From Tikak´s Doshi
By Tilak Doshi
When Andy Burnham returned from the summer recess to make his first Commons speech as Prime Minister, he promised MPs a “clear diagnosis” of what ails Britain. From the 1980s, he said, the country took a series of wrong turns. According to him, political power was centralised, economic assets were privatised and industry was hollowed out. Thatcher was the villain and the 1970s constituted the lost Eden. The Institute of Economic Affairs rightly called it a speech steeped in nostalgia. Weeks later, at the Labour conference in Liverpool, the PM went further. Invoking 1945, he declared that “we built the common good”, then promised to repeal the Thatcher-era ban on public ownership of water companies and to launch GB Grid, a publicly owned company to take on private energy operators. Energy, water and housing were to come back under “public control”.
“Common good” is no accident of speechwriting. It is the title of Mariana Mazzucato’s recent book. She is the self-billed “one of the world’s most influential economists” and her consultancies with governments, international agencies and politicians are too numerous to list here but investigative reporter Charlotte Gill’s blog provides good coverage. The day before Burnham took the Liverpool stage, she published a Project Syndicate column urging that the state’s public-finance institutions be scaled up and the fiscal rules reformed to let them “grow”. Britain, she says, has recorded the lowest public investment in the G7 for most of three decades, a gap she puts at roughly £500 billion. The column opens by welcoming Chancellor John Healey’s pledge to sharpen the focus of those institutions, which tells you who is advising whom. Mazzucato is the media’s favourite economist, whose ideas helped shape Labour’s pitch for power, and who is fêted on Channel 4, in the New Statesman and the Guardian, and on podcasts without end. She is no less active in social media (here and here).
Meanwhile one barely hears of Jon Moynihan, whose two-volume Return to Growth is probably among the most thorough audits of British stagnation, as I argued in my review. The pattern is familiar. In 1980 the Malthusian doomster Paul Ehrlich bet the economist Julian Simon that the prices of five metals would rise over a decade. All five fell, and Ehrlich mailed Simon a cheque for $576.07. Ehrlich went on collecting honours despite every one of his dire predictions failing. Simon died in 1998 with little notice from the legacy media. Mazzucato is the Paul Ehrlich of British economics, consulted by the powerful whatever the predictive or analytical worth of her work. Moynihan is the Julian Simon. Britain is being handed the Fabian compass when what it needs is Moynihan’s detailed, classical liberal reform manual.
A compass with no needle
What, exactly, is the “common good”? Not, Mazzucato insists, the economics textbook definition of public goods which the state supplies because they are non-excludable and non-rivalrous and hence unprofitable for private enterprise. In her own telling it is “an objective, not a correction”, a collectively chosen goal to be written into contracts, procurement, patents and public balance sheets from the start. The book’s “compass” has five points: purpose and direction, co-creation, collective learning, reward-sharing through “pre-distribution”, and accountability.
As I noted in my June review, there are no difficult, real world economic trade-offs in her list of items for the common good. The content of the “common good”, whether Net Zero, “shared prosperity” or public control of water, is whatever the ‘commissions’ and ‘stakeholder panels’ decide. And who decides who participates in these commission and panels? We don’t know, although it is presumed that these are democratic in construct.
Let’s examine the Climate Change Committee quango as an example. As Ross Clark notes in the Telegraph, the Committee seems to think that “it is being paid to behave like a green pressure group”. The CCC’s recommendations, while not binding on the Government, have been adopted in every instance. One can only imagine Mazzucato-style committees and panels being stuffed with fellow redistributionist Fabians and green zealots and called ‘democratic representations’ of the public. Can you imagine a Tommy Robinson being in a Mazzucato-inspired panel to discuss immigration policy in the UK?
Mazzucato dresses up her Fabian ideals in contemporary clothes. Allow private capital to remain private, but direct it permanently by public purpose as defined by experts. Burnham’s “public control” is its political twin, and the family resemblance is plain. The abstract of Mazzucato’s new UCL report frames its subject as delivering the Government’s commitment to greater public control of essential services. The IEA’s Kristian Niemietz finds the same link, calling Burnham’s ‘Manchesterism’ speech “straight out of the Mariana Mazzucato playbook”. In July, she was already telling readers how Burnham can make devolution work.
Marking her own homework
A sound economist would ask what the doctrine has actually delivered. Camden is the test case Mazzucato never tires of citing. She co-chaired its Renewal Commission in 2020-21, and her institute then drew up the blueprint for a £30 million Community Wealth Fund. Deployment did not begin until 2025, when the council committed an initial £4 million to a pilot, £2 million for a Youth Fund and £2 million for a Diversity Fund, steered by a panel of young people and a diversity panel of over 500. The Youth Fund’s first investment was £112,000 in a single outfit. After years of commissions, strategies and panels, there is little published evidence that child poverty, food access or employment in Camden has improved at all, as I set out earlier in these pages.
What the council publishes so far is mostly about ‘missions’ and process: who sits on the panels, how many residents took part, how well ‘diverse’ applicants fit the missions. None of that tells a Camden resident whether her street, her child or her small business is better off. The process has become the product, and the process is what Mazzucato’s common good project is all about. It’s all hat and no cattle, as the cousins across the pond might say. Charlotte Gill captures this best, if somewhat cynically: “A mission-led mission to use the word mission as much as mission possible.” Here is a doctrine that cannot lose. When mission-oriented policy works, the doctrine is vindicated; when it flounders, the government misunderstood the doctrine, and the remedy is a bigger mandate and a bigger balance sheet.
The UCL September report asks for precisely that. It grades the National Wealth Fund, Great British Energy and the new National Housing Bank against nine design features of a “mission-oriented” public finance institution, criteria of the author’s own devising. She, of course, finds that more scale, more coordination and looser fiscal rules are needed. A student who sets the exam, marks the paper and recommends more generous funding for her school would be viewed with suspicion. The NWF, meanwhile, was launched with a target of mobilising £3 of private money for every £1 of its own, at least £70 billion in all, and its flagship is the £38 billion Sizewell C, in which the British state is the largest shareholder at 44.9%. As Moynihan documents, such reactors cost four to five times what the Koreans or Emiratis pay, given the strangulating regulations in Britain.
Moynihan’s operating manual
Moynihan surveys the same stagnation and writes from a different prescription. Volume I organises the problem around three variables: the size of the state, the tax burden and the volume of regulation. Debt servicing costs over £100 billion a year, debt is over 110% of GDP, and the tax take is forecast to reach a historic high within five years. This is hardly a state starved of resources. Regulation is the third and deadliest variable: housebuilders tangled in habitats rules for bats while demand for homes soars, domestic oil and gas left in the ground while nuclear costs multiply, a City smothered by compliance.
None of these is a shortage of public equity. Set Mazzucato’s £500 billion against that. Her counterfactual treats public capital – which as Margaret Thatcher never tired of reminding us, is taxpayers’ money – as growth-enhancing by definition. The institutions she wants to be “scaled” inherit every constraint Moynihan documents. It would seem that Mazzucato has never read Friedrich von Hayek’s work and its lessons of the inefficiencies of government planning. She is apparently unaware that the policy-induced distortions of government planning are far worse than the market imperfections it is meant to cure. Nor, apparently, is the famous economist aware of how state control of credit, industrial licensing and foreign exchange breeds corruption and rent-seeking. Perhaps her focus on government-led “missions” as the solution to Britain’s two-decades long stagnation blinds her to the lesson that central planning concentrates power rather than creating resources. Prime Minister Burnham, with advisor Mazzucato’s assistance, has misdiagnosed Britain’s ills.
Simon’s fate, Moynihan’s warning
Why, then, does Mazzucato get the microphone? Because she tells governments what they want to hear: that they are the architects of prosperity. Moynihan tells them to shrink the state, cut taxes, slash regulation and allow the economy to grow. This is not something the elites, the state salariat and the legacy media find comfortable.
Konstantin Kisin, writing after the Liverpool speech, concluded that Burnham will get his way because voters when polled in the abstract oppose taxes and government spending in general. “But ask about anything specific and the picture inverts. 72% want higher taxes on the top 5%. 61% will pay more themselves for the NHS.” 82% want water nationalised and 76% the railways, with large majorities of Reform voters among them. It will not work, he argues, because “Britain has a production problem rather than a distribution problem”, with the tax burden already at a post-war high of 36% of GDP. Kisin believes “the whole thing will end in the kind of humiliation that lingers in the national memory for a generation”, as it is hard to see Britain breaking out of the ideology it is trapped in.
The belief that prosperity is brought about by “mission-oriented” government mandarins in Whitehall rather than created by entrepreneurs unencumbered by stifling regulations – as Ayn Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged so memorably novelised – is a faith. And faiths are refuted by failure, not evidence. Moynihan himself expects no better: he doubts any government will adopt his reform programme short of a crisis on the scale of the late 1970s. The bond market, where 30-year gilt yields touched 6.03% on October 1st, the highest in 28 years, is watching.
Burnham’s Government will, I suspect, give Mazzucato’s compass a thorough trial: more public control, more public equity, looser fiscal rules, more missions. The Wealth Fund will report billions “mobilised”, a Camden-style panel will bless the result, and the debt-service bill will keep climbing. Britain has run this experiment before, and it ended in the 1976 crisis which led Britain to approach the IMF with the begging bowl.
Dr Mazzucato’s “mission-oriented” policy advice is Britain’s primrose path to economic disaster, and it seems there is no other path that is even faintly discernible on the horizon despite the clear programme outlined by Moynihan. Woe unto Britain indeed, it shall never again rule the waves and being enslaved to sovereign bond holders for a generation is in prospect.
This article was first published in the Daily Sceptic https://dailysceptic.org/2026/10/08/burnhams-common-good-is-reheated-fabian-socialism/
Dr Tilak K. Doshi is the Daily Sceptic’s Energy Editor. He is an economist, a member of the CO2 Coalition and a former (cancelled) contributor to Forbes. Follow him on Substack and X.
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