Ministers promise a new economic direction, backing industry and clean energy, but old habits and powerful interests still shape the outcome
The government’s industrial strategy is a small step forward for the country, but a much bigger one for Labour. Following the 2008 financial crisis, the party talked tough about replacing a failed economic model. But just a year later, its ministers produced a strategy that made clear real change was off the agenda. “The last thing the government wants to do,” they wrote in 2009, “is revive old theories or to invent a new ideology in managing the economy”.
Those days are gone. Labour has been carried on the tides of global transformation, and its 2025 strategy paper contains a welcome critique of market-led failure – particularly in the areas of regional inequality and energy dependence. What the document also reflects is a long-overdue embrace of a more hands-on state.
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