, a number of global shocks to prices have happened with alarming frequency and increasing intensity, from the Covid pandemic and supply-chain blockages, to the US-China trade war, to the invasions of Ukraine and Iran, to climate-induced crop failures, wildfires and droughts. All these have left British businesses and families exposed, because we did not manage the risks of greater global integration while reaping the rewards.

What I find most interesting about the end of the Great Moderation is the confidence that economists attached to their ability to manage the future. In 2003, for example, Robert Lucas told the American Economic Association that the discipline of macroeconomics had succeeded at figuring out how to prevent depressions.¹⁹ Federal Reserve Chair Ben Bernanke, in 2004, weighed whether this period of stability was a result of luck, or good management – and decided it was the result of good central-bank management.²⁰ Olivier Blanchard, writing months before the financial crisis broke, argued that the theoretical battles in macroeconomics had been resolved and that views had converged on consensus.²¹

That these leading economists could be proved wrong is not a failure of their intellect. For me it illustrates the human tendency to seek certainty and comfort in one’s own ability to affect the future. For people to have confidence in a technocratic state, we must have confidence in the methods and economic theories espoused by the technocrats. But perhaps Bernanke’s greatest luck was to be a technocrat during the early 2000s, before fortunes shifted. 

In the absence of technocratic certainty lies the uncertainty inherent to politics. Community organiser Marshall Ganz defines leadership as ‘accepting responsibility to create conditions that enable others to achieve shared purpose in the face of uncertainty.’²² That is why we look to leaders – in particular, leaders with a clear set of principles and ideology – to chart a path through terrain where technocratic methods alone can’t guide us. At the end of neoliberalism comes the return of political vision. 

What comes after the end of neoliberalism? 

If neoliberalism meant a deliberate transfer of power from politicians to regulators and market monopolists, then ending neoliberalism also means giving power back to the people. There are many ways in which this can be done: through increasing the democratic scrutiny of regulators, devolving power from regulators back to elected politicians in Westminster, devolving power from regulators to local politicians across the country, and directly devolving power from elected politicians to directly participative democratic bodies, such as citizens’ assemblies. 

At present, many independent regulators only ever answer to the public when answering questions in front of Parliamentary Select Committees, which are composed of MPs. This form of parliamentary scrutiny is incredibly valuable, partly because it is so rare. You can tell it matters because civil servants spend so long preparing for them through their media training to avoid saying anything they shouldn’t. In the words of one of my former colleagues on the Treasury Select Committee, ‘After a few months I realised that a lot of the jargon and expert language that witnesses came back with was being used as a façade – to avoid answering a question in a straightforward way.’ 

Technical language has its place, but technocrats – including economists – would be better equipped at communicating to the public, and less able to side-step questions, if they had to answer questions from a wide audience more frequently. Similarly, the work of Select Committees too often only reaches a narrow selection of policy wonks, unless there is sufficient media interest. 

One way in which parliamentary scrutiny is being taken out into the public is via the use of public assemblies. Earlier this year, the Home Affairs Committee started rolling out deliberative democracy events on the topic of immigration, with around a hundred people paid to attend each event, in collaboration with Demos and King’s College London.²³ Their brief is to explore trade-offs; in particular, the trade-off between the government’s goal to reduce net migration, and businesses’ and public services’ need for immigrant workers.

Deliberative democracy will matter even more in a post-neoliberal society. To use the tools of power well, we also have to equip people with the ability to use them. And conversely, if we want electorates that are able to handle trade-offs, then they need to be given meaningful trade-offs to consider.

And that means that, in a world where Burnham and Healey have succeeded in bringing about a new era of devolution and public control, a higher level of honesty and transparency will be needed to hold together the social contract. 

That means the following:

Media reporting, particularly on economic issues, needs to highlight trade-offs and the existence of political choices, rather than presenting decisions as inevitable – as recommended by the BBC’s independent Dilnot review in 2022 of its economics coverage.²⁴

Politicians need to be more honest with voters about trade-offs, and voters can be better equipped to understand and debate those trade-offs.  

People should feel that their elected representatives are trying to solve the problems that matter most to them, and if they do fail, understand the reasons for their failures. 

And, when a politician fails to deliver something the public have demanded because it is in the hands of an independent body, that independent body should also be subject to public scrutiny.

This change is already happening – on Monday the Government issued measures to increase the agency of ministers in making decisions, for example in limiting judicial reviews on major infrastructure so that ‘vexatious litigation cannot block economic growth’.²⁵

Now, I know that many of those in the audience today are in the business of producing ideas and making intellectual contributions to our Labour movement. When I left the Financial Times to stand for Parliament, I left partly because I had confidence in my colleagues – and the thinkers and writers in this audience – to continue to do good work. I had little confidence, however, that the Conservative MPs of the day would turn good ideas into action, and so I thought I would be of greater use in Parliament.

But the production and communication of ideas matters even more in a post-neoliberal world, and there’s much work to be done here.

Injecting pluralism and debate into the economics curriculum is a cause I spent my first few years as an economics graduate fighting in the early 2010s, when I was building the charity Rethinking Economics. It’s an issue that matters not only inside the academy but outside of it. As one former Treasury permanent secretary remarked to me, a small dose of undergraduate economics and an over-confidence in one’s methods yields the most uncreative civil servants. That’s why intellectual curiosity and pluralism is one of the essential tools we require in a post-neoliberal world.

Friedman diagnosed a similar moment to ours in 1951: ‘Ideas have little chance of making much headway against a strong tide; their opportunity comes when the tide has ceased running strong but has not yet turned. This is, if I am right, such a time, and it affords a rare opportunity…to affect the new direction the tide takes.’²⁶

So, because I’ve quoted Friedman, I’ll allow myself to finish by going back to Robert Skidelsky, a dear old friend and mentor of the Rethinking Economics movement, who passed away a few months ago, and to whom we owe a great deal.

In 2018 he wrote: ‘We are at a junction where the whole of macroeconomic policy is up for grabs. Everything we thought settled by the Great Moderation of the fifteen pre-recession years, a period of exceptional stability in Western economies, has been thrown into turmoil by the scale of the collapse of 2008-9 and the feebleness of the recovery from it. That poses a mighty challenge for the ruling economic doctrines. Economics in the future will need to reflect much more on where it has come from and what it needs to do.’²⁷ It’s time to build a new political economy, and that is the task for all of us in this room.

Yuan Yang is the Labour MP for Earley and Woodley, currently serving as Parliamentary Private Secretary to the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Before standing for Parliament, she spent eight years working as a journalist at the Financial Times, where she was FT Europe-China correspondent, and before that their Beijing deputy bureau chief. In 2024 she published her first book, Private Revolutions, which was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction. The book describes China’s economic transformation and the rise and fall of social mobility, told through the coming-of-age stories of four millennial Chinese women.

Notes

1. Anneliese Dodds, ‘Why Labour mustn’t lose: social democracy vs the bros’, Renewal: A Journal of Social Democracy, 33/3-4, 2026, pp6-22.
2. ‘Andy Burnham’s first speech as Prime Minister’, https://www.gov.uk, 20 July 2026.
3. Martin Wolf, The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism, Penguin, 2023. 
4. Martin Wolf, ‘Who will win the war of neo-mercantilists?’, https://www.ft.com, 22 July 2026. 
5. Mick Moran, ‘Manchester Capitalism series introduction’, Manchester University Press, 2016.
6. Yuan Yang, ‘Growth and Productive Investment’, Renewal: A Journal of Social Democracy, 34/Special Issue, pp35-44.
7. Alex Diner and Hollie Wright, Reforming Right to Buy, New Economics Foundation, 10 May 2024.
8. Mathew Lawrence and Alex Williams, ‘The Productive State: A Framework for Manchesterism’, https://www.mainstreamlabour.org/, 21 June 2026.
9. ‘Regulating for investment and outcomes in the water sector’, National Audit Office, 25 April 2025. 
10. George Box, ‘Science and Statistics’, Journal of the American Statistical Association, 71/356, 1976, pp791-799.
11. David Edgerton, The Rise and Fall of the British Nation: A Twentieth-Century History, Allen Lane, 2018.
12. John Burn-Murdoch, ‘Home ownership in Britain has become a hereditary privilege’, https:// www.ft.com/, 14 July 2023. 
13. Milton Friedman, ‘Neo-Liberalism and its Prospects’, Farmand, 17 February 1951, pp89-93.
14. Brett Christophers, Rentier Capitalism: Who Owns the Economy, and Who Pays for It?, Verso, 2020.
15. Martin Wolf, ‘Martin Wolf: why rigged capitalism is damaging liberal democracy’, https://www.ft.com/, 18 September 2019.
16. ‘Chancellor John Healey’s Growth Speech 2026’, https://www.gov.uk/, 7 September 2026.  
17. ‘Chancellor John Healey delivers speech to Treasury staff’, https://www.gov.uk/, 22 July 2026.  
18. ‘Chancellor John Healey’s Growth Speech 2026’, op cit. 
19. Robert Lucas, ‘Macroeconomic priorities’, American Economic Review, 93/1, March 2003.
20. Ben Bernanke, ‘Remarks by Governor Ben S. Bernanke At the meetings of the Eastern Economic Association’, https://www.federalreserve.gov/, February 20, 2004.
21. Olivier Blanchard, ‘The State of Macro’, NBER, Working Paper 14259, August 2008.
22. Marshall Ganz, Leading Change: Leadership, Organization, and Social Movements, Havard Business Press, 2010. 
23. ‘Home Affairs select committee to hold “citizen-assembly style” events on immigration’, Demos.co.uk, 19 January 2026. 
24. Michael Blastland and Andrew Dilnot, ‘Review of the impartiality of BBC coverage of taxation, public spending, government borrowing and debt’, BBC, November 2022. 
25. ‘Chancellor John Healey’s Growth Speech 2026’, op cit. 
26. Milton Friedman, ‘Neo-Liberalism and its Prospects’, op cit. 
27. Robert Skildelsky, Money and Government: The Past and Future of Economics, Yale University Press, 2018.