Britain faces a compounding crisis - of living costs, economic performance, and public finances - that grinds on without resolution. The causes are multiple, but running through them all is a key driver of our failure to build at scale and guarantee affordability: the privatisation of essential services and systematic transfer and loss of public control of life's non-negotiables.
The solution is to build a third pillar of political economy: the Productive State. In The Productive State: A Framework for Manchesterism, Mainstream's inaugural publication, Mathew Lawrence and Alex Williams outline the case for and shape of this new economic approach, where public control is reasserted through direct engagement in public investment, provision, ownership and coordination.
The Productive State outlines a way to scale up Andy Burnham's Manchesterism nationally and offers a starting point for creating the institutional basis for a more inclusive, resilient and democratic society, where belonging is built through the things we experience in common rather than divided by what we can afford.
