Why are UK infrastructure projects so expensive, and what can be done about this?
To what extent is the rise of the far-right the result of economic stagnation?
How can we raise economic growth given that we're close to full employment and so ordinary deficit financing would be inflationary?
How do we divert labour towards construction, social care and public services without accelerating pub closures and high street decline, both of which could strengthen the far-right?
Are tax rises sufficient to do this, or do we need microeconomic interventions as well?
What can be done to cut the UK's high energy costs?
How can we reform utilities given that regulation is ineffective?
How can we reform income tax to reduce any disincentive effects of 60%+ tax rates?
How can we alter the tax system to boost growth, either by simplifying it or by shifting taxes from incomes to property or wealth?
Do we have the management skill in this country to reform public services or deliver infrastructure projects on time and on budget, and if not what can be done about this?
What can be done to curb rentierism and stimulate productive entrepreneurship?
Which inequalities matter most - of income, power or wealth and if so between exactly which groups?
Is inequality itself a barrier to faster growth?
Would more economic democracy be a good idea, and if so of what particular form?
Is there a case for a sovereign wealth fund, either for purposes of economic stabilization or as a means of funding public spending?
Has the public sphere really deteriorated in recent years (or is thinking so mere nostalgia?) and if so what can be done about it?
How can we change politicians' incentives so they better favour the public good rather than the interests of plutocrats?
All these questions here - and you can no doubt add many more - bear upon the same general issue: how, if at all, might we improve the material standard of living for millions of people? Questions about the public sphere do this at one remove: a healthier democracy would perhaps lead to better policy-making.
And yet issues such as these rarely dominate mainstream discourse, being confined to a few marginalized economists on Bluesky. What has dominated the mainstream recently, however, are the ketamine-fuelled racist lies of a billionaire: nobody intelligent enough to be reading this thinks for a moment that Musk, Farage or Badenoch give a shit about working class northern girls.
What we have here are two agendas - one on how to improve the real world, and another dealing in fantasies and crank issues. Which is a contrast to what happened in my now-distant youth. Back then left and right were bitterly divided - maybe more so than now - but they agreed on what were the issues. And the right at least made some effort to engage with facts and thought; Thatcher regularly cited leading intellectuals such as Popper, Hayek and Friedman in a way that her epigones have not. Yes, we claimed that Thatcher was mistaken about economics, but we didn't think she was a liar or fantasist as we do her recent successors.
So, why are we in this mess?
Part of the blame lies with the media. There has been a rise in the number of speakyourbranes shows, Jeremy Vine's programmes being the worst of many. There aren't enough knowledgeable people to fill all this airtime: they have better things to do than wag their jaws in a London studio. The space is therefore fill by know-nothings, often from Tufton Street, happier to spout off about irrelevancies. It takes knowledge to talk about tax reform, but any fool can gibber about immigrants.
GBNews blurted out the truth here recently when it told Liam Halligan that it “doesn’t need an economics and business editor”. It doesn't, for the same reason that Mrs Brown's Boys doesn't need one: it's mindless entertainment, not an attempt to reveal the truth.
Also, as Sam Freedman pointed out in Failed State, journalism has seen a drop in the number of specialist reporters but increase in lobby correspondents which distorts how politics is discussed. Rather than ask "will this measure actually improve the real world?" the focus is on "how will this play out"? That encourages a short-termism that crowds out serious thinking about policy, as well as the chasing of headlines and soundbites about anything that will "cut through."
Some political scientists, I fear, play into this distortion with their focus upon opinion polls. Not only are these pretty much irrelevant when we're four years away from a general election, but they also beg the questions: how is public opinion formed? Why does it influence policy in some areas (immigration?) but not others (nationalisation?) What's the connection between public opinion and effective or ethical policy?
"Politics" as it is discussed by journalists and (ugh) "commentators" - and even many politicians - has become a melange of gossip, fantasy and lies divorced from material scientific questions of how to improve living standards. One nice but unremarked indicator of this is that Patrick Grant's Less is not regarded by the mainstream as a book on politics. That's because the things it discusses are not seen as "political": decommodification, the decline of craftsmanship and nature of capitalism.
Yes, it's the C-word again. One reason why the right is frantically grabbing for any culture war issue is that they have no even half-credible answers to economic stagnation.
What they do have, though, is the power to set the agenda. As Elmer Schattschneider wrote in 1960, "some issues are organized into politics while others are organized out." The right wants to organize into politics conflicts about immigration, race, trans rights and "wokeness" whilst the serious left wants to organize in questions about capitalism. And guess who's winning?
This raises a problem for us. In challenging the right's falsehoods, we are acquiescing in its choice of agenda and thus accepting its power. Worse still, we risk treating its bad faith as a legitimate concern, or treating as sane what is in fact a psychiatric disorder. And of course, we risk a backfire effect, whereby merely discussing their concerns lends them credence.
Every good general knows that it is important to choose the right terrain on which to fight. The problem for the left - and also for those centrists who are reality-based - is that it is the right that chooses the battleground.