Year Zero: Building a New Economy
Britain needs a fundamental change in direction. Neoliberalism has lost intellectual credibility, yet the present government is continuing to govern by its doctrines. Labour has so far failed to mark a clear break from the past. This is despite a growing consensus – national and global – that today’s immense challenges require a complete ‘reset of capitalism.’
Here the lessons of 1945 are important. Under Clement Attlee, Labour treated the crisis that came from the immense hardship of the 1930s and then war, as an opportunity for a new start. A better future depends on another progressive paradigm shift: a 2024 Year Zero.
Year Zero: Building a New Economy explores how we can create an economic model that builds on traditional social democratic economic thinking, including the importance of equality and caring, while integrating more recent ideas about a Doughnut Economy and the ‘foundational economy’.
The New Settlement is a project from Compass that hopes to address the growing need for a new politics to build a new society. It will help to describe a post neoliberal world and the nature of a deeper democracy, political economy and state that will underpin it, along with the movement and alliances, across party, in civil society and purposeful business, that will shape it and bring it into being.
This is the first of a series of publication produced by Compass members around the New Settlement project. Three groups of members have used their experiences and insight to create papers on each of the main pillars of the project. These are based around the good society, a new economy and a new democracy. These papers will underpin the project and set out an enticing vision of the changes we want to see, and how to get there.
