“We need a changed approach for the economy that radically boosts public investment to generate the sustained growth people need. That must come with more immediate measures to ease the cost of living.”
Simon Fletcher
I will be one of the speakers at this event next week – ‘A Fork in the Road Moment: For an Irreversible Shift in the Balance of Power & Wealth.’ To join us next week, register here. It follows fringe meetings on the same subject at TUC and Labour conference last month, also organised by Arise.
I spoke at the Labour fringe meeting and it was a notably large and lively event. So popular was it that this online follow-up has now been organised, hosted by John McDonnell MP, with Richard Burgon MP, Sarah Woolley (general secretary of the BFAWU), Gawain Little (GFTU general secretary), Zita Holbourne, (BARAC – Black Activists Rising Against Cuts) and others to be announced.
The interest in the fringe meetings was no doubt generated by the fact that both the Labour government and the labour movement are faced with sharp choices. The Starmer period dragged popular support for the Labour Party downwards and then pushed the party into crisis once in office. Andy Burnham entered Number 10 on the promise of change and the end of neo-liberalism. But how exactly do we move on from forty years of a failed model?
This event is designed to consider the alternatives we need.
Reproduced below are my (short) speaking notes from the fringe at Labour conference in Liverpool, posted here as a contribution to it. Some of these points were addressed in an article for Tribune last week, here. The fringe meeting took place on the evening after the Chancellor of the Exchequer, John Healey, delivered his keynote speech to the conference.
‘A Fork in the Road Moment – For an Irreversible Shift in the Balance of Power & Wealth’
First on John Healey’s speech. It is true that under Andy Burnham an improved political space has definitely opened up. But John Healey’s speech today was largely a stern lecture on financial pressures and constraints. He actually used a key passage of his speech on welfare to prefigure cutting the benefits bill.
We are not seeing a reorientation that goes far enough towards the underlying problems. On defence spending, it is actively worsening it.
Therefore the title of this meeting is very timely. The Labour Party is indeed at a fork in the road, as is British politics. But the title also rightly poses the question of a shift in the balance of power and wealth.
It’s the absence of such a fundamental shift that was the cause of the crisis that engulfed Keir Starmer’s leadership.
So bad was that that sections of the PLP used the mechanism of a by-election to change of leader of the Labour Party. This is unheard of.
We are confronted with one of the most dangerous periods since the end of the second world war. Extreme warmongering is normalised. The drive for higher military spending across Europe and NATO member states is unrelenting.
At the same time, the climate crisis is real.
AI generates not only its own huge issues but also connects with the climate crisis through the use of energy and natural resources.
Here, most public services are under severe strain, public investment is far too low, and living standards are stagnant.
And in the face of the rise of racism and the far right, the Labour leadership’s strategy has been a disaster.
Traditionally social democracy has carried out the function of securing reforms that improved living standards within the framework of capitalism.
But when the problems stored-up are of such a scale, what happens when Labour rejects a programme that goes near the magnitude of the problem? John Healey even partially alluded to this today. ‘The money New Labour had in the nineties,’ he argued, ‘is simply not there now.’
That raises some questions….
The Reeves-Starmer plan for the economy was indeed inadequate to the challenge.
It was clear from before the general election that it would generate conflicts with its own base.
It relied on the private sector to generate growth with no major programme of raising public investment. It meant tight public spending, no major redistribution, no progressive changes to tax the richest, no measures to deal with the cost of living.
With the exception of rail, Labour made no serious commitment to expand public ownership.
A yawning gap opened up between Labour’s programme and the reality of life facing working class people.
These domestic errors went alongside the Labour right’s immoral stance on the genocide against the Palestinian people. Getting Gaza wrong caused a collapse in support amongst key voters even before the general election.
I say all this not because of some sort of simple diatribe about the right wing of the Labour Party but because you have to confront the real situation in order to advance the position of the working class and its allies. You cannot to do politics without making mistakes – but the most important thing is to learn from them and stop making the same ones over and over.
We need a changed approach for the economy that radically boosts public investment to generate the sustained growth people need. That must come with more immediate measures to ease the cost of living.
So some brief points for the discussion.
In the unions in particular the drive for restructuring the British economy in the interests of working class people has been advancing. Union leaders on this platform tonight have given a lead. We need to work out how to make the left’s alternatives the leading view in the labour movement and in society. People in the Labour Party should work with people not in the Labour Party to achieve that.
Second, whilst it is necessary to fight for an economic alternative, it is also necessary to stand shoulder to shoulder with people on the sharp end of the rise of racism, racist attacks and the demonisation of Muslim people in Britain.
Thirdly no economic alternative can accept rising military spending. The Left has to build opposition to rearmament into its programme, likewise against the war on Iran. We cannot concede on that point because it is critical to all the other things we have discussed.
John Healey today invoked the Attlee government but he did not go near the scale of the ambition. It falls to the Left to make the case.
- A Fork in the Road Moment: For an Irreversible Shift in the Balance of Power & Wealth is hosted by Arise a Festival of Left Ideas, taking place online at 6.30pm Wednesday 21 October
- This article was originally published by Simon Fletcher’s Modern Left on 14 October 2026.
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