The death and life of the center-left
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Welcome to the LSE Events Podcast by the London School of Economics and Political Science. Get ready to hear from some of the most influential international figures in the social sciences.

Right. Good evening, everybody. Sorry for the slightly late start. One of our speakers is stuck in London traffic and not an unusual event. But he will be arriving, Wilhelm will be arriving, hopefully we'll just be able to slot into the discussion. So good evening, welcome to the LSE. My name is Jonathan Hopkin. I'm a professor in the European Institute here and I'm chairing this, what promises to be a very interesting discussion.

So obviously the title of the talk, Death and Life of the Center Left, is kind of every conversation I've had as an academic in the last 30 years, really. But we have, it's a really interesting time to be talking about this, and we have some fantastic speakers to shed some light on where the center left is going.

So first speaker will be Robert Kuttner, who is co-founder and co-editor of the American Prospect magazine. He was also a columnist for Businessweek and the Boston Globe. He's the founder of the Economic Policy Institute and serves on its board and is author of multiple books about the global political economy today.

and American politics and progressive politics, but there is no time to name them all. So he will be speaking first, and we're really looking forward to that.

We also have Stephanie Ricard from the government department here at LSE, who is a professor of political science, works in the field of international political economy. She's published widely in a range of journals on subjects such as trade, inequality, distributional politics. She's also an editor of International Organization, which is probably the premier journal in international political economy.

And she also wrote a book, an award-winning book called "Spending to Win," which looks at the economic geography of economic policy and distributional politics.

And on the furthest to the right in the panel we have Will Hutton, who is a very well-known commentator, obviously, on political economy, politics and economics of the UK in particular. And he has been a columnist for The Observer, is currently president of the Academy of Social Sciences and co-chairs the Purposeful Company.

a think tank that argues that companies' intrinsic purpose should drive their strategy, values and ultimately profit. So I should mention that this event is co-sponsored by the Ralph Miliband Program, which was set up in 1996 thanks to a generous donation from a former PhD student who's inspired by Ralph Miliband's contribution to social thought.

So we run a lecture series every year here at LSE and lots of interesting events. So, you know, follow the Ralph Milliband program if you can. And this reflects a broad interest.

in politics, political economy, progressive politics here at LSE. The other co-sponsor is the Programme on Cohesive Capitalism, which is a major multidisciplinary initiative to investigate new political and economic paradigms, institutions and policies.

that could serve the common interest. So this is led by Professor Tim Besley here at LSE, based in Stickard and the Department of Economics. So this is quite a major program trying to think about how we can make capitalism better, I guess, is one way of putting it.

If you're into social media, there's a hashtag for this event, which is #LSCEvents. So feel free to tweet or skeet about what you hear. Our first speaker, Robert, will speak for Håfanand and we'll have comments and replies from Stephanie and Will for about 10-15 minutes each, and then we'll open up for Q&A. So get your questions ready.

Please make them questions. Please make them sort of concise and intelligible. I will have also an iPad telling me questions coming from our online audience, which we also welcome. And yeah, we try and get as many questions in as possible and get some debate going with our panelists. So that's enough for me. I'll hand over to Robert. Thanks for coming and I hope you enjoy this event. Thank you.

Great to be here. This is a homecoming for me in two senses. I was a student here in the 1960s. I was eager to come to the LSE for what they called a junior year abroad for Americans because the economics they were teaching me at Oberlin College was hopelessly free market, and I wanted to study political economy.

But to my chagrin, I found that economics at the LSE in the 60s was in a period of monetarist captivity. But I was still able to cobble together a nice program from other departments, and my year here set me on a career as a political economist. Daniel and I planned this electric topic last September.

And a few things have happened since then. Donald Trump got elected a second time. This time he has gone about systematically destroying both American democracy and the modern state, as well as the global trading system. So besides thinking about what sort of democratic left might revive, we also need to consider the survival of democracy itself. And of course, the two things are related because the more credibility there

that the progressive left has with public opinion, the more chance we have of rescuing democracy. I don't especially like the term "center-left" because it tends to blur two very different things: the robust progressivism of a Franklin Roosevelt or a Clement Attlee and the destructive neoliberalism of Clinton, Blair, and Schroeder. Roosevelt and Attlee were serious about regulating capitalism.

They were serious about complementing regulation with public ownership, comprehensive social insurance, and effective trade unionism. The politics reinforced the economics, empowering a progressive governing majority. The neoliberalism of Clinton, Blair, and Schroeder was not all that successful as a general economic topic, but it was a superb political success for elites.

It left working families more precarious economically without a credible political champion. It seeded the 2008 financial collapse, and of course it paved the way

for a neo-fascist reaction. Globalization on corporate terms was at the core of this ideology, not just by promoting outsourcing, but by strengthening the political power of finance to resist regulation, weakening labor, and undermining the capacity of the nation state to regulate capitalism. Trump and company channeled the backlash. Something similar happened in nearly all of the Western countries. Brexit was a variation on the theme.

This much is well known and has been the subject of a great deal of commentary and scholarly inquiry, some of the best of it by people in this room. To advance the conversation, I'd like to explore whether there was something inherent about the international system or the stage of capitalism that pushed our political economy in the neoliberal direction and compelled the center-left to sign on.

Nothing is inevitable, but were there propensities? Konrad Adenauer once said that history is the sum total of things that might have been different. There's a book that I highly recommend by the American historian Jefferson Cowie titled The Great Exception. It's ostensibly a book about Roosevelt's New Deal, but it had broader implications. The New Deal was exceptional

in several respects because it was far more egalitarian than anything in the United States before or since. It tightly regulated financial markets. It reinforced an era of class solidarity with the state on the side of organized labor. And while wars usually destroy domestic progressivism, World War I being the epic example, World War II in the United States strengthened the progressive state.

and with the state on the side of organized labor. Corporations assumed that the labor movement was here for keeps and they needed to make room for it. And the war was followed by a 30-year boom that was not just a period of economic growth, but a period of narrowing income inequality and greater opportunity for ordinary people.

The New Deal looked to be a durable shift, but it turned out to be a great exception. Internationally, the Bretton Woods system was also a great exception. It was Roosevelt's effort, seconded by Keynes, to enable the entire world to have something like the American New Deal, a blend of tightly regulated capitalism and social democracy insulated from the austerity demands of private creditors that had impeded recovery from World War I.

The elements included public capital via the World Bank and the IMF, and later the Marshall Plan, fixed exchange rates, and controls on private speculation. Thanks to these very uncharacteristic rules,

The British Labour government, elected in July of 1945, could build the world's most expansive welfare state, despite the fact that Britain had come out of the war with an unthinkable debt-to-GDP ratio of 270%.

Had it not been for the Bretton Woods rules, deflationary demands of private capital markets would have crushed the pound and destroyed labor's program. And that's exactly what happened to Francois Mitterrand a quarter of a century later when in 1982, after Bretton Woods had been scrapped, Mitterrand ventured a program not unlike Attlee's, and within a few months, private capital markets had crushed the franc.

Because Britain in 1944 was so dependent on the United States and Kane's paramount goal as a British diplomat was to negotiate a post-war American loan on favorable terms, he had far less leverage over the Bretton Woods rules than his American counterpart, Harry Dexter White. And so the American version prevailed.

The dollar would be the global currency rather than Keynes' imagined currency, which he dubbed Bancorp. But Bretton Woods worked. 1944 was also the year when everybody seemed to recognize the centrality of full employment. It was the year of Beveridge's famous report, "Full Employment in a Free Society."

It was the year of Roosevelt's Four Freedoms speech, the year of the proposed Full Employment Act in the United States, the year of the GI Bill. It was the year that Karl Polanyi published his masterwork, The Great Transformation, on how the utopian effort to commodify much of human life creates such instability that ordinary people willingly turn to fascism. And Polanyi's other key point, often overlooked,

was that the remarkable period of municipal socialism in so-called Red Vienna between 1918 and 1933 was possible only because workers and unions were well mobilized. Another great exception that's often overlooked: at the end of World War II, there was simply no right wing in continental European politics. The far right, much of the corporate right, had been discredited by collaboration with Hitler.

the libertarian right had been discredited by the Great Crash. Hayek might advocate a resurrection of laissez-faire, but for decades that view had no credibility, no political following. Christian Democrats were about as far right as continental politics went, and in that era they vied with social Democrats over who would be champions of building a welfare state. Both were pushed to the left-wing.

by the power of the Communist Party, which was the largest party in both France and Italy. As a great exception to capitalist theory, to capitalist history I mean, as a great exception to capitalist history, this was a fortuitous convergence of the economics and the politics, a governing coalition everywhere in the West in favor of housebreaking capitalism to support broad prosperity.

One intriguing question is whether this model was a temporary anomaly or was it gratuitously destroyed for reasons that were accidental or opportunistic or both. Now, some say that this prolonged boom was mainly the result of post-war reconstruction. That's just plain wrong. Nothing comparable happened after World War I. The opposite happened. Conservatives and bankers were in power.

They made an effort to turn the clock back to pre-1914, defend pre-war currency parities and the gold standard, and collect debts that could not be collected. The result was austerity rather than reconstruction. The people in charge did just about everything wrong, including but not limited to bankrupting Germany. Unemployment in the UK never fell below 10% during the entire interwar period.

Neville Chamberlain, remembered best for the Munich Agreement, was Chancellor of the Exchequer before he was Prime Minister. In February 1932, when British unemployment was over 20%, Chamberlain told the House of Commons, referring to the fear that things could get even worse, and I quote, "...we owe our freedom from that fear largely to the fact that we have balanced our budget."

It would be unkind here to mention Rachel Rees. In Germany, following the same conventional wisdom, Chancellor Heinrich Brüning of the Center Party in 1930 imposed cuts in wages and public benefits. He raised taxes. He brushed off proposals by the trade unions for a public works program. He was rewarded with a budget surplus and a massive increase in the vote for the Nazis.

By contrast, we had a broadly egalitarian boom in the aftermath of World War II because we had the right policies. So why couldn't that continue?

Now, some argue that the post-war regime of managed capitalism and broad prosperity was brought down by the unsustainable role of the US dollar. In the famous Triffin dilemma, the United States could either supply a de facto global currency for a growing world economy, or it could have price stability at home, but not both.

So sooner or later, something like Nixon's devaluation and the destruction of the Bretton Woods system was inevitable. I think that view is badly overstated. The Triffin explanation leaves out the history.

In 1964, after the Kennedy assassination, Lyndon Johnson was elected by Roosevelt's scale margins. He was well on the way of completing what remained to be done of the New Deal until he squandered it all on Vietnam. And before he abdicated in 1968, Johnson tried to maintain his faltering political support in the idiom of the day by offering both guns and butter,

But with the war already producing substantial economic stimulus, that proved to be inflationary. And so with the Democratic Party split over the war, Johnson's legacy was the election of Nixon and increased inflation. By the 70s, the Bretton Woods system did need some adjustment, maybe a stronger version of special drawing rights, a more

a modest version of Keynes' proposed currency bank, or maybe a basket of anchor currencies trading within very narrow margins, and a Tobin tax to slow down currency speculation. All of this might have been the object of careful study leading up to a second Bretton Woods conference. But instead, Nixon, with no notice to allies or even to his own cabinet, abruptly ordered the devaluation of the dollar

followed by an end to the gold dollar standard. At the time, he was preoccupied by the Watergate scandal.

And on the Watergate tapes, as Bretton Woods was coming apart, there's a hilarious exchange between Nixon and his chief aide, H.R. Haldeman, which shows the extent of Nixon's distraction. And I quote, Haldeman, the British floated the pound. Nixon, that's devaluation. Haldeman, yeah. Nixon, I don't care. Haldeman, Burns, the Federal Reserve chair, is concerned about speculation against the Lyra.

Nixon. I don't give a shit about the lyric. The great economic historian Charles Kindleberger proposed the theory of hegemonic stability, in which the hegemonic nation takes responsibility for the entire economic system. Britain, as the hegemon in the 19th century, relied on the gold standard and biased the system toward free trade and austerity.

The US, as hegemon after World War II, followed a very different policy, biasing the system towards managed capitalism and broadly distributed growth. But either way, a hegemon needs to give a shit about the lira and the pound. Nixon abandoned the role of benign hegemon in order to save his own skin.

The Watergate distraction also emboldened the Arabs to launch the 1973 Yom Kippur War and then to quadruple the price of oil. And since oil was denominated in dollars, devaluation cost oil-exporting nations money. That exacerbated inflation.

In response, the then Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker put interest rates up to 21%, which in turn helped elect Ronald Reagan. Most of this did not have to happen. It was political events, not economic imperatives, that destroyed the post-war settlement. The alternative to Volcker's engineered recession was an incomes policy. History is the sum total of things that might have been imported. So,

The economic liberalism of Hayek improbably got another turn at bat. Reagan and Thatcher moved to dismantle regulated capitalism. The opposition leaders who succeeded them in the 1990s, notably Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, and Garrett Schroeder, were center-left rather than progressive Democrats. New Democrats, new labor, noyamita.

they doubled down on financial deregulation, privatization, weakening of labor, and a corporate model of globalization. I don't think this was inevitable or necessary, much less desirable. Clinton, more than either Nixon or even Reagan, was the architect of extreme financial deregulation, which in turn...

led to the 2008 financial collapse. Clinton tried to create a majority politics that combined tough on crime, tough on welfare, fiscally conservative, friendly to finance, globalist, with the use of market-like measures to achieve social objectives. It was a political disaster. In the 1994 midterm election, Clinton's Democrats lost both houses of Congress, losing a record 54 seats in the House.

And in 1996, running against a very weak Republican opponent, Clinton himself managed to get re-elected, but he was terrible for his party and terrible for its constituency of working people. I once described Clinton as the typhoid Mary of American politics. He survived. Everyone around him got sick. The deregulation of global finance led to crises in Latin America, East Asia, Russia,

Greenspan, the Fed chair, knowing the risks, nonetheless kept interest rates very low to bail out the bondholders, and that further inflated financial markets. So the late 90s and early 2000s were a period of bubble prosperity that was wildly unequal. And when Obama was elected in 2008,

because of a collapse that had occurred on the watch of George W. Bush. He made the catastrophic mistake of bringing back Clinton's economic team, all proteges of Robert Rubin, who had devised the deregulation that had caused the collapse. Obama's team compounded the mistake

by under-stimulating the economy, pivoting to deficit reduction in 2009, long before the recession was over, and bailing out the banks rather than cleaning them out. At one point in 2009, meeting with a group of bankers seeking their support for his completely inadequate reform program, Obama said, I'm the only thing standing between you and the pitchforks.

Well, Obama needed to be with the pitchforks. Roosevelt was with the pitchforks. So instead of the prolonged economic crisis impeaching the Republicans and Wall Street as after 1929, the crisis was on Obama. And in the 2010 midterm elections, Obama managed to break Clinton's record from 1994. He lost 63 House seats.

And like Clinton in '96, Obama got lucky. He ran against a weak Republican opponent, Mitt Romney, who didn't have a populist bone in his body and managed to get reelected. But with unemployment elevated, the popular reaction only fastened. And of course, it all came apart in 2016 with the election of Trump. Blair was a close student of Clinton.

New Labor's branding was directly copied from Clinton's New Democrats. The program combined an alliance with the city, so-called light-touch financial regulation, a real animus towards trade unions, partly the bitter memory of the strikes of Callahan's winter of discontent in 1979, which helped elect Thatcher. But Blair kept most of Thatcher's rules designed to weaken Labor.

And yeah, there was some social spending, poverty was reduced somewhat, but the overall income inequality widened and life became more precarious for ordinary Brits. Parenthetical. In the Blair era, I spent a lot of time in London. I got to know and admire John Monks, then the head of the TUC. Monks was a modernizer.

He wanted a Scandinavian-style labor movement for Britain. You may recall Barbara Castle's report under Harold Wilson called "In Place of Strife," calling for a more collaborative labor movement. But in those years, the unions preferred strife. However, after 18 years of Thatcher, they were ready for something different. And so Monks told me the story of Blair's first courtesy call at Congress House

And Blair pointed to photos on the wall of Wilson and Callahan. "Is that your trophy gallery?" he asked Monks. "You're not going to have my head on that wall." So there was real animus toward the unions.

Schroeder, Germany's social democratic chancellor, was a similar story. In 1999, Schroeder changed tax laws so that banks could sell appreciated stocks and corporations without paying capital gains tax. The rate was cut from 54% to zero. Der Spiegel termed this shift, quote, a type of financial regulation that Helmut Kohl, the conservative leader, never would have dared.

And after winning election narrowly in 2002, Schroeder unveiled a manifesto called Agenda 2010 for drastic liberalization of Germany's social welfare and labor system to complement the liberalization of the capital markets, as if

This was somehow responsible for the sluggishness that had afflicted Germany ever since the Federal Republic's costly absorption of the DDR. The reforms were intended to force workers to take low-wage jobs. These policies provoked a split in the SPD. In May of 2005, the former party chair and finance minister, Oscar La Fontaine, quit the party, spearheaded creation of Die Linke,

which was a new party of disaffected social democrats and presumably reformed communists.

And the center-left never recovered from the split. The result was 15 years of rule under Angela Merkel. In fact, the SPD and Die Linke together won a majority of seats in the Bundestag in the 2005 election. But such was the bitterness that rather than going into coalition with Die Linke, the SPD preferred to be a junior coalition partner to Merkel, which is exactly where the SPD is today. So...

The death of the center-left, I would argue, was a well-deserved death. And if the next center-left governments are like the last ones, they will invite Trumpism all over again. I would argue that this set of policies was opportunistic and often corrupt. Robert Rubin went...

from Wall Street to Washington and back to Wall Street, where he profited immensely from the policies that he had devised as Treasury Secretary and as head of Clinton's National Economic Council. Trump's corruption is flagrant. Rubin's corruption is well-mattered. And there's not a lot of difference. And if you want to understand why democracy was so vulnerable to Trump just giving it a good push,

I think one of the reasons is that people have become cynical about democracy itself. People look at the corruption and they conclude that what the hell, they all do it. Now, disclaimer, I'm not arguing that everything about the post-war system was admirable. My feminist friends remind me that it was patriarchal. It assumed a traditional male breadwinner family.

It was also, in some respects, racist. It co-existed with colonialism. I'm only arguing that, as a model for making capitalism socially bearable, it was better than anything before or since. And you can think of regimes or orders. The New Deal order really lasted until the 70s. It was then succeeded

by the neoliberal order and God knows what the neoliberal order is going to be succeeded by. For the moment, it's been succeeded by Trump. And I think it's up to the Democratic left, if you will, to devise something more plausible, more better, a narrative that persuades ordinary people that if you elect progressive parties,

they will transform your life for the better. This brings me to Keri Starmer, who is a perfect example of what not to do. We can talk about this more in the discussion. I know my friend Will Hutton has been rather hopeful about the Labour government.

and maybe it can still be redeemed, but the amazing success of reform last week is the result of the fact that the current government has really not inspired anybody to believe that their life is going to get better under this government. And so this is tragic because it's the only government in the West with a left-of-center party with a working majority.

Starmer has the ability to be a lot bolder. And I'll be interested to hear what other people on the panel think in terms of how much of this is characterological and how much of this is the continuing undertow of the influence of neoliberalism. In my remaining few minutes, I want to say a little bit about Biden, because Biden pointed us back towards something closer to the New Deal.

This was partly accidental. It was accidental because he happened to be president at the time of the pandemic, and so he had to do something drastic. It was accidental because had Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders not both been running for the nomination in 2020, one of them would probably have gotten it, but they crowded each other out.

And so Biden made a bunch of deals, managed to get nominated. And Elizabeth Warren, who's probably the best student of capitalism in the United States, did something very clever. When she realized that Biden was going to be the nominee, she signed on early. And as a result, she had a lot of influence over both personnel and policy. And as somebody who has been part of the loyal opposition, if you will, towards centrist Democrats for my entire career,

I've had this startling experience of seeing friends of mine who were part of that group take positions of high government office. Amazing. So, you know, Biden moved us back away from global neoliberalism to something more like the ground rules for the global economy that we had in the years after World War II.

where you didn't have a WTO telling you that, sorry, you can't nationalize industry, and sorry, you have to privatize and deregulate. And if you think about the rules that applied in the 50s and 60s, the original common market was a customs union. But if France wanted to nationalize some banks or if the European countries wanted to create Airbus,

There was nobody telling them that this violated the WTO. So you had a nice balance between the ability of the state to regulate capitalism and gradually growing trade. And I think Biden moved us back in that direction. And of course, Biden also was able to spend a huge amount of money socially, partly because of the pandemic situation.

And he would have done even more had it not been for the fact that he had an almost non-existent working majority. One of Biden's most transformative programs was child tax credit, refundable tax credit, which is another word for a

child allowance for working parents of $3,000 per year per child, more if the child is under six. And this was sufficient to wipe the poverty rate in half, cut the poverty rate in half. The only reason that that did not become permanent policy was that two members of the Senate who were very center-right Democrats, Sinema of Arizona and Manchin of

West Virginia refused to support it. So question, if Biden was so good, why was he all but thrown out of office? And I think it's very simple. He's too old. And if Biden had been 20 years younger, he would have been a much better exponent for his own policies. Tragically, when Biden finally did agree to step down,

there was such euphoria that he finally stepped aside that people read their enthusiasm into Kamala Harris, who was a very weak candidate. She was a weak candidate when she ran for the nomination in 2020, and she was just as weak when she ran for president in 2024. And I would add as a parenthetical that leadership matters. Leadership matters.

And we progressives have been unlucky on that front. I mean, if you think about it, Biden was too old. Harris was too weak. Corbyn, as a representative of the old left, was exactly the wrong progressive to offer an alternative to Blair. In France, where the left sometimes does govern coalition between the far left and the socialists, Jean-Luc Mélenchon is a very nasty character who makes it almost impossible for progressives

there to be that sort of coalition. So to conclude, and my mentor, Professor Galbraith, used to say, you always have to say to conclude to give the audience hope. Let me ask what sort of a left we do need. I think

We need to remember that policies that were mainstream in the 1930s and 1940s, when we had Roosevelt and Attlee, are still mainstream. It's just that the center of politics has moved so far to the right that normal progressive policies look left-wing. For instance,

We need true public institutions. We need comprehensive social insurance. We need serious regulation of capital. And we need to remember that policies are only as good as the popular politics that undergird them, and that small-bore incremental changes do not inspire anybody. One central fallacy of the neoliberal era

was that since markets are efficient, we should liberate markets and redistribute after the fact. There are two problems with that formulation. First of all, markets are not nearly as efficient as neoclassical economists teach. If they were, they would not have systematically priced securities wrong, leading to the collapses of 1929 and 2008.

They would not equilibrate far below their production potential, leading to prolonged depressions. They would not price carbon wrong, leading to catastrophic global climate change. But even if markets are sometimes efficient, they produce extremes of wealth that translate into extremes of political power. And so

When you hear an economist say that let's let markets rip and then we can redistribute after the fact, this ducks the question of who is we. It's not as if billionaires are lined up to sponsor policies of redistribution. And you think about the fruits of the idea that

We should take advantage of the supposed efficiencies of markets for public purposes. Take the case of partial privatization. It has been a costly failure on just about every front. Costly fiscally, costly politically, parasitic middleman profit. The system becomes less efficient and the public sector takes the blame.

We see one variation on the theme with the NHS. We see another variation on the theme with Medicare, the US program of universal non-means tested health insurance for the elderly. Half of Medicare is now privatized for profit. And when you have a system that is a so-called public-private partnership,

There are all kinds of incentives on the privatizers, the private contractors, the middlemen to game the rules, which then invites more corruption. In the US, publicly owned electric power is both cleaner and more efficient and cheaper than private power. And I could go on and on and on. We need real social housing. We still have it in the Netherlands and in Vienna.

And so the failure of center-left governments to get serious about both constraining capitalism and complementing it and standing up for working people and their embrace instead of cultural leftism has allowed the far right to pose as true champions of ordinary people. It works all too well.

Another generation of center-left ideology and policy will not change these dynamics. We in the progressive mainstream need to return to our progressive roots. I thank you. Thank you.

Fantastic, thank you very much Robert. So Stephanie, do you want to? Yeah, I think I'm going to stay. You're going to take the lectern. Great. Fantastic. There's a whole swath of the audience because I'm so short. Well first of all, thank you so much Bob. Thanks for coming home to the LSE and thanks for those very thought-provoking remarks. I'd like to pick up on something that you started with which is globalization and I'd like to really focus on globalization's impact on the labor market.

because that's an important part of the story. It's only part of the story, of course. It's a long and complex story about how we've gotten here, how we've seen center-left policies shift, and how we've seen voters shift as well. But it's an important part of the story. We know that in part because this trend is not limited to a single country or even to a single region. We see this shift in the center-left and in voters in multiple countries across the world.

So we suspect at the LSE we're always trying to understand the cause of things. We suspect that cause must be something common, that these countries in different parts of the world and different regions are being exposed to. And one such thing is globalization.

We know that these countries are open to the flow of goods and services and capital and people across national borders. And so that's one place to interrogate and to look to try to understand how this is impacting politics and particularly the center-left. So we know, of course, that globalization has distributive consequences. So within any country, there are some groups, some people, some segments of society and the economy that will be made better off.

that will have better employment opportunities, higher wages, more profits. But we also know that at the exact same time, within the exact same countries, some groups will be made worse off. They'll see fewer employment opportunities, lower wages and lower incomes. And this is precisely why globalization is political. It creates political cleavages within societies. So one thing that's been particularly politicized when it comes to globalization is the impact of globalization on labor markets.

So we've seen, for example, globalization has really impacted on manufacturing jobs. Now, the number of manufacturing jobs is declining in many developed countries around the world, but we know that at least part of this is due to globalization. So in the United States, for example, since 1990, Chinese imports into the United States accounts for about 25 percent of the lost manufacturing jobs.

So these job losses have political and economic consequences. Manufacturing jobs were good jobs. They provided a good, steady income that allowed for a middle-class lifestyle. So as these jobs are lost, it has real economic consequences. It also has consequences because they're concentrated in terms of demographics and in terms of geography. So we typically see these manufacturing job losses hitting men, often hitting white men, and often hitting men without university degrees.

So these loss are really concentrated in a particular segment of the population. They also tend to be geographically concentrated, and this is true in the United Kingdom, it's true in Europe, it's true in the United States, where particular parts of the country are really being hit hard by rising imports. A good example comes from the United States in terms of manufacturing furniture. So the manufacturing of furniture was really geographically concentrated, located in just a few parts of southern states, particularly Kentucky.

So this was good during good times. There was a dominant industry. It employed a lot of people, either directly or indirectly. And during the good times, these economies, these local communities were growing and thriving. But as lower-cost furniture started to become imported into the United States, we saw this domestic industry contract. People lost their jobs. Factories were shuttered.

And then the sort of economic consequences spiraled or rippled out. We saw housing prices decline, we saw property taxes decline, and we saw a decline in public services. So these communities really got hit, they suffered economic consequences, and now they're often called these "left-behind places."

And so this geographic concentration has created both economic inequality, where you have some parts of the country steaming ahead, other parts of the country getting hit hard, but it's also generated political polarization, because we know that these areas that have been hit by imports vote differently. That's true in the UK, in Europe, and in the United States.

In France, for example, I find that people who live in these local economies that have been hit or exposed to rising imports are twice as likely to vote for the radical right. I find in Spain that people who live in local economies who see jobs move abroad, jobs being offshored or outshored, we see that in those communities, people are much less likely to vote for the incumbent. And that's true for both the center-right, PP, but also for the center-left, the National Socialist Party.

So we know that these job losses have political consequences. Now of course governments aren't just sitting back and taking this. Governments are thinking about ways they can enact policies to try to respond. But what we've seen them do is really target globalization itself. They said if people are changing their vote, if people are losing their jobs because of globalization, let's target job losses caused by globalization explicitly.

So in both Europe and the United States, there are programs that are specifically designed to help people who have lost their jobs because of globalization. So these are very targeted programs. The problem is they don't work. At least they don't work the way we thought that they would work. So the idea was that we would build these programs to help people who are hit by globalization, to compensate them for their losses, to help retrain them, get them reemployed, keep them in the labor markets.

And while there's some evidence that the economics of these programs may work, the politics aren't working. So we thought maybe when these policies were designed and we have people on the center left saying this, certainly in Europe, let's put this program together. It'll keep people from voting for the radical right. It'll keep people engaged in politics. It'll keep people supportive of the center parties. But that hasn't worked.

So in France, for example, I find that in these areas that are exposed to rising imports, those that get additional help for displaced workers maybe vote less for the radical right, but it's a really small effect, 0.5 percentage points. That's not enough to keep Le Pen or the radical right out of office. In Denmark, even more discouraging results, I find absolutely no effect.

We provide all this additional assistance for people who lose their jobs due to trade. It doesn't keep people from turning to the radical right. A good question that we don't know is why they don't turn to the radical left, but we certainly see they're turning to the radical right, and this form of compensation is not stopping that. In the US, even more discouraging results, if you compare communities that are exposed to these rising imports, those that receive additional help, additional assistance for displaced workers, actually vote less for the incumbent. So these policies aren't working.

So an important question for us to interrogate is why aren't they working and what could we do instead to rebuild the center left and to keep sort of people in the center of the political spectrum. So I'm going to give you three potential suggestions for why these policies aren't working. First, maybe they're too targeted. They're targeted to people who lose their jobs directly as a result of trade. But we know that the economic consequences of import shocks are much bigger than that.

I might see my house value decline, my local public goods or public services decline, even if I didn't lose my job because of trade. So perhaps the support is just too narrowly targeted. Second, maybe the support just doesn't have enough fiscal firepower. It's underfunded. It's not doing enough.

So in the United States, for example, when you see an increase in exports, an increase in imports worth a thousand dollars, it generates about a four dollar increase in this type of assistance for unemployed workers due to trade. In France, on average, it's about 10 euros. So these are not big budgets that they're working with. And so maybe these programs are just underfunded and there's not enough support.

A third possibility that comes out of research done by one of my colleagues in the United States suggests that these types of targeted compensation policies might engender racial resentment or resentment of others or outsiders.

What's clear is that these policies, these very targeted policies, are not working. They're not sufficient to keep people engaged with the center-left. They're not sufficient to keep people from turning to the radical right. It doesn't mean they're not important. We need them. We need to support displaced workers. And there is some evidence that it helps displaced workers retrain, reskill and become reemployed.

But it seems like a better target or a better way to move forward is to embed these programs in a bigger compensation program, a bigger set of programs that helps build a lifelong ladder of opportunity that provides workers with the human capital that they need to navigate changing labor markets, whether those changes come from globalization, automation, or even the green transition. So I'll stop there. Thanks. APPLAUSE

Fantastic. Thank you, Stephanie. That's great. So, Will, over to you. Shall I stand at the... You can stay there or do whatever you want. Can you hear me clearly? I think maybe I'll stay seated, actually. I met Bob 45 years ago going to a conference somewhere and we sat in the back of this coach and I realised that he was an American doctor

who had read and had been inspired by all the same books as me. And it's been a lifelong friendship. And his steer on American politics is pretty much, I mean, you've got to be on pretty secure ground if you're going against Bob Kuttner, I can tell you. So listening to him celebrate the greats, you know, FDR, Attlee, Keynes,

Of course, I'm cheering along. I was writing my own book just recently, this time No Mistakes, which is a comical title given what's happened in the last 12 months. Anyway, I came across a fantastic definition by Clare Matley, or I consider it to be a good definition. He was asked to define socialism.

And he paused. It was in the run-up to the 1955 general election campaign after which he would stand down as leader of the Labour Party. And he paused a moment and he said, well, I am praying the greatest socialist borough, William Morris. Socialism is fellowship and fellowship is the hope of the world. And I really like that. I like this notion of fellowship.

it kind of immediately gets you into a kind of different place. You're no longer talking about simultaneously, you're talking about values, talking about having each other's backs, and you also quickly migrate to what that means in terms of economic program. And I was also struck, maybe you don't know this, but I was very struck, it was November 1924,

when Maynard Keynes gave his famous lecture, The End of Laissez-Faire, which turned into a book that he published in 1926. And here we are, Bob and me, and lots of you in the audience, kind of still raging about what Keynes was developing and a bunch of other people at the same time, in fairness, was a kind of overwhelmingly kind of correct critique of

of how market economies couldn't find points of equilibrium. They were restless, unstable, propensities to monopoly, propensities to inequity, propensities to unfairness, propensities to get locked into prolonged depressions through which Keynes lived. There had to be, capitalism had to be kind of regulated and managed. And that's another big thing that I took away from what Bob was saying,

And I think it's, we don't discuss it enough. I mean, I imagine the Q&A session and kind of, we will be correctly critical of where Labour have got to. I was really horrified to learn yesterday that the opinion polls in Wales have reform on 30%, plied Cwmru on 25% and Labour on 18%.

And actually, it's only 12 months ago that Labour was standing at 42% in the polls and they recorded 20% in the kind of elections. Half your share of the vote in 10 months is an astonishing kind of failure.

There's lots of reasons why that's taken place. But one of the reasons, I think, is what Bob was kind of pointing us to. And actually, we don't discuss enough in centre-left circles in Britain that actually your policy options as a government, and it was very clear to Keynes, your policy options as a government are closely related to the international order. And here you kind of were living in a period in which

Unlike 1944, when actually financial transactions and GDP were more or less in a one-to-one relationship, financial transactions in 2024 are 100 times GDP. The power of the financial markets is just incredible.

And then you get into a kind of debate, and I'd be interested to hear what you all think about this. I'd like to ask Bob this. I mean, I think that that's a huge problem. But there's a bunch of people who might say, well, Will, it was the power of the financial markets that actually did for Liz's trust, and actually did for reciprocal tariffs.

The financial markets kind of, you'll find lots of commentators across the political spectrum kind of saying, well, thank God for the financial markets. They did what democracy couldn't. They actually forced Trump to back off these terrifying tariffs. So, I mean, I think that's kind of a paradox of our times. One of the reasons why there's a second paradox of our times is

I was taken aback to run across Lord Maurice Glassman the day he came back from America. And as you all know, or many of you all know, he was the only British politician who was invited by the Trump administration to the inauguration. And he was invited by J.D. Vance. And J.D. Vance, author of Hilly Billy Blues, was an absolute fanatical follower of Blue Labour.

And he asked Glassman to stay on after the inauguration, which he did for 10 days.

And Morris and J.D. Vance met daily, sometimes for three hours, brainstorming about the depredations of globalization, how he must understand that the Trump administration was going to bring globalization to a juddering halt in the name of correcting global imbalances, that actually a period of reindustrialization was ahead, and

There was going to be an American industrial strategy and he looked and he was going to, well, possibly his opening up, surely for some of the values that Morris Glassman believes in, blue labor, family, community, protective industrial working class, all the things that J.D. Vance believed in.

So I find that a jaw-dropping account of actually an exchange between Vance and Glasman. And you're swimming in tricky pools here, and we find it with reform, where Farage, calling for the nationalization of British steel, and it's picking up on the same kind of beat, if you like,

that actually what we've got to do in 2025, we populists on the right, is actually to be kind of, it's a left-wing economics. We must champion industrial strategy. We must champion bringing jobs back to the industrial heartlands. We must champion, we must even champion unions,

And actually, if you're on the centre-left, in the next breath, they're anti-immigration, all their instincts are regressive. The idea of comprehensive social insurance of the type that Bob was mapping out tonight is an anathema to them. They also argue for low taxes. They also argue for minimal regulation. I mean, they are a cat's cradle of inconsistencies. But that's

kind of an appeal. And I was wondering also, as Bob was talking, I was thinking about how relatively easy it was to organize trade unions. I mean, even as late as 1970, Britain was the leading manufacturing country in Europe, actually.

And the tariffs that were introduced in the Ottawa conference in 1932, I grew up in the 50s and 60s behind an average tariff wall for all imported manufactured goods, all imported manufactured goods that came from outside the empire or the Commonwealth. It was a tariff of 15%.

So we managed to sustain our industrial base right up until we joined the common market in 1973 behind tariffs that on average are higher than the flat tariff that actually Trump imposed where we may settle when these tariff wars finish. It's certainly higher than the 10% base tariff that he's suggesting.

So, a lot of kind of stuff here to kind of – so, what is the international order going to be? It was very easy to organize trade unions in – where you had literally in Britain, there were 20 – more than 20 manufacturing sites in the 1950s that employed more than 50,000 men.

And it was pretty easy to organize in those. You know, there isn't one industrial site in Britain in 2025 employing 50,000 people. In fact, I can't think of very many kind of workplaces where there's more than 10,000 people. So organizing trade unions becomes bloody difficult. And so I have to round off my remarks by kind of a series of challenges, really, because, you know, I, you know, I write, I,

ride with this man you know I kind of share his values and how we what international order can we imagine that would kind of give us greater policy options at home who would make it who would make common cause with us

Is the European Union a building block? I think it is. Is the euro a building block? I think it is. But we're far away from even kind of entering into that kind of dialogue with European partners, let alone kind of having that kind of outcome. Unless we have that kind of conversation...

How are we to kind of get Rachel Reeves or any successor chancellor kind of being impaled on fiscal rules when you need to budget for some kind of current surplus and current revenues and current taxes in five years' time to keep these bond markets off your back? So she has to talk – she or her successor has to talk in these terms.

And all your only scope is to do as much as you can into kind of capital expenditures. What are we to do with the new technologies? How are we to create a cohort of fabulous growth companies that actually

will acknowledge the role of their workers in their councils, recognize unions, want to include them in the decision-making and strategy of the firms in which they're part. How are we to develop a language that actually will put reform back in the box or that comparative parties across Europe

So at the end of Bob's lecture, he opened that Pandora's box of questions for me, actually. I'm hoping he'll come up with some answers. Thank you. Thank you, Will. So we've had a very disciplined panel that's stuck very precisely to

the time that we scheduled, which means there's a good chunk of time for questions from the audience. So just to... So please raise your hands if you want to ask a question. Those who've gone live, please submit it online. And I have an iPad in front of me which will give me a list of questions. If I don't call you, it might be...

because I can't see you because my eyesight isn't very good, or it may be because I'm trying to balance out the composition of the questionnaires. There may be many reasons, so please be patient. I'll try and fit in as many questions as we can. So far, I have one hand up, so that's a good start. In the meantime, two, great. The rest of you, three, fantastic. So we're probably going to collect a few and then have rounds of replies later.

from the panel. And yeah, I'll keep my eyes open. I can't see that side of the room quite so well, so maybe wave. So for now, let's say, let's take these three questions on this side first, starting at the front, and we'll just work our way back. And I've noted there are also some hands up on that side. So yeah, go ahead. Also quickly say who you are.

Quickly say who you are. Yeah.

Hi, my name is Lou. That's great, thank you very much. So I'm originally from Taiwan and I grew up in the Netherlands and I think where we're from we've got a wider political spectrum because there's more space for different parties to get into the government. And something that I've noticed is that a lot of the rights side is mostly focused on cultural issues and social issues.

And so I see a lot of people who economically would benefit more from a centre-left government actually voting for the right. And I see that in social media nowadays. That's how we reach a lot of people, that these kind of populist snaps and these quick arguments do better with younger demographics as well. So I was wondering what kind of, how can we make sure that

What kind of arguments can we reach a younger demographic with in such a divisive world? Great, thank you. Yeah, so there was another hand up a couple of rows back. Okay.

Hello, uh, you are McGahee professors law, King's College, London. Thank you for the wonderful discussion. Um, Stephanie, I think that you were saying that some targeted solutions fail is the main message that I got. Um, Robert, you were saying, uh, you were talking about all the big things that social democratic governments did post-war full employment, comprehensive social security, uh, restoration of trade union power, more public ownership. Um,

And the one thing that... And then, Will, you talked about the spectre of the power of financial markets and how they can be destructive. Also, they can be destructive of destructive governments, but they can be destructive of social democratic governments. And I'm wondering how to tie these things together. And it seems to me that, you know...

we haven't got any government that's committed to full employment. We've got governments that are incredibly sceptical about social security, including fiddling around with the winter fuel allowance, which is probably the most damaging thing that's been done, uh,

failure to get a very simple set of trade union rights that would be normal in Denmark or Sweden or Finland, in the UK, public ownership the same. The one really big thing I think that's lacking in social democratic government since the war is trying to ensure that the economy is more democratic.

You have authoritarians in the economy, you know, who are incredibly, incredibly rich, powerful elite who project their power into politics. We have an authoritarian management of the economy. It's projecting its power to try and make politics less democratic, more authoritarian. So the way that you fight back against that is you make the economy more democratic and

And that means not just trade union power, but workers on boards. I think you touched on that, Will. More democratic control over financial institutions through our pension funds. So, you know, when you have two systems colliding, one has to prevail. And, you know, if we don't want the Trump authoritarians to prevail, then we've got to make the economy more democratic. So I guess my question is, what do you think about that?

Okay. So actually, yeah, so we'll take the gentleman back and then there's another question in the third row and then that will give the panelists a chance to respond. Hello, I'm a study abroad student from Japan. I'm at LSE for one year. And my question is to Professor Kuttner. I think you mentioned that there has been a shift, overall shift of political views

towards the right, making anything that's moderately left look like a very radical left-leaning ideas. But I feel like the opposite is also true. I feel like what has been moderately left

For example, I think also the left side of the political spectrum has been exploring deep into the extreme end. So I feel like, for example, I started learning English when I was 11, which was 10 years ago. And back then...

I added on to the fact that we were just teenagers. Terms like retarded, gay were more frequently used online or offline. But now those terms have been considered rightfully so to be more offensive and a slur in some cases. And a lot of newer and more words have been considered and identified as a slur or an inappropriate term. And I think that's

I think the right-wing media likes to pick up on these things as all the lefts are hunting these words and making a fuss out of these words. But I think

I think they have a point in saying that the left has also been more and more radical and extreme, like ways of demonstrating against oil, for example, often involved throwing tomato cans at Goh, which caught media's attention, but also is more extreme than what has been previously tried. So do you think my assessment is accurate that the left is also leaning more and more into the extreme end?

Okay, fantastic. I'll just, this question here in the third row, and then I noted for the next round, there's someone over there too. So yeah, just last question, then we'll get some responses. Hi, I'm Sadaf. When I wrote this question, it was for Robert Kuttner, but anyone can sort of answer this.

So you mentioned that the market level reform since the 90s has mostly been a disaster. And you said that it was mainly due to, it was a political choice rather than an economic one. And we see the continuation of such policies till today under Labour. For example, the incoming welfare cuts that we have. We've got crackdown on strikes and protests. We've got housing issues and so on.

And we see this not just in the UK, but across Western Europe. I mean, across the kind of global north.

Do you think this is also just a political choice or simply capitalism itself is the problem? Because the logic of capitalism is profit maximization. And when you have that, then, as you say, we can't actually have fellowship. It's very hard to. So what do you think about that? Thank you. Thank you very much. OK, so we'll let the panelists respond. I have some questions online stacked up as well. And anyone...

who has a thought for the next round, maybe wave at me while we're getting these answers. So, Bob, do you want to start? Yeah, let me try and synthesize some of these. Can you hear me? On the cultural issues and the question of whether left parties have moved left on cultural issues, I think that does much less damage. Some of it is ridiculous. Some of it is self-parody. Some of it is long overdue.

And it's very tricky to get that right. But when you take care of the economic stuff, when you address the needs of working people, the power of the cultural issues to damage progressives just fades away. So in 2020, Biden managed to get elected, despite the fact that this was the peak of the Black Lives Matter movement.

And it didn't prevent Biden from being elected because Biden had a plausible economic program. And I think Hillary Clinton in 2016 was one of the worst offenders because she went right on economics and she went left on cultural issues. And that's like waving the proverbial red flag at a bull. I mean, if you tell a working class guy that, by the way,

very important issue is which bathrooms are available to what sort of self-identified genders. And then you're taking $500,000 honoraria from Wall Street. You know, it's a recipe for electing Donald Trump. So I think economics is paramount. If you deal with economics,

working class people who are rather conservative socially are willing to support you even though you may have avant-garde views on some social questions. That said, I think the cultural left does a lot of silly, stupid things. I refuse to give my pronouns. I don't know, is that a thing in Britain? It's a thing in the U.S. It's bloody stupid because you're asking people to out themselves. I've never understood the logic of that.

I refuse to use the term Latinx, which is a thing in the United States, because it violates Spanish. And native Spanish people, speakers, think it's a joke. Okay, enough about that. Yeah, capitalism's the problem. And the remarkable thing about the New Deal era and the post-New Deal era is that a panoply of public policies managed to housebreak capitalism.

so that it would do what it did well without destroying democracy. And meanwhile, you not only constrain it, but you complement it with all kinds of social policies and public investments and public ownership. And somehow we need to get that back. Now, my friend Damon Silvers, who's sitting in the audience, I was hoping Damon would ask a question.

made the point that if Britain had the same tax system as Canada, it would have £100 billion to spend on social needs and social investments. And the reason that Britain has the lightest taxation of capital in the entire OECD is because for 150 years,

The British economy has been overly dependent on finance, and that maybe worked in the 19th century. But in the 19th century, the late 19th century, Britain was exporting capital rather than exporting goods, and Germany overtook Britain. And with Brexit, the idea that you can build the entire British economy around the city and do a deal with finance, that's not going to do it.

One of the things that a Labour government needs to do is modernize the British economy. And the pity of the obsession with budget balance is that the Labour government has denied itself the resources to do that. Okay, enough. Thank you.

I'll just say very quickly in response to the radical right question, it's an excellent question. I give you three reasons why these compensation programs don't work to keep people away from the radical right. But you gave us a fourth, because they're not voting for the radical right because of economic reasons. So we can't compensate them. And so it's a great question. I think all we can do is really do more research on trying to understand the causal factors that push people to vote for the radical right.

I have just a few sentences and another round of questions. I just want to really reiterate what Bob has just said. I mean, capitalism is the problem. And any party of the centre-left, if you don't have a policy framework which actually addresses that, you fall at the first fence. And

And then you find yourself in a kind of discourse in which, and I read a piece on the weekend, which some of the figures I came across about what's happening to our children, avalanche of child poverty, these deprivation of liberty orders, two-thirds of youth centres have closed in the last 15 years, formerly kids living in poverty, etc. And yet the national conversation is about who's going to use a bathroom?

I mean, it's kind of crazy. And that falls out, I think, when actually center-left politicians actually stop talking about the depredations of capitalism and what they're going to do about it. And I think that that's – I mean, I always find getting a fix of Bob kind of restores my faith in a central tenet of my kind of belief system –

And I think it also opens up the Japanese gentleman. Of course, you're right. For want of mobilizing around talking about the things we should be talking about, promoting fairness, getting capitalism working for the common good, how to set boundaries for it, how to insert notions of the social, kind of the public, the common good in the whoop and woof of our capitalism,

we end up kind of talking about getting more extravagant kind of debates about what words are appropriate, which is a kind of blind alley, I think. In fact, any time you enter a discourse about that, you're handing the prize to the right. And I think that what was the most successful ad, Bob, in the campaign? She is for them and Trump is for you. Yeah.

As soon as I saw that, I thought, we've lost it. So I think that one of the great takeaways of tonight is that, you know, A, kind of have that front and centre, and B, kind of we have to think through how to make kind of...

as many advanced economies as possible construct kind of an order, an international order, in which the kind of policy options that you need at home are feasible. And we're not even talking about it. Great, thank you. So I have quite a few hands up and I have some questions online. I'm going to collect a few. We are...

Yeah, which is your friend Damon? Yes. So Damon, whoever you are, I'm guessing, yeah, that's you. If you, yeah, you could ask a question. I have, gentleman has been waiting patiently with his hand up over there too. And then just behind. So that's three there. So fire away, please make the questions short and snappy so we can get more in. And then I'll call in a few more in a minute.

So I'm Damon Silvers. I'm a visiting professor at UCL. I'm the person Bob referred to earlier. I have a question, but I just can't resist the observation about trade adjustment assistance and the like. I was involved in this for the American trade union movement for a long time, and I would just observe this.

There are places that were devastated by deindustrialization that have recovered economically and that are political strongholds of the center-left. Pittsburgh in the United States is one, the city of Pittsburgh is one such place. Newcastle in the United Kingdom is a second. But if you go 15 miles outside of both those cities, you will find places that were equally strong for the left 50, 60 years ago that are now entirely for the far right.

because their economy simply did not in any sense recover. And the aid that was offered was a joke. It's the fact that the aid was a joke that is the critical fact here. Now, my question is this. I just couldn't resist this observation about this. Right now, there is a political struggle underway

I would just observe in both the Labor Party and the Democratic Party, the Labor Party struggle kicked into gear about four days ago. The Democratic Party's internal struggle began obviously the day after Election Day, but really it began well before Election Day.

There's an internal struggle in both parties about whether the appropriate response to right-wing authoritarianism is a return to neoliberalism or an embrace of something like what this panel is advocating. And I assume something similar must be going on in the SPD in Germany, but I don't know much about it. But I know in the Labour Party and the Democratic Party, this struggle is underway for real.

and bound up in it is the question of the finances of both those parties. And the question I have for the panel is, what advice would you give to competence? How might you actually win the political fight for the ideas that you're advocating within these two parties? Thank you. Gentleman over there. Hi. So I've noticed that you mentioned capitalism and other related factors such as globalism is part of the reason why

Deafness centre-left, centre-left-right have taken over. In my personal opinion, I believe that there was other, not factors, but bad actors involved into the demolishment or the turning of the political spectrum to a lot of Europe and a lot of the world to the right. Do you believe that there's other actors involved as well? I'm not going to ask you to mention anyone because I don't want anyone to get in trouble, but do you believe that there's other influences and actors involved in the movement to the right?

Great. And another one just behind. Yeah. Hi. My question is for Professor Kottner. What made Kamala Harris a weak leader and what makes a good leader for progressive left? Thanks. Nice. Great question. There was somebody else. Let's take this question over here. Yeah, it's behind you.

And then I'll read out a couple from the online audience. Hi, I'm Alex Hill. I'm a health economist at the London School. Briefly, two things. One, it seems like reform's main platform is anti-immigration. I'm just wondering how the panel think the left should think about immigration and how they should respond to that, which is a major issue, I think, that's mobilised people on the right.

and also the housing crisis. I mean, my impression is that that's a big driver of political issues. And how much should we embrace what Ezra Klein is calling, you know, the abundance agenda and just deregulate construction, basically, and just be building, building, building? And how much could that shift political economy?

Fantastic, thank you. I'm also going to squeeze in some questions from our online audience, which are some very good questions. Sorry if I'm overloading the panel, but I think we probably only have time for this one round, so then I'll come back to you. So from Matthew Sullivan, is the issue not loss of jobs, but loss of the identity provided by jobs that policy can't replace, but the far right can?

Antonio Santos Spiritos, an Italian LSE visitor, says, is it possible to build an international order given the historical inequalities between developed and developing countries? And

There is also a question about whether the push from an anonymous user, push for diversity is causing cynicism towards democracy, or do you think we should encourage diversity? So plenty to choose from. You don't have to address every question, but there's plenty of grist for your mail. So we'll go in reverse order this time. Start with Will and then Stephanie and then finish with Bob. Gosh, I...

I do think the immigration question has to be looked in the eye. And, I mean, personally, I've not understood the reason against ID cards. I've always thought that we need to tell...

the people living 10 miles outside the city centres of Newcastle who get so exercised with immigration that we do know who's here and we know where they're working and they're not going to undermine your jobs and your wages. I mean, there has to be some kind of credible, kind of understandable framework for kind of reassuring people

for want of a better word, a disaffected working class, that actually we've got their backs. And we want to remain as open as we can for all the advantages of being open. I don't see any other kind of way of doing it, otherwise you end up with kind of this awful world of deportation and locking people up. Oh dear, you know. And I so agree with you on housing. I mean, I think that the...

I mean, two factoids that keep going around my head are that wealth as a share of national income in Britain was three times, three and a half times in 1980. It's now seven times. And almost all of that has been the rise of house prices. In London, house prices in relation to average incomes were around 12 times. That's the highest it's been since the 1880s.

I mean, it's kind of insupportable. And the amount of disposable income that young men and women have to spend on either paying rent or on paying mortgages or doing neither and living at home until they're... I mean, what is it? I think the highest... It's something like 28% to 29% of people under 35 are living at home.

And I think to myself, as desperate for them, but I really feel for their parents as well. I mean, you know, it's not, it's just a kind of, so unblocking all of that is fundamental. And I think, you know, a huge social housing program has to happen. I think that residential property taxation has to be organized properly. It's ridiculous that council tax is based on 1999 property values. And that has to be looked at in the eye. There's lots more to be said, but I've taken up my quota of time. Thanks.

Thank you. Stephanie? Immigration is very important. I was going to address it, but Will took that hot potato. So I'm going to try to bring together some of the questions about left behind places. The key question, I think, is how do we ensure that there's a Pittsburgh that was deindustrialized, but

recovered and is now a thriving economy and 50 miles down the road it's not. And unfortunately there's no silver bullet. It seems to be some combination of universities, hospitals, government support, subsidies and investment. All of those cost money. So it's about finding the political will to put together these packages to re-energize these left behind places. And that's really key, not only for economic inequality, but also for political polarization.

Great. Thanks. Bob, final word. Thank you. And thanks to the panel. This has been a very good discussion and also to the audience. Let me try and synthesize some of this. Economic grievance can go left or it can go right. And Bernie Sanders almost won the nomination twice. And he was a very credible tribune.

of what are conventionally seen as fairly radical policies, but that people happen to support. Medicare for all, universal health insurance, repudiation of student debt. You look at life from the perspective of a 30-year-old who doesn't have wealthy parents. Housing is unaffordable. You're more likely to get a gig than a job.

In the United States, where you don't have national health insurance, your health coverage is iffy. You probably are not going to get any kind of a pension other than the basic Social Security pension. And people in that situation are just, unless they happen to have progressive values, are just sitting ducks for the far right. And I think the lesson of the past half century is that neoliberal policies are just...

inviting the far right to use demagogic alternatives to play on social issues, cultural issues, anti-immigrant issues, backlash against gender equality, and that substitutes for an economic program. And the same thing is true, by the way, of the choices internationally. You can have a salutary form of economic nationalism that restores to the nation state the ability to plan, the ability to regulate capital,

the ability to have the kinds of regional policies that, if they're seen as subsidies, are illegal in terms of the WTO. But if you believe that there's a binary choice between protectionism and free trade, which is what standard economics teaches, then you see the field of the far right. And if you don't have the sort of salutary economic nationalism that we had during the post-war boom, you're going to get far-right fascistic nationalism.

which is what you get under Trump. And it's not a choice between free trade and Trump. Biden, I think, was well on the way to defining that kind of middle ground. And again, the tragedy of Biden was that he was not a very good spokesman for his own policies. So I think if you get the right package of policies with the right leadership,

It's possible to revive a progressive vision and a progressive narrative. It has to be credible. It has to be heartfelt. And it has to break some norms, the norm that we dare not regulate capital or we dare not tax capital. The whole problem of a capitalist society is that even though capitalism does some things well,

It has too damn much political power to game the rules and to feather its own nest at the expense of everyone else. So I think the only good news is that Trump is going to fail. And how he fails and how our side responds to the failure...

determines whether we will be in for a long, long era of different kinds of right-wing authoritarianism or whether we have some hope of a revival of both democracy and progressivism. Thanks very much.

Before, just a couple of words of thanks before you all go. Thanks to all of you. Sorry for those of you who had questions and there wasn't time for them, but thanks for attending this event. Thanks to Meg and the LSE events team for running it so smoothly. Thanks to Daniel Chandler and the Cohesive Capitalism Programme and Malena Bastida-Antic and the Ralph Miliband Programme for supporting this event. And finally, of course, thanks to our panellists. Give them a big hand once again. Bob, Stephanie and Ro. Thank you.

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