“If the past 45 years have taught us anything, it is that tinkering around the edges won’t deliver the kind of change we need. We need system-wide change.”
By Gawain Little
If there is one clear lesson we can draw from the state of politics in Britain in 2026, it is that our economy isn’t working.
We have an epidemic of low pay, with real wages stagnating (and for many groups of workers actually falling) since the financial crisis of 2007-9. When you take into account the cuts to the ‘social wage’ through the years of Tory austerity, with schools and hospitals going underfunded, social housing sold off and pension terms slashed, and the fact that none of this has been reversed by Labour since 2024, you have an existential crisis. We have a generation of workers who will be poorer than their parents in real terms.
Britain has the lowest levels of investment in the G7, leading to chronically low productivity, and a sluggish economy. At the same time, the restructuring of our economy, with the growth of zero-hours and platform employment, along with continued outsourcing, has created real job insecurity. A broken housing market, where homes are treated as investment assets, and insufficient regulation of the private rental sector (in spite of the new Renters Rights Act), has added increasing housing insecurity to the mix.
These economic issues have real-world consequences. They leave working people – our people – plagued by anxiety about what the future looks like, worried not just about where the next meal comes from but whether they will still have a job in a year’s time. They leave our people at the mercy of bad landlords, worried about whether they will be able to keep a roof over their families’ heads.
These are also the key factors driving the rapid rise of the far right and fuelling division and fragmentation in our society. Fascism is not a working-class phenomenon. Far-right ideas are pushed by the super-rich, the 1%, the ruling class. But in order to grow in society, they need to take root within the working class. The constant diet of Islamophobic, anti-migrant, misogynist rhetoric pushed by far-right media channels is packaged to latch on to real resentment, anger and frustration.
That resentment, anger and frustration is being created by a system that treats working people as just another commodity, that traps them in economic insecurity, and by the failure of mainstream politics to offer any concrete solutions to the economic problems that we face.
The fact is that these solutions do exist. Indeed, the pages that follow are filled with them. Trade unionists, heterodox economists, tax justice campaigners and others propose a range of measures that would make a real difference. Rent controls, price caps on essentials and a right to food would protect working people from the worst impacts of the current system. Collective bargaining, insourcing and a wave of above-inflation pay rises would start to correct the imbalances in our economy. Capital controls, investment in rail transport infrastructure, the creation of a public investment bank, restructuring the way we source our food, and crucially investment in education, skills and training, could all form a part of a comprehensive plan to reorient our economy for the long-term.
However, for far too long, these measures have been considered taboo within mainstream economic discourse. We have been trapped within a neoliberal economic discourse that rules out effective intervention in the economy from the word go. Now it is time to tear down these barriers and begin a proper discussion about how we fix our broken economy.
If the past 45 years have taught us anything, it is that tinkering around the edges won’t deliver the kind of change we need. We need system-wide change. It is time for our movement to take on that challenge – to begin the discussion, to shape the comprehensive economic programme we need, and to take on the fight to win it.
Our economy isn’t working – it is up to us to fix it!
- Gawain Little is General Secretary of the General Federation of Trade Unions (GFTU): you can follow him on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter/X, and the GFTU on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter/X, Bluesky and YouTube.
- This article first appeared on the GFTU Substack on 12 September 2026.
- You can hear Gawain and others speak at the For an Irreversible Shift in the Balance of Power and Wealth event in Brighton on Tuesday September 15th 12:30pm. Register here.
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