No return to ‘normal’: how do we build a new economy?

We’ve had a decade of austerity that left the NHS badly exposed to coronavirus. The economic model introduced by Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s has also produced stark regional inequalities. Many post-industrial regions have never recovered.

Globally inequality has mushroomed, tax evasion is systemic, a small group of billionaires control financial assets that dwarf many states, and a handful of big data corporations dominate the twenty-first century economy.

So even before the Covid-19 crisis our economy faced huge problems and challenges. The model was broken and needed to change.

The current crisis has undermined the neoliberal idea that the state doesn’t have a role to play in the economy. Massive interventions mean that the state is back with a vengeance.

But what kind of state intervention do we need? How do we ensure the response to the crisis tackles the fundamental inequalities and injustices of the modern economy? Is there a danger that the end of neoliberalism gives rise to something even worse – a capitalism that is hugely dependent on the state but uses it to sustain, not challenge, global inequalities?

To find answers to these crucial questions Zoe Williams (Guardian) and Niccolo Milanese (European Alternatives) will talk to Anneliese Dodds, the Shadow Chancellor and Labour MP for Oxford East and economist James Meadway.

The event is organised as a collaboration between Another Europe Is Possible, European Alternatives and Friedrich Ebert Stiftung. Christos Katsioulis, director of FES London, will offer some opening remarks to kick off the discussion.