Here’s an odd thing about Britain. All summer it marshalled rage against asylum-seekers. Anti-immigration was summer 2025’s big British social movement. It was the public face Britain showed the world. Then in September, Britain sent more than 100,000 people to the Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (aka “Tommy Robinson”) neofascist march in London. Yet at the same time, Britain was unable to get angry about failed economic policy, Labour’s or anyone else’s. There were no 100,000-person marches demanding that Labour fulfill its 2024 economic promises for green growth or 300,000 new homes or a restored NHS or any of the rest.  

One reason that the British don’t rally for economics is the boring narrowness of the acceptable public discussion.  Here’s my Financial Times front page for 30 September 2025.

Photo via Christopher Newfield. 

Are you kidding me? Is Liz Truss still prime minister? Is George Osbourne the real chancellor and this is 30 September 2012?  The endlessly repeated headline of maybe a tax rise coupled with the nauseatingly familiar duty of fiscal discipline sends every voter into an instant coma. I had to eat a late birthday chocolate with my coffee to get myself to read to the fold.

Labour has crashed in the polls because no British person believes they are going to build back anything. We assume they’ll spend the next four years revering the bond market so that the interest rate on 10-year gilts will maybe stay below 5% (it’s currently 2 points above Germany and 1 point above Italy and France).

In contrast, culture is where things happen and where societies change—especially compared to Labour’s dead idea of economics.

Reform voters are famous for hating immigration and putting traditional (white) British culture first. A September study by More in Common confirmed they think “levels of immigration” is the “most important issue” by 61% compared to 30% for all Britons. Same goes for “asylum seekers crossing the channel,” important to 56% for Reform voters compared to 26% for all Britons (p 24). 

Another set of questions confirmed that Reform supporters are more likely than other Britons to see immigration as “causing cultural tensions in communities” and are twice as likely to say immigration is “risking the loss of national identity and cultural traditions.”

These are serious mistakes and are sugar-coating an upsurge of what the Institute for Race Relations long ago correctly named “xeno-racism.” But take a look at the whole set of issues in the More in Common poll.

“Cost of living” comes in second with Reform supporters. This could give Labour a lot to work with. But Labour is really doing very little on this front—except trying to embarrass and disown the major Labour figure who pushes building in spite of bond traders, Greater Manchester mayor Andy Burnham.

The level of economic discussion in Britain is dismally low. This is in large part by design, since high levels of the “economic literacy” that City of London leaders often call for would put enormous pressure on the status quo.

Many individuals work very hard to spread economic knowledge—there’s the tireless Richard Murphy at Funding the Future (here explaining why Burnham is right not to fear the bond reapers).  But the media discussion is very bad. Its badness on economics—the mind-numbing and depressing narrowness and futility of the economic options it offers-- is one reason why cultural backlash rules politics instead.

Take a look at these two further figures from the same More in Common study.

Reform supporters want more government control over the economy and over big business.  They also don’t believe that “economic growth” trickles down to ‘”ordinary working people.” 

They are not Reagan Democrats who thought tax cuts and the deregulation of business would be great for the white working class. Forty-five years later, experience has made this large portion of right-of-centre voters anti-free market, which would mean unsympathetic to a bond market override of their cultural and social desires. But they don’t believe the Labour or the Conservative parties will ever do anything about bond market dominion or business control.

Reform’s racism and migrant-scapegoating should be rejected and confronted systematically. But Labour also needs to confront British capital systematically.

Britain’s working classes and regional cities are suffering from a quarter-century of stagnation that derives in large part from the failure of British investors to invest in the UK economy.  FT columnist Tej Parikh laid this out over the summer, and published one especially illuminating chart:

One of Parikh’s analysts found that “UK workers have to make do with a third less capital per hour than their counterparts in higher-productivity peer countries.”  Even though British capital is likely undertaxed, it chronically underinvests.

The poor performance of capital investors explains about a third of the UK’s lag behind peer economies. Tera Allas, the study’s co-author, told Parikh, “This has accumulated from decades of under-investment in equipment, research and development, training and infrastructure, by both the public and private sector.”

The other two-thirds of the lag comes from a category that economists unhelpfully call “Total Factor Productivity.”  Yet it too involves underinvestment in training and infrastructure—no trams in medium-sized cities, lack of housing near jobs that people are qualified to take, and so on.

There’s also a problem that will be familiar to staff in British universities: Britain’s “weak management skills.” Parikh writes, “A recent study finds that domestic manufacturing firms become, on average, 4.9 per cent more productive and 23.3 per cent more capital-intensive after hiring foreign managers.”

The set of issues raised in this one column about the UK’s low productivity growth could get the public engaged with an economic argument that would generate economic change. 

Following the summer break, ISRF is restarting the seminar for its research programme, Redesigning Finance for Climate Justice (REDFIC), led by the economist Daniela Gabor. We’ve had fascinating seminars on China’s Government Guidance Funds as a highly effective mode of industry policy (Cornel Ban and Xuan Li), on the history of state credit policies (Éric Bonnet), on literally dozens of state instruments that can accelerate the green transition (Juliette de Pierrebourg for L’Institut Avant-Garde), and the inadequacy of portfolio-level metrics for measuring progress towards climate goals (John Ploeg). In October, Leah Rose Downey is coming to talk about the relationship between climate credit policy and democratized central banking.

You might think these topics are abstruse. I think they are vastly more interesting than the economics discussed in The Times, The Guardian, and the BBC. 

My guess is that if the wider public had regular exposure to these topics, they would agree with me. And I’d include Reform supporters in a public attracted to transformative economic ideas.