25 September 2018, Labour Party Conference, Liverpool
This year’s Labour Party Conference came almost exactly a decade after the collapse of Lehman Brothers, one of the key turning points in the Global Financial Crisis. This was the focus of the Progressive Economy Forum’s fringe meeting, where we launched our first publication 10 Years Since The Crash: Causes, Consequences and the Way Forward and hosted a discussion on these themes, led by the following PEF Council members and authors of the pamphlet:
- Patrick Allen: Founder and Chair of the Progressive Economy Forum; Senior Partner at Hodge Jones & Allen LLP
- Ann Pettifor: Author of The Production of Money (Verso, 2017) and the prescient The Coming First World Debt Crisis (Palgrave, 2006); Director of PRIME Economics; Leader of Jubilee 2000 campaign
- Prof John Weeks: Professor Emeritus in Development Economics at SOAS; Author of Economics of the 1% (Anthem, 2014) and The Irreconcilable Inconsistencies of Neoclassical Macroeconomics (Routledge, 2013)
- Dr Johnna Montgomerie: Reader in International Political Economy at King’s College London; Author of Should we abolish household debts? (Polity, November 2018)
We were thrilled to be joined by delegates from Constituency Labour Parties (CLPs) across the country and are grateful for their contributions, especially on how we can best help activists advocate for a progressive economics in their communities and on the doorstep – this has influenced our planned programme of work for the future. We were also happy to be joined by Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell, in a show of support for our work.
Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell and PEF Chair Patrick Allen
As a way of focussing the debate on what a progressive economic policy would look like, we also discussed the burgeoning direction of our 100 Policies to End Austerity project, a series of progressive economic policy proposals in the form of short, clear blog posts, delivered in collaboration with openDemocracy and The Conversation. You can see the first few entries on our blog.
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Photo credit: Terry Kearney / Flickr