Snowdon argues that Britain’s current economic model is neither neoliberal nor socialist, and that we lack a proper name for it. His suggestion is a “capitalist command economy”: industry stays in private hands, but the state steers it through price controls (energy, water, rail and bus fares, and now arguably rents via the Renters’ Rights Act), mandated sales targets (the ZEV mandate, heat pump quotas, proposed fines on supermarkets for selling too many calories) and “social value” conditions on procurement and planning.
His claim is that politicians get the power of central planning without the responsibility of running anything, while the left blames the results on a free market that doesn’t exist.
Relevant here because it challenges the meme, particularly common on the left, that Britain is some sort of ‘neoliberal hellscape’ when, on his account, neoliberals haven’t had meaningful influence on any government for thirty years and there’s frankly no free market to speak of in Britain given the extent of state control.
Bayliss argues that Britain is drifting into a late-Soviet style contradiction: prices that no longer mean much, and spending commitments that no longer track what anyone can pay for.
His starting point is the Soviet economy, where distorted resource allocation was hidden for decades until reform and foreign creditors exposed it. He concedes that the analogy only goes so far because obviously we don’t live in a literally communist state, but says the British parallel is a system in which needs are increasingly defined as *legal entitlements* rather than budgetary trade-offs.
Examples include councils legally obliged to fund adult social care and SEND transport they cannot afford, equal pay rulings that bankrupted Birmingham City Council, cross-subsidised pricing in banking and utilities, the energy price cap, and a growing slice of the new car market funded through Motability.
His claim is that when courts rather than the tax-and-spend process decide what gets met, and prices stop signalling anything, productivity and the link between production and consumption suffer, with borrowing papering over the gap, but eventually becoming unsustainable beacuse you can only ignore reality for so long before it forces its way back in.
Worth-Jicama3936 on
Can i just call it “build nothing that could possibly change anything” economy?
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Snowdon argues that Britain’s current economic model is neither neoliberal nor socialist, and that we lack a proper name for it. His suggestion is a “capitalist command economy”: industry stays in private hands, but the state steers it through price controls (energy, water, rail and bus fares, and now arguably rents via the Renters’ Rights Act), mandated sales targets (the ZEV mandate, heat pump quotas, proposed fines on supermarkets for selling too many calories) and “social value” conditions on procurement and planning.
His claim is that politicians get the power of central planning without the responsibility of running anything, while the left blames the results on a free market that doesn’t exist.
Relevant here because it challenges the meme, particularly common on the left, that Britain is some sort of ‘neoliberal hellscape’ when, on his account, neoliberals haven’t had meaningful influence on any government for thirty years and there’s frankly no free market to speak of in Britain given the extent of state control.
As a supplementary article, I’d also recommend ‘[The British economy cannot sustain its contradictions](https://thecritic.co.uk/the-british-economy-cannot-sustain-its-contradictions/)’ by Chris Bayliss, also in *The Critic.*
Bayliss argues that Britain is drifting into a late-Soviet style contradiction: prices that no longer mean much, and spending commitments that no longer track what anyone can pay for.
His starting point is the Soviet economy, where distorted resource allocation was hidden for decades until reform and foreign creditors exposed it. He concedes that the analogy only goes so far because obviously we don’t live in a literally communist state, but says the British parallel is a system in which needs are increasingly defined as *legal entitlements* rather than budgetary trade-offs.
Examples include councils legally obliged to fund adult social care and SEND transport they cannot afford, equal pay rulings that bankrupted Birmingham City Council, cross-subsidised pricing in banking and utilities, the energy price cap, and a growing slice of the new car market funded through Motability.
His claim is that when courts rather than the tax-and-spend process decide what gets met, and prices stop signalling anything, productivity and the link between production and consumption suffer, with borrowing papering over the gap, but eventually becoming unsustainable beacuse you can only ignore reality for so long before it forces its way back in.
Can i just call it “build nothing that could possibly change anything” economy?