Labour can be a party of growth – but not like this: Andy Burnham should focus less on how wealth is shared and start asking why it isn’t being created (Roger Partridge, 30 June 2026, CapX)
If growth cannot be commanded from above, the cure for Britain’s cost-of-living crisis is not to pull energy, water and transport back under public control. A centre that cannot create growth should surrender the levers, not seize more of them. The road Burnham should follow leads somewhere British Labour has spent forty years refusing to look: to a Labour government that began with the failure of central control and did not stop halfway.
One of the most sweeping market reforms in the democratic world was not the work of Margaret Thatcher or Ronald Reagan. In 1984, New Zealand elected a Labour government facing a run on the currency and an economy strangled by controls that successive governments had built to protect workers. Its finance minister, Roger Douglas, started from Burnham’s premise and took it further: if the state could not direct growth, it had to stop pretending it could. So, Labour let the market back in, stripping out regulation, opening the country to trade, cutting subsidies and eventually selling the state’s trading arms. It did not betray Labour’s ends; it pursued them by means that could deliver them.
Unfortunately, the left–like the right–has turned on its most successful leaders: Blair and Clinton. Their central insight was that using capitalist means you could achieve socialist ends, creating ever more wealth to redistribute. Wealth creation itself has become anathema.