The Works Canteen Keynesian/MMT Action
Plan:
Labour must pick up the Spanner
and fix the economy
For decades, the Labour Party has been suffering
from a linguistic coup.
If you sit in a Westminster committee room or watch
the evening news, you will hear a dialect that sounds like economics, but is
actually a class barrier. It is what the sociologist Basil Bernstein called
the "elaborated code"—a bloodless, abstract jargon packed
with phrases like fiscal stability, supply-side reform, structural readjustment
and other bullshit
It is the native language of Socio-Economic Groups
A and B. It is the language of Magic Circle lawyers, corporate consultants, and
Treasury technocrats who have spent their lives passing exams by rote. They
have treated the British economy like a textbook to be memorised, completely
detached from the physical reality of working class life and the everyday
consumer.
And while they recite their formulas in television
studios, the rest of the country—the true working-class majority spanning from
Groups C1 down to E—is left holding the bill. If Labour wants to survive the
next general election, the "exam machines" running the Treasury need
to stand aside for a partnership that understands the dignity of a hard day's
work. It is time for a Burnham-Streeting leadership to
implement a Works Canteen Action Plan.
The Tool Kit: get rid of the
myth of fiscal rules
The first step of the Action Plan is to completely
smash the orthodox lie that the government has run out of money or is like a
business or even worse is like a family. The UK government is nothing like a
business or a family.
When oxcam technocrats tell you the national
ledger must balance like a household checque book on a kitchen table, they are
lying. The objective reality is:
a state with its own central bank and its own
currency can never "go bust".
Money is not a finite resource dug out of the
ground; it is a sovereign tool kit. The only real limits on our economy are
physical limits—availability of steel, energy, engineering talent, and factory
space.
Instead of waiting for private venture capitalists
to save our declining towns, a pragmatic Labour Treasury must use the power of
the state to issue long-term, guaranteed procurement contracts. We don't fund
things by squeezing more tax out of an already broken workforce; we fund them
by mobilising the unlimited national credit card that never needs to be repaid
to manufacture physical assets.
Govrnment bonds (gilts) are a savings scheme for banks, insurance companies, pension schemes, big corporations and the very rich. It is a liability on the government just like the savings you have in a bank are a liability on the bank to pay you the savings if you need them. let's get this straight, government bonds are not government borrowing. Government bonds are a government backed secure savings scheme.
The Holy Trinity of British
Production
We don't need abstract growth lines on a
spreadsheet; we need boots on factory floors. The Works Canteen Action Plan
targets three concrete, heavy-industrial hubs with three immediate,
common-sense commercial goals:
1. Sunderland: Steel on the
water for Modern Energy
Offshore wind farms in the North Sea need a
constant, massive fleet of specialized Service Operation Vessels (SOVs) to keep
running.
Right now, we buy those ships from foreign yards.
- The Plan: Labour uses state power to mandate
that every single wind farm service vessel operating in British waters is
built with British steel in Sunderland shipyards.
- The Adaptation: The CO2 emitted
from melting that steel isn't pumped into the sky; it is captured at the
chimney stack and reacted with alkaline steel slag waste to turn the gas
into solid calcium carbonate salts—creating a hard, stable mineral
aggregate to mix into concrete for our national infrastructure.
2. Brough: putting British
designed and built aircraft back on the runway
The decision to let the British aerospace industry
slide was a political choice, not an engineering failure. The legendary Trident
platform was beaten by Boeing because of bad state management, not bad
mechanics.
- The Plan: We return to the precision
engineering days of East Yorkshire to build an updated, modernised version
of that short-to-medium-haul aviation platform. We use state procurement
to secure a 10-year order book, giving thousands of local lads steady, high-wage
(proper) engineering apprenticeships like the one I did.
Even to this day I am proud to be a Hawker Siddely
apprentice, Labour can bring back that pride in young people of today.
3. Swindon: The Return of the
Reliable Family Car
For years, the Hondas rolling off the lines in
Swindon were rated the most reliable vehicles on earth. That reputation wasn't
earned in an office in Tokyo; it was earned by the pride and skill of the
Wiltshire workforce.
- The Plan: Pure electric vehicles (EVs) are a
middle-class fantasy for people with private driveways. For a bloke or a woman living
on a terraced street or in a block of flats, they are a non-starter.
Labour will lease back the newly built manufacturing spaces on the old
Swindon site to build a dead-reliable, good-looking, affordable British
family hybrid. It is future-proof, common-sense engineering that fits
the way people actually live.
A British designed and built car to equal the Swindon
built Hondas
The 3-Year Election Countdown
A Burnham-Streeting team taking power by September
wouldn't have time to wait for decades of oxcam academic reviews. But under
this plan, they wouldn't have to. Because the roofs are already over our heads
in Swindon, the yards exist in Sunderland, the blueprints and sheds big enough
to build Tridents (again) exist in Brough, the money can hit the ground within
six months.
By the time the next election arrives, Labour
wouldn't be campaigning on dry statistics. The Prime Minister would stand on
the tarmac at Brough next to a world beating aviation prototype, or on the
docks at Sunderland with a massive steel hull rising behind him. Or drive the
British build hybrid car equal to any made in China, off the production line in
Swindon.
The message to working class people and consumers would
be undeniable:
"The last lot told you Britain couldn't make
anything anymore. They told you the money wasn't there. Look behind me. There
is British steel in the water and the most reliable cars in the world are
coming off the lines again. We used national power to back you. Give us five
more years to finish the job."
If Labour wants to win, it has to stop speaking the
bloodless, rote-learned code of the Oxford/Cambridge common room exam machine.
It must return to the context-rich, direct language of production lines and the
works canteen, fire up the Keynesian factory floor, and put pragmatic working
class women and men in control of the Labour Party.
To see the stark reality of how the current
political dialect completely fails to connect with the people who do the actual
work, watch this footage of the Chancellor's speech to
engineering workers, where the restless, completely disengaged
reactions of the staff in the background reveal just how hollow the textbook
approach looks on a real factory floor.
Working class, consumer focussed Keynes combined
with modern money theory is the way to build Britain again.
