It could not come at a more significant moment. Last week, Andy Burnham won the Makerfield by-election with an offer of bold economic and political reform that had public control and affordability at its core.
Bringing that vision to life is vital if we are to equip Labour with a plan to transform the country and, as we did in Makerfield last week, defeat Reform.
Our new paper by Mathew Lawrence and Alex Williams, The Productive State: A Framework for Manchesterism, outlines how we can begin to do that.
Mathew Lawrence, co-author of the paper and Director of Common Wealth, said:
Every political movement has to answer a simple question: who builds the country’s essentials, and who owns what gets built? For forty the answer was the market and private ownership. That settlement has delivered an economy that extracts when it should invest, fragments when it should coordinate, and prices for profit instead of meeting needs.
The Productive State is the antidote: a state that owns, invests and provides to make life affordable. A politics that takes back control of the foundations of a decent life: clean water, cheap energy, warm homes, reliable transport, built and run by institutions that answer to the public.
The Productive State fixes the foundations to rebuild a dynamic, secure and sovereign economy. It is the programme to deliver the security, stability and abundance the public are crying out for.
Luke Hurst, National Coordinator of Mainstream, said:
The Labour Party is at a critical juncture. Our response can’t be business as usual. We need a much more transformative offer and real debate within the party about our platform and priorities.
The Productive State: A Framework for Manchesterism aims to contribute to the necessary and urgent rethinking of Labour’s political economy by setting out how a concern for economic democracy goes hand in hand with improving productivity, state capacity, and affordability.
Miatta Fahnbulleh, Labour MP for Peckham and former Minister for Devolution, Faith and Communities, said:
The system in this country has been failing people for too long. Our economy is broken, delivering only for the privileged few.
At the heart of the cost of living crisis gripping this country is a basic truth. The essentials that everyone needs to survive - a decent home, clean water, electricity, transport - have become unaffordable for too many.
The public have put us on notice: we must deliver the change we promised in 2024, give people control back over the essentials in their lives and make life affordable again for the many up and down this country.
This essay is an important contribution to the debate on how we fix this, deliver the change that people are crying out for and start to rebuild our broken economy.
Clive Lewis, Labour MP for Norwich South and a member of the Mainstream PLP group, said:
Every transformational political project needs an economic spine running through it, holding up its vision of the good society.
The Productive State: A Framework for Manchesterism is precisely that, with ideas to spare. What it does is articulate a truth known instinctively for some time: that the foundations we all rely on - the buses, the homes, the clean water -should be built for the public and owned in common, run by bodies that earn their keep, and answer to voters rather than shareholders.
It really is the tonic for a country told for 40 years that decline was the only realistic option.
Lord Stewart Wood, Labour peer and former economic advisor to Ed Miliband, said:
Since the 2008 Crash, Labour has been unable to develop a sustainable political economy to replace the approach developed in the New Labour years under Blair and Brown. Mat Lawrence and Alex Williams’ excellent essay makes an important contribution in trying to respond to this challenge.
They set out the rationale for a role for the state in supporting the long-term productivity of public services, helping to build new infrastructure and helping to produce public goods that are vital to thriving communities. It is a valuable contribution to rethinking a social-democratic case for a more active state that helps to generate wealth and improve lives across the country.
Yuan Yang, Labour MP for Earley and Woodley, and Member of the Executive Committee of the Tribune Group of MPs, said:
This excellent paper on the Productive State is an important contribution to the debate being had across the economic policy sphere right now. Its diagnosis of the problems of privatised utilities has direct relevance for the future of Thames Water, which has failed my constituents and many others.
Change requires a diagnosis and a solution that matches the scale of our challenges, and a broad consensus is emerging within the Labour Party on the need for bolder measures to tackle the cost-of-living crisis at its root, reducing inflation and ensuring sustainable growth in the long run.
Daniel Chandler, Research Director of the Programme on Cohesive Capitalism at LSE and author of Free and Equal: What Would a Fair Society Look Like?, said:
This is not your typical think tank report - it is a genuinely original and ambitious work of political economy, which brings serious intellectual heft to Andy Burnham's emerging vision of Manchesterism.
Lawrence and Williams have achieved something I didn't think was possible: they've made public ownership feel like an idea whose time has come again, not as a nostalgic throwback to the 1970s but as the foundation of a distinctively modern economic agenda. Agree or disagree, their ideas deserve to be widely read and debated.
